The Christmas Scorpion: A Jack Reacher Short Story

by Child, Lee

  ‘Are you in this business too?’

  ‘I was a military cop.’

  The guy said, ‘Huh.’

  Reacher opened the door and climbed out, and closed the door again behind him, and walked far enough away to give the guy space to swing the Subaru around, gravel shoulder to gravel shoulder, across the whole width of the road, and then to take off back the way he had come. All of which the guy did, with a brief gesture Reacher took to be a rueful good-luck wave. Then he got smaller and smaller in the distance, and Reacher turned back and continued walking, south, the way he was headed. Wherever possible he liked to maintain forward momentum. The road he was on was a two-lane, wide enough, well maintained, curved here and there, a little up and down. But no kind of a problem for a modern car. The Subaru had been doing sixty. Yet there was no traffic. None at all. Nothing coming, either way. Total silence. Just a sigh of wind in the trees, and the faint buzz of heat coming up off the blacktop.

  Reacher walked on.

  Two miles later the road he was on curved gently left, and a new road of equal size and appearance split off to the right. Not exactly a turn. More like an equal choice. A classic Y-shaped junction. Twitch the wheel left, or twitch the wheel right. Your call. Both options ran out of sight through trees so mighty in places they made a tunnel.

  There was a road sign.

  A tilted arrow to the left was labelled Portsmouth, and a tilted arrow to the right was labelled Laconia. But the right-hand option was written in smaller writing, and it had a smaller arrow, as if Laconia was less important than Portsmouth. A mere byway, despite its road being the same size.

  Laconia, New Hampshire.

  A name Reacher knew. He had seen it on all kinds of historic family paperwork, and he had heard it mentioned from time to time. It was his late father’s place of birth, and where he was raised, until he escaped at age seventeen and joined the Marines. Such was the vague family legend. Escaped from what had not been specified. But he never went back. Not once. Reacher himself had been born more than fifteen years later, by which time Laconia was a dead detail of the long-ago past, as remote as the Dakota Territory, where it was said some earlier ancestor had lived and worked. No one in the family ever went to either place. No visits. The grandparents had died young and were rarely referred to. There were apparently no aunts or uncles or cousins or any other kind of distant relatives. Which was statistically unlikely and suggested a rift of some kind. But no one other than his father had any real information, and no one ever made any real attempt to get any from him. Certain things were not discussed in Marine families. Much later as a captain in the army Reacher’s brother Joe was posted north and said something about maybe trying to find the old family homestead, but nothing ever came of it. Probably Reacher himself had said the same kind of thing, from time to time. He had never been there either.

  Left or right. His call.

  Portsmouth was better. It had highways and traffic and buses. It was a straight shot to Boston. San Diego beckoned. The Northeast was about to get cold.

  But what was one extra day?

  He stepped right, and chose the fork in the road that led to Laconia.

  At that same late-afternoon moment, nearly thirty miles away, heading south on a different back road, was a worn-out Honda Civic, driven by a twenty-five-year-old man named Shorty Fleck. Next to him in the passenger seat was a twenty-five-year-old woman named Patty Sundstrom. They were boyfriend and girlfriend, both born and raised in Saint Leonard, which was a small faraway town in New Brunswick, Canada. Not much happened there. The biggest news in living memory was ten years previously, when a truck carrying twelve million bees overturned on a curve. The local paper reported with pride that the accident was the first of its kind in New Brunswick. Patty worked in a sawmill. She was the granddaughter of a guy from Minnesota who had slipped north half a century earlier, to beat the draft for Vietnam. Shorty was a potato farmer. His family had been in Canada for ever. And he wasn’t particularly short. Maybe he had been once, as a kid. But now he figured he was what any eyewitness would call an average-looking guy.

  They were trying to make it non-stop from Saint Leonard to New York City. Which by any standard was a hardcore drive. But they saw a big advantage in doing it. They had something to sell in the city, and saving a night in a hotel would maximize their profit. They had planned out their route, looping west to avoid the summer people heading home from the beaches, using back roads, Patty’s blunt finger on a map, her gaze ranging ahead for turns and signs. They had timed it out on paper, and figured it was a feasible course of action.

  Except they had gotten a later start than they would have liked, due a little bit to general disorganization, but mostly due to the Honda’s ageing battery not liking the newly crisp autumnal temperatures blowing in from the direction of Prince Edward Island. The delay put them in a long line at the U.S. border, and then the Honda started overheating, and needed nursing along below fifty miles an hour for an extended spell.

  They were tired.

  And hungry, and thirsty, and in need of the bathroom, and late, and behind schedule. And frustrated. The Honda was overheating again. The needle was kissing the red zone. There was a faint grinding noise from under the hood. Maybe the oil was low. No way of telling. All the dashboard lights had been on continuously for the last two and a half years.

  Shorty asked, ‘What’s up ahead?’

  Patty said, ‘Nothing.’

  Her fingertip was on a wandering red line, which was labelled with a three-digit number, and which was shown running north to south through a jagged shape shaded pale green. A forested area. Which was obvious just from looking out the window. The trees crowded in, still and dark, laden down with heavy end-of-summer leaves. The map showed tiny red spider-web lines here and there, like the veins in an old lady’s leg, which were presumably all tracks to somewhere, but nowhere big. Nowhere likely to have a mechanic or a lube shop or radiator water. The best bet was about thirty minutes ahead, some ways east of south, a town with its name printed not too small and semi-bold, which meant it had to have at least a gas station. It was called Laconia.

  She said, ‘Can we make another twenty miles?’

  Now the needle was all the way in the red.

  ‘Maybe,’ Shorty said. ‘If we walk the last ten of them.’

  He slowed the car and rolled along on a whisker of gas, which generated less new heat in the engine, but which also put less airflow through the radiator vanes, so the old heat couldn’t get away so fast, so in the short term the temperature needle kept on climbing. Patty rubbed her fingertip forward on the map, keeping pace with her estimate of their speed. There was a spider-web vein coming up on the right. A thin track, curling through the green ink to somewhere about an inch away. Without the rush of high-speed air coming in through her leaky window she could hear worse noises from the engine. Clunking, knocking, grinding. Faint, but definitely there.

  Then up ahead on the right she saw the mouth of a narrow road. The spider-web vein, right on time. But more like a dark tunnel through the trees. At the entrance on a frost-heaved post was nailed a board, on which were screwed ornate plastic letters, and an arrow pointing into the tunnel. The letters spelled the word Motel.

  ‘Should we?’ she asked.

  The car answered. The temperature needle was jammed against the stop. Shorty could feel the heat in his shins. The whole engine bay was baking. For a second he wondered what would happen if they kept on going. People talked about automobile engines blowing up and melting down. Which were figures of speech, surely. There would be no actual puddles of molten metal. No actual explosions would take place. Would they? No, it would just conk out, peacefully. Or seize up. It would coast gently to a stop. In the middle of nowhere, with no passing traffic and no cell signal.

  ‘No choice,’ he said, and braked and steered and turned in to the tunnel. Up close they saw the plastic letters on the sign had been painted gold, with a narrow brush and a steady hand, lik
e a promise, like the motel was going to be a high-class place. There was a second sign, identical, facing drivers coming the other way.

  ‘OK?’ Shorty said.

  The air felt cold in the tunnel. Easily ten degrees colder than the main drag. The trees met overhead. Last fall’s leaf litter and last winter’s mud were mashed together on the shoulders.

  ‘OK?’ Shorty said again.

  They drove over a wire lying across the road. A fat rubbery thing, not much smaller than a garden hose. Like they had at gas stations, to ding a bell in the kiosk, to get the pump jockey out to help you.

  Patty didn’t answer.

  Shorty said, ‘How bad can it be? It’s marked on the map.’

  ‘The track is marked.’

  ‘The sign was nice.’

  ‘I agree,’ Patty said. ‘It was.’

  They drove on.

  TWO

  THE TREES COOLED and freshened the air, so Reacher was happy to keep up a steady four miles an hour, which for his length of leg was exactly eighty-eight beats a minute, which was exactly the tempo of a whole bunch of great music, so it was easy time to pass. He did thirty minutes, two miles, seven classic tracks in his head, and then he heard real sounds behind him, and turned around to see an ancient pick-up coming crabwise towards him, as if each of the wheels wanted to go in a different direction.

  Reacher stuck out his thumb.

  The truck stopped. An old guy with a long white beard leaned across inside and wound down the passenger window and said, ‘I’m going to Laconia.’

  ‘Me too,’ Reacher said.

  ‘Well, OK.’

  Reacher got in, and wound the window back up. The old guy pulled out and wobbled back up to speed.

  He said, ‘I guess this is the part where you tell me I need to get new tyres.’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Reacher said.

  ‘But at my age I try to avoid large capital expenditures. Why invest in the future? Do I have one?’

  ‘That argument is more circular than your tyres.’

  ‘Actually the frame is bent. I was in a wreck.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Close on twenty-three years ago.’

  ‘So this is normal to you now.’

  ‘Keeps me awake.’

  ‘How do you know where to point the steering wheel?’

  ‘You get used to it. Like sailing a boat. Why are you going to Laconia?’

  ‘I was passing by,’ Reacher said. ‘My father was born there. I want to see it.’

  ‘What’s your last name?’

  ‘Reacher.’

  The old guy shook his head.

  He said, ‘I never knew anyone in Laconia named Reacher.’

  The reason for the previous Y-shaped fork in the road turned out to be a lake, wide enough to make north– south drivers pick a side, right bank or left bank. Reacher and the old guy squirmed and shuddered along the right bank, which was mechanically stressful, but visually beautiful, because the view was stunning and the sun was less than an hour from setting. Then came the town of Laconia itself. It was a bigger place than Reacher was expecting. Fifteen or twenty thousand people. A county seat. Solid and prosperous. There were brick buildings and neat old-fashioned streets. The low red sun made them look like they were in an old-time movie.

  The squirming pick-up truck wobbled to a stop at a downtown corner. The old guy said, ‘This is Laconia.’

  Reacher said, ‘How much has it changed?’

  ‘Around here, not much.’

  ‘I grew up thinking it was smaller than this.’

  ‘Most people remember things bigger.’

  Reacher thanked the guy for the ride, and got out, and watched the truck squeal away, each tyre insisting the other three were wrong. Then he turned away and walked random blocks, getting a sense for what might be where, in particular two specific destinations for start of business the next day, and two for immediate attention that evening, the first being a place to eat, and the second being a place to sleep.

  Both were available, in a historic-downtown kind of way. Healthy food, no place more than two tables wide. No hotels in town, but plenty of inns and plenty of bed and breakfasts. Which was fine. Reacher wasn’t about to walk ten miles the wrong way just to save a buck. And then ten miles back. He was strict with himself, but he wasn’t an idiot.

  He ate at a narrow bistro because a waitress smiled at him through the window, after a moment of embarrassment when she brought him his order. Which was some kind of salad with roast beef in it, which was the menu choice he felt was most nutritious. But when it came it was tiny. He asked for a second order, and a bigger plate. At first the waitress misunderstood. She thought there was something wrong with the first order. Or the size of the plate. Or both. Then she caught on. He was hungry. He wanted two portions. She asked if there was anything else he needed. He asked for a bigger cup for his coffee.

  Afterwards he tracked back to lodgings he had seen, on a side street near the city offices. There was room at the inn. Vacation time was over. He paid a premium price for what the innkeeper called a suite, but what he called a room with a sofa and way too many floral patterns and feather pillows. He shovelled a dozen off the bed and put his pants under the mattress to press. Then he took a long hot shower, and climbed under the covers, and went to sleep.

  The tunnel through the trees turned out to be more than two miles long. Patty Sundstrom traced its curves with her finger on the map. Under the Honda’s wheels was greyed and pitted blacktop, the finished surface completely washed away in places by runoff water, leaving shallow potholes the size of pool tables, some of them bare ribbed concrete, some of them gravelled, some of them full of leaf mould slop still wet from springtime, because overhead the leafy canopy was thick and unbroken, apart from one spot where no trees grew for twenty-some yards. There was a bar of bright pink open sky. Maybe a narrow seam of different dirt, or a sudden underground escarpment of solid rock, or a hydraulic oddity with no ground water, or too much. Then the sliver of sky was behind them. They were back in the tunnel. Shorty Fleck was going slow, to save the shocks and nurse the motor. He wondered if he should put his headlights on.

  Then the canopy thinned for a second time, with the promise of more to come, like a big clearing was on its way, like they were arriving somewhere. What they saw was the road ahead coming out of the trees and running in a straight line through a couple acres of flat grassland, the thin grey ribbon suddenly naked and exposed in the last of the daylight. Its destination was a group of three substantial wooden buildings, laid out one after the other on a sweeping right-hand curve, maybe fifty yards between the first and the last. All three were painted dull red, with bright white trim. Set against the green grass they looked like classic New England structures.

  The closest building was a motel. Like a picture in a kid’s book. Like learning your ABCs. M is for Motel. It was long and low, made of dull red boards, with a pitched roof of grey asphalt shingle, and a red neon Office sign in the first window, and then a louvred door for storage, and then a repeating pattern, of a broad window with an HVAC grille and two plastic lawn chairs under it, and a numbered door, and another broad window with the same grille and the same chairs, and another numbered door, and so on, all the way to the end. There were twelve rooms, all in a line. But there were no cars parked out front of any of them. Looked like zero occupancy.

  ‘OK?’ Shorty said.

  Patty didn’t answer. He stopped the car. In the distance on the right they saw the second building was shorter from end to end, but much taller and deeper from front to back. Some kind of barn. But not for animals. The concrete ramp to the door was conspicuously clean. There was no shit, to put it bluntly. It was a workshop of some kind. Out front were nine quad-bike ATVs. Like regular motorcycles, but with four fat tyres instead of two slicks. They were lined up in three ranks of three, with exact precision.

  ‘Maybe they’re Hondas,’ Patty said. ‘Maybe these guys would know how to fix the c
ar.’

  On the end of the line the third building was a regular house, of plain construction but generous size, with a wraparound porch, which had rocking chairs set out on it.

  Shorty rolled the car forward, and stopped again. The blacktop was about to end. Ten yards short of the motel’s empty lot. He was about to bump down on to an owner-maintained surface that his expert potato-farmer eye told him was made up of equal parts gravel, mud, dead weeds, and live weeds. He saw at least five species he would rather not have in his own dirt.

  The end of the blacktop felt like a threshold. Like a decision.

  ‘OK?’ he said again.

  ‘The place is empty,’ Patty said. ‘There are no guests. How weird is that?’

  ‘The season is over.’

  ‘Like flicking a switch?’

  ‘They’re always complaining about it.’

  ‘It’s the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘I guess it’s a getaway vacation. No hustle, no bustle. People enjoy that.’

  Patty was quiet a long moment.

  Then she said, ‘I guess it looks OK.’

  Shorty said, ‘I think it’s this or nothing.’

  She traced the structure left to right, the plain proportions, the solid roof, the heavy boards, the recent stain. Necessary maintenance had been performed, but nothing flashy. It was an honest building. It could have been in Canada.

  She said, ‘Let’s take a look.’

  They bumped down off the blacktop and rattled across the uneven surface and parked outside the office. Shorty thought a second and shut the motor down. Safer than letting it idle. Maybe the molten metal and the explosions weren’t just figures of speech. If it didn’t start up again, too bad. It was already near enough where it needed to be. They could ask for room one, if necessary. They had one huge suitcase, full of the stuff they planned to sell. It could stay in the car. Apart from that they didn’t have many bags to haul.