23 Past Tense

by Lee Child

  A replacement. Not exactly, Reacher thought. The guy was an improvement. He was there to strengthen the roster. He was specialist talent, drafted in for the occasion. After the lessons of the night before. Maybe he had been borrowed from a friend of a friend. Maybe he was a nightclub bouncer. In Manchester. Or even Boston. Maybe that was the big leagues, for college stars.

  Reacher decided to stay clear of his arms. Wrestling was all about grabbing and grasping and grappling. The guy was probably good at it. Or at least experienced. He probably knew all kinds of follow-up tricks. He would know a dozen different ways to get his opponent down on the mat. Which would be a fate best avoided. A horizontal struggle would be a problem. Too much bulk. It could end up like trying to bench press a whale. Fortunately the guy’s arms were not long. The exclusion zone was not large. There was some scope for action. Something could be done.

  But what exactly? For once in his life Reacher wasn’t sure. The head butt was still a possibility, but risky, because it meant stepping right into the bear-claw grasp. And maybe the guy knew enough to twist away and take the blow on his neck, which up close looked about as sensitive as an automobile tire. Body shots could be delivered, fast right-left-right combinations, like working with the heavy bag, but the guy was built with the kind of slabby construction that would feel like punching a bulletproof vest. With about as much effect.

  The wrestler moved again. The same dramatic maneuver. Again like sumo. Reacher had seen it on the television. In the afternoons, in motels. Grainy orange pictures. Huge men in fancy loincloths, blank and oiled and implacable.

  Now the guy was a whole step closer.

  Overhead the hawk circled slowly.

  Too late Reacher realized what the guy was going to do. Which was to barge forward, leading with his stomach, again like the sumo on the television, except in that case the other guy was also doing the exact same thing, so they met in the middle with a loud slap, but Reacher wasn’t moving at all, which meant the other guy had all the momentum to himself, which meant Reacher was about to get hit hard. Like getting run over by a tractor tire.

  He ducked and twisted and flung a Hail Mary right hook into the guy’s side, which landed hard, and therefore according to Isaac Newton’s laws of equal and opposite reactions took some momentum out of the equation, but the guy’s barreling bulk was basically unstoppable, and Reacher was spun around and bounced away, and then he had to twist again to avoid a bear claw swinging out toward him. He staggered backward, flailing his arms, trying to stay on his feet.

  The wrestler charged again. He was nimble, for a guy built like a walrus. Reacher ducked away and got a weak jab into the guy’s kidney as he passed. It made no discernable difference. The guy reversed direction with a neat one-two shuffle and came barreling back again, hot and fierce and feinting left and right, looking to get a grip. Best avoided. Reacher stepped back, and again, and the guy came on, and Reacher launched a straight right to the guy’s face, which was like punching the wall of a rubber room, and then he ducked away, low down under the bear claw’s swing, and came back up and twisted and got a hard left hook into the guy’s back, before bouncing away out of range.

  Now the wrestler was breathing hard. He had run around a little and taken two and a half decent body shots. Soon he would be stiffening up. Reacher stepped back. Underfoot the ground was lumpy. On his left was a windfall apple, bright like a jewel on the sunburned grass. The two surviving guys from the night before were creeping nearer, smelling blood.

  Overhead the hawk was still circling.

  The two surviving guys formed up and fanned out, a step ahead of the wrestler. Flank support. Or a chase-down crew. Maybe they expected him to run.

  The wrestler dropped down into his combat stance. Reacher waited. The wrestler charged. Same as before. A low-down swarming thrust off bent and powerful legs, and a high-speed waddle, leading with the stomach, aiming to use it like a battering ram. Reacher swayed left, but his foot caught in an undulation and the guy hit him a glancing blow with his charging shoulder, which felt like getting run over by a truck, twice, first with the original impact and then immediately again with its equal and opposite echo as he hit the ground, right shoulder first, then his head, then his body, then a tangle of limbs.

  The guy was nimble and came straight back. Reacher rolled away, but not fast enough. The guy got in a kick that caught him high on the back and rolled him faster. A rare position for Reacher to be in. But not unknown. Rule one was get the hell up, right now. So was rule two. And three. Staying down was one foot in the grave. So he waited until he rolled face down and then sprang upright like he was a gym rat showing off after fifty push-ups. Now he was breathing hard. And swelling up with anger. He was pretty sure kicking wasn’t in the rules of wrestling. The game had changed.

  He thought, OK, then.

  The wrestler dropped down into his combat stance again. And Reacher saw what he should have seen before. Or would have seen before, if the game had changed a little sooner.

  He waited.

  The wrestler charged. A low-down swarming thrust, off bent and powerful legs. Reacher stepped in and kicked him in the knee, just as hard as he had kicked him in the cup, with the same scything upswing, and an equally perfect connection. Plus the guy ran right into it. He brought all his own momentum to the party. A football would have left two stadiums. The result was spectacular. The knee was any heavy guy’s weak spot. A knee was a knee. A humble joint. It was what it was. It didn’t get bigger and stronger just because a guy chose to spend a whole semester lifting weights. It just got more and more stressed.

  In this case it more or less exploded. The knee cap shattered or dislocated and maybe a whole bunch of stuff was severed inside, because the guy went down like his strings were cut, and then the same rule-one instinct bounced him upright again, immediately, howling, standing on one leg, waving the bear claws for balance. The two surviving guys stepped back a pace. Like the stock market. Investments can go down as well as up. Behind them in the distance Burke was standing still and watching, peering anxiously, pressed up tight against the fence.

  From that point on Reacher opted for brutal efficiency. Style points no longer mattered. The wrestler threw a despairing bear claw at him, and Reacher caught it and jerked him off balance, and he went down again, awkwardly, clumsily, whereupon Reacher kicked him in the head, once, twice, until he went still.

  Reacher stood up straight, and breathed out, and in, and out.

  The two surviving guys stepped back another pace. They shuffled in place and tried to look aw-shucks sheepish. They raised their hands, palms out. They patted the air in front of them. Surrendering. But also distancing themselves. Making a point.

  Not our idea .

  Reacher asked them, “Where did you find this tub of lard?”

  He kicked the wrestler one more time, in the ribs, but gently, as if merely to indicate which particular tub of lard he was talking about.

  No one answered.

  “You should tell me,” Reacher said. “It’s important to your futures.”

  The kid on the right said, “He came up this morning.”

  “From where?”

  “Boston. He lives there now, but he grew up here. We knew him in high school.”

  “Did he win trophies?”

  “Lots of them.”

  “Get lost now,” Reacher said.

  They did. They ran south, at a sprint, up the slope, knees and elbows pumping. Reacher watched them go. Then he picked his way through the vanquished and walked on through the orchard. Burke was waiting at the fence. He held up the hand he had been waving. In it was his phone.

  “It kept trying to ring,” he said. “But there’s really no service here. So I walked back to where I got half a bar. It was the ornithologist. He was returning your call, from the university. He said it was his only chance to talk, because he’s tied up the rest of the day. So I ran back here and tried to attract your attention.”

  “I saw,�
� Reacher said.

  “He left a message.”

  “On the phone?”

  “With me.”

  Reacher nodded.

  He said, “First I need to call Amos at the Laconia PD.”

  Chapter 29

  The fifth arrival was as unobtrusive as the first and the third. In the back parlor Mark and Steven and Robert heard the bell ring, from the wire across the blacktop. They watched the screens. Robert lined up three different views of the track. They waited. Two miles took four minutes at thirty miles an hour, and six minutes at twenty. Call it five minutes on average, depending on how fast a person was prepared to drive, and what kind of vehicle they had. The surface could be jolting.

  It was five minutes and nineteen seconds exactly, according to the digital clocks in the bottom right-hand corners of the screens. They saw a pick-up truck come out of the trees and into the light. Robert used a joystick and zoomed the close-up camera tight on it. It was a Ford F150. Single cab, long bed. Dirty white paint. Close to a base specification, three or four model years old. A workingman’s vehicle. A tool of a trade.

  Robert tightened the shot some more, to check the license plate. It said Illinois, which they all knew was bullshit. The guy was from New York City. His office ISP was unbreakable, but his home wifi was wide open. He ran a fund on Wall Street. He was one of the new faceless super-rich no one had ever heard of. Mark was keen to impress him. He thought Wall Street could be a key market. The right kind of people, with the right kind of needs, and the right kind of money.

  They watched him drive through the meadow, and bump down off the track into the motel lot. They saw him stop outside the office. They saw Peter come out to greet him. They shook hands, and exchanged pleasantries. Peter gave him a key, and pointed. Room eleven. The absolute prime location. Significant in every way. Their bed and your bed were almost touching. Head to head. Symmetrical. Separated only by the width of a wall. Just a matter of inches. Room eleven was the VIP enclosure, no doubt about it. An honor not to be given lightly. But Mark had insisted. Demographics were important, he had said.

  Robert clicked mice and tapped keyboards and arranged the screens so they could see just about everything at once, all around them on the walls, one picture overlapping the next, some of the angles different, like a clumsy attempt at virtual reality. They saw the Wall Street guy park his truck beyond the dead Honda. They saw him detour for a look in room ten’s window. Nothing doing. He walked back. He looked like Wall Street. Decent haircut, fit from the gym, tan from a lamp and weekends at his wife’s summer rental in the Hamptons. He was dressed well, even though they supposed he was trying not to be. To match the everyday truck. His closet had failed the challenge. His luggage was two hard cases and a soft nylon duffel, all of them dusty from the open bed.

  Plus, last of all, from the passenger seat, a plastic bag from a New York deli, stuffed with what were either potatoes or rolls of money.

  Meanwhile the first four arrivals were gathering close by, forming up, sliding from screen to screen, getting ready to talk, or try to, or at least to rock from foot to foot until someone said something. Male bonding. Sometimes a slow process. Robert turned up the sound. There were hidden microphones all up and down the length of the motel. Aided by what was painted to look like a TV dish, but was really a parabolic microphone, as sensitive as a bat’s ear, aimed down the row, at the patch of dirt outside room ten’s window. Where folks were likely to cluster. Overkill, electronically, but Mark had insisted. Consumer feedback was important, he said. The more raw and unfiltered the better. Best of all when they didn’t know anyone was listening.

  They listened. The voices were tinny and a little distorted. There were guarded greetings, the same as before, and the same war stories from the road, about getting there on time and undetected, and the same description of Patty and Shorty themselves, as specimens, in terms of their health and strength and general appeal.

  Then the consumer feedback turned a little negative. Mark looked away, disappointed. On the screens a small schism had opened up. There were two opposing factions, separated by one vital difference between them. Arrivals number one, two and three had actually seen Patty and Shorty through their window. Live and in the flesh. Right there. After their blind went up. Arrivals number four and five had not. By then Patty and Shorty were hiding in their bathroom. Which had no damn window. So theirs was a two-point complaint. If everyone was starting out equal, like they should, free country, level playing field, and so on and so forth, then wait until everyone had gotten there, surely, and then raise the damn blind like a ceremony. Like a special occasion. With everyone lined up to witness it. Or at least put a window in the damn bathroom. One thing or the other.

  In the parlor Mark said to the others, “I don’t see how we could put a window in the bathroom. Not with plain glass, anyway. Too weird. But anything else wouldn’t work. You couldn’t see in.”

  Steven said, “We could use a plastic sheet on the outside. Some kind of design on it. So it looked pebbled from the inside. Then we could peel it off when we’re ready.”

  “You’re dodging the issue,” Robert said. “We screwed up with their blind. Simple as that. The guy is right. We should have left it down until everyone got here.”

  Mark said, “Patty wanted to see the sunshine.”

  “What are we now, social workers?”

  “Her mood might prove critical.”

  “How’s her mood now?”

  “Relax,” Mark said. “Think outside the box. What’s done is done. And as it happens we did it at the exact halfway point. Three saw them, and three won’t. We could think of it as a reward for punctuality. Like a bonus threshold. Like we’re offering something. We could call it marketing.”

  “Punctual means on time, not early. We should treat them all equally.”

  “Too late.”

  “Never too late to fix a mistake.”

  “How?”

  “You get on the mike with Patty and Shorty, and you remind them you warned them about this earlier, and you say but maybe they didn’t realize exactly what they were getting themselves into, so now for their own comfort we have taken a unilateral decision to close their blind again for them. And we do, right away. They’ll hear it. They’ll come out of the bathroom. Meanwhile we apologize to arrivals four and five, and we tell them we’ll have a proper ceremony later. After Patty and Shorty have calmed down again. When we’re all assembled. Maybe as the sky goes dark. We could suddenly raise the blind and light up the room both at the same time. I bet we would catch them right there on the bed. It would look like Saks Fifth Avenue on Christmas Day. People would come from miles around.”

  “That doesn’t solve the problem,” Mark said. “All it means is three people will have seen them once and three people will have seen them twice. That’s not equal.”

  “Best we can do,” Robert said. “As a gesture. Which could be important. We can’t let this become an issue. You know how they talk in the chat rooms. Word of mouth can make you or break you. We should be seen to go the extra mile to put this right.”

  Mark was quiet a long moment.

  Then he glanced at Steven.

  Who said, “I guess.”

  Mark nodded.

  He said, “OK.”

  Robert clicked a switch labeled Room Ten, Window Blind, Down .

  —

  His voice came out of the ceiling. Like before. In the bathroom it was just as loud as it had been in the main room. He said, “Guys, I apologize. Most sincerely. My fault entirely. I wasn’t clear enough when we spoke earlier. About the downside of seeing the view, I mean. So we put it right for you. The blind is down again now and will stay down as long as you want. I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable that way. Again, I apologize. I was thoughtless.”

  Patty said, “What do you want with us? What’s going to happen to us?”

  “We’ll discuss what we want with you before the end of the day.”

  “You can’t
keep us here forever.”

  “We won’t,” Mark said. “I promise. You’ll see. Not forever.”

  Then there was a small electronic pop and the ceiling went quiet again.

  In the silence Shorty said, “Do you believe him?”

  “About what?” Patty said.

  “The blind being down again.”

  She nodded.

  “I heard it,” she said.

  Shorty got up stiffly, from his spot on the floor, and he opened the door, just a crack. He knew right away. There was no bar of daylight. Just gloom.

  “I’m going through,” he said. “It’s uncomfortable in here.”

  “They’re going to raise it again.”

  “When?”

  “Probably when we least expect it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re messing with us.”

  “Soon?”

  “Probably not. They’ll wait a while. They’ll want us to build up a sense of security.”

  “So it’s safe for a spell. Right now. Then later we could nail up a sheet.”

  “Could we?”

  “Why not?” Shorty said.

  In the past she would have objected purely on the grounds of good manners. Being Canadian. Both the sheet and the wall would be damaged, surely. But now all she said was, “Do you have nails and a hammer?”

  “No,” Shorty said.

  “Shut up, then. Save your breath to cool your porridge.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He stood at the door for a moment. Then he went through. He was sore from sitting, with his butt on one kind of cold tile, and his back on another. He lay down on the bed and stared up through the dark at the ceiling. Somewhere there was a camera. He couldn’t see it. The plaster was smooth all over. So it was in the light fixture or the smoke alarm. Had to be. Probably not the light fixture. Too hot, surely. Secret spy cameras were presumably delicate. Circuit boards, and tiny transmitters.