“We could use two. Like tugboats pulling an ocean liner to the harbor mouth.”
“That’s crazy,” Patty said.
“OK, maybe we could use a quad-bike to haul just the suitcase.”
“You mean drag it along?”
“I think they have a platform on the back.”
“Too small.”
“Then we could balance it on the gas tank and the handlebar.”
“They won’t like it if we leave our car here.”
“Too bad.”
“Do you even know how to drive a quad-bike?”
“It can’t be that hard. We would want to go slow anyway. And we couldn’t fall off. Not like a regular motorbike.”
“It’s a possibility,” Patty said. “I suppose.”
“Let’s wait until after dinner,” Shorty said. “Maybe the phone is back on and the mechanic will show up and everything will work out fine. If not, we’ll take a look at the barn after dark. OK?”
Patty didn’t answer. They stayed where they were, slumped down in their lawn chairs, keeping the low sun on their faces. They left their room door wide open.
* * *
—
Fifty yards away in the command center in the back parlor, Mark asked, “Who missed the cotton bud?”
“All of us,” Peter said. “We all checked the room and we all signed off on it.”
“Then we all made a bad mistake. Now they’re agitated. Way too soon. We need to pace this better.”
“He thinks it was the painter. She’ll believe him eventually. She doesn’t want to worry. She wants to be happy. She’ll talk herself around. They’ll calm down.”
“You think?”
“Why would we lie about the room? There’s no possible reason for it.”
Mark said, “Bring me a quad-bike.”
Chapter 10
Reacher walked back to the fancy county office with the census scans and the million-dollar cubicles, and he found the same surly guy on duty at the desk. Once again Reacher asked for two censuses, the first when Stan was two, and the second when he was twelve, but this time for the rest of the county that lay outside of Laconia’s technical city limit.
The guy said, “We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“You’re asking for a donut shape. With a hole in the middle, which is Laconia, which you already saw. Am I right?”
“You got it in one.”
“That’s not how the extracts are done. There are no donut shapes. You can have an area, or a bigger area, or a bigger-still area. Which would be the city, the county, and the state. But the bigger area always includes the smaller area all over again. And the bigger-still area includes both of them all over again. Which is logical, if you think about it. There are no holes in the middle. The city is in the county, and the county is in the state.”
“Understood,” Reacher said. “Thank you for the explanation. I’ll take the whole county.”
“Are you still a resident?”
“You agreed I was this morning. And here I am again. Clearly I didn’t leave town with all my worldly possessions. I would say my status as a resident is more secure than ever.”
“Cubicle four,” the guy said.
* * *
—
Patty and Shorty heard an engine start up in the distance, deafening like a motorcycle, and they got up and walked to the corner to take a look. They saw Peter riding a quad-bike back to the house. Now only eight were neatly parked.
“First turn of the key,” Shorty said. “I hope they’re all like that.”
“Way too noisy,” Patty said, disappointed. “We can’t do it. They would know.”
Peter parked at the distant house. He killed the engine and silence came back. He got off and went inside. Patty and Shorty went back to their lawn chairs.
Shorty said, “The land is pretty flat around here.”
“Does that help us?”
“We could push the quad-bike. With the engine off. With the suitcase balanced on it. We could use it like a furniture dolly.”
“Could we?”
“They can’t be that heavy. You see people wheeling motorbikes all the time. We wouldn’t even have to keep it upright, and there are two of us. I bet we could do it dead easy.”
“Two miles there and two miles back? Which would leave the suitcase by the side of the road, and us back here. So then we would have another two miles to walk. Altogether six, four of them pushing a quad-bike. It would take a good long time.”
“I figure about three hours,” Shorty said.
“Depends how fast we could push. We don’t know yet.”
“OK, call it four hours. We should time it to finish at dawn. Maybe we might see a farmer heading to market. There has to be traffic sometimes. So we should