Ли Чайлд - Past Tense

Mark shook his head.

‘Shorty burned my motel,’ he said. ‘That’s why I care. Forgive me for feeling a tiny bit vengeful.’

‘You made us play the game. Starting a fire was a valid move.’

‘And leaving him to die is a valid response.’

Patty looked away. At Karel, lifeless on the blacktop, caught by the spread of the headlight beams. All harsh white light and jagged black shadows.

She looked back.

She said, ‘What are you going to do with me?’

‘Always the same question,’ Mark said. ‘You sound like a broken record.’

‘I have a right to know.’

‘You’re a witness.’

‘I said all along you wouldn’t let us win. The game was bullshit.’

‘It served its purpose. You should see what’s in the back of my car.’

‘Let me go see to Shorty. Come with me. Do it there. Both of us.’

‘That’s romantic,’ he said.

She didn’t answer.

‘Where is he exactly?’ Mark asked.

‘A ways back.’

‘Too far. I’m sorry. I really need to get going. Let’s do it here. Just you.’

He aimed the gun. She saw it clearly in the headlight spill. She recognized the brand from the TV shows she watched. A Glock, she was sure. Boxy, detailed, finely wrought. The tube on the front was satin finished. A precision component. It looked like it cost a thousand dollars. She breathed out. Patricia Marie Sundstrom, twenty-five, two years of college, a sawmill worker. Briefly happy with a potato farmer she met in a bar. Happier than she ever expected to be. Happier than she knew. She wanted to see him again. Just one more time.

Something moved behind Mark’s left shoulder.

She saw it in the corner of her eye. In the deep black shadows beyond the headlight beams. A flash of something white. Ten feet back. Suspended in the air. Eyes, she thought. Or teeth. Like a smile. She listened. She heard nothing. Just the rustle of the car’s idling engine, and the soft wet burble of its patient exhaust.

Then she sensed a shape. Behind Mark’s back. A dark void. Like a tree was moving.

Crazy.

She looked away.

Mark asked, ‘Ready?’

‘I’m glad your motel burned down,’ she said. ‘I just wish you had been in it.’

‘That’s not nice,’ he said.

She looked back at him.

There was a man right behind him.

A giant. He had stepped into the headlight wash. In his left hand was a single arrow. On his head he was wearing a night-vision device with the tube flipped up. He was six inches taller than Mark and about twice as wide.

He was huge.

He was silent.

He stepped up right behind Mark’s back, not more than a foot away, like two men in a crowded queue, to get in the hockey game, or get on a plane. He reached around with his right hand and closed it over Mark’s wrist. He eased Mark’s arm sideways, keeping it straight, keeping it level, effortlessly, like slowly and steadily opening a door, through a perfect ninety-degree arc, until the Glock was aimed sideways at nothing. He reached around with his left hand and clamped a bent elbow over Mark’s upper body and crushed him to his chest. He touched the point of his arrow to the hollow of Mark’s throat. Neither man moved. They looked like they were clasped together, ready to dance the tango. Except Mark was the wrong way around.

The big man said, ‘Drop the weapon.’

A deep voice, but quiet. Almost intimate. As if intended for Mark’s ear alone, which was only inches away. In tone it sounded more like a suggestion than a command. But with a bleak implication behind it.

Mark didn’t drop it.

Patty saw muscles bunching in the giant’s right forearm. Their contours were exaggerated by the harsh flat light. They looked like rocks in a bag. There was no expression on his face. She realized he was crushing Mark’s wrist. Slowly, steadily, inexorably. Relentlessly. Mark yelped and breathed fast. She heard bones click and creak and move. Mark jerked and thrashed.

The big man kept on squeezing.

Mark dropped the gun.

‘Good choice,’ the big man said.

But he didn’t let go. He didn’t change the tango-dancing stance.

He said, ‘What’s your name?’

Mark didn’t answer.

Patty said, ‘His name is Mark.’

‘Mark what?’

‘I don’t know. Who are you?’

‘Long story,’ the big man said.

His muscles bunched again.

Mark squirmed.

‘What’s your last name?’ the big man asked.

Bones clicked and creaked and moved.

‘Reacher,’ Mark gasped.

A HUNDRED YARDS back Reacher had seen the woman light up the hunter with the flashlight beam, and then run like hell. He had seen the hunter chase after her. He had chased after both of them. He caught up in time to see the Mercedes arrive. He crossed the track in the dark way behind it, and crept up on the far side. He heard most of the conversation. The tow truck key, and Shorty, and the burned motel. He had heard the guy say he thought he and the woman were the last two standing. Her name was Patty Sundstrom, according to the banker, just before he died. Shorty would be Shorty Fleck. Canadians. Stranded.

‘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?’