Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(50)

“Nine-thirty on the dot. Something about visiting hours.”

Amos paused a beat.

“OK,” she said. “You’re authorized to do that. But you’ll do it my way. You don’t leave your room at any point, no one ever sees you, and at nine-thirty in the morning exactly you run straight to the car with your head down. And you drive away. And you don’t come back. That’s the deal I’m offering. Or we run you out now.”

“I already paid for my room,” Reacher said. “Running me out now would be an injustice.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “This is not the O.K. Corral. This is collateral damage just waiting to happen. If they miss you, they’ll hit two other people instead. Watch my lips. We are not going to allow drive-by shootings in our town. No way. This is Laconia, not Los Angeles. And with respect, major, you should support our position. You should know better than to put innocent bystanders at risk.”

“Relax,” Reacher said. “I support your position. I support it big time. I’ll do everything your way. I promise. Starting tomorrow. Today I’m still legal.”

“Start when it gets dark tonight,” Amos said. “Play it safe. For my sake.”

She took out a business card and handed it to him.

She said, “Call me if you need me.”





Chapter 20


Patty took off her shoes, because she was Canadian, and stepped up on the bed, and stood upright on the bouncy surface. She shuffled sideways and tilted her face up toward the light.

She said, loudly, “Please raise the window blind. As a personal favor to me. I want to see daylight. What possible harm could it do? No one ever comes here.”

Then she climbed down, and sat on the edge of the mattress to put her shoes back on. Shorty watched the window, like he was watching a ball game on a television screen. The same kind of close attention.

The blind stayed down.

He shrugged.

“Good try,” he mouthed, silently.

“They’re discussing it,” she mouthed back.

They waited again.

And then the blind rolled up. The motor whirred and a blue bar of bright afternoon light came spilling in, narrow at first, but widening all the time, until it filled the room with sunshine.

Patty glanced up at the ceiling.

“Thank you,” she said.

She walked to the door, to kill the hot yellow bulb. Three steps. The first felt good, because she liked the daylight. The second felt better, because she had made them do something for her. She had established a line of communication. She had made them understand she was a person. But then the third step felt worse again, because she realized she had given them leverage. She had told them what she feared to lose.

She put her elbows on the sill and her forehead on the glass and stared out at the view. It was unchanged. The Honda, the lot, the grass, the wall of trees. Nothing else.

—

In the back parlor over at the house Mark finished a phone call and put the receiver down. He checked the screens. Patty was happy. He turned to face the others.

“Listen up,” he said. “That was a neighbor on the phone. Some old apple farmer twenty miles south of here. They had a guy there today, making trouble. They want us to keep an eye out for him. In case he happens to come by, looking for a room. They’ll send folks up to get him. Apparently they need to teach him a lesson.”

“He won’t come by,” Peter said. “We took the signs down.”

“The apple farmer said this was a big rough guy. Which is exactly what our friend at the county office said too. About a big rough guy named Reacher, who was researching his family history. Who looked at four separate censuses. At least two of which must have had a Ryantown address. Which is a place where theoretically I had distant relatives. And which is a place right there in the corner of the apple farm in question. This guy is mapping out Reacher real estate. He’s going from parcel to parcel. He must be some kind of mad hobbyist.”

“You think he’ll come here?”

“My grandfather’s name is still on the deed. But that was after Ryantown. It was after they got rich.”

“We don’t need this now,” Robert said. “We have bigger fish to fry. The first arrival is less than twelve hours away.”

“He won’t come here,” Mark said. “He must be a different branch of the family. I never heard about anyone like that. He’ll stick to his own lineage. Surely. Everyone does. No reason why he would come here.”

“We just rolled their blind up.”

“Leave it up,” Mark said. “He won’t come here.”

“They could signal for help.”

“Watch the track and listen for the bell.”

“Why would we need to, if he won’t come here?”

“Because someone else might. Anyone could. We need maximum vigilance now. Because this is where we earn it, guys. Attention to detail today pays dividends tomorrow.”

Steven switched out the screens either side of center to two alternate views of the mouth of the track, where it came out of the trees, one close up, one wide angle.

Nothing was moving.

—

Reacher did it Amos’s way. He went back to his room and holed up for the rest of the afternoon. No one saw him. Which was good. Except dinner was going to be a problem. The place he had picked to stay was just a bijou little inn. There was no room service. Probably no catering at all, except brought-in muffins for the breakfast buffet. Free, in the lobby. But not yet. Not for another twelve hours, at the earliest. Probably closer to fourteen. A person could starve to death.