Worth Dying For by Lee Child Page A

about fifteen bucks with tip.’
    The woman looked surprised. And satisfied.
    ‘That’s a lot of money,’ she said. ‘That’s two hours’ wages. That’s like having a nine-day work week.’
    ‘Not all profit,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m hungry, don’t forget.’
    She led him inside through a door to a back hallway. The housewas what Seth Duncan’s place might have been before the expensive renovations. Low ceilings overhead, small panes of wavy glass in the windows, uneven floors underfoot, the whole place old and antique and outdated in every possible way, but cleaned and tidied and well maintained for a hundred consecutive years. The kitchen was immaculate. The stove was cold.
    ‘You didn’t eat yet?’ Reacher asked.
    ‘I don’t eat,’ the woman said. ‘Not breakfast, at least.’
    ‘Dieting?’
    The woman didn’t answer, and Reacher immediately felt stupid.
    ‘I’m buying,’ he said. ‘Thirty bucks. Let’s both have some fun.’
    ‘I don’t want charity.’
    ‘It isn’t charity. I’m returning a favour, that’s all. You stuck your neck out bringing me here.’
    ‘I was just trying to be a decent person.’
    ‘Me too,’ Reacher said. ‘Take it or leave it.’
    She said, ‘I’ll take it.’
    He said, ‘What’s your name? Most times when I have breakfast with a lady, I know her name at least.’
    ‘My name is Dorothy.’
    ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Dorothy. You married?’
    ‘I was. Now I’m not.’
    ‘You know my name?’
    ‘Your name is Jack Reacher. We’ve all been informed. The word is out.’
    ‘I told the doctor’s wife.’
    ‘And she told the Duncans. Don’t blame her for it. It’s automatic. She’s trying to pay down her debt, like all of us.’
    ‘What does she owe them?’
    ‘She sided with me, twenty-five years ago.’
    Roberto Cassano and Angelo Mancini were driving north in a rented Impala. They were based in a Courtyard Marriott, which was the only hotel in the county seat, which was nothing more than a token grid of streets set in the middle of what felt likea billion square miles of absolutely nothing at all. They had learned to watch their fuel gauge. Nebraska was that kind of place. It paid to fill up at every gas station you saw. The next one could be a million miles away.
    They were from Vegas, which as always meant they were really from somewhere else. New York, in Cassano’s case, and Philadelphia, in Mancini’s. They had paid their dues in their home towns, and then they had gotten hired together in Miami, like playing triple-A ball, and then they had moved up to the big show out in the Nevada desert. Tourists were told that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that wasn’t true as far as Cassano and Mancini were concerned. They were travelling men, always on the move, tasked to roam around and deal with the first faint pre-echoes of trouble long before it rolled in and hit their boss where he lived.
    Hence the trip to the vast agricultural wastelands, nearly eight hundred miles north and east of the glitter and the glamour. There was a snafu in the supply chain, and it was a day or two away from getting extremely embarrassing. Their boss had promised certain specific things to certain specific people, and it would do him no good at all if he couldn’t deliver. So Cassano and Mancini had so far been on the scene for seventy-two hours straight, and they had smacked some beanpole yokel’s wife around, just to make their point. Then some other related yokel had called with a claim that the snafu was being caused by a stranger poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Bullshit, possibly. Quite probably entirely unconnected. Just an excuse. But Cassano and Mancini were only sixty miles away, so their boss was sending them north to help, because if the yokel’s statement was indeed a lie, then it indicated vulnerability, and therefore minor assistance rendered now would leverage a better deal later. An obvious move. This was American business,