23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  Shorty said, “How much further?”

  Patty looked back, and then forward.

  “About a mile and a half to go,” she said.

  “How long have we taken so far?”

  “Maybe twenty minutes.”

  “Damn, that’s slow.”

  “You said four hours. We’re about on schedule.”

  They took up their positions again, and forced the thing to roll. Like a bobsled team at the top of the hill, going harder and harder with every step. They got it up to speed and kept it there, jamming their forearms against the trembling suitcase, ducking their heads, breathing deep, glancing up again to check their direction. They did another half mile, and rested again. And another. A whole hour had gone by.

  “Coming back will be easier,” Patty said. “Without the weight.”

  They passed through the section where no trees grew. They saw a belt of sky, full of stars.

  “Getting close,” Patty said.

  Then she said, “Wait,” and she hauled back on the handlebar and dug her heels in, way out in front, like a kid stopping a home-made cart.

  Shorty said, “What?”

  “There was a wire. Like at the gas station. For ringing a bell. Laying across the road. It probably rings in the house.”

  Shorty hauled the bike to a dead stop. He remembered. As fat and rubbery as a garden hose. He searched ahead with his flashlight. They saw nothing. They rolled on, half speed, which was a pain through the potholes, with one beam ranging far, and the other sweeping close.

  A hundred yards later they saw it.

  Fat and rubbery and laying across the road.

  They stopped four feet short.

  Patty said, “How does it work?”

  “I guess inside there are two metal strips. Somehow held apart. But when a wheel goes over, they get pressed together and a bell rings. Like a push switch.”

  “So we can’t let a wheel go over.”

  “No.”

  Which was a problem. Shorty couldn’t lift the quad-bike. Not at either end. Maybe an inch for a second, but not enough to ease it over the wire and set it down again.

  “How much further?” he said.

  “About three hundred yards.”

  “I’ll carry the suitcase.”

  “Wait,” she said again.

  She ducked down and eased her fingers under the fat rubber wire. She lifted it. It came up easily, an inch, a foot, as much as she wanted. She tested it side to side, and pulled and tugged to make it equally loose.

  “Get ready,” she said.

  She lifted it up, gently, on open palms, head high, arms wide. Shorty ducked low and pushed the bike under it. She held it until he was clear. She felt like she was performing a dance ceremony at a hippy’s wedding.

  “OK,” Shorty said.

  She laid the wire back down, gently, like she was bowing. Then they pushed on, energized. Safe. On the last lap. Not far to go. Their flashlight beams bounced and swayed, first showing nothing but trees and the track between, but then a different kind of void loomed up ahead. The two-lane road. Where they had turned in, what felt like a thousand years ago. Shorty had said, OK? Patty hadn’t answered.

  Now she said, “We need to find a place to hide the suitcase. But not too far from the road. So we can load it easy when we get a ride.”

  They let the bike slow to a stop where the mouth of the track widened out to meet the road. Hiding places looked to be in short supply. Tree trunks crowded in either side. The last yard of shoulder was thick with underbrush. Although maybe a little thinner where the frost-heaved posts were set. Maybe the ground had been disturbed many years earlier. Maybe the brush was coming back slower. Maybe there was a suitcase-sized hole behind one or the other.

  Patty went to check. In the end she figured the right-hand hole was better than the left. They huffed and puffed and got the bike as close as possible. Shorty spread his arms wide and lifted the suitcase off the bike, and then he grunted and gasped and turned and dropped it in the bushes, where it scraped and crackled through the lower branches and came to rest pretty well hidden. Patty walked up the road a spell and used her flashlight like an approaching headlight beam, and said she saw nothing much. Certainly nothing anyone would stop for. Just a dark shape, way low down, behind the base of the post. It could have been the corpse of a deer. She was satisfied.

  Then her voice changed and she said, “Shorty, come here.”

  He went. They stood together on the county blacktop and looked back the way he had come, back along her flashlight beam, which was wavering on a wide area centered on the frost-heaved post, with the dark shape low and behind it. Which you couldn’t really see unless you knew it was there. He was satisfied too.

  He said, “What am I looking for?”

  “Think, Shorty,” she said. “What did we see when we turned in?”

  He thought. He visualized. He took two sideways steps left, nearer the center line of the road, where the Honda’s wheel had been. He squatted down a little, to approximate the level of the driver’s seat. What had he seen? He had seen a frost-heaved post, on which was nailed a board, on which were screwed ornate plastic letters, and an arrow pointing into the woods. The letters had spelled out the word Motel .

  He compared his memory with the scene in front of him.

  He was pretty sure it was different.

  He stared. Then he saw. Now there was no board. No letters, no word, no arrow. Now there was just a post. Nothing on it. Same both sides of the track.

  “Weird,” he said.

  “You think?”

  “So is it a motel or not? Sure feels like one to me. They’re taking our money.”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “We are. First car that comes.”

  “After we take the bike back to the barn.”

  “We don’t owe them that,” Shorty said. “We don’t owe them diddly. Not anymore. Not if they’re pulling weird shit on us now, with the motel signs. We should dump the bike here and let them come get it themselves.”

  “They get up with the sun,” Patty said. “If there’s a bike missing they’ll know right away. But if it’s back in its proper place, they might not think about us for hours. They’ll assume we’re eating breakfast on our own, in our room. They’ll have no reason to come by until later in the morning.”

  “It’s a gamble.”

  “It could buy us a lot of time later. They’ll come looking for us as soon as they find us gone. We need to delay that moment as long as possible. We need to be miles away by then. We definitely can’t afford to be still stuck down here with our thumbs out. I think we should buy ourselves as much time as we can get.”

  Shorty said nothing. He looked along the dark and silent road, first one way, and then the other.

  “I know it feels weird to go back,” Patty said. “Now that we just got here. But there are no cars coming anyway. Not yet. We’ll do better closer to dawn.”

  Shorty was quiet another long moment.

  Then he said, “OK, we’ll take the bike back to the barn.”

  “As fast as we can,” Patty said. “Now it’s all about speed.”

  They unstrapped their overnight bags from the rack and stashed them close to the suitcase, and then they eased the bike around a wide circle on the blacktop. The air smelled sweeter in the open. They got the bike pointed back down the track. They took up their positions. They set off. The same two-plus miles all over again, in the reverse direction. But Patty had been right. Pushing was much easier without the weight of the suitcase. The bike felt buoyant. Like it was floating. They did the hippy dance under the wire again, and then they got it going and kept it up at a fast walk with what felt like barely any effort at all. They didn’t stop and they didn’t rest.

  Chapter 14

  It took them a fraction more than thirty minutes to push the two-plus miles. They rolled to a stop where the track came out of the trees. It ran on ahead of them, gray and ghostly in the mo
onlight, through the flat two acres, to the curve of buildings in the distance. The motel, dark and quiet. The barn, dark and quiet. The house, dark and quiet. Five-thirty in the morning, by Patty’s watch. Easily an hour before the first hint of daylight.

  All good.

  They pushed on, as quiet as they could, nothing but the hiss of the tires and the slap of their soles on the last of the blacktop. Then they bumped down into the motel lot, and their progress got louder, with crunching steps and squelching stones, past the office, past room one, and two, all the way to the dead Honda, and onward, past room twelve’s corner, straight toward the barn. They could see eight ghostly shapes, neatly parked, and the ninth slot empty, like a punched-out tooth in a smile. Shorty pointed and gave Patty a thumbs-up. She was right. The first daylight glance out the window would have raised the alarm.

  They cut the last corner across the grass, and rolled real slow on the parking area’s gravel. Putting the bike back in place was easy. Just a question of lining it up and pushing it in, nose first, and then nudging it dead level with the others, and stepping away. Job done. Perfect. Undetectable. They tiptoed across the gravel, and they walked away on the grass, back to the track, where they stood for a second and took a breath. Ahead of them were the same two-plus miles. All over again. But this time they had nothing to push. This time they would be walking, plain and simple. Walking away, forever.

  Behind them a door opened. Over at the house. Relatively distant. A faraway voice called out, “Hey guys, is that you?”

  Mark.

  They stood still.

  “Guys?”

  A flashlight beam lanced beyond them, with their shadows cut out, which meant light was playing on their backs.

  “Guys?” Mark called again.

  They turned around.

  Mark was walking through the dark toward them. He was fully dressed. His day had already begun. He was keeping his flashlight low, and so were Shorty and Patty, all three beams acting polite, trying to illuminate, but not dazzle.

  They waited.

  Mark arrived.

  He said, “This is the most amazing coincidence.”

  Along with the flashlight he was carrying a blank sheet of paper and a pencil.

  Patty said, “Is it?”

  “I’m sorry, I should have asked, is everything OK?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “Just out for a walk?”

  “Why is it a coincidence?”

  “Because literally at this very moment I have the mechanic on the phone. He starts work at five, to be ready for rush hour. This morning he woke up with a sudden thought. He remembered we had mentioned you drove down from Canada. He realizes at the time he instinctively assumed you were Americans returning home. Then this morning he realized it was equally likely you were Canadians visiting the other way around. In which case you would have a Canadian-spec car. In which case you would have the mandatory winter package, which back then was a different heater and no AC. In which case his diagnosis was wrong. That’s a U.S.-spec problem. In Canada it’s the starter motor relay that fries. He needs to know which part to pick up at the scrapyard. He’s heading there now. He literally just sent me out to get the ID number off your windshield.”

  He held up the paper and pencil, as if in proof.

  Then he said, “But obviously it will be a lot quicker for all concerned if you come in and answer his questions yourselves.”

  He mimed the relative distances by chopping his palms closer together and further apart, first showing the long way still to go to the Honda, plus the even longer way back again, versus a short sharp one-way trip from where they were standing to the phone in the house. A dramatic difference. Impeccable logic. Shorty looked at Patty. She looked at him. All kinds of questions.

  Mark said, “We could make a pot of coffee. We could ask the guy to call us back when he’s actually got the part he needs in his hot little hand. And then again, when he’s actually in his truck and on his way to you. I want you to hear it from the horse’s mouth. I feel at this point a little reassurance is in order. I feel that’s the least we can do. You folks have been messed around enough already.”

  He held out his hand, in a courtly after-you gesture.

  Patty and Shorty walked toward the house. Mark walked with them. All three flashlight beams bounced along in the same direction. At the end Mark sped up and then waited at the kitchen door, ushering them in. He flicked on a light and pointed ahead to the inner hallway, where the dead phone had been demonstrated at lunch the day before. Now the receiver was lying tethered by its cord on the seat of a chair. On hold, the old-fashioned way.

  Mark said, “His name is Carol. Probably spelled different. He’s from Macedonia.”

  He held out his hand, toward the phone, in a courtly help-yourself gesture.

  Patty picked up the receiver. She put it to her ear. She heard a kind of spacy noise. A cell connection somewhere, doing its best.

  She said, “Carol?”

  A voice said, “Mark?”

  “No, my name is Patty Sundstrom. My boyfriend and I own the Honda.”

  “Oh man, I didn’t mean for Mark to wake you guys up. That isn’t polite.”

  The voice had an accent that sounded like wherever it came from deserved a name like Macedonia. Eastern Europe, she thought. Or Central. Somewhere between Greece and Russia. The kind of guy who should shave twice a day but didn’t. Like a sinister bad guy in the movies. Except his voice was friendly. Light in tone. Helpful, and full of concern. Full of energy, too, first thing in the morning.

  She said, “We were awake anyway.”

  “Were you?”

  “We were taking a walk, as a matter of fact.”

  “Why?”

  “Something else woke us up, I suppose.”

  “Listening to your voice I’m guessing you’re Canadian.”

  “So is our car.”

  “Yeah,” the voice said. “I made an assumption and thereby nearly made a mistake. I learned my trade in the old Yugoslav army. Like armies everywhere they taught us assuming things made an ass out of you and me. This time it’s all me, I’m afraid. I apologize. But let’s be certain. Have you ever had cause to change out the heater hoses?”

  “I know they go low down,” Patty said.

  “OK, that’s Canadian for sure. Good to know. I’ll pick up a starter motor relay. Then I got to pay the bills. I’ll head out to the highway for a spell. Maybe I’ll get lucky with a wreck. If not, I’ll get to you all the sooner. Call it two hours minimum, four hours maximum.”

  “You sure?”

  “Ma’am, I cross my heart,” the voice said, with its accent. “I promise I’ll get you on your way.”

  Then the call went dead and Patty hung up the phone.

  Mark said, “The coffee is ready.”

  Patty said, “He’ll be here between two hours and four hours from now.”

  “Perfect.”

  Shorty said, “Really?”

  “He promised,” she said.

  They heard a vehicle on the track outside. The crunch of stones, and the thrash of an engine. They looked out the window and saw Peter in a battered old pick-up truck. He was coming close. He was slowing to a stop. He was parking.

  Shorty said, “Whose truck?”

  “His,” Mark said. “He gave it another try late last night. Maybe the warmth of the day helped the battery. He got it going. Now he’s been down to the road and back, to charge it up and blow the cobwebs away. Maybe that was what woke you up. He can give you a ride to your room, if you like. Better than walking. It’s the least we can do. I’m sure you’re tired.”

  They said they didn’t want to impose, but Peter wouldn’t take no for an answer. His truck was a crew cab, so Shorty rode in front, and Patty sat in back. Peter parked next to the Honda. Room ten’s door was closed. Which Patty thought was weird. She was pretty sure they had left it open. Maybe it had blown. Shorty’s shoes were back on his feet, after all. Although she didn’t
remember wind. She had been outdoors most of the night. She remembered the air as still and oppressive.

  They got out of the truck. Peter watched them to their door. Patty turned the handle and opened up. She went in first. Then she came straight back out again. She pointed at Peter in his truck and she yelled, “You stay there.”

  She stepped aside. Shorty looked in the room. In the center of the floor was their luggage. Back again. Their suitcase and their two overnight bags. Neatly placed, in a precise arrangement, as if a bell boy had left them. Their suitcase was now tied up with rope. There were complicated knots on the upper face, with a doubled thickness of rope between them. Like an improvised handle.

  Patty said, “What the hell is this?”

  Peter got out of his truck.

  “We sincerely apologize,” he said. “We are very, very sorry about this, and very, very embarrassed that you should get caught up in it.”

  “In what?”

  “It’s the time of year, I’m afraid. College semesters are starting. Undergraduates are everywhere. Their fraternities set them challenges. They steal our motel signs all the time. Then they started a new thing. Some kind of initiation rite. They had to steal everything out of a motel room while the guest was temporarily absent. Stupid, but it was what it was. We thought it was finished a couple of years ago, but now it seems to be back again. I found your stuff in the hedge, down by the road. It’s the only possible explanation. They must have gotten in while you were taking your walk. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know if anything is damaged. We’re going to make a police report. I mean, OK, everyone likes high spirits, but this kind of thing is ridiculous.”

  Patty said nothing.

  Shorty didn’t speak.

  Peter got back in his truck and drove away. Patty and Shorty stood still for a moment. Then they went inside. They stepped around their luggage and sat down together on the bed. They left the door open.

  —

  The breakfast part of Reacher’s bed and breakfast deal was located in a pretty room that was half a story below the street but level with the small rear garden, which was just as pretty as the room. Reacher took an inside table at a quarter to eight in the morning, ready for coffee. He was the only person in there. The season was over. He was showered and dressed and felt good and looked respectable, all except for a cut knuckle. From the kid in the night. His teeth, no doubt. Not a serious injury. Just a short worm of crusted blood. But a distinctive shape. Reacher had been a cop for thirteen years, and then not a cop for longer, so he saw things from both points of view. As a result wherever possible he liked to avoid confusion. He ordered his meal and then got up and stepped out to the garden. He squatted down and made a fist with his right hand and tapped and scraped it on the brick of a flowerbed wall. Just enough to make the tooth mark one of many. Then he went back to his table and dipped the corner of his napkin in his water glass, and sponged the grit off his knuckles.