They waited.
It didn’t come back.
They waited.
Nothing.
No sound, no movement. Nothing out the window except the view as before. The Honda, the lot, the grass, the wall of trees.
Shorty said, “Maybe he got hung up for a minute. Maybe the assholes came out and started talking to him.”
“He’s been gone longer than a minute,” Patty said. She put her bags down and stepped closer to the window. She craned her neck and peered out.
“Can’t see anything,” she said.
Shorty put the suitcase down. He joined her at the window. He said, “I could go check from the corner.”
“They might see you. They’re probably all standing around talking. What else can they be doing? How long does it take to turn a truck around?”
“I’ll be careful,” Shorty said.
He stepped to the door. He turned the knob and pulled. But the door was stuck. It wouldn’t move at all. He checked it was properly unlocked from the inside, and he tried the knob both ways. Nothing happened. Patty stared at him. He pulled harder. He put one meaty palm flat on the wall and hauled.
Nothing.
“They locked us in,” Patty said.
“How?”
“They must have a button in the house. Like remote control. I think they’ve been messing with it all along.”
“That’s completely crazy.”
“What isn’t here?”
They stared out the window. The Honda, the lot, the grass, the wall of trees. Nothing else.
Then the window blind motored down in front of them and the room went dark.
Chapter 17
Karel stepped into the back parlor and the others crowded around and whooped and hooted and slapped him on the back. Steven ducked away and pattered at a keyboard and the video on the screens rewound at high speed, three jerky figures racing around, doing everything fast and backward. He put on a TV voice and said, “Folks, let’s go to the action replay, and let’s ask the man of the hour how it felt to hit that big grand slam.”
He changed to forward motion and normal speed, and on the screens Karel was seen smiling encouragingly and shooing Patty and Shorty toward their door. The audio caught him saying, “Go inside and pack your stuff. This is a two-minute job.”
“But it’s a swing and a miss,” the real Karel said, in a TV voice of his own, like a scratchy signal coming in all the way from the Balkans. “The first at-bat is a strikeout.”
On the screens Patty said, “We packed already.”
In the parlor Karel said, “And from that point onward I was just making it up as I went along. I figured something might happen sooner or later. I knew all I needed to do was maneuver them into the room and close the door. In the end I got lucky.”
The others hooted and hollered again, but Mark said, “There was no luck involved. That was a virtuoso performance. We should save this video forever. We should learn it by heart. It was like hearing a maestro play the violin. You’ve done this before, haven’t you, Karel?”
The parlor went quiet.
On the screens the video ran on, with the three figures huddled between the Honda and the boardwalk, talking low.
Mark said, “You distanced yourself from us, by pretending not to be our friend, which purely by default generated a closer bond with them. They fell right into it. They did this to themselves. They became almost intimate. Which you then built on by confirming their worst fears about certain inconsistencies they had noticed. Then you doubled down even more by slowly agreeing to help them escape. It was a masterpiece of emotional manipulation. It was a perfectly constructed rollercoaster. They were worried all morning, then suddenly filled with intense hope, which then increased to actual euphoria, as they stood there, bags in hand, waiting to go, and now they’re suddenly sick with utter defeat.”
Steven clicked to a live feed. Patty and Shorty were sitting on their bed, in the dark, not moving at all.
“It works better this way,” Karel said. “I promise. It’s better when they’re in touch with their feelings. It marinates their brains. It makes them more fun later, cross my heart.”
Then he said, “I’ll see you soon,” and walked out the door.
* * *
—
Reacher saw the left turn coming up. It was a hundred yards ahead. It met the main drag at an oblique angle and curved gently away, as if reluctant. Then it ran onward through apple orchards. He walked on toward it. Halfway there he had to step up on the grass shoulder to let a giant tow truck blow by. It was huge and bright red and spotlessly clean. It had gold pinstripes all over it. It shook the ground under his feet. He watched it go. Then he walked on again and took the turn.
The side road was narrower than the main drag, but wide enough and hard enough for the kind of primitive trucks they might have used long ago, for hauling wood or coal or tin. On either side in the orchards the apple trees were bending over with heavy fruit. He could smell it in the air. He could smell hot dry grass. He could hear the buzz of insects. Overhead a hawk rode the thermals.
Then half a mile after its reluctant turn away from Laconia, the road turned again, as if definitively, due west. After that it ran straight into the distance, through more apple orchards, toward a small shiny dot, which Reacher figured might be a parked car. Beyond that seemed to be trees of a different green. He walked on. As he got closer he saw the dot was indeed a car. Shiny because of the power of the sun, not because of the paint on the car. It looked like a battered old lump. Eventually he saw it was a Subaru, a little like the one he had ridden in with the contractor with the inspector problem, genetically related, but twenty years older. Like an ancestor. It was parked head on against a wooden fence that ran side to side where the blacktop ended. Beyond the fence was another acre of apple orchard, and then another fence, beyond which were wild trees with bigger leaves.
There was a guy in the Subaru.
He was sitting behind the wheel. Reacher could see the collar of a blue denim jacket, and a long gray ponytail. The guy wasn’t moving. He was just staring ahead through the windshield.
Reacher walked the length of the car on the passenger side and stopped with his back to the guy and his hips against the fence. The next fence was a hundred yards away. The trees beyond it looked like regular New England species, densely but randomly scattered, twisted and competing. Which might be what happened when seeds blew in.
Also, the fence looked straight.
Promising.
Behind him he heard a car door open, and a voice said, “You’re the man who talked to Bruce Jones.”