Ли Чайлд - Past Tense

‘Their grandparents were hiding from the law.’

‘Interesting,’ Reacher said.

‘It happened,’ Carrington said. ‘Obviously no one with a federal warrant would fill out a census form. Other folks thought laying low might help them in the future.’

Reacher said nothing.

Carrington said, ‘What did you do in the army?’

‘Military police,’ Reacher said. ‘You?’

‘What makes you think I was in the army?’

‘Your age, your appearance, your manner and bearing, your air of decisive competence, and your limp.’

‘You noticed.’

‘I was trained to. I was a cop. My guess is you have an artificial lower leg. Barely detectable, therefore a really good one. And the army has the best, these days.’

‘I never served,’ Carrington said. ‘I wasn’t able to.’

‘Why not?’

‘I was born with a rare condition. It has a long and complicated name. It meant I had no shin bone. Everything else was there.’

‘So you’ve had a lifetime of practice.’

‘I’m not looking for sympathy.’

‘You’re not getting any. But even so, you’re doing OK. Your walk is close to perfect.’

‘Thank you,’ Carrington said. ‘Tell me about being a cop.’

‘It was a good job, while it lasted.’

‘You saw the effect of crime on families.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Your dad joined the Marines at seventeen,’ Carrington said. ‘Got to be a reason.’

Patty Sundstrom and Shorty Fleck sat outside their room, in the plastic lawn chairs under the window. They watched the mouth of the track through the trees and waited for the mechanic to come. He didn’t. Shorty got up and tried the Honda one more time. Sometimes leaving a thing switched off for a spell fixed it. He had a TV set like that. About one time in three it came on with no sound. You had to shut it down and try again.

He turned the key. Nothing happened. On, off, on, off, silently, no difference at all. He went back to his lawn chair. Patty got up and took all their maps from the glove box. She carried them back to her own chair and spread them out on her knee. She found their current location, at the end of the inch-long spider-web vein, in the middle of the pale green shape. The forested area. Which seemed to average about five miles across, and maybe seven from top to bottom. The tip of the spider-web vein was off-centre in the space, two miles from the eastern limit but three from the western. It was about equal north and south. The green shape had a faint line around it, as if it was all one property. Maybe the motel owned the forest. There was nothing much beyond it, except the two-lane road they had turned off, which wandered east and south, to the town with its name printed semi-bold. Laconia, New Hampshire. Nearer thirty miles away than twenty. Her guess the day before had been optimistic.

She said, ‘Maybe the best bet will be what you said. We should forget the car and get a ride in the tow truck. Laconia is near I-93. We could hitch a ride to the cloverleaf. Or take a taxi, even. For less money than another night here, probably. If we can get to Nashua or Manchester we can get to Boston, and then we can get the cheap bus to New York.’

‘I’m sorry about the car,’ Shorty said. ‘I mean it.’

‘No use crying over spilt milk.’

‘Maybe the mechanic can fix it. It might be easy. I don’t get how it can be so dead. Maybe there’s a loose connection, simple as that. I had a radio once, wouldn’t light up at all. I was banging and banging on it, and then I saw the plug had fallen out of the wall. It felt the same kind of dead.’

They heard footsteps in the dirt. Steven stepped around the corner and walked towards them. He passed room twelve, and eleven, and came to a stop.

‘Come to lunch,’ he said. ‘Don’t take what Mark said to heart. He’s upset, that’s all. He really wants to help you, and he can’t. He thought Peter would fix it in two minutes. He got frustrated. He likes things to turn out right for everybody.’

Shorty said, ‘When is the mechanic coming?’

‘I’m afraid we haven’t called him yet,’ Steven said. ‘The phone has been down all morning.’

REACHER LEFT CARRINGTON in the garden, and walked back to the city office. He pressed the record department’s bell, and a minute later Elizabeth Castle came in through the door.

He said, ‘You told me to check back.’

She said, ‘Did you find Carter?’

‘He seems like a nice guy. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to date him.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘When I wondered if he was your boyfriend, and you were incredulous.’

‘That he would want to date me. He’s Laconia’s most eligible bachelor. He could have anyone he wants. I’m sure he has no idea who I am. What did he tell you?’

‘That my grandparents were either poor or thieves, or poor thieves.’

‘I’m sure they weren’t.’

Reacher said nothing.

She said, ‘Although I know both those things were frequent reasons.’

‘Either one is a possibility,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to walk on eggs.’

‘Probably they didn’t register to vote, either. Would they have had driver’s licences?’

‘Not if they were poor. Not if they were thieves, either. Not in their real names, anyway.’

‘Your dad must have had a birth certificate. He must be on paper somewhere.’

The customer door from the corridor opened, and Carter Carrington stepped inside, with his suit and his smile and his unruly hair. He saw Reacher and said, ‘Hello again,’ not surprised at all, as if he had expected no one else. Then he turned towards the counter and stuck out his hand and said, ‘You must be Ms Castle.’

‘Elizabeth,’ she said.

‘Carter Carrington. Really pleased to meet you. Thanks for sending this gentleman my way. He has an interesting situation.’

‘Because his dad is missing from two consecutive counts.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Which feels deliberate.’

‘As long as we’re sure we’re looking at the right town.’

‘We are,’ Reacher said. ‘I saw it written down a dozen times. Laconia, New Hampshire.’

‘Interesting,’ Carrington said. Then he looked Elizabeth Castle in the eye and said, ‘We should have lunch sometime. I like the way you saw the thing with the two counts. I’d like to discuss it more.’

She didn’t answer.

‘Anyway, keep me in the loop,’ he said.

She said, ‘We figure he must have had a birth certificate.’

‘Almost certainly,’ he said. ‘What was his date of birth?’

Reacher paused a beat.

He said, ‘This is going to sound weird. In this context, I mean.’

‘Why?’

‘Sometimes he wasn’t sure.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Sometimes he said June, and sometimes he said July.’

‘Was there an explanation for that?’

‘He said he couldn’t remember because birthdays weren’t important to him. He didn’t see why he should be congratulated for getting another year closer to death.’

‘That’s bleak.’

‘He was a Marine.’

‘What did the paperwork say?’

‘July.’

Carrington said nothing.

Reacher said, ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I already agreed with Ms Castle we don’t need to walk on eggs.’

‘A child uncertain of its birth date is a classic symptom of dysfunction within a family.’

‘Theoretically,’ Reacher said.

‘Anyway, birth records are in date order. Could take some time, if you’re not sure. Better to find another avenue.’

‘Such as?’

‘The police blotter, maybe. Not to be insensitive. Purely as a percentage play. If nothing else it would be nice to eliminate the possibility. I don’t want them to be hiding from the law, any more than you do. I want a more interesting reason than that. And it won’t take long to find out. As of now our police department is computerized back about a thousand years. They spent a fortune. Homeland Security money, not ours, but still. They also built a statue of the first chief.’