Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(29)

She craned her neck and moved the flashlight beam.

She found two black hoses connected to the engine block. There were no other candidates. She followed them with the flashlight beam. They stayed low in the bay. They passed through the bulkhead into the passenger compartment very low down. Directly behind where the floor console was, with the gearshift lever. The heater was right above it.

The heater hoses go through the back of the dashboard .

No they don’t, Patty thought. She double checked. They went nowhere near the back of the dashboard. They went through level with the bottom of the foot well. Much lower down. And there was nothing near them anyway. Just thick metal components, all caked with dirt. No wires. Nothing vulnerable. Nothing that would fry from excessive temperatures. Certainly no black boxes that might contain electronic chips.

She backed away and straightened up. She looked at the house. All quiet. The barn was ghostly in the moonlight. All nine quad-bikes were neatly parked. She killed the flashlight beam and minced back to the room. She stepped to the bed and nudged Shorty awake. He sat up in a panic and looked all around for passersby or other intruders.

He saw none.

He said, “What?”

She said, “The heater hoses don’t go through the back of the dashboard.”

He said “What?” again.

“In the car,” she said. “They go through real low down, about level with the bottom of the gearstick.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked,” she said. “With one of the flashlights they gave us.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Why?”

“I woke up. Something is not right.”

“So you ripped the console out of the car?”

“No, I looked under the hood. From the other side. I could see the connection. And there’s no electronic chip nearby.”

“OK, maybe the mechanic got it wrong,” Shorty said. “Maybe he was thinking of a different year. Ours is a pretty early model. Or maybe Hondas are different in Canada.”

“Or maybe the mechanic doesn’t exist. Maybe they never called one.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe they’re keeping us here.”

“What?”

“How else do you explain it?”

“Why would they? Seriously. You mean, like an occupancy thing? Because of the bank? They want our fifty bucks?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Hell of a way to do business. We could go on TripAdvisor.”

“Except we can’t go on anything. There’s no wifi and no cell signal and no phone in the room.”

“They can’t just keep people here, against their will. Someone would miss them eventually.”

“We as good as told them no one knows we’re gone.”

“We also as good as told them we’re broke,” Shorty said. “How long can they expect us to pay fifty bucks?”

“Two days,” Patty said. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Six meals each.”

“That’s crazy. Then what? Then they call the mechanic?”

“We have to get out of here. We have to do the thing you said with the quad-bike. So get dressed. We have to go.”

“Now?”

“This minute.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Like you said. They’re asleep now. We have to do it now.”

“Because a mechanic was wrong on the phone?”

“If there was a mechanic at all. And because of everything.”

Shorty said, “Why did they give us flashlights?”

Patty said, “I don’t know that either.”

“It’s like they knew we might want to leave in the dark.”

“How could they?”

Shorty got out of bed. He said, “We should take some food. Can’t count on getting anywhere before lunchtime, earliest. We’ll miss breakfast for sure.”

They got dressed, hopping from foot to foot in the half dark, with nothing but moonlight coming in the open door. They packed their stuff by feel and put their bags outside near the car.

“You sure about this?” Shorty said. “Never too late to change your mind.”

“I want to go,” Patty said. “Something isn’t right here.”

They walked down to the barn on the grass, not the dirt, because they felt it would be quieter. They were cautious across the last of the gravel, to the near corner of the perfect square of bikes, to the one Peter had driven away for Mark to use. Its engine was still faintly warm. Shorty wanted that exact one, because he had seen how to put its gearbox in neutral, and he knew it rolled along OK, but most of all because it was closest. Who wanted to push extra yards? Not him. He clicked the lever to neutral, and pushed back on the handlebars, kind of weak and sideways at first, but even so the machine rolled back obediently, getting faster and faster as Shorty got more and more head-on in his pushing.

“This is not too bad,” he said.

He dragged the machine to a stop and took up a new position and pushed it forward again, in a tight curve, a perfect neat maneuver, like reversing out of a parking space and turning and driving away. Patty joined in on the other side, and they pushed together and got up to a decent speed, steering along the center of the track toward the motel building, pretty much silently, apart from the scrape of their shoes on the dirt, and a lot of close-up squelching and popping from stones under the bike’s soft rubber tires. They pushed on, breathing hard, around room twelve’s corner, and onward to the Honda, two bays down, outside room ten. They stopped the bike right behind the car. Shorty popped the hatch.