by Lee Child
But not fixed in time. Speed was under Reacher’s control. The kid would be expecting a normal kind of approach, plus or minus. Maybe a little tense and urgent. Maybe a little cautious and wary. But mostly average. He would trigger the hook at the first glimpse of Reacher coming around the corner. Any kind of normal walking pace would bring it home good and solid. The kid wasn’t dumb. Possibly an athlete. Probably had decent hand to eye coordination.
Therefore nothing would be done at normal or average speed.
Reacher stopped six paces short of the corner, and waited, and waited, and then he took another pace, a slow, sliding scrape across grit and dirt, and then he paused, and waited, and took another step, slow, sliding, ominous. And then another long wait, and another slow step. He pictured the kid around the corner, tensed up, his fist cocked, holding his position. And holding. Holding too long. Getting too tensed. Getting all cramped and shaky.
Reacher took another step, long and slow. Now he was six feet from the corner. He waited. And waited. Then he launched fast, at a run, his left hand up, palm open, fingers spread like a baseball glove. He burst around the corner and saw the kid sputtering to life, confused by the change of pace, locked into slow-motion waiting, so that his triumphant right hook was so far coming out like a herky-jerky feeble squib, which Reacher caught easily in his left palm, like a soft liner to second. The kid’s fist was big, but Reacher’s open hand was bigger, so he clamped down and squeezed, not hard enough to crush the bones, but hard enough to make the kid concentrate on keeping his mouth shut, so no whines or squeals came out, which obviously he couldn’t afford, being a hell of a guy.
Then Reacher squeezed harder. Mostly as an IQ test. Which the kid failed. He used his free hand to claw at Reacher’s wrist. The wrong move. Unproductive. Always better to go straight to the source of the problem, and use your free hand to hit the squeezer in the head. Or thumb out his eye, or otherwise get his attention. But the kid didn’t. A missed opportunity. Then Reacher added a twist to the squeeze. Like turning a door knob. The kid’s elbow locked up and he dropped a shoulder to compensate, but Reacher kept on twisting, until the kid got so lopsided he had to take his hand off Reacher’s wrist and hold his whole arm straight out for balance.
Reacher said, “Want me to hit you?”
No reply.
“It’s not a difficult question,” Reacher said. “A yes or no answer will do it.”
By that point the kid was shuffling in place, trying to find a bearable position, huffing and gasping. But not squealing yet. He said, “OK, sure, I got her signals wrong. I’m sorry, man. I’ll leave her alone now.”
“What about her job?”
“I was kidding, man.”
“What about the next new waitress, down on her luck, in need of secure employment?”
The kid didn’t answer.
Reacher clamped down harder, and said, “Want me to hit you?”
The kid said, “No.”
“No means no, right? I expect they teach you that now, at your fancy university. Kind of theoretical, I guess, from your point of view. Until now.”
“Come on, man.”
“Want me to hit you?”
“No.”
Reacher hit him in the face, with a straight right, maximum force, crashing and twisting. Like a freight train. The kid’s lights went out immediately. He went slack and gravity took over. Reacher kept his left hand rock solid. All the kid’s weight fell on his own locked elbow. Reacher waited. One of two things would happen. Either the strength and elasticity in the kid’s ligaments would roll him forward, or they wouldn’t.
They didn’t. The kid’s elbow broke and his arm turned inside out. Reacher let him fall. He landed on the bricks outside the bag shop, one arm right and the other arm wrong, like a swastika. He was breathing. A little bubbly, from the blood in his throat. His nose was badly busted. Cheekbones too, maybe. Some of his teeth were out. Upper row, mostly. His dentist’s kid was going to be just fine for college.
Reacher walked away, back to his lodgings, up the winding stair and through the low door to his room, where he took a second shower and got back in bed, once again warm and damp. He punched the pillow into shape, and went back to sleep.
—
At which moment Patty Sundstrom woke up. A quarter past three in the morning. Once again a pulse of subconscious disquiet had forced its way through to the surface. What were the flashlights for? Why two of them? Why not one, or twelve?
The room was blissfully cool. She could smell the night air, rich, like velvet. Why pack two flashlights with twelve meals? Why pack them at all? What did flashlights have to do with food? They weren’t natural partners. No one ever said, do you want a flashlight with that? And what Shorty suggested was nonsense. No one ate lunch in the dark. Which was all it was. It was lunch, for fellow rich guys up from Boston, who wanted to feel rugged for a week. No one paying before-Labor-Day or leafpeeper rates would accept granola bars for dinner. Or breakfast. Lunch only, surely, as part of a manly outdoor fantasy. So why the flashlights? Lunch was eaten in the middle of the day. Generally speaking the sun was out. Unless the rich guys were spelunkers. In which case they would have flashlights of their own, surely. Expensive specialist items, probably strapped to their heads.
Why would flashlights be packed in a carton of food, as if they were somehow integral, like silverware or napkins would be?
Were they packed?
Maybe they were just shoved in there as afterthoughts. She kept her eyes closed and pictured the scene when they opened the box. She had slit the tape with her nail, and Shorty had lifted the flaps. What had been her impression?
Two flashlights in the box, standing on their ends, crammed in among the food .
Crammed in.
Therefore not packed as integral components. Added later.
Why?
Two flashlights for two people.
They had each been given a flashlight and six subsistence meals.
Why?
We put together some ingredients for you. Either join us at the house, or help yourselves from the box . Which was kind of phony. Which they didn’t mean.
What else didn’t they mean?
She flipped the covers back and slid out of bed. She padded over to the dresser, where the carton sat in front of the TV screen. She lifted the flaps and felt inside. The first flashlight had fallen over in the void where the first two meals had been. She lifted it out. It was big and heavy. It felt cold and hard. She pressed it against her palm and switched it on. She rolled her palm a fraction and let a sliver of light spill out. It was pink from her skin. The flashlight was a famous make. It felt like it had been machined out of a solid billet of aerospace-grade aluminum. It had a cluster of tiny LED bulbs, like an insect’s eye.
She looked back in the box. The other flashlight was where it had started, rammed down into the crux between lunches nine, ten, eleven and twelve. Some of the granola bars around it were cracked and splintered. One of the raisin boxes was crushed. Added later, for sure. She looked at the tape she had slit. Two layers. One from the wholesaler, and one from them, when they resealed the box, after they added the flashlights.
What else didn’t they mean?
She padded toward the door, and she nudged Shorty’s bent shoe aside with her toe, and opened a gap wide enough to slip outside. She took her hand off the flashlight lens. It cast a bright white beam of light. She minced toward the Honda, with bare feet on the stones. She opened the passenger door. The hood release was where her shin would be. She had seen it a million times. A broad black lever. She tugged on it. The hood sprang up an inch with a thunk that in the still of the night sounded like a wreck on the highway.
She turned off the flashlight and waited. No one came. No windows in the house lit up. She turned the beam on again. She walked around to the front of the hood. She jiggled the catch and raised it up. She propped it with the bent metal rod that fit in the hole. She worked in a sawmill. She knew her way arou
nd machinery. She moved left and right, and ducked her head, until she could see what she wanted to see.
The acid test.
He knows what the problem is. He’s seen it before. Apparently there’s an electronic chip close to where the heater hoses go through the back of the dashboard .
She leaned forward. She held the flashlight in her fingers, like a medical probe. She angled the beam this way and that.
Chapter 13
Patty Sundstrom identified the back of the dashboard easily enough. It was a bare panel, pressed and dimpled with strengthening reinforcements, gray and dirty, partially covered by a thin and peeling sheet of sound deadening material. All kinds of wires and pipes and tubes went through it. Mostly electrical, she thought. The hot water for the heater would be in a thick hose. Maybe an inch or so in diameter, serious and reinforced. By convention black, she expected, clamped to a port on the engine block, which was where the hot water came from. And obviously it would be twinned with an identical black hose, for the return feed. Circulation, around and around. Because of the water pump. Which stopped when the engine stopped, Peter said.
She craned her neck and moved the flashlight beam.
She found two black hoses connected to the engine block. There were no other candidates. She followed them with the flashlight beam. They stayed low in the bay. They passed through the bulkhead into the passenger compartment very low down. Directly behind where the floor console was, with the gearshift lever. The heater was right above it.
The heater hoses go through the back of the dashboard .
No they don’t, Patty thought. She double checked. They went nowhere near the back of the dashboard. They went through level with the bottom of the foot well. Much lower down. And there was nothing near them anyway. Just thick metal components, all caked with dirt. No wires. Nothing vulnerable. Nothing that would fry from excessive temperatures. Certainly no black boxes that might contain electronic chips.
She backed away and straightened up. She looked at the house. All quiet. The barn was ghostly in the moonlight. All nine quad-bikes were neatly parked. She killed the flashlight beam and minced back to the room. She stepped to the bed and nudged Shorty awake. He sat up in a panic and looked all around for passersby or other intruders.
He saw none.
He said, “What?”
She said, “The heater hoses don’t go through the back of the dashboard.”
He said “What?” again.
“In the car,” she said. “They go through real low down, about level with the bottom of the gearstick.”
“How do you know?”
“I looked,” she said. “With one of the flashlights they gave us.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“Why?”
“I woke up. Something is not right.”
“So you ripped the console out of the car?”
“No, I looked under the hood. From the other side. I could see the connection. And there’s no electronic chip nearby.”
“OK, maybe the mechanic got it wrong,” Shorty said. “Maybe he was thinking of a different year. Ours is a pretty early model. Or maybe Hondas are different in Canada.”
“Or maybe the mechanic doesn’t exist. Maybe they never called one.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe they’re keeping us here.”
“What?”
“How else do you explain it?”
“Why would they? Seriously. You mean, like an occupancy thing? Because of the bank? They want our fifty bucks?”
“I don’t know why.”
“Hell of a way to do business. We could go on TripAdvisor.”
“Except we can’t go on anything. There’s no wifi and no cell signal and no phone in the room.”
“They can’t just keep people here, against their will. Someone would miss them eventually.”
“We as good as told them no one knows we’re gone.”
“We also as good as told them we’re broke,” Shorty said. “How long can they expect us to pay fifty bucks?”
“Two days,” Patty said. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Six meals each.”
“That’s crazy. Then what? Then they call the mechanic?”
“We have to get out of here. We have to do the thing you said with the quad-bike. So get dressed. We have to go.”
“Now?”
“This minute.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Like you said. They’re asleep now. We have to do it now.”
“Because a mechanic was wrong on the phone?”
“If there was a mechanic at all. And because of everything.”
Shorty said, “Why did they give us flashlights?”
Patty said, “I don’t know that either.”
“It’s like they knew we might want to leave in the dark.”
“How could they?”
Shorty got out of bed. He said, “We should take some food. Can’t count on getting anywhere before lunchtime, earliest. We’ll miss breakfast for sure.”
They got dressed, hopping from foot to foot in the half dark, with nothing but moonlight coming in the open door. They packed their stuff by feel and put their bags outside near the car.
“You sure about this?” Shorty said. “Never too late to change your mind.”
“I want to go,” Patty said. “Something isn’t right here.”
They walked down to the barn on the grass, not the dirt, because they felt it would be quieter. They were cautious across the last of the gravel, to the near corner of the perfect square of bikes, to the one Peter had driven away for Mark to use. Its engine was still faintly warm. Shorty wanted that exact one, because he had seen how to put its gearbox in neutral, and he knew it rolled along OK, but most of all because it was closest. Who wanted to push extra yards? Not him. He clicked the lever to neutral, and pushed back on the handlebars, kind of weak and sideways at first, but even so the machine rolled back obediently, getting faster and faster as Shorty got more and more head-on in his pushing.
“This is not too bad,” he said.
He dragged the machine to a stop and took up a new position and pushed it forward again, in a tight curve, a perfect neat maneuver, like reversing out of a parking space and turning and driving away. Patty joined in on the other side, and they pushed together and got up to a decent speed, steering along the center of the track toward the motel building, pretty much silently, apart from the scrape of their shoes on the dirt, and a lot of close-up squelching and popping from stones under the bike’s soft rubber tires. They pushed on, breathing hard, around room twelve’s corner, and onward to the Honda, two bays down, outside room ten. They stopped the bike right behind the car. Shorty popped the hatch.
“Wait,” Patty said.
She walked back to the corner and watched the house. No lights, no movement. She came back to the Honda and said, “OK.”
Shorty turned to face the open hatch square on, and he bent forward with his arms spread wide, and he wriggled his fingers under the suitcase, both ends, and he heaved it up at the front, and dragged it forward until it rested at an angle on the lip of the hatch. He grabbed the handle and hauled, intending to balance the case weightless on the lip, so he had time to change his position and adjust his grip, ready for the clean-and-jerk, and the turn toward the bike.
But the handle tore off the suitcase.
Shorty tottered back a step.
He said, “Damn.”
“Proves we couldn’t have carried it anyway,” Patty said. “That would have happened sooner or later.”
“How are we going to get it on the bus?”
“We’ll have to buy a rope. We could wrap it around a couple of times, and make a new handle. So we need a gas station or a hardware store. For the rope. First place we see.”
Shorty stepped forward again and bent down and got his fingers under the case. He grunted and lifted and gasped and turned and set it down on the bike, len
gthways, the top corners resting on the handlebar, the bottom edge digging into the padded seat. He nudged it a little and got it balanced. It ended up pretty solid. Better than he thought it would. He was pleased, overall.
He shut the Honda’s hatch, and they strapped their overnight bags on the bike’s rear rack. Then they took up position, Shorty on the left and Patty on the right, each of them with one hand clamped tight on the short length of handlebar visible either side beyond the suitcase’s corners, and the other hand close to it, partly pushing, partly juggling a flashlight. Which gave them twin makeshift headlight beams, and it made steering easy, and it meant they could steady the suitcase between them, with Shorty’s right forearm and Patty’s left at the top end, and with his right hip and her left at the bottom end, assuming they both walked kind of bent over at the waist, which clearly they would need to, because the weight of the load made pushing a whole different thing than before. Getting started required a full-on effort, both of them straining like a strongman show on cable television, and then keeping going afterward required nearly as much, although it got a little better when they bumped up out of the stony lot and onto the blacktop, at the very end of the road through the trees.
More than two miles to go. They entered the tunnel. The air was cool, and it smelled of rotten leaves and damp earth. They gasped and trudged. Through trial and error they learned it was best to keep their speed as high as they could bear, so that momentum alone would carry them through the long shallow potholes. It meant a lot of effort all of the time, but it was better than starting over whenever the front wheels bumped down into a pit. They kept on going, almost running against the weight, very quickly no fun at all, just grinding it out.
“I need to rest,” Patty said.
They let the bike coast to a stop. They nudged the suitcase left and right to perfect its balance. Then they stepped away, and arched their backs, and clamped their palms low down on their spines. They huffed and puffed, and eased their necks.