Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(72)

Reacher walked on, looking straight ahead. Refusing to glance left, at the top of the rise, where they might be waiting and watching. Refusing to give them the satisfaction. Let them come to him. He walked on. He got halfway across the orchard. Where he had knocked the kid down. There was no sign. No evidence. Maybe a little scuffed grass, from tensed-up footsteps. Maybe in a TV show they would make something out of it. But not in the real world. He walked on.

He made it all the way to the second fence. Undisturbed. All around was peace and quiet and silence. Nothing was moving. Straight ahead the leaves were darker, and the smell was ranker. The sunless shadows looked colder. He glanced back. Nothing doing.

He climbed over the fence.

Ryantown, New Hampshire.

He walked down Main Street, like the day before, stepping between swaying pipe-thin trees, stumbling now and then on tipped-up stones, passing the low remains of the church, and the school. He picked his way onward, to the four-flats. To the right-hand foundation. To the remains of the kitchen, in the far back corner. The fragment of tile. He pictured his grandfather, like a clean-shaven Blackbeard, yelling and screaming and throwing punches and knocking people down. Probably drinking. He pictured his grandmother, hard and cold and sour. Never smiling. Never saying a nice thing. Always looking cross. Angrily sewing the kind of bedsheets she would never get to use.

He pictured his father, crawling around on the floor. Or not. Maybe sitting quietly in a corner, staring out the window. At a teeming patch of sky.

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

He stood there for a long moment more, and then he said his goodbyes to the place. He turned and retraced his steps. Out the kitchen, through the hallway, past the trees, through the lobby, out the street door.

No one there. Nothing but peace and quiet and silence, all over again. He walked back up Main Street. He stopped at the school. Up ahead the street bent around to meet the church. Without sixty years of trees the vista would have been wide open. A person would have seen a big patch of sky. Maybe right there was their birdwatching spot. Where they saw the hawk. Maybe the binoculars belonged to the school. A grant from the county. Communally owned. Not to be taken away. Or maybe a kindly teacher had found them in a junk shop, and laid out a couple of bucks.

He walked on. He passed the church. He got back to the fence. Ryantown’s city limit. Ahead of him was the orchard. Where the road used to be. A straight shot, a hundred yards, to the parked Subaru. Which was still there. It was clearly visible in the distance. Between it and him were only two points of interest. The more distant was Burke himself. He was standing in the space between the back of his car and the safe side of the fence, and he was hopping from foot to foot, and jumping up and down, and waving his arm.

The second point of interest was fifty yards closer. Halfway across the orchard, strung out across the width of the stolen road, was a line of five men.

Overhead the hawk circled slowly.

Reacher climbed the fence. He left the mossy tangle of unchecked nature behind him, and walked between orderly lines of pruned and identical trees. Up ahead the five men stood still. They were shoulder to shoulder, but not quite touching. They looked like a singing group, about to start up with a tune. Like a barbershop quartet, plus one. Maybe an alto, two tenors, a baritone and a bass. In which case the bass would be the guy in the center. He was bigger than the others. Reacher was pretty sure he hadn’t seen him before. Also he was pretty sure the older guy was standing on the big guy’s right. The middle generation. Better jeans, cleaner shirt, grayer hair. The other three were the same as the night before. Minus the one that got popped. Big healthy specimens, but no military service or prison time or secret sessions with Mossad.

He walked on.

They waited.

Way beyond them in the distance Burke was still hopping up and down and waving his arm. Reacher wasn’t sure why. As a warning it would always be too late. Because of the linear geometry. He would see the problem before he saw the warning. Which made no sense. Maybe Burke was offering tactical advice. Do this, then do that. But Reacher couldn’t understand the semaphore. And he felt it would likely be superfluous anyway. No doubt a man like Burke had many and various talents, but brawling didn’t seem to be one of them. Not so far.

Maybe it was just general agitation.

Reacher walked on.

The guy in the center of the line of five was tall and wide and shaped like an artillery shell. He had a small head set on a thick bull neck fully four inches wider than his temples. Below that his shoulders sloped down, smooth and fast, like a sea creature. He had a big barrel chest, which made his arms and legs look short. He looked young, and fit, and strong.

He was a wrestler, Reacher thought. Maybe once a high school star. Then a college star. Now an apple picker. Was there a big leagues for college wrestlers? If so, the guy hadn’t made it. That was clear.

But still, he was big.

Twenty yards to go.

They waited.

The wrestler was staring dead ahead. He had tiny dark eyes set back deep in his tiny head. Not much expression. Altogether passive. Hence his relative lack of success in the post-college world, perhaps. Perhaps he lacked drive. Perhaps he failed to interpret the world around him. In which case, too bad. He was going to have to suck it up. He had been warned. Obviously. He had been drafted as a replacement. There was a clue in the word. He knew what he was getting into. He could have declined.