Текст книги "Make Me"

Автор книги: Lee Child

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Chapter 58

They hurdled the hog farmer and spilled out the studio door and headed half left, aiming around the end of the house to the mouth of the driveway. Because the driveway was the goal. Had to be. Human nature. Escape. The only way out. Everything else was wheat.

They saw him sixty feet ahead, running, looking back, his M16 in one hand and nothing in the other. He was a stocky guy with a red face and big waves of hair all scooped up around his head. He was wearing blue jeans that looked starched. He got near the driveway mouth and glanced back. They ducked in closer to the house. The guy was all alone in the landscape. The hog pen was behind him, and then nothing but wheat before Missouri. The driveway was on his right. Twenty miles to Mother’s Rest.

The guy stood still.

Chang said, “Can you hit him from here?”

Reacher didn’t answer.

She said, “You OK?”

He said, “Ninety percent.”

Which was how he saw it. There was nothing wrong with him. Nothing specific. No broken bone, no bleeding wound. But nothing was working right. Not exactly. The brain is not the same thing as an arm.

Chang said, “How do we do this?”

Reacher counted back in his head. The rounds aimed at the small building. Punch, whang. How many?

Memory.

He stepped out a pace.

The guy with the jeans and the hair raised his rifle.

An M16 at sixty feet. Theoretically a problem. Any competent rifleman could hit with a long gun at sixty feet. Less than forty barrel lengths, for an M16. Practically touching distance. But the guy wasn’t a competent rifleman. That had been proved. At the small building. And now he had been running. Now he was breathing hard. His chest was heaving. His heart was thumping.

Reacher stood still.

The guy fired.

A miss. A foot high and a foot wide. Reacher heard the buzz of the round in the air, and then a distant thump far behind him as it hit a building. The small place near the broken fence, probably. With the dead guys.

He stepped back into cover.

He said, “Sooner or later he’ll run out of ammunition.”

Chang said, “He’ll reload.”

“But not fast.”

“Is that your plan?”

“I need you with me. Just in case.”

“Of what?”

“Two heads are better than one. Especially mine right now.”

“You OK?”

“Not really. But then, how good do I need to be?”

“I’ll go do it.”

“I can’t let you.”

“Not woman’s work?”

Reacher smiled. He thought about the women he had known.

“Just a personal thing,” he said. “Habit, mostly.”

“How do we do it?”

“I’ll draw his fire. He’ll miss every time. I promise. When he clicks on empty I’ll hose him down. Meanwhile you’ll be running closer, so if I miss, you won’t.”

Chang said, “No, we’ll both draw his fire. We’ll do this together.”

“Not efficient.”

“I don’t care. That’s how we’re doing it.”

They stepped out. The guy was still there. All alone in the vastness. Jeans, hair, M16 rifle. Sixty feet away. Chang aimed her gun, one eye closed. Reacher stood still, arms held wide, looking up at the sky, his gun hanging upside down off his trigger finger. Take your best shot. The guy did. He raised his gun, held still, and aimed, and fired.

And missed.

Missed both of them.

Chang fired back. Single shot. The spent case spat through the air. The bullet missed. But the guy backed off. Five clumsy paces, backward. Then ten.

Chang fired again. Another case glittered through the air. Another miss. The wheat moved in waves, heavy, and slow, and silent.

The guy raised his rifle.

But he didn’t shoot.

Chang said, “Is he out of bullets?”

Reacher’s head hurt.

He said, “He doesn’t know. He lost count. So did I.”

Then he smiled.

He said, “Do we feel lucky?”

He raised his gun. Two grips, held easy, somewhere between firm and gentle. The front sight, and the blur beyond. He blinked. He had focus, but it was not molecular. Plus he had a microscopic thrill in his arms. Through his whole body. Difficulties with coordination, movement, memory, vision, speech, hearing, managing emotion, and thinking.

He lowered his gun.

He said, “We should get closer.”

They made up the distance the guy had retreated. Slow and easy. Heart rate low, breathing normal. The guy added ten more paces. The jeans and the hair, moving backward, toward the hog pen.

Reacher and Chang got closer.

The smell was bad.

But better than the movie studio.

The guy backed off ten more paces.

And jammed up hard against the hog pen fence.

Reacher and Chang stopped.

The guy raised his rifle.

And then lowered it again. He stood against the fence, all alone, the rails at his back, small and absurd in the emptiness. The sun was high in the south. Far behind the guy his hogs moved out of their shelter. Fat and smooth, glistening with slime. Each one the size of a Volkswagen.

Reacher walked forward. Chang kept level.

The guy dropped his rifle and raised his hands.

Reacher walked forward. Chang kept level.

Fifty feet. Forty. Thirty.

Twenty feet.

The guy had his hands in the air.

In the tall tales told by firelight there was always a brief conversation. Because the bad guy had to be told why he had to die.

Reacher said nothing.

Tales were tales, and not the real world.

But the guy spoke first.

He said, “Their lives were forfeit. Surely you see that. They had given their lives away. Their decision was made. They were already gone. They were mine to use. And they got what they wanted anyway. In the end.”

Reacher said, “I don’t think they got what they wanted. That wasn’t the holy grail.”

“It was an hour or two. At the very end. After the end, as far as they were concerned. They had made their decision.”

“How many hours was the guy you starved to death? Or was it a woman?”

The guy didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “One practical question.”

The guy looked up.

“Where are the bodies?”

The guy said nothing. But he glanced back. Reflex. Involuntary.

He glanced at the hogs.

Reacher said, “Then why did you bury Keever?”

The guy said, “The hogs had already eaten that day.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy said, “It was a custom order from Japan. An excellent match. All I’m doing is meeting a need. You can’t blame me for other people’s tastes.”

Reacher said nothing.

The guy’s hands came down an inch. He wanted his shoulders free to work the normal way, and his neck, and his head, for body language, for gestures, for cajoling, for explaining. For bargaining, and for offering. All the guys Reacher had ever known. Right up to the very end. They believed they would get away with it.

Chang raised her gun. Reacher watched her. Black hair, hanging loose. Dark lively eyes, one closed, one tight on her front sight. The needle post in the hooded ring.

She said, “This is for Keever.”

The bad guy had to be told.

She said, “It could have been me.”

She touched the trigger. Twenty feet. Instantaneous. She hit him in the throat. Full metal jacket, through and through. The bullet would fall to earth way out in the wheat, where it would never be found. It would be plowed under, lost and forgotten, and it would return to its constituent elements, lead and copper, part of the planet, the same way it started.

The guy gurgled, a lone tubercular cough, very loud, and blood foamed and sprayed from his wound. For a second he stayed upright, just a guy leaning on a rail, and then everything gave way all at once, and he went down like liquid, in a sprawled puddle, all arms and legs and jeans and hair.

Reacher said, “Where were you aiming?”

Chang said, “Center mass.”

Reacher smiled.

“Can’t beat center mass,” he said.

He walked twenty feet, and found the guy’s collar, and the back of his belt, and he hoisted him up, and he dumped him over the fence.

The hogs came running.

Chapter 59

They didn’t want to take the crew-cab back to town, because they didn’t want to sit where those guys had sat, so they rode the backhoe, as before, Westwood driving, Reacher and Chang face to face above his head, but this time on the dirt road. Which was slow, but more comfortable. They parked in the dealer’s lot. The salesman came out. The backhoe was examined. It was a little stained by crushed wheat, and a little scratched on the sides. There was a little dirt caked on. And the front bucket had a dimple, where the bullet had struck. Not new anymore. Not exactly. Reacher gave the guy five grand from their leftover money. Easy come, easy go.

Then they walked south through the plaza. The sun was warm. A kid threw a ball against a building, and hit the rebound with a stick. The same kid they had seen before. They stopped by the motel office, where Westwood booked a whole bunch of rooms. For himself, and his photographers, and all kinds of assistants and interns. The new help at the desk was a teenage girl. Maybe ready for college. She was fast and efficient. She was cheerful and bright.

Reacher asked her, “Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?”

She said, “I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“Why?”

“The farmers don’t like it. They’ve done their best to bury it.”

“I won’t tell them you told me.”

“It’s a corruption of the old Arapaho Indian name. One word, but it sounds like two. It means the place where bad things grow.”

Westwood gave Chang the key to his rental car, and said goodbye. Reacher walked with her to the diner, where the red Ford was parked.

She said, “You were headed for Chicago.”

He said, “Yes, I was.”

“You wanted to get there before the weather turned cold.”

“Always a good idea, with Chicago.”

“You could take the seven o’clock train. Eat lunch in the diner. Sleep all afternoon in the sun. In a lawn chair. I saw you, the very first day.”

“You saw me?”

“I was walking by.”

“I told you. I was in the army. I can sleep anywhere.”

“Are you going to follow up with a doctor?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m driving to Oklahoma City. I’ll drop the car at the airport. I guess Westwood’s interns will bring him another. I can fly home from there.”

He said nothing.

She said, “You OK?”

He said, “We were just in Chicago. Maybe I should go someplace else.”

She smiled. “Go visit Milwaukee. All thirty-six blocks.”

He paused a beat.

She said, “You OK?”

“Will you come with me?”

“To Milwaukee?”

“Just a couple of days. Like a vacation. We earned one. We could do what people do.”

She was quiet for a long moment, five or six seconds, right to the edge of discomfort, and then she said, “I don’t want to answer that question here. Not in Mother’s Rest. Get in the car.”

He did, and she did, and she started the engine. She put the lever in gear, and turned the wheel, and they drove away from the diner, and the dry goods store, to the old wagon train trail, where they turned left and headed west, with the road running straight on ahead of them through the wheat, forever, until it disappeared in the golden haze on the far horizon, at that point as narrow as a needle.

Acknowledgments

TK

About the Author

LEE CHILD is the author of twenty New York Times bestselling Jack Reacher thrillers, with ten having reached the #1 position. All have been optioned for major motion pictures; the first of which, Jack Reacher, was based on One Shot. Foreign rights to the Reacher series have sold in almost a hundred territories. A native of England and a former television director, Child lives in New York City.

leechild.com

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