Ли Чайлд - Past Tense

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 around 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.

PATTY SUNDSTROM IDENTIFIED the back of the dashboard easily enough. It was a bare panel, pressed and dimpled with strengthening reinforcements, grey 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 footwell. 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 passers-by 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 manoeuvre, 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 centre of the track towards 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 tyres. 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 towards 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.’