Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(28)

“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.





Chapter 13


Patty Sundstrom identified the back of the dashboard easily enough. It was a bare panel, pressed and dimpled with strengthening reinforcements, gray and dirty, partially covered by a thin and peeling sheet of sound deadening material. All kinds of wires and pipes and tubes went through it. Mostly electrical, she thought. The hot water for the heater would be in a thick hose. Maybe an inch or so in diameter, serious and reinforced. By convention black, she expected, clamped to a port on the engine block, which was where the hot water came from. And obviously it would be twinned with an identical black hose, for the return feed. Circulation, around and around. Because of the water pump. Which stopped when the engine stopped, Peter said.