'So what's the message?'
'It's more of a question.'
'OK, so what's the question?'
'The question is, how do you like it?'
Reacher had been fighting since he was five years old, and he had never had his nose broken. Not even once. Partly good luck, and partly good management. Plenty of people had tried, over the years, either deliberately or in a flurry of savage unaimed blows, but none had ever succeeded. Not one. Not ever. Not even close. It was a fact Reacher was proud of, in a peculiar way. It was a symbol. A talisman. A badge of honour. He had all kinds of nicks and cuts and scars on his face and his arms and his body, but he felt that the distinctive but intact bone in his nose made up for them.
It said: I'm still standing.
The blow came in exactly as he expected it to, a clenched fist, a straight right, hard and heavy, riding up a little, aiming high, as if Duncan subconsciously expected Reacher to flinch up and back, like his wife Eleanor probably did every single time. But Reacher didn't flinch up and back. He started with his head up and back, his eyes open, watching down his nose, timing it, then jerking forward from the neck, smashing a perfect improvised head-butt straight into Duncan's knuckles, an instant high-speed high-impact collision between the thick ridge in Reacher's brow and the delicate bones in Duncan's hand. No contest. No contest at all. Reacher had a skull like concrete, and an arch was the strongest structure known to man, and hands were the most fragile parts of the body. Duncan screamed and snatched his hand away and cradled it limp against his chest and hopped a whole yowling circle, looking up, looking down, stunned and whimpering. He had three or four busted phalanges, Reacher figured, certainly a couple of proximals, and maybe a couple of cracked distals too, from the fingers folding much tighter than nature intended, under the force of the sudden massive compression.
'Asshole,' Reacher said.
Duncan clamped his right wrist under his left armpit and huffed and blew and stomped around. He came to rest a whole minute later, a little cramped and crouched and bent, and he glowered up and out from either side of his splint, hurting and angry and humiliated, looking first at Reacher, and then at his fourth guy, who was standing there stock-still, holding the shotgun. Duncan jerked his head, from the guy to Reacher, a gesture full of silent fury and impatience.
Get him.
The fourth guy stepped up. Reacher was pretty sure he wasn't going to shoot. No one fires a shotgun at a group of four people, three of which are his friends.
Reacher was pretty sure it was going to be worse than shooting.
The guy reversed the gun. Right hand on the barrel, left hand on the stock.
The guy behind Reacher moved. He wrapped his left forearm tight around Reacher's throat, and he clamped his right palm tight on Reacher's forehead.
Immobile.
The fourth guy raised the gun horizontal, butt first, two-handed, and cocked it back over his right shoulder, ready to go, lining it up like a spear, and then he rocked forward and took a step and aimed carefully and jabbed the butt straight at the centre of Reacher's face and
CRACK
BLACK
FORTY-TWO
JACOB DUNCAN CONVENED AN UNSCHEDULED MIDDLE-OF-THE-NIGHT meeting with his brothers, in his own kitchen, not Jonas's or Jasper's, with Wild Turkey, not Knob Creek, and plenty of it, because his mood was celebratory.
'I just got off the phone,' he said. 'You'll be pleased to hear my boy has redeemed himself.'
Jasper asked, 'How?'
'He captured Jack Reacher.'
Jonas asked, 'How?'
Jacob Duncan leaned back in his chair and shot his feet straight out in front of him, relaxed, expansive, a man at ease, a man with a story to tell. He said, 'I drove Seth home, as you know, but I let him out at the end of his road, because he was a little down, and he wanted to walk a spell in the night air. He got within a hundred yards of his house, and he was nearly run over by a car. His car, as it happens. His own Cadillac, going like a bat out of hell. Naturally he hurried home. His wife was induced to reveal all the details. It turns out Reacher stole the Cadillac earlier in the afternoon. It turns out the doctor was with him. Misguided, of course, but it seems the poor fellow has formed an alliance of sorts with our Mr Reacher. So Seth took his old Remington pump and set off in Eleanor's car and sure enough, Reacher was indeed at the doctor's house, large as life and twice as natural.'
'Where is he now?'
'In a safe place. It seems like the capture was mostly uneventful.'
'Is he alive?'
'So far,' Jacob Duncan said. 'But how long he stays alive is what we need to discuss.'
The room went quiet. The others sat and waited, as they had so many times before, for their brother Jacob, the eldest, a contemplative man, always ready with a pronouncement, or a decision, or a nugget of wisdom, or an analysis, or a proposal.
Jacob said, 'Seth wants to finesse the whole thing, right down to the wire, and frankly I'm tempted to let him try. He wants to rebuild his credibility with us, which of course I told him isn't necessary, but it remains true that all of us need to pay some attention to our own credibility, in a collective sense, with Mr Rossi, our good friend to the south.'
Jasper asked, 'What does Seth want to do?'
'He wants to stage things so that our prior hedging is shown to have been entirely justified. He wants to wait until our shipment is about an hour away, whereupon he wants to unveil Reacher to Mr Rossi's boys, whereupon he wants to fake a phone call and have the truck arrive within the next sixty minutes, as if what we've been saying all along about the delay was indeed true and legitimate.'
'Too risky,' Jonas said. 'Reacher is a dangerous man. We shouldn't keep him around a minute longer than we have to. That's just asking for trouble.'
'As I said, he's in a safe place. Plus, in the end, if we do it Seth's way, we'll have been seen to have solved our own problems with our own hands, without any outside assistance at all, and therefore whatever small shred of vulnerability we displayed will evaporate completely.'
'Even so. It's still risky.'
'There are other factors,' Jacob said.
The room went quiet again.
Jacob said, 'We've never really known or cared what happens to our shipments once they're in Mr Rossi's hands, except that I imagine we always vaguely supposed they pass down a lengthy chain of commerce, sale and resale, to an ultimate destination. And now that chain, or at least a large part of it, has become visible. As of tonight, it seems that three separate participants have representation here. Probably they're all desperate. It's clear to me they have agreed to work together to break up the logjam. And once that is done, it's equally clear to me they will be under instructions to eliminate one another, so that the last man standing triples his profit.'
Jonas said, 'That's not relevant to us.'
'Except that Mr Rossi's boys seem to be jumping the gun. It was inevitable that one of them would seize the initiative. Our stooges on the phone tree tell me that two men are already dead. Mr Rossi's boys killed them outside Mr Vincent's motel. So my idea is to give Mr Rossi's boys enough time to shorten the chain a little more, so that by the end of tomorrow Mr Rossi himself will be the last man standing, whereupon he and we can have a little talk about splitting the extra profit equally. The way it works mathematically is that we'll all double our shares. Mr Rossi will be happy to live with that, I imagine, and so will we, I'm sure.'
'Still risky.'
'You don't like money, brother?'
'I don't like risk.'
'Everything's a risk. We know that, don't we? We've lived with risk for a long time. It's part of the thrill.'
A long silence.
Jonas said, 'The doctor lied to us. He told us Reacher hitched a ride in a white sedan.'