Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(15)

“The geek,” Reacher said. “All I want is background information.”

“How long ago?”

Reacher told him, first the year his father was two, and then the year he was twelve.

Carrington said, “What’s the question?”

So Reacher told him the story, the family paperwork, the Marine Corps clerks and their typewriters, cubicle two’s computer screen, the conspicuous absence of Reachers.

“Interesting,” Carrington said.

“In what way?”

Carrington paused a beat.

He said, “Were you a Marine too?”

“Army,” Reacher said.

“That’s unusual. Isn’t it? For the son of a Marine to join the army, I mean.”

“It wasn’t unusual in our family. My brother did it too.”

“It’s a three-part answer,” Carrington said. “The first part is all kinds of random mistakes were made. But twice in a row makes that statistically unlikely. What were the odds? So we move on. And neither part two or part three of the answer reflect all that well on a theoretical person’s theoretical ancestors. So you need to accept I’m talking theoretically. In general, as in most of the people most of the time, the vast majority, nothing personal, lots of exceptions, all that kind of good stuff, OK? So don’t get offended.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “I won’t.”

“Focus on the count when your dad was twelve. Ignore the earlier one. The later one is better. By then we’d had seven years of the Depression and the New Deal. Counting was really important. Because more people equaled more federal dollars. You can be sure that state and city governments tried like crazy not to miss anyone that year. But they did, even so. The second part of the answer is that the highest miss percentages were among renters, occupants of multi-family dwellings or overcrowded quarters, the unemployed, those of low education and income levels, and those receiving public assistance. Folks on the margins, in other words.”

“You find people don’t like to hear that about their grandparents?”

“They like it better than part three of the answer.”

“Which is?”

“Their grandparents were hiding from the law.”

“Interesting,” Reacher said.

“It happened,” Carrington said. “Obviously no one with a federal warrant would fill out a census form. Other folks thought laying low might help them in the future.”

Reacher said nothing.

Carrington said, “What did you do in the army?”

“Military police,” Reacher said. “You?”

“What makes you think I was in the army?”

“Your age, your appearance, your manner and bearing, your air of decisive competence, and your limp.”

“You noticed.”

“I was trained to. I was a cop. My guess is you have an artificial lower leg. Barely detectable, therefore a really good one. And the army has the best, these days.”

“I never served,” Carrington said. “I wasn’t able to.”

“Why not?”

“I was born with a rare condition. It has a long and complicated name. It meant I had no shin bone. Everything else was there.”

“So you’ve had a lifetime of practice.”

“I’m not looking for sympathy.”

“You’re not getting any. But even so, you’re doing OK. Your walk is close to perfect.”

“Thank you,” Carrington said. “Tell me about being a cop.”

“It was a good job, while it lasted.”

“You saw the effect of crime on families.”

“Sometimes.”

“Your dad joined the Marines at seventeen,” Carrington said. “Got to be a reason.”

—

Patty Sundstrom and Shorty Fleck sat outside their room, in the plastic lawn chairs under the window. They watched the mouth of the track through the trees and waited for the mechanic to come. He didn’t. Shorty got up and tried the Honda one more time. Sometimes leaving a thing switched off for a spell fixed it. He had a TV set like that. About one time in three it came on with no sound. You had to shut it down and try again.

He turned the key. Nothing happened. On, off, on, off, silently, no difference at all. He went back to his lawn chair. Patty got up and took all their maps from the glove box. She carried them with her to her own chair and spread them out on her knee. She found their current location, at the end of the inch-long spider web vein, in the middle of the pale green shape. The forested area. Which seemed to average about five miles across, and maybe seven from top to bottom. The tip of the spider web vein was off-center in the space, two miles from the eastern limit but three from the western. It was about equal north and south. The green shape had a faint line around it, as if it was all one property. Maybe the motel owned the forest. There was nothing much beyond it, except the two-lane road they had turned off from, which wandered east and south, to the town with its name printed semi-bold. Laconia, New Hampshire. Nearer thirty miles away than twenty. Her guess the day before had been optimistic.

She said, “Maybe the best bet will be what you said. We should forget the car and get a ride in the tow truck. Laconia is near I-93. We could hitch a ride to the cloverleaf. Or take a taxi, even. For less money than another night here, probably. If we can get to Nashua or Manchester we can get to Boston, and then we can get the cheap bus to New York.”