Past Tense

Chapter 12

Steven called to Robert, who called to Peter, who called to Mark. They were all in different rooms. They got together in the back parlor, and stared at the screens.

“It’s a pair of shoes,” Steven said. “In case you’re wondering.”

“Why did they do it?” Mark asked. “Did they say?”

“She wants air. It’s consistent behavior. She’s mentioned it before. I don’t think it’s a problem.”

Mark nodded. “I told her a story about a supermodel doing her make up. I think she believed it. I told her a mechanic will be riding to the rescue in the morning. I even made up some technical stuff about the heater hoses. I think she believed all of it. I think she’s calm now. Doesn’t matter about the door.”

“We need to lock it pretty soon.”

“But not tonight. Let sleeping dogs lie. They’re relaxed now. They have nothing to worry about.”

Reacher preferred to move on whenever possible, so he found a new place to sleep, one street away from the previous night. It was a fancy bed and breakfast, in a narrow house built of brick, with its trim newly painted in faded colors. He got a top-floor room, through a low door at the head of a steep and dog-legged stair. He took a long hot shower, and fell asleep, still warm and damp.

Until one minute past three in the morning.

Once again he snapped awake, instantly, like flicking a switch. The same thing exactly. Not touch or taste or sight or smell. Therefore sound. This time he got out of bed immediately, and he pulled his pants out from under the mattress, and dressed fast, and tied his shoes. Then he headed out through the low door and down the winding stair to the street.

The night air was cool, and the silence was hard and brittle, all brick and glass and narrow spaces and humming electricity in the wires. He stood still. A minute later he heard a brief scrape of feet on the sidewalk. Ahead and half left. Maybe thirty yards away. Not going anywhere. Just shuffling in place. Maybe two people. Nothing visible.

He waited.

Another minute later he heard a muted yelp. A woman’s voice. Maybe joy. Or ecstasy. Or maybe not. Maybe outrage or anger. It was hard to tell. But it was definitely muted. It was suppressed, in a particular way. It was the sound of clamped lips.

Nothing visible.

He moved left, and saw a gap between a bag store and a shoe store. It was pedestrian access to a narrow alley that divided two buildings. The alley had doors both sides for walk-up apartments above the stores. Two people were standing next to one of the doors. A man and a woman, in a full-on clinch. Like wrestling standing up. They were half lit by a harsh bulb above the door. The guy was young. Not much more than a kid. But he was big and solid. The woman was a little older. She had blonde hair, and she was wearing high heels and black nylons under a short black coat, which was getting rucked up by the wrestling.

Good or bad?

Hard to tell.

He didn’t want to ruin anyone’s evening.

He watched.

Then the woman squirmed her face away and said, “No,” in a sudden low and breathy tone, like spitting, as firm as talking to a dog, but also with what Reacher took to be feelings of shame and embarrassment and disgust. She pushed against the guy’s chest, and tried to get away. The guy wouldn’t let her.

Reacher said, “Hey.”

They both turned their faces toward him.

He said, “Take your hands off her, kid.”

The boy said, “This is none of your business.”

“It is now. You woke me up.”

“Get lost.”

“I heard her say no. So step back.”

The kid half turned. He was wearing a sweatshirt embroidered with the name of a famous university. He was a big solid boy. Maybe six-three, and 220 pounds. Maybe an athlete. He was rippling with youth and excitement. He had a look in his eye. He thought he was a hell of a guy.

Reacher looked at the woman and said, “Miss, are you OK?”

She asked, “Are you a cop?”

“I was once upon a time, in the army. Now I’m just a guy passing through.”

She didn’t reply. She was close to thirty, Reacher thought. She looked like a nice person. But sad.

“Are you OK?” he asked her again.

She pushed away from the boy and stood a yard apart. She didn’t speak. But she looked at Reacher like she didn’t want him to leave.

He said, “Did this happen last night too?”

She nodded.

“Same place?”

She nodded again.

“Same exact time?”

“It’s when I get home from work.”

“You live here?”

“Until I get on my feet.”

Reacher looked at her heels and her hair and her nylons and said, “You work in a cocktail bar.”

“In Manchester.”

“And this guy followed you home.”

She nodded.

“Two nights running?” Reacher said.

She nodded again.

The boy said, “She asked me to, man. So butt out and let nature take its course.”

“That’s not true,” the woman said. “I did not ask you.”

“You were all over me.”

“I was being polite. That’s what you do when you work in a cocktail bar.”

Reacher looked at the boy.

“Sounds like a classic misunderstanding,” he said. “But easily fixed. All you need to do is apologize most sincerely and then go away and never come back.”

“It’s her who won’t come back. Not to that bar, anyway. My father owns a big chunk of it. She’ll lose her job.”

Reacher looked at the woman, and said, “What happened last night?”

“I let him,” she said. “He agreed one time only. So I got it over with. But now he’s back for more.”

“I’ll discuss it with him, if you like,” Reacher said. “Meanwhile you go inside now, if you want. And think no more about it.”

“Don’t you dare go inside,” the boy said. “Not without me.”

The woman looked from him to Reacher, and back again. And again, as if choosing. As if down to her last twenty bucks at the racetrack. She made her decision. She took her keys from her bag, and unlocked her door, and stepped inside, and closed her door behind her.

The boy in the sweatshirt stared first at the door, and then at Reacher. Who jerked his head toward the mouth of the alley, and said, “Run along now, kid.”

The boy stared a minute longer, apparently thinking hard. And then he went. He walked out of the alley and turned out of sight. To the right. Which made him right-handed. He would want to set up his ambush so that Reacher would walk face first into a free-swinging right hook. Which pretty much defined the location. About three feet around the corner, Reacher thought. Level with the edge of the bag shop’s window. Because of the pivot point for the right hook. Basic geometry. Fixed in space.

But not fixed in time. Speed was under Reacher’s control. The kid would be expecting a normal kind of approach, plus or minus. Maybe a little tense and urgent. Maybe a little cautious and wary. But mostly average. He would trigger the hook at the first glimpse of Reacher coming around the corner. Any kind of normal walking pace would bring it home good and solid. The kid wasn’t dumb. Possibly an athlete. Probably had decent hand to eye coordination.

Therefore nothing would be done at normal or average speed.

Reacher stopped six paces short of the corner, and waited, and waited, and then he took another pace, a slow, sliding scrape across grit and dirt, and then he paused, and waited, and took another step, slow, sliding, ominous. And then another long wait, and another slow step. He pictured the kid around the corner, tensed up, his fist cocked, holding his position. And holding. Holding too long. Getting too tensed. Getting all cramped and shaky.

Reacher took another step, long and slow. Now he was six feet from the corner. He waited. And waited. Then he launched fast, at a run, his left hand up, palm open, fingers spread like a baseball glove. He burst around the corner and saw the kid sputtering to life, confused by the change of pace, locked into slow-motion waiting, so that his triumphant right hook was so far coming out like a herky-jerky feeble squib, which Reacher caught easily in his left palm, like a soft liner to second. The kid’s fist was big, but Reacher’s open hand was bigger, so he clamped down and squeezed, not hard enough to crush the bones, but hard enough to make the kid concentrate on keeping his mouth shut, so no whines or squeals came out, which obviously he couldn’t afford, being a hell of a guy.

Then Reacher squeezed harder. Mostly as an IQ test. Which the kid failed. He used his free hand to claw at Reacher’s wrist. The wrong move. Unproductive. Always better to go straight to the source of the problem, and use your free hand to hit the squeezer in the head. Or thumb out his eye, or otherwise get his attention. But the kid didn’t. A missed opportunity. Then Reacher added a twist to the squeeze. Like turning a door knob. The kid’s elbow locked up and he dropped a shoulder to compensate, but Reacher kept on twisting, until the kid got so lopsided he had to take his hand off Reacher’s wrist and hold his whole arm straight out for balance.

Reacher said, “Want me to hit you?”

No reply.

“It’s not a difficult question,” Reacher said. “A yes or no answer will do it.”

By that point the kid was shuffling in place, trying to find a bearable position, huffing and gasping. But not squealing yet. He said, “OK, sure, I got her signals wrong. I’m sorry, man. I’ll leave her alone now.”

“What about her job?”

“I was kidding, man.”

“What about the next new waitress, down on her luck, in need of secure employment?”

The kid didn’t answer.

Reacher clamped down harder, and said, “Want me to hit you?”

The kid said, “No.”

“No means no, right? I expect they teach you that now, at your fancy university. Kind of theoretical, I guess, from your point of view. Until now.”

“Come on, man.”

“Want me to hit you?”

“No.”

Reacher hit him in the face, with a straight right, maximum force, crashing and twisting. Like a freight train. The kid’s lights went out immediately. He went slack and gravity took over. Reacher kept his left hand rock solid. All the kid’s weight fell on his own locked elbow. Reacher waited. One of two things would happen. Either the strength and elasticity in the kid’s ligaments would roll him forward, or they wouldn’t.

They didn’t. The kid’s elbow broke and his arm turned inside out. Reacher let him fall. He landed on the bricks outside the bag shop, one arm right and the other arm wrong, like a swastika. He was breathing. A little bubbly, from the blood in his throat. His nose was badly busted. Cheekbones too, maybe. Some of his teeth were out. Upper row, mostly. His dentist’s kid was going to be just fine for college.

Reacher walked away, back to his lodgings, up the winding stair and through the low door to his room, where he took a second shower and got back in bed, once again warm and damp. He punched the pillow into shape, and went back to sleep.

At which moment Patty Sundstrom woke up. A quarter past three in the morning. Once again a pulse of subconscious disquiet had forced its way through to the surface. What were the flashlights for? Why two of them? Why not one, or twelve?

The room was blissfully cool. She could smell the night air, rich, like velvet. Why pack two flashlights with twelve meals? Why pack them at all? What did flashlights have to do with food? They weren’t natural partners. No one ever said, do you want a flashlight with that? And what Shorty suggested was nonsense. No one ate lunch in the dark. Which was all it was. It was lunch, for fellow rich guys up from Boston, who wanted to feel rugged for a week. No one paying before-Labor-Day or leafpeeper rates would accept granola bars for dinner. Or breakfast. Lunch only, surely, as part of a manly outdoor fantasy. So why the flashlights? Lunch was eaten in the middle of the day. Generally speaking the sun was out. Unless the rich guys were spelunkers. In which case they would have flashlights of their own, surely. Expensive specialist items, probably strapped to their heads.

Why would flashlights be packed in a carton of food, as if they were somehow integral, like silverware or napkins would be?

Were they packed?

Maybe they were just shoved in there as afterthoughts. She kept her eyes closed and pictured the scene when they opened the box. She had slit the tape with her nail, and Shorty had lifted the flaps. What had been her impression?

Two flashlights in the box, standing on their ends, crammed in among the food.

Crammed in.

Therefore not packed as integral components. Added later.

Why?

Two flashlights for two people.

They had each been given a flashlight and six subsistence meals.

Why?

We put together some ingredients for you. Either join us at the house, or help yourselves from the box. Which was kind of phony. Which they didn’t mean.

What else didn’t they mean?

She flipped the covers back and slid out of bed. She padded over to the dresser, where the carton sat in front of the TV screen. She lifted the flaps and felt inside. The first flashlight had fallen over in the void where the first two meals had been. She lifted it out. It was big and heavy. It felt cold and hard. She pressed it against her palm and switched it on. She rolled her palm a fraction and let a sliver of light spill out. It was pink from her skin. The flashlight was a famous make. It felt like it had been machined out of a solid billet of aerospace-grade aluminum. It had a cluster of tiny LED bulbs, like an insect’s eye.

She looked back in the box. The other flashlight was where it had started, rammed down into the crux between lunches nine, ten, eleven and twelve. Some of the granola bars around it were cracked and splintered. One of the raisin boxes was crushed. Added later, for sure. She looked at the tape she had slit. Two layers. One from the wholesaler, and one from them, when they resealed the box, after they added the flashlights.

What else didn’t they mean?

She padded toward the door, and she nudged Shorty’s bent shoe aside with her toe, and opened a gap wide enough to slip outside. She took her hand off the flashlight lens. It cast a bright white beam of light. She minced toward the Honda, with bare feet on the stones. She opened the passenger door. The hood release was where her shin would be. She had seen it a million times. A broad black lever. She tugged on it. The hood sprang up an inch with a thunk that in the still of the night sounded like a wreck on the highway.

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.