The Midnight Line

by Lee Child

  Silence.

  He crept back to the kitchen door. Now logic said Billy was upstairs. He had been warned. His view would be marginally better from a second-floor window. He would see a mile or more of the two-lane beyond the old post office. He would get six or seven minutes, even if an incoming vehicle was driving fast.

  Reacher tried the door handle.

  It turned.

  The door opened.

  He pushed it gently, with spread fingers. The kitchen air smelled still and stale. There were dark wood cabinets and a cold stove. Yesterday’s dishes were in the sink. There was tile on the floor. The inside door was open to the living room. No people. Last winter’s ash was still in the fireplace. A poker and a brush and a long-handled shovel were propped together in a stand on the hearth stones.

  Slowly, carefully, he eased the poker out of the stand. It was iron, about a yard long, and it had a vicious hook at the end, jutting out like a hitchhiker’s thumb.

  Better than nothing.

  He crept to the foot of the stairs. Listened hard. The log construction was massive and solid. No sound. Nothing at all.

  He started up the stairs. The moment of maximum vulnerability. Nothing to be done if Billy showed up shooting in the upstairs hallway. Short of swinging the poker at the bullet like a slugger going after a high fastball. Unlikely to work. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The stairs were sawn half-logs about ten inches thick. No danger of creaking. He held his breath.

  He made it to the top. Directly ahead of him was a half-open door to a bathroom, directly above the kitchen. No one in it. Ahead and to his right was a half-open door to a back bedroom, above the back parlor. No one in it. He turned in the hallway and faced two front bedrooms. One had a wide-open door. No one in it.

  One had a closed door.

  Reacher held the poker across his body, at port arms.

  You and me, Billy, he thought.

  There was a rag rug in the upstairs hallway. He stepped onto it and walked slowly, carefully, silently. He stopped four feet short of the door. He was a big believer in shock and awe and surprise and overwhelming force. What used to be called common sense, before the Pentagon pointy-heads started dreaming up fancy names for simple concepts. He set his feet and rocked back and forth, back and forth, like a high-jumper going for a record, and then he smashed through the door with the sole of his boot and exploded into the room with the poker scything through the air in front him.

  The room was empty.

  No Billy.

  Just an unmade bed, and the sour smell of sleep, and a three-pane window with a perfect view to the horizon. Nothing out there except the herd of pronghorns, grazing unconcerned a mile away.

  Reacher had searched a lot of houses, and he found the barn keys in the first place he looked, on a nail in the wall near the kitchen door. The barn was a big one-story space that smelled of dust and wood stain and cold motor oil. There were bald tires and all kinds of mechanical junk and a detached snowplow blade stacked on the floor. No actual vehicles. Nothing else of interest. He went back to the house and stood on the front porch and checked the view. He traced the route, along the driveway, along the dirt road, bit by bit, his eyes moving like a finger on a map, all the way out past the old post office and the firework store.

  Nothing coming.

  No dust on the dirt road.

  He started downstairs and searched the house methodically, running a clock in his head, returning to the porch every sixty seconds to check the horizon. There was nothing of significance in the kitchen. Nothing in the living room. Billy seemed to be a guy with neat but not obsessive habits. The place was reasonably tidy and reasonably clean. The stuff in it was neither obviously expensive nor obviously cheap. It was clear he lived alone.

  The back parlor was set up as an office. A desk, a chair, a file cabinet. On the desk was a cell phone. A simple thing. Old fashioned but not old. It was plugged in to a charger. The battery icon said a hundred percent. The screen said New Message.

  Sixty seconds. Reacher slipped out to the porch and checked the view. Nothing coming. He went back to the office. He had never owned a cell phone, but he had used one from time to time. He knew how they worked. At the bottom of the screen were the words Menu and Play, and below them were two slim bar-shaped buttons. He pressed the bar below Play.

  He heard a nervous breath and a throat being cleared.

  Then he heard Scorpio’s voice.

  It said, “Billy, this is Arthur. We got some weird shit going on. Nothing real serious. Just a strange piece of bad luck. Some guy showed up chasing a ring.”

  Sixty seconds. Reacher stepped out to the front porch again and checked the view. Still nothing coming. He went back in and up the stairs to the slept-in bedroom. First thing he looked at was the closet. Just for fun. Against the back wall behind a rail of hanging pants he found four shoeboxes. They were neatly stacked two on two. The top two held shoes. White athletic sneakers on the left, and rubber soled black leather dress items on the right. The kind of thing a country boy might wear to a wedding or a funeral or a visit with the loan officer at the bank. Both pairs had been worn, but not often. Both pairs were size eight and a half. The hanging pants were all thirty-two waist and thirty leg.

  Billy was a small guy.

  Sixty seconds. He checked out the window.

  There was a long dust plume on the dirt road.

  A hanging ochre cloud, long, spiraling and drifting. A vehicle, coming on fast. Still just a tiny dot in the distance. Too far away to see what it was.

  Six minutes, maybe.

  He went back in the closet. Checked the bottom pair of boxes.

  One was full of money.

  Tens and twenties and fifties, used and creased, sour and greasy, done up in inch-thick bricks with rubber bands. Maybe ten grand in total. Maybe more.

  The other box was full of trinkets. Mostly gold. Gold crosses on thin tangled chains, gold earrings, gold bracelets, gold charms, gold chokers.

  And gold rings.

  Some were wedding rings.

  Some were class rings.

  Reacher stepped back to the window and watched. The dust plume was a mile long, hanging in the motionless air. At the head of it was a tiny dark dot, quivering, bobbing, bouncing. The pronghorn herd rippled, uneasy.

  The tiny dot looked black.

  It was hammering and juddering right to left in front of him. It was doing maybe forty miles an hour. Maybe more. Some kind of familiarity with the terrain, or some kind of urgency, or some kind of both.

  He waited.

  It slowed.

  The dust cloud caught up with it.

  It turned in at the driveway.

  Billy’s ride would be a pick-up truck, Reacher figured. Snowplows usually were. Winter tires, chains, a hydraulic mechanism for the blade, extra spotlights mounted high. All detached in the summer, leaving a familiar silhouette. Hood, cab, bed.

  Which Reacher didn’t see.

  It wasn’t a pick-up truck.

  It was big and square and boxy. An SUV. A black SUV. Travel stained and dusty. It flashed in and out of sight through the trees. Then it pulled clear and drove the last hundred yards over the beaten red dirt.

  It slowed and turned and came to a stop.

  It was a Toyota Land Cruiser.

  It had Illinois plates.

  Chapter 16

  Reacher watched from the upstairs window. The black SUV parked a respectful distance from the house. The driver’s door opened. A man stepped down. A small guy, neat and compact, in a dark suit and a shirt and a tie. Terry Bramall. From Chicago. Retired FBI. The missing persons specialist. Last seen the day before, in Rapid City, in the breakfast place opposite Arthur Scorpio’s laundromat.

  The guy stood still for a long moment, and then he set out walking toward the house, with a purposeful stride.

  Reacher went down the stairs. He made it to the bottom and heard a knock on the door. He opened up. Bramall was standing on the porch. He
had taken a polite step back. His hair was brushed. His suit was the same, but his shirt and his tie were different. He had the kind of look on his face that Reacher recognized. The kind of look he had used himself, many times. Open, inquisitive, inoffensive, faintly apologetic for the interruption, but no-nonsense all the same. An experienced investigator’s look. Which changed for a split second, first to surprise, then to puzzlement, and then finally it came back the same as before.

  “Mr. Bramall,” Reacher said.

  “Mr. Reacher,” Bramall said. “I saw you yesterday in the coffee shop in Rapid City. And the night before in the convenience store. You called me and left a message.”

  “Correct.”

  “I assume your first name isn’t Billy.”

  “You assume right.”

  “Then may I ask what you’re doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Not my house. Not for me to say.”

  “Yet you seem to be making yourself at home.”

  Reacher looked beyond Bramall’s shoulder at the view. The dust cloud over the dirt road had settled. The pronghorn herd had gone back to placid grazing. Nothing was moving. No one was coming.

  He said, “What do you want from Billy?”

  “Information,” Bramall said.

  “He’s not here. Probably been gone about twenty-four hours. Or more. Scorpio left him a voicemail around this time yesterday and it was still showing on his phone as a new message. It hadn’t been picked up yet.”

  “He went out without his phone?”

  “It was charging. Maybe it’s not his main phone. It looks like a burner. Maybe it’s for special purposes only.”

  “Did you listen to the message?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Scorpio asked Billy to shoot me with a deer rifle from behind a tree.”

  “To shoot you?”

  “He included a description.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “I agree.”

  Bramall said, “We should talk.”

  “On the porch,” Reacher said. “In case Billy comes back.”

  Four eyes were better than two. They sat side by side in Billy’s wooden chairs, with Bramall gazing west of dead ahead, and Reacher gazing east. They talked into the void in front of them, not looking at each other, which made the conversation easier in some respects, and harder in others.

  Bramall said, “Tell me what you know.”

  Reacher said, “You’re retired.”

  “That’s what you know? Hardly relevant. Or even true. I’m pursuing a second career.”

  “I mean you’re retired FBI. Which means you don’t get to use FBI bullshit anymore. As in, you don’t get to ask all the questions and then walk away. You get to give as well as take.”

  “How do you know I was FBI?”

  “A police detective in Rapid City told me. Name of Nakamura.”

  “She must have done some research.”

  “That’s what detectives do.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “I’m afraid I’m bound by a certain degree of confidentiality.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  Bramall said, “I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Jack Reacher. No middle name. Retired military police. Some of your guys came to us for training.”

  “And some of yours came to us.”

  “So we’re on an equal footing. Give and take, Mr. Bramall.”

  “Rank?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You know it does.”

  “Terminal at major.”

  “Unit?”

  “Mostly the 110th MP.”

  “Which was?”

  “Like the FBI, but with better haircuts.”

  “Is the military connection why you’re here?”

  “Should it be?”

  “I’m serious,” Bramall said. “Clients like discretion. Most of the time I make my living by keeping things quiet. For all I know, you work for a website now.”

  “I don’t. Whatever that means.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “I don’t work.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Tell me about your client, Mr. Bramall. Broad strokes, if you like. No names at this point. No identifying details.”

  “You can call me Terry.”

  “And you can call me Reacher. And you can quit stalling.”

  “My client is someone in the Chicago area worried about a family member.”

  “Worried why?”

  “No contact for a year and a half.”

  “What took you to Rapid City?”

  “Land line calls in old phone records.”

  “What brought you here?”

  “The same.”

  “Was the family with the missing member originally a Wyoming family?”

  Bramall said nothing.

  “There are hundreds of families in Wyoming,” Reacher said. “Maybe even thousands. You won’t be giving anything away.”

  “Yes,” Bramall said. “Originally it was a Wyoming family. From the other side of the Snowy Range. About sixty miles from here. Maybe seventy. That’s about two blocks away, by Wyoming standards.”

  Reacher said, “Had the family member in question spent time overseas?”

  “Give and take, Mr. Reacher. You’re retired too.”

  Reacher checked his part of the horizon, from the dirt road out past Mule Crossing’s forlorn buildings, to the two-lane. No movement. Nothing coming. He checked Bramall’s part too, tracing the dirt road west until it disappeared in the hills. No dust. No movement. Nothing coming.

  He took the ring out of his pocket. He balanced it on his palm. He held out his hand. Bramall took the ring from him. He looked at it. He took out a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses from an inside pocket. He read the engraving on the inner face.

  S.R.S. 2005.

  He said, “Now we really need to talk.”

  Reacher told him the story. The bus out of Milwaukee, and the comfort stop, and the pawn shop, and Jimmy Rat in the biker bar, and Arthur Scorpio in the Rapid City laundromat, and the tale about how a guy named Porterfield brought him the ring, which had proved to be a lie, because of the big sensation with either the bear or the mountain lion, or both.