Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(31)

“About three hundred yards.”

“I’ll carry the suitcase.”

“Wait,” she said again.

She ducked down and eased her fingers under the fat rubber wire. She lifted it. It came up easily, an inch, a foot, as much as she wanted. She tested it side to side, and pulled and tugged to make it equally loose.

“Get ready,” she said.

She lifted it up, gently, on open palms, head high, arms wide. Shorty ducked low and pushed the bike under it. She held it until he was clear. She felt like she was performing a dance ceremony at a hippy’s wedding.

“OK,” Shorty said.

She laid the wire back down, gently, like she was bowing. Then they pushed on, energized. Safe. On the last lap. Not far to go. Their flashlight beams bounced and swayed, first showing nothing but trees and the track between, but then a different kind of void loomed up ahead. The two-lane road. Where they had turned in, what felt like a thousand years ago. Shorty had said, OK? Patty hadn’t answered.

Now she said, “We need to find a place to hide the suitcase. But not too far from the road. So we can load it easy when we get a ride.”

They let the bike slow to a stop where the mouth of the track widened out to meet the road. Hiding places looked to be in short supply. Tree trunks crowded in either side. The last yard of shoulder was thick with underbrush. Although maybe a little thinner where the frost-heaved posts were set. Maybe the ground had been disturbed many years earlier. Maybe the brush was coming back slower. Maybe there was a suitcase-sized hole behind one or the other.

Patty went to check. In the end she figured the right-hand hole was better than the left. They huffed and puffed and got the bike as close as possible. Shorty spread his arms wide and lifted the suitcase off the bike, and then he grunted and gasped and turned and dropped it in the bushes, where it scraped and crackled through the lower branches and came to rest pretty well hidden. Patty walked up the road a spell and used her flashlight like an approaching headlight beam, and said she saw nothing much. Certainly nothing anyone would stop for. Just a dark shape, way low down, behind the base of the post. It could have been the corpse of a deer. She was satisfied.

Then her voice changed and she said, “Shorty, come here.”

He went. They stood together on the county blacktop and looked back the way he had come, back along her flashlight beam, which was wavering on a wide area centered on the frost-heaved post, with the dark shape low and behind it. Which you couldn’t really see unless you knew it was there. He was satisfied too.

He said, “What am I looking for?”

“Think, Shorty,” she said. “What did we see when we turned in?”

He thought. He visualized. He took two sideways steps left, nearer the center line of the road, where the Honda’s wheel had been. He squatted down a little, to approximate the level of the driver’s seat. What had he seen? He had seen a frost-heaved post, on which was nailed a board, on which were screwed ornate plastic letters, and an arrow pointing into the woods. The letters had spelled out the word Motel .

He compared his memory with the scene in front of him.

He was pretty sure it was different.

He stared. Then he saw. Now there was no board. No letters, no word, no arrow. Now there was just a post. Nothing on it. Same both sides of the track.

“Weird,” he said.

“You think?”

“So is it a motel or not? Sure feels like one to me. They’re taking our money.”

“We have to get out of here.”

“We are. First car that comes.”

“After we take the bike back to the barn.”

“We don’t owe them that,” Shorty said. “We don’t owe them diddly. Not anymore. Not if they’re pulling weird shit on us now, with the motel signs. We should dump the bike here and let them come get it themselves.”

“They get up with the sun,” Patty said. “If there’s a bike missing they’ll know right away. But if it’s back in its proper place, they might not think about us for hours. They’ll assume we’re eating breakfast on our own, in our room. They’ll have no reason to come by until later in the morning.”

“It’s a gamble.”

“It could buy us a lot of time later. They’ll come looking for us as soon as they find us gone. We need to delay that moment as long as possible. We need to be miles away by then. We definitely can’t afford to be still stuck down here with our thumbs out. I think we should buy ourselves as much time as we can get.”

Shorty said nothing. He looked along the dark and silent road, first one way, and then the other.

“I know it feels weird to go back,” Patty said. “Now that we just got here. But there are no cars coming anyway. Not yet. We’ll do better closer to dawn.”

Shorty was quiet another long moment.

Then he said, “OK, we’ll take the bike back to the barn.”

“As fast as we can,” Patty said. “Now it’s all about speed.”

They unstrapped their overnight bags from the rack and stashed them close to the suitcase, and then they eased the bike around a wide circle on the blacktop. The air smelled sweeter in the open. They got the bike pointed back down the track. They took up their positions. They set off. The same two-plus miles all over again, in the reverse direction. But Patty had been right. Pushing was much easier without the weight of the suitcase. The bike felt buoyant. Like it was floating. They did the hippy dance under the wire again, and then they got it going and kept it up at a fast walk with what felt like barely any effort at all. They didn’t stop and they didn’t rest.