Past Tense (Jack Reacher #23)(75)

From that point on Reacher opted for brutal efficiency. Style points no longer mattered. The wrestler threw a despairing bear claw at him, and Reacher caught it and jerked him off balance, and he went down again, awkwardly, clumsily, whereupon Reacher kicked him in the head, once, twice, until he went still.

Reacher stood up straight, and breathed out, and in, and out.

The two surviving guys stepped back another pace. They shuffled in place and tried to look aw-shucks sheepish. They raised their hands, palms out. They patted the air in front of them. Surrendering. But also distancing themselves. Making a point.

Not our idea .

Reacher asked them, “Where did you find this tub of lard?”

He kicked the wrestler one more time, in the ribs, but gently, as if merely to indicate which particular tub of lard he was talking about.

No one answered.

“You should tell me,” Reacher said. “It’s important to your futures.”

The kid on the right said, “He came up this morning.”

“From where?”

“Boston. He lives there now, but he grew up here. We knew him in high school.”

“Did he win trophies?”

“Lots of them.”

“Get lost now,” Reacher said.

They did. They ran south, at a sprint, up the slope, knees and elbows pumping. Reacher watched them go. Then he picked his way through the vanquished and walked on through the orchard. Burke was waiting at the fence. He held up the hand he had been waving. In it was his phone.

“It kept trying to ring,” he said. “But there’s really no service here. So I walked back to where I got half a bar. It was the ornithologist. He was returning your call, from the university. He said it was his only chance to talk, because he’s tied up the rest of the day. So I ran back here and tried to attract your attention.”

“I saw,” Reacher said.

“He left a message.”

“On the phone?”

“With me.”

Reacher nodded.

He said, “First I need to call Amos at the Laconia PD.”





Chapter 29


The fifth arrival was as unobtrusive as the first and the third. In the back parlor Mark and Steven and Robert heard the bell ring, from the wire across the blacktop. They watched the screens. Robert lined up three different views of the track. They waited. Two miles took four minutes at thirty miles an hour, and six minutes at twenty. Call it five minutes on average, depending on how fast a person was prepared to drive, and what kind of vehicle they had. The surface could be jolting.

It was five minutes and nineteen seconds exactly, according to the digital clocks in the bottom right-hand corners of the screens. They saw a pick-up truck come out of the trees and into the light. Robert used a joystick and zoomed the close-up camera tight on it. It was a Ford F150. Single cab, long bed. Dirty white paint. Close to a base specification, three or four model years old. A workingman’s vehicle. A tool of a trade.

Robert tightened the shot some more, to check the license plate. It said Illinois, which they all knew was bullshit. The guy was from New York City. His office ISP was unbreakable, but his home wifi was wide open. He ran a fund on Wall Street. He was one of the new faceless super-rich no one had ever heard of. Mark was keen to impress him. He thought Wall Street could be a key market. The right kind of people, with the right kind of needs, and the right kind of money.

They watched him drive through the meadow, and bump down off the track into the motel lot. They saw him stop outside the office. They saw Peter come out to greet him. They shook hands, and exchanged pleasantries. Peter gave him a key, and pointed. Room eleven. The absolute prime location. Significant in every way. Their bed and your bed were almost touching. Head to head. Symmetrical. Separated only by the width of a wall. Just a matter of inches. Room eleven was the VIP enclosure, no doubt about it. An honor not to be given lightly. But Mark had insisted. Demographics were important, he had said.

Robert clicked mice and tapped keyboards and arranged the screens so they could see just about everything at once, all around them on the walls, one picture overlapping the next, some of the angles different, like a clumsy attempt at virtual reality. They saw the Wall Street guy park his truck beyond the dead Honda. They saw him detour for a look in room ten’s window. Nothing doing. He walked back. He looked like Wall Street. Decent haircut, fit from the gym, tan from a lamp and weekends at his wife’s summer rental in the Hamptons. He was dressed well, even though they supposed he was trying not to be. To match the everyday truck. His closet had failed the challenge. His luggage was two hard cases and a soft nylon duffel, all of them dusty from the open bed.

Plus, last of all, from the passenger seat, a plastic bag from a New York deli, stuffed with what were either potatoes or rolls of money.

Meanwhile the first four arrivals were gathering close by, forming up, sliding from screen to screen, getting ready to talk, or try to, or at least to rock from foot to foot until someone said something. Male bonding. Sometimes a slow process. Robert turned up the sound. There were hidden microphones all up and down the length of the motel. Aided by what was painted to look like a TV dish, but was really a parabolic microphone, as sensitive as a bat’s ear, aimed down the row, at the patch of dirt outside room ten’s window. Where folks were likely to cluster. Overkill, electronically, but Mark had insisted. Consumer feedback was important, he said. The more raw and unfiltered the better. Best of all when they didn’t know anyone was listening.