Free Worth Dying For by Lee Child Page A

east or west?’
    ‘Some crazy plan,’ the woman said. ‘About fifty years ago. There was supposed to be a strip right here, all commercial, a mile long, with houses east and west. A couple of farms were sold for the land, but that’s about all that happened. Even the gas station went out of business, which is pretty much the kiss of death, wouldn’t you say?’
    ‘This motel is still here.’
    ‘By the skin of its teeth. Most of what Mr Vincent earns comes from feeding whiskey to the doctor.’
    ‘Big cash flow right there, from what I saw last night.’
    ‘A bar needs more than one customer.’
    ‘He’s paying you.’
    The woman nodded. ‘Mr Vincent is a good man. He helps where he can. I’m a farmer, really. I work the winters here, because I need the money. To pay the Duncans, basically.’
    ‘Haulage fees?’
    ‘Mine are higher than most.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Ancient history. I wouldn’t give up.’
    ‘On what?’
    ‘I can’t talk about it,’ the woman said. ‘It’s a forbidden subject. It was the start of everything bad. And I was wrong, anyway. It was a false allegation.’
    Reacher got up off the bed. He headed for the bathroom and rinsed his face with cold water and brushed his teeth. Behind him the woman stripped the bed with fast practised movements of her wrists, sheets going one way, blankets the other. She said, ‘You’re heading for Virginia.’
    Reacher said, ‘You know my Social Security number too?’
    ‘The doctor told his wife you were a military cop.’
    ‘Were, as in used to be. Not any more.’
    ‘So what are you now?’
    ‘Hungry.’
    ‘No breakfast here.’
    ‘So where?’
    ‘There’s a diner an hour or so south. In town. Where the county cops get their morning coffee and doughnuts.’
    ‘Terrific.’
    The housekeeper stepped out to the path and took fresh linens from a cart. Bottom sheet, top sheet, pillowcases. Reacher asked her, ‘What does Vincent pay you?’
    ‘Minimum wage,’ she said. ‘That’s all he can afford.’
    ‘I could pay you more than that to cook me breakfast.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Your place.’
    ‘Risky.’
    ‘Why? You a terrible cook?’
    She smiled, briefly. ‘Do you tip well?’
    ‘If the coffee’s good.’
    ‘I use my mother’s percolator.’
    ‘Was her coffee good?’
    ‘The best.’
    ‘So we’re in business.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ the woman said.
    ‘They’re not going to be conducting house-to-house searches. They expect to find me out in the open.’
    ‘And when they don’t?’
    ‘Nothing for you to worry about. I’ll be long gone. I like breakfast as much as the next guy, but I don’t take hours to eat it.’
    The woman stood there for a minute, unsure, a crisp white pillowcase held flat across her chest like a sign, or a flag, or a defence. Then she said, ‘OK.’
    Four hundred and fifty miles due north, because of the latitude, dawn came a little later. The grey panel truck sat astride the sandy path, hidden, inert, dewed over with cold. Its driver woke up in the dark and climbed down and took a leak against a tree, and then he drank some water and ate a candy bar and got back in his sleeping bag and watched the pale morning light filter down through the needles. He knew at best he would be there most of the day, or most of two days, and at worst most of three or four days. But then would come his share, of money and fun, and both things were worth waiting for.
    He was patient by nature.
    And obedient.
    *     *     *
    Reacher stood still in the middle of the room and the housekeeper finished up around him. She made the bed tight enough to bounce a dime, she changed the towels, she replaced a tiny vial of shampoo, she put out a new morsel of paper-wrapped soap, she folded an arrowhead into the toilet roll. Then she went to get her truck. It was a pick-up, a battered old item, very plain, with rust and skinny tyres and a sagging suspension. She looped around the wrecked Subaru and parked with the passenger door