She pressed the button on her phone.
The screen lit up.
It showed 10:59.
“Close,” she said.
It changed to 11:00.
“How do you do that?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said again. “Where will I find your friend Carter, the census enthusiast?”
“I didn’t say he was my friend.”
“Co-worker?”
“Different department entirely. In the back office. Not part of the customer-facing ecology, as they say.”
“Then how do I get to see him?”
“That’s why I asked the time. He takes a coffee break at a quarter past eleven. Every day, regular as clockwork.”
“He sounds like a man of sound character.”
“He takes thirty minutes exactly, in the place across the light. In the garden, if the sun is shining. Which it might or might not be. We can’t tell in here.”
“What’s Carter’s first name?” Reacher asked, thinking about baristas calling out to customers. He figured the place could be crowded with office workers taking thirty-minute breaks, all of them looking pretty much the same.
“Carter is his first name,” Elizabeth Castle said.
“What’s his last name?”
“Carrington,” she said. “Check back and tell me how it went. Don’t give up. Family is important. There will be other ways to find out.”
Chapter 6
Patty and Shorty were alone in room ten, sitting together on the unmade bed. Mark had invited them to breakfast after all. He had turned to go and then turned back with a forgiving grin on his face, all-friends-together, let’s-not-be-stupid. Patty had wanted to say yes. Shorty said no. They had gone inside and drunk toothbrush glasses of tepid water, standing at the bathroom sink.
Patty said, “You’ll only feel worse when you have to ask him to give us lunch. You should have gotten it over with right away. Now it’s going to build up in your mind.”
Shorty said, “You got to admit that was weird.”
“What was?”
“All of what just happened.”
“Which was what?”
“You saw it. You were there.”
“Tell me in your own words.”
“From my own lips? You sound like him. You saw what happened. He started up with some weird vendetta against me.”
“What I saw was Peter voluntarily donating his time to help us out. He got to work right away. I wasn’t even awake yet. Then what I saw was you kicking him in the teeth by saying he had made it worse.”
“I agree yesterday the car was not running great, but now it’s not running at all. What else can have happened? Obviously he did something.”
“There was plenty wrong with your car already. Maybe starting it up last night was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“It was weird, what he made me do.”
“He made you tell the truth, Shorty. We would have been in New York City by now. The deal would have been done. Now we could be driving to one of those lots where they take anything in trade. We could have gotten something better. We could have gone the rest of the way in style.”
“I’m sorry,” Shorty said. “I mean it.”
“Maybe the mechanic can fix it.”
“Maybe we should just dump it and walk away. Before we have to pay another fifty bucks for the room.”
“What do you mean, walk away?”
“On our own two feet. We could walk back to the road and thumb a ride. You said there was some place twenty miles ahead. They might have a bus.”
“The track through the trees was more than two miles long. You’d be carrying the suitcase. It’s bigger than you are. We can’t leave it here. And then all we got anyway is a back road. With no traffic. We planned it that way, remember? We could wait there all day for a ride. Especially with a big suitcase. That kind of thing puts people off. They don’t stop. Maybe their trunk is already full.”
“OK, maybe the mechanic will fix it. Or at least he could give us a ride to town. In his truck. With the big suitcase. We could figure something out from there.”
“Another fifty bucks will surely make a dent.”
“It’s worse than that,” Shorty said. “Fifty bucks is a drop in the ocean. We could stay here all week, compared to what the mechanic will cost. Those guys get a call-out charge, can you believe that? Which is basically like getting paid for still being alive. It’s not like that when you grow potatoes, let me tell you. Which mechanics eat, by the way. They love potatoes. French fries, hash browns, twice baked with cheese and bacon. What if I asked them to pay me just to think about growing them a potato?”
Patty got up suddenly, bouncing the bed, and she said, “I’m going out for some air.”
She crossed to the door and turned the handle and pulled. Nothing happened. It was jammed again. She checked the lock.
She said, “This is what happened in the night.”
Shorty got off the bed and stepped over.
He turned the handle.
The door opened.
He said, “Maybe you’re turning the handle wrong.”
She said, “How many ways are there to turn a handle?”
He closed the door and stood back.
She stepped up and tried again. She used the same grip as before, the same turn, the same pull.
The door swung open.
She said, “Weird.”
* * *
—
The sun was shining on downtown Laconia, a little low in the sky, like the first days of fall, but it was still as warm as summer. Reacher got to the coffee shop across the light at ten past eleven, five minutes ahead of schedule, and he got a seat at a small iron table in the corner of the garden, where he could see the sidewalk coming down from the city office door. He wasn’t sure what kind of a person he expected Carter Carrington to be. Although there were a number of clues. One, Elizabeth Castle found it absurd to imagine the guy as her boyfriend. Two, she had taken pains to point out he wasn’t even her regular friend. Three, the guy was banished to a back office. Four, he was kept away from customers. Five, he was enthusiastic about census methodology.
The signs were not good.
The garden had a side gate also, for the parking lot. People came and went. Reacher ordered regular black coffee, in a go-cup, not because he was planning on rushing away, but because he didn’t like the look of the table service alternatives, which were about the size and weight of chamber pots. Poor cups for coffee, in his opinion, but other people must have been satisfied, because the garden was filling up. Pretty soon there were only three spare seats. One of which was opposite Reacher, inevitably. A fact of his life. People didn’t find him approachable.