“I was born with a rare condition. It has a long and complicated name. It meant I had no shin bone. Everything else was there.”
“So you’ve had a lifetime of practice.”
“I’m not looking for sympathy.”
“You’re not getting any. But even so, you’re doing OK. Your walk is close to perfect.”
“Thank you,” Carrington said. “Tell me about being a cop.”
“It was a good job, while it lasted.”
“You saw the effect of crime on families.”
“Sometimes.”
“Your dad joined the Marines at seventeen,” Carrington said. “Got to be a reason.”
* * *
—
Patty Sundstrom and Shorty Fleck sat outside their room, in the plastic lawn chairs under the window. They watched the mouth of the track through the trees and waited for the mechanic to come. He didn’t. Shorty got up and tried the Honda one more time. Sometimes leaving a thing switched off for a spell fixed it. He had a TV set like that. About one time in three it came on with no sound. You had to shut it down and try again.
He turned the key. Nothing happened. On, off, on, off, silently, no difference at all. He went back to his lawn chair. Patty got up and took all their maps from the glove box. She carried them with her to her own chair and spread them out on her knee. She found their current location, at the end of the inch-long spider-web vein, in the middle of the pale green shape. The forested area. Which seemed to average about five miles across, and maybe seven from top to bottom. The tip of the spider-web vein was off-center in the space, two miles from the eastern limit but three from the western. It was about equal north and south. The green shape had a faint line around it, as if it was all one property. Maybe the motel owned the forest. There was nothing much beyond it, except the two-lane road they had turned off from, which wandered east and south, to the town with its name printed semi-bold. Laconia, New Hampshire. Nearer thirty miles away than twenty. Her guess the day before had been optimistic.
She said, “Maybe the best bet will be what you said. We should forget the car and get a ride in the tow truck. Laconia is near I-93. We could hitch a ride to the cloverleaf. Or take a taxi, even. For less money than another night here, probably. If we can get to Nashua or Manchester we can get to Boston, and then we can get the cheap bus to New York.”
“I’m sorry about the car,” Shorty said. “I mean it.”
“No use crying over spilt milk.”
“Maybe the mechanic can fix it. It might be easy. I don’t get how it can be so dead. Maybe there’s a loose connection, simple as that. I had a radio once, wouldn’t light up at all. I was banging and banging on it, and then I saw the plug had fallen out of the wall. It felt the same kind of dead.”
They heard footsteps in the dirt. Steven stepped around the corner and walked toward them. He passed room twelve, and eleven, and came to a stop.
“Come to lunch,” he said. “Don’t take what Mark said to heart. He’s upset, that’s all. He really wants to help you, and he can’t. He thought Peter would fix it in two minutes. He got frustrated. He likes things to turn out right for everybody.”
Shorty said, “When is the mechanic coming?”
“I’m afraid we haven’t called him yet,” Steven said. “The phone has been down all morning.”
Chapter 7
Reacher left Carrington in the garden, and walked back to the city office. He pressed the record department’s bell, and a minute later Elizabeth Castle came in through the door.
He said, “You told me to check back.”
She said, “Did you find Carter?”
“He seems like a nice guy. I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to date him.”
“Excuse me?”
“When I wondered if he was your boyfriend, and you were incredulous.”
“That he would want to date me. He’s Laconia’s most eligible bachelor. He could have anyone he wants. I’m sure he has no idea who I am. What did he tell you?”
“That my grandparents were either poor or thieves, or poor thieves.”
“I’m sure they weren’t.”
Reacher said nothing.
She said, “Although I know both those things were frequent reasons.”
“Either one is a possibility,” he said. “We don’t need to walk on eggs.”
“Probably they didn’t register to vote, either. Would they