Reacher said, 'I'm going to Virginia.'
'OK.'
'With two stops along the way.'
'Where?'
'I'm going to drop in on the county cops. Sixty miles south of here. I want to see their paperwork.'
'Will they still have it?'
Reacher nodded. 'A thing like that, lots of different departments cooperating, everyone on best behaviour, they'll have built a pretty big file. And they won't have junked it yet. Because technically it's still an open case. Their notes will be in storage somewhere. Probably a whole cubic yard of them.'
'Will they let you see them? Just like that?'
'I was a cop of sorts myself, thirteen years. I can usually talk my way past file clerks.'
'Why do you want to see it?'
'To check it for holes. If it's OK, I'll keep on running. If it's not, I might come back.'
'To do what?'
'To fill in the holes.'
'How will you get down there?'
'Drive.'
'Showing up in a stolen truck won't help your cause.'
'It's got your plates on it now. They won't know.'
'My plates?'
'Don't worry, I'll swap them back again. If the paperwork's OK, then I'll leave the truck right there near the police station with the proper plates on it, and sooner or later someone will figure out whose it is, and word will get back to the Duncans, and they'll know I'm gone for good, and they'll start leaving you people alone again.'
'That would be nice. What's your second stop?'
'The cops are the second stop. First stop is closer to home.'
'Where?'
'We're going to drop in on Seth Duncan's wife. You and me. A house call. To make sure she's healing right.'
TWENTY-FIVE
THE DOCTOR WAS IMMEDIATELY DEAD SET AGAINST THE IDEA. IT was a house call he didn't want to make. He looked away and paced the kitchen and traced his facial injuries with his fingertips and pursed his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth. Then eventually he said, 'But Seth might be there.'
Reacher said, 'I hope he is. We can check he's healing right, too. And if he is, I can hit him again.'
'He'll have Cornhuskers with him.'
'He won't. They're all out in the fields, looking for me. The few that remain, that is.'
'I don't know about this.'
'You're a doctor. You took an oath. You have obligations.'
'It's dangerous.'
'Getting out of bed in the morning is dangerous.'
'You're a crazy man, you know that?'
'I prefer to think of myself as conscientious.'
Reacher and the doctor climbed into the pick-up truck and headed back to the county two-lane and turned right. They came out on the road a couple of miles south of the motel and a couple of miles north of the three Duncan houses. Two minutes later the doctor stared at them as they passed by. Reacher took a look, too. Enemy territory. Three white houses, three parked vehicles, no obvious activity. By that point Reacher assumed the second Brett had delivered his messages. He assumed they had been heard and then immediately dismissed as bravado. Although the burned-out truck should have counted for something. The Duncans were losing, steadily and badly, and they had to know it.
Reacher made the left where he had the night before in the Subaru wagon, and then he threaded through the turns until Seth Duncan's house appeared ahead on his right. It looked much the same lit by daylight as it had by electricity. The white mailbox with Duncan on it, the hibernating lawn, the antique horse buggy. The long straight driveway, the outbuilding, the three sets of doors. This time two of them were standing open. The back ends of two cars were visible in the gloom inside. One was a small red sports car, maybe a Mazda, very feminine, and the other was a big black Cadillac sedan, very masculine.
The doctor said, 'That's Seth's car.'
Reacher smiled. 'Which one?'
'The Cadillac.'
'Nice car,' Reacher said. 'Maybe I should go smash it up. I've got a wrench of my own now. Want me to do that?'
'No,' the doctor said. 'For God's sake.'
Reacher smiled again and parked where he had the night before and they climbed out together and stood for a moment in the chill. The cloud was still low and flat, and mist was peeling off the underside of it and drifting back down to earth, ready for afternoon, ready for evening. The mist made the air itself look visible, grey and pearlescent, shimmering like a fluid.
'Show time,' Reacher said, and headed for the door. The doctor trailed him by a yard or two. Reacher knocked and waited and a long minute later he heard feet on the boards inside. A light tread, slow and a little hesitant. Eleanor.
She opened up and stood there, with her left hand cupping the edge of the door and her right-hand fingers spidered against the opposite wall, as if she needed help with stability, or as if she thought her horizontal arm was protecting the inside of the house from the outside. She was wearing a black skirt and a black sweater. No necklace. Her lips had scabbed over, dark and thick, and her nose was swollen, the white skin tight over yellow contusions that were not quite hidden by her make-up.
'You,' she said.
'I brought the doctor,' Reacher said. 'To check on how you're doing.'
Eleanor Duncan glanced at the doctor's face and said, 'He looks as bad as I do. Was that Seth? Or one of the Cornhuskers? Either way, I apologize.'
'None of the above,' Reacher said. 'It seems we have a couple of tough guys in town.'
Eleanor Duncan didn't answer that. She just took her right hand off the wall and trailed it through a courtly gesture and invited them in. Reacher asked, 'Is Seth home?'
'No, thank goodness,' Eleanor said.
'His car is here,' the doctor said.
'His father picked him up.'
Reacher asked, 'How long will he be gone?'
'I don't know,' Eleanor said. 'But it seems they have much to discuss.' She led the way to the kitchen, where she had been treated the night before, and maybe on many previous occasions. She sat down in a chair and tilted her face to the light. The doctor stepped up and took a look. He touched the wounds very lightly and asked questions about pain and headaches and teeth. She gave the kinds of answers Reacher had heard from many people in her situation. She was brave and somewhat self-deprecating. She said yes, her nose and mouth still hurt a little, and yes, she had a slight headache, and no, her teeth didn't feel entirely OK. But her diction was reasonably clear and she had no loss of memory and her pupils were reacting properly to light, so the doctor was satisfied. He said she would be OK.
'And how is Seth?' Reacher asked.
'Very angry at you,' Eleanor said.
'What goes around comes around.'
'You're much bigger than him.'
'He's much bigger than you.'
She didn't answer. She just looked at Reacher for another long second, and then she looked away, seemingly very unsure of herself, an expression of complete uncertainty on her face, its extent limited only by the immobility caused by the stiff scabs on her lips and the frozen ache in her nose. She was hurting bad, Reacher thought. She had taken two blows, he figured, probably the first to her nose and the second aimed lower, at her mouth. The first had been hard enough to do damage without breaking the bone, and the second had been hard enough to draw blood without smashing her teeth.
Two blows, carefully aimed, carefully calculated, carefully delivered.
Expert blows.
Reacher said, 'It wasn't Seth, was it?'
She said, 'No, it wasn't.'
'So who was it?'
'I'll quote your earlier conclusion. It seems we have a couple of tough guys in town.'
'They were here?'
'Twice.'
'Why?'
'I don't know.'
'Who are they?'
'I don't know.'
'They've been saying they represent the Duncans.'
'Well, they don't. The Duncans don't need to hire people to beat me. They're perfectly capable of doing that themselves.'