Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(111)

“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?”

She didn’t answer. Just breathed in, and breathed out.

“You would win in the end,” Reacher said. “Probably. Some kind of justifiable homicide, or self defense. But nothing is certain. Also you’re foreigners. Overall it would be a rollercoaster. You wouldn’t be allowed to leave the state. All they get here is the Red Sox. You need to think about this carefully.”

She said nothing.

Reacher said, “Most likely better if we don’t call the cops.”

Mark started to struggle.

Reacher said to Patty, “He wanted to leave Shorty to die.”

She paused a long moment.

She looked down at the gun in her hand.

“Come around,” Reacher said. “So you’re pointing it away from me.”

She came and stood next to him.

Mark struggled and thrashed, harder and crazier, until Reacher hauled him upright and punched him hard in the solar plexus, and lowered him down again, not exactly still, but at least momentarily incapable of voluntary muscular control.

Reacher said, “Stick the tip of the suppressor hard in his back, between his shoulder blades. About six inches below where I’m grabbing him. The safety is a little tab on the front of the trigger. It clicks in as soon as your finger is in the correct position. Then all you do is squeeze.”

She nodded.

She stood still for what felt like twenty seconds.

She said, “I can’t.”

Reacher let go of Mark’s collar, and sent him sprawling with a push. He took the Glock from Patty. He said, “I wanted you to have the opportunity. That was all. Otherwise you would have wondered all your life. But now you know. You’re a good person, Patty.”

“Thank you.”

“Better than me,” he said.

He turned and shot Mark in the head. Twice. A fast tight double-tap, low in the back of the skull. What the army schools called the assassination shot. Not that they would ever admit it.

—

They used the Mercedes to go get Shorty. First Reacher dragged the tow truck guy into the trees on one side of the track, and then Mark on the other. Out of the way. He didn’t want to drive over them. Not if Shorty had a broken leg. Bumps would shake him up.

Patty drove. She got turned around and headed back with high beam headlights. She came out of the mouth of the track. She paused there a moment. Up ahead and two acres away the motel was a low pile of glowing embers. The cars in front of it were burned out and ashy. The barn was burning fiercely. The house was burning harder. The flames could have been fifty feet high.

Two riderless quad-bikes stood abandoned near the center of the meadow. There were two humped shapes on the ground next to them.

“There were four altogether,” Patty said. “Mark, Peter, Steven, and Robert.”

“I heard gunshots,” Reacher said. “Not long ago. Suppressed nine-millimeter rounds. I think Mark just dissolved the partnership.”

“Where’s the fourth guy?”

“In the house, probably. I wouldn’t have heard a gunshot from there. There won’t be much left behind.”

They watched the flames for a minute more, and then Patty turned a tight left and drove across the bumpy grass close to the edge of the woods. She watched carefully. She slowed down in two separate places, and took a long hard look, but both times she looked away and drove on. Finally she stopped. She kept her hands on the wheel.

She said, “It all looks the same now.”

Reacher asked, “How deep in is he?”

“I can’t remember. We walked a bit, and then I dragged him further. To where I thought he was safe.”

“Where did you go in?”

“Between two trees.”

“Doesn’t help.”

“I think it was here.”

They shut down and got out. Without headlights the world was pitch dark. Patty put her headset on again, and Reacher dropped his tube down in place. Infinite green detail came back. Patty turned her head left and right. She looked at the front rank of trees. At the spaces between.

“I think it was here,” she said again.

They pushed into the forest. She led the way. They walked a slow curve, east and north. As if aiming to hit the track maybe thirty yards along its length. Thirty yards from its mouth. They stepped left and right around trees. Vines and bushes clawed at their ankles.

Patty said, “I don’t recognize anything.”

Reacher called out, “Shorty? Shorty Fleck?”

Patty called out, “Shorty, it’s me. Where are you?”

Nothing.

They walked on. Every ten paces they stopped and called and shouted and yelled. Then they stood still and held their breath and listened.