Worth Dying For by Lee Child Page B

after all. Forcing down the wholesale price was the name of the game.
    They came up the crappy two-lane and rolled through the crappy crossroads and pulled in at the motel. They had seen it before. It looked OK at night. Not so good in the daylight. In the daylight it looked sad and botched and half-hearted. Theysaw a damaged Subaru standing near one of the cabins. It was all smashed up. There was nothing else to see. They parked in the lot outside the lounge and got out of the rental car and stood and stretched. Two city boys, yawning, scoured by the endless wind. Cassano was medium height, dark, muscled, blank-eyed. Mancini was pretty much the same. They both wore good shoes and dark suits and coloured shirts and no ties and wool overcoats. They were often mistaken for each other.
    They went inside, to find the motel owner. Which they did, immediately. They found him behind the bar, using a rag, wiping a bunch of sticky overlapping rings off the wood. Some kind of a sadsack loser, with dyed red hair.
    Cassano said, ‘We represent the Duncan family,’ which he had been promised would produce results. And it did. The guy with the hair dropped the rag and stepped back and almost came to attention and saluted, like he was in the army, like a superior officer had just yelled at him.
    Cassano said, ‘You sheltered a guy here last night.’
    The guy with the hair said, ‘No, sir, I did not. I tossed him out.’
    Mancini said, ‘It’s cold.’
    The guy behind the bar said nothing, not following.
    Cassano said, ‘If he didn’t sleep here, where the hell did he sleep? You got no local competition. And he didn’t sleep out under a hedge. For one thing, there don’t seem to be any hedges in Nebraska. For another, he’d have frozen his ass off.’
    ‘I don’t know where he went.’
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘He wouldn’t tell me.’
    ‘Any kindly souls here, who would take a stranger in?’
    ‘Not if the Duncans told them not to.’
    ‘Then he must have stayed here.’
    ‘Sir, I told you, he didn’t.’
    ‘You checked his room?’
    ‘He returned the key before he left.’
    ‘More than one way into a room, asshole. Did you check it?’
    ‘The housekeeper already made it up.’
    ‘She say anything?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Where is she?’
    ‘She finished. She left. She went home.’
    ‘What’s her name?’
    ‘Dorothy.’
    Mancini said, ‘Tell us where Dorothy lives.’

SIXTEEN
    D OROTHY ’ S IDEA OF A FIFTEEN-DOLLAR BREAKFAST TURNED OUT to be a regular feast. Coffee first, while the rest of it was cooking, which was oatmeal, and bacon, and eggs, and toast, big heaping portions, lots of everything, all the food groups, all piping hot, served on thick china plates that must have been fifty years old, and eaten with ancient silverware that had heavy square Georgian handles.
    ‘Fabulous,’ Reacher said. ‘Thank you very much.’
    ‘You’re welcome. Thank you for mine.’
    ‘It isn’t right, you know. People not eating because of the Duncans.’
    ‘People do all kinds of things because of the Duncans.’
    ‘I know what I’d do.’
    She smiled. ‘We all talked like that, once upon a time, long ago. But they kept us poor and tired, and then we got old.’
    ‘What do the young people do here?’
    ‘They leave, just as soon as they can. The adventurous ones go all over the place. It’s a big country. The others stay closer to home, in Lincoln or Omaha.’
    ‘Doing what?’
    ‘There are jobs there. Some boys join the State Police. That’s always popular.’
    ‘Someone should call those boys.’
    She didn’t answer.
    He asked, ‘What happened twenty-five years ago?’
    ‘I can’t talk about it.’
    ‘You can, to me. No one will know. If I ever meet the Duncans, we’ll be discussing the present day, not ancient history.’
    ‘I was wrong anyway.’
    ‘About what?’
    She wouldn’t answer.
    He asked, ‘Were you the neighbour with the dispute?’
    She wouldn’t answer.
    He asked, ‘You want help cleaning