23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  “I got money,” Mark said. “You can have it.”

  “Don’t want it,” Reacher said. “Don’t need it.”

  “Got to be some way we can work this out.”

  Reacher said, “Patty, pick up his gun. Very carefully. Finger and thumb on the grip.”

  She did. She came close and ducked down and grabbed the gun and scuttled back. Reacher bent Mark’s arm at the elbow, ninety degrees, like he was waving, then more, until his forearm was folded back tight on his upper arm, and his hand was touching his shoulder.

  Then more. Reacher pulled Mark’s hand below the horizontal, scraping it down the back of his shoulder blade, two inches, four, six. Which put all kinds of stress on all kinds of joints. Mostly the elbow. But the shoulder too. And all the ligaments and tendons in between.

  Reacher took his arrow away from Mark’s throat, and his elbow off his chest, and Mark dropped gratefully to his knees, to relieve the pressure on his arm. Reacher changed his grip. He let go of his wrist and bunched his fist in his collar, and twisted, to make a tight figure eight, to choke him against the button.

  Then he looked at Patty and said, “Do you want to do it, or should I?”

  “Do what?”

  “Shoot him.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You said you wished he had burned up in the fire.”

  “Who are you?” she said again.

  “Long story,” he said again. “I have an appointment in the morning, south of here. I needed a motel for the night. This was all I could find.”

  “We should call the police.”

  “Were you headed somewhere?”

  “Florida,” she said. “We wanted a new life.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Windsurfer rentals. Maybe jet skis too. Shorty got the idea of T-shirts.”

  “Living where?”

  “A shack on the beach. Maybe over the store.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “We thought so.”

  “Alternatively you could spend three years living in a chain hotel somewhere in New Hampshire, talking to really obnoxious people, half the time bored to death, and the other half scared to death. Want to do that instead?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what will happen if we call the police. You’ll be talking to detectives and prosecutors and lawyers and psychiatrists, over and over again, including some pretty tough questions along the way, because they’ll do the math the same way I have. I came in from the road, and the action was always ahead of me. So far I caught up to four of them. I’m guessing there were more to come, originally.”

  “There were six originally.”

  “What happened to the first two?”

  She didn’t answer. Just breathed in, and breathed out.

  “You would win in the end,” Reacher said. “Probably. Some kind of justifiable homicide, or self defense. But nothing is certain. Also you’re foreigners. Overall it would be a rollercoaster. You wouldn’t be allowed to leave the state. All they get here is the Red Sox. You need to think about this carefully.”

  She said nothing.

  Reacher said, “Most likely better if we don’t call the cops.”

  Mark started to struggle.

  Reacher said to Patty, “He wanted to leave Shorty to die.”

  She paused a long moment.

  She looked down at the gun in her hand.

  “Come around,” Reacher said. “So you’re pointing it away from me.”

  She came and stood next to him.

  Mark struggled and thrashed, harder and crazier, until Reacher hauled him upright and punched him hard in the solar plexus, and lowered him down again, not exactly still, but at least momentarily incapable of voluntary muscular control.

  Reacher said, “Stick the tip of the suppressor hard in his back, between his shoulder blades. About six inches below where I’m grabbing him. The safety is a little tab on the front of the trigger. It clicks in as soon as your finger is in the correct position. Then all you do is squeeze.”

  She nodded.

  She stood still for what felt like twenty seconds.

  She said, “I can’t.”

  Reacher let go of Mark’s collar, and sent him sprawling with a push. He took the Glock from Patty. He said, “I wanted you to have the opportunity. That was all. Otherwise you would have wondered all your life. But now you know. You’re a good person, Patty.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Better than me,” he said.

  He turned and shot Mark in the head. Twice. A fast tight double-tap, low in the back of the skull. What the army schools called the assassination shot. Not that they would ever admit it.

  —

  They used the Mercedes to go get Shorty. First Reacher dragged the tow truck guy into the trees on one side of the track, and then Mark on the other. Out of the way. He didn’t want to drive over them. Not if Shorty had a broken leg. Bumps would shake him up.

  Patty drove. She got turned around and headed back with high beam headlights. She came out of the mouth of the track. She paused there a moment. Up ahead and two acres away the motel was a low pile of glowing embers. The cars in front of it were burned out and ashy. The barn was burning fiercely. The house was burning harder. The flames could have been fifty feet high.

  Two riderless quad-bikes stood abandoned near the center of the meadow. There were two humped shapes on the ground next to them.

  “There were four altogether,” Patty said. “Mark, Peter, Steven, and Robert.”

  “I heard gunshots,” Reacher said. “Not long ago. Suppressed nine-millimeter rounds. I think Mark just dissolved the partnership.”

  “Where’s the fourth guy?”

  “In the house, probably. I wouldn’t have heard a gunshot from there. There won’t be much left behind.”

  They watched the flames for a minute more, and then Patty turned a tight left and drove across the bumpy grass close to the edge of the woods. She watched carefully. She slowed down in two separate places, and took a long hard look, but both times she looked away and drove on. Finally she stopped. She kept her hands on the wheel.

  She said, “It all looks the same now.”

  Reacher asked, “How deep in is he?”

  “I can’t remember. We walked a bit, and then I dragged him further. To where I thought he was safe.”

  “Where did you go in?”

  “Between two trees.”

  “Doesn’t help.”

  “I think it was here.”

  They shut down and got out. Without headlights the world was pitch dark. Patty put her headset on again, and Reacher dropped his tube down in place. Infinite green detail came back. Patty turned her head left and right. She looked at the front rank of trees. At the spaces between.

  “I think it was here,” she said again.

  They pushed into the forest. She led the way. They walked a slow curve, east and north. As if aiming to hit the track maybe thirty yards along its length. Thirty yards from its mouth. They stepped left and right around trees. Vines and bushes clawed at their ankles.

  Patty said, “I don’t recognize anything.”

  Reacher called out, “Shorty? Shorty Fleck?”

  Patty called out, “Shorty, it’s me. Where are you?”

  Nothing.

  They walked on. Every ten paces they stopped and called and shouted and yelled. Then they stood still and held their breath and listened.

  Nothing.

  Until the third time they did it.

  They heard a tiny sound. Distant, quiet, metallic, slow. Tink, tink, tink . Due east, Reacher thought, maybe forty yards away.

  He called out, “Shorty Fleck?”

  Tink, tink, tink .

  They changed direction. They hustled. Trees, vines, brambles, bushes. They called out his name every step of the way, first Patty, then Reacher, taking turns. They heard tink, tink, tink , getting louder with every step. They followed the sound.

  They found him slumped
against a tree. Exhausted with pain. He had night vision on. He had an arrow in his hand. He was tapping it against the optical tube. Tink, tink, tink . It was all he could do.

  —

  Reacher carried him back and laid him out across the rear seat of the Mercedes. His leg was busted bad. The wound was a mess. He had lost a lot of blood. He was pale but hot. He was damp with sweat.

  Patty said, “Where should we take him?”

  “Probably better to get out of the county,” Reacher said. “You should go to Manchester. It’s a bigger place.”

  “Are you not coming with us?”

  Reacher shook his head.

  “Not all the way,” he said. “I have an appointment in the morning.”

  “They’ll ask questions at the hospital.”

  “Tell them it was a motorcycle accident. They’ll believe you. Hospitals believe anything about motorcycles. They won’t need to report it. It’s obviously not a gunshot wound. You could tell them he fell on a piece of metal.”

  “OK.”

  “Get him set, and then go park the car somewhere quiet. Leave the doors unlocked and the key in. You need it to disappear pretty quick. Then you’re home and dry.”

  “OK,” she said again.

  She got behind the wheel. Reacher got in the passenger seat, half turned around to keep an eye on Shorty. Patty turned a wide slow circle over the lumpy ground. Shorty bounced and jostled and gasped. Patty turned in at the mouth of the track.

  Shorty slapped the seat beside him, once, twice, weak and feeble.

  Reacher said, “What?”

  Shorty opened his mouth. No words would come out. He tried again.

  He whispered, “Suitcase.”

  Patty drove on, slow and steady.

  “We had a suitcase in the room,” she said. “I guess it burned up.”

  Shorty slapped the seat again.

  “I took it out,” he whispered.

  Patty stopped the car.

  “Where is it?” she said.

  “In the grass,” he said. “Across the lot.”

  She backed up, inexpertly, corkscrewing a little, and then she turned around in the mouth of the track and set out forward across the meadow. Past the abandoned bikes, and the bodies.

  “Peter and Robert,” she said.

  She drove on. She stopped in the lot. They could feel the heat through the windows. Reacher saw the metal cage, sticking up out of the carpet of coals. Steel bars and steel mesh. Scorched and distorted. Room ten. Shorty moved his forearm, back and forth, just once, weak and vague and limp, like an old priest pronouncing a benediction, or a wounded man miming a journey. From there to there . Reacher got out and walked up level with the metal cage. He turned and walked to the edge of the grass. A straight line. The shortest distance between two points. He dropped his night vision tube in place.

  He saw the suitcase immediately. It was a huge old leather thing tied up with rope. It was lying flat in the grass. He stepped over and picked it up. It weighed a ton. Maybe two. He struggled back with it, lopsided. Patty got out and opened the trunk for him. He rested the case on the ground.

  He said, “What the hell have you got in here?”

  “Comics,” she said. “More than a thousand. All the great ones. Lots of early Superman. From our dads and granddads. We were going to sell them in New York, to pay for Florida.”

  There were two bags already stashed in the trunk. Two soft leather duffels, zipped and bulging. Reacher took a look inside. They were both full of money. Both full of bricks and bricks of cash, all neatly stacked. Mostly hundred dollar bills, mostly banded into inch-thick wads. Ten thousand bucks at a time, according to the printed labels. There were about fifty bricks in each bag. Maybe a million dollars in total.

  “You should keep the comics,” Reacher said. “You should use this instead. You could buy all the windsurfers you want.”

  “We can’t,” Patty said. “It isn’t ours.”

  “I think it is. You won the game. I’m guessing this is what they put in the pot. Who else should have it?”

  “It’s a fortune.”

  “You earned it,” Reacher said. “Don’t you think?”

  She said nothing.

  Then she asked, “Do you want some?”

  “I have enough to get by,” Reacher said. “I don’t need more.”

  He hefted the suitcase up and slid it in the trunk.

  The Mercedes sagged on its springs.

  “What’s your name?” Patty asked. “I would like to know.”

  “Reacher.”

  She paused.

  She said, “That was Mark’s name.”

  “Different branch of the family.”

  They got back in the car, and she drove through the meadow, into the woods, almost two miles, all the way to the tow truck. Reacher took the key and climbed up and let himself in. Heavy pressure. He was a bad driver anyway, and the controls were unfamiliar. But after a minute he got the lights turned on. Then he got the engine started. He found the gear selector and shoved it in reverse. A screen on the dashboard lit up, with a rear view camera. A wide-angle lens. A color picture. It showed an ancient Subaru, parked right behind the truck, just waiting.

  Chapter 43

  Reacher climbed down from the cab, and gave Patty a wait-one signal, which he hoped she understood. Then he squeezed and slid down the side of the truck, to the rear, and out to the air.

  Burke met him right there. The Reverend Patrick G. He had his hands up, palms out, in a kind of placatory I know, I know gesture. Patting the air. Apologizing in advance.

  He said, “Detective Amos called on my phone. She said I should find you and tell you 10-41. I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s a military police radio code,” Reacher said. “It means immediate callback requested.”

  “There’s no cell service here.”

  “We’ll head south. But first move your car so I can move the truck. We got someone else also heading south. They’re in a bigger hurry.”

  He squeezed back to the cab, and gave Patty what he hoped was a reassuring wave from the ladder. He got the selector back in reverse. He saw a live picture of Burke backing up, so he backed up after him, a little jerky, sometimes off line, fighting the trees here and there, beating most of them, getting thumped pretty hard once or twice. When he got out to the road he swung the wheel, and parked backward on the opposite shoulder, not totally straight, but not embarrassing either.

  The black Mercedes nosed out after him.

  He climbed down from the cab.

  The Mercedes stopped beside him.

  Patty buzzed the window down.

  He said, “I’m getting a ride from the guy in the Subaru. It was nice meeting you. Good luck in Florida.”

  She craned up in her seat, and looked down at the road.

  “We’re out,” she said. “At last. Thank you. I mean it. I feel we owe you.”

  “You would have figured it out,” Reacher said. “You still had the flashlight. It would have worked just as well. Four big batteries, all kinds of fancy LEDs. It’s not just a night vision thing. His first shot would have missed. Then you would have been in the trees.”

  “But then what?”

  “Rinse and repeat. I bet he didn’t have a spare magazine. He seems to have packed in a hurry.”

  “Thank you,” she said again. “I mean it.”

  “Good luck in Florida,” he said again. “Welcome to America.”

  He crossed the road to where the Subaru was waiting. She drove away, south. She raised a hand through her open window, like a wave, and then she kept it there a hundred yards, fingers open, feeling the rush of nighttime air against her palm.

  —

  Burke drove south, on the back road. Reacher watched the bars on the phone. Burke was concerned about the lateness of the hour. He said he was sure Detective Amos would be fast asleep in bed by then. Reacher said he was sure she meant it when she sent the 10-41. Immediate callback. She
could have used a different code.

  One bar came up, and then a second, and then the wide gravel shoulder they had used before. Burke pulled over. Reacher dialed the number. Amos answered right away. Not asleep. There was car noise. She was driving.

  She said, “The Boston PD called to tell us the cleanup hitter got home in the middle of the evening.”

  “Does he have Carrington?”

  “They’re making inquiries.”

  “What about Elizabeth Castle?”

  “Both are still missing.”

  “Maybe I should go to Boston.”

  “You have somewhere else to go first.”

  “Where?”

  She said, “I found Stan Reacher.”

  “OK.”

  “He showed up thirty years ago. He lived on his own for a long spell, and then he moved in with a younger relative. He’s registered to vote and he still has a driver’s license.”

  “OK,” Reacher said again.

  “I called his house. He wants to see you.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “It’s late.”

  “He has insomnia. Normally he watches TV. He says you’re welcome to come over and talk all night.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Laconia,” she said. “Right here in town. Chances are you walked right by his house.”

  —

  It turned out the closest Reacher had previously gotten was two streets away, in his second hotel. He could have made a left out the door, and a right, and a left, and then found an alley like the one where the cocktail waitress lived, with a door on the right and a door on the left, in this case not to upstairs apartments, but to neat three-story townhouses set either side of an interior courtyard.

  Stan lived in the house on the left.

  Amos met them in an unmarked car, out on the curb, at the entrance to the alley. She shook Burke’s hand and said she was pleased to meet him. Then she turned to Reacher and asked if he felt OK. She said, “This could be very weird.”