Ли Чайлд - Past Tense

‘Why would they lie about the room?’

‘Maybe they didn’t. Maybe a painter used the cotton bud. To touch up a last-minute ding in the wood stain. That happens, too. Maybe when they moved the furniture in. Hard to avoid.’

‘Now you think they’re OK?’

‘Not about the car, no. If theirs wouldn’t start this morning, why hadn’t they already called the mechanic anyway?’

‘The phone was out.’

‘Maybe not then. Maybe not first thing in the morning. We could have tagged on. We could have split the call-out charge. That would have made it more reasonable.’

‘Shorty, forget the call-out charge, OK? This is more important. They’re acting weird.’

‘I told you that at the beginning.’

‘I thought you just didn’t like them.’

‘For a reason.’

‘What are we going to do?’

Shorty glanced around. First at the mouth of the track through the trees, and then at the dead Honda’s load space, where their suitcase was weighing down the springs.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe we could tow the car with a quad bike. Maybe the keys are in them. Or on a hook inside the barn.’

‘We can’t steal a quad bike.’

‘It wouldn’t be stealing. It would be borrowing. We could tow the car two miles to the road, and then bring the quad bike back again.’

‘Then what? All we would have is a dead car on the side of the road.’

‘Maybe a wrecker would come by. Or we could get any kind of ride and forget about the car. The county would come along and junk it sooner or later.’

‘Do we have a tow rope?’

‘Maybe there’s one in the barn.’

‘I don’t think a quad bike would be strong enough.’

‘We could use two. Like tugboats pulling an ocean liner to the harbour mouth.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Patty said.

‘OK, maybe we could use a quad bike to haul just the suitcase.’

‘You mean drag it along?’

‘I think they have a platform on the back.’

‘Too small.’

‘Then we could balance it on the gas tank and the handlebar.’

‘They won’t like it if we leave our car here.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Do you even know how to drive a quad bike?’

‘It can’t be that hard. We would want to go slow anyway. And we couldn’t fall off. Not like a regular motorbike.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Patty said. ‘I suppose.’

‘Let’s wait until after dinner,’ Shorty said. ‘Maybe the phone is back on and the mechanic will show up and everything will work out fine. If not, we’ll take a look at the barn after dark. OK?’

Patty didn’t answer. They stayed where they were, slumped down in their lawn chairs, keeping the low sun on their faces. They left their room door wide open.

Fifty yards away in the command centre in the back parlour, Mark asked, ‘Who missed the cotton bud?’

‘All of us,’ Peter said. ‘We all checked the room and we all signed off on it.’

‘Then we all made a bad mistake. Now they’re agitated. Way too soon. We need to pace this better.’

‘He thinks it was the painter. She’ll believe him eventually. She doesn’t want to worry. She wants to be happy. She’ll talk herself around. They’ll calm down.’

‘You think?’

‘Why would we lie about the room? There’s no possible reason for it.’

Mark said, ‘Bring me a quad bike.’

REACHER WALKED BACK to the fancy county office with the census scans and the million-dollar cubicles, and he found the same surly guy on duty at the desk. Once again Reacher asked for two censuses, the first when Stan was two, and the second when he was twelve, but this time for the rest of the county that lay outside of Laconia’s technical city limit.

The guy said, ‘We can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re asking for a doughnut shape. With a hole in the middle, which is Laconia, which you already saw. Am I right?’

‘You got it in one.’

‘That’s not how the extracts are done. There are no doughnut shapes. You can have an area, or a bigger area, or a bigger-still area. Which would be the city, the county, and the state. But the bigger area always includes the smaller area all over again. And the bigger-still area includes both of them all over again. Which is logical, if you think about it. There are no holes in the middle. The city is in the county, and the county is in the state.’

‘Understood,’ Reacher said. ‘Thank you for the explanation. I’ll take the whole county.’

‘Are you still a resident?’

‘You agreed I was this morning. And here I am again. Clearly I didn’t leave town with all my worldly possessions. I would say my status as a resident is more secure than ever.’

‘Cubicle four,’ the guy said.

Patty and Shorty heard an engine start up in the distance, deafening like a motorcycle, and they got up and walked to the corner to take a look. They saw Peter riding a quad bike back to the house. Now only eight were neatly parked.

‘First turn of the key,’ Shorty said. ‘I hope they’re all like that.’

‘Way too noisy,’ Patty said, disappointed. ‘We can’t do it. They would know.’

Peter parked at the distant house. He killed the engine and silence came back. He got off and went inside. Patty and Shorty went back to their lawn chairs.

Shorty said, ‘The land is pretty flat around here.’

‘Does that help us?’

‘We could push the quad bike. With the engine off. With the suitcase balanced on it. We could use it like a furniture dolly.’

‘Could we?’

‘They can’t be that heavy. You see people wheeling motorbikes all the time. We wouldn’t even have to keep it upright, and there are two of us. I bet we could do it dead easy.’

‘Two miles there and two miles back? Which would leave the suitcase by the side of the road, and us back here. So then we would have another two miles to walk. Altogether six, four of them pushing a quad bike. It would take a good long time.’

‘I figure about three hours,’ Shorty said.

‘Depends how fast we could push. We don’t know yet.’

‘OK, call it four hours. We should time it to finish at dawn. Maybe we might see a farmer heading to market. There has to be traffic sometimes. So we should start in the middle of the night. Which is good. They’ll be asleep.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Patty said. ‘I suppose.’

They heard the distant quad bike start up again, fifty yards away, then closer. It sounded like it was passing the barn and coming straight towards them.

They stood up.

The engine got loud and the machine roared around the corner, with Mark riding it, scattering dirt. There was a cardboard carton strapped to the rack on the back. Mark braked to a stop, and tapped the gear change into neutral, and shut the motor down. He smiled his master-of-the-universe smile.

‘Good news,’ he said. ‘The phone is back on. The mechanic will be here first thing in the morning. We were too late to get him today. But 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. The chip fries when the water in the hoses gets too hot. He’s bringing a replacement chip he got from a wrecker’s yard. He wants five dollars for it. Plus fifty for labour.’

‘That’s great,’ Shorty said.

Patty said nothing.

Mark said, ‘And I’m afraid I want another fifty for the room.’

There was silence for a second.

Mark said, ‘Guys, I would love to tell you just forget it, but the bank would kick my ass. This is a business, I’m afraid. We have to take it seriously. And from your point of view it’s not so terrible. A hundred for the motel and fifty-some to fix your car, and you’re out of here for less than two hundred dollars all in. Could have been a whole lot worse.’