The Midnight Line

by Lee Child

  The guy didn’t answer.

  Reacher watched him. Watched all of them. They weren’t backing off. But they weren’t coming on forward either. They were static. They were like a rookie squad when the plan stops working. Something had derailed them. Not Mackenzie. They were looking at her way more than they should, in the middle of a tense get-out-of-town showdown, but the looking was pure animal biology. Not recognition. Mostly it showed in their mouths.

  The guy with the boots said, “No one’s ass needs to get kicked.”

  “I agree,” Reacher said. “Least of all mine.”

  “But you should give it up.”

  “Here’s a counteroffer,” Reacher said. “You don’t mess with me, I won’t mess with you.”

  The guy nodded. Not like he agreed, but like he understood the sentence. Reacher said, “Look, kid,” and beckoned the guy close, as if for a private word, like two world leaders sharing a confidence.

  Reacher put his hand on the guy’s elbow. A friendly gesture, inclusive, intimate, maybe even conspiratorial.

  He squeezed.

  He whispered, “Tell whoever sent you this won’t be like the FBI or the DEA or the ATF. Tell whoever sent you this time it’s the U.S. Army.”

  The guy reacted. Reacher felt it in his elbow. Then he let him go, and the eight-foot gap opened up again. Reacher stood square on and up straight. His old professional pose. Sooner or later everyone’s thoughts turned to violence. Better to deal with that upfront. Better to say, you have got to be kidding me. So he stood chin up, his full height, shoulders back, hands loose, not a circus freak, but a little bigger all around than a normal big guy, enough so they noticed. Plus the eyes, which he found most people liked, except he could blink and come back different, like changing the channel, from a happy show to some bleak documentary about prehistoric survival a million years ago.

  Then suddenly he changed the channel again and smiled and nodded, in a shared, self-deprecating kind of a way, as if obviously two guys such as them could only be kidding around, and the other four would catch on eventually.

  Always offer the other guy a graceful exit.

  The guy in the boots took it. He smiled back, like they were just two old boys horsing around, which could happen anytime, and especially in the presence of such a pretty lady. Then he turned around and led his guys away. Reacher crossed to the opposite sidewalk and watched them around the corner. They climbed in a huge crew-cab pick-up parked head-in by a fence. It backed out and took off. It turned left at the first four-way, and was lost to sight.

  “See?” Mackenzie said. “It didn’t have to be a fight.”

  Reacher said nothing. He stared at her. Then he stared at the corner, where the pick-up had turned.

  Something wrong.

  With the wrong thing.

  He said to Bramall, “Did you take interrogation classes with us?”

  Bramall said, “Only the semester with the rubber hoses.”

  “We were taught the art of interrogation is mostly about listening. His language was weird. His choice of phrase. At the end he said we should give it up. What did that mean? Give what up?”

  “Our quest,” Mackenzie said. “Our search for Rose. Obviously. I mean, to give something up, you have to be doing it in the first place, and that’s about all we’ve been doing. There’s nothing else we could give up.”

  “What category of person would care either way about our search for Rose?”

  “All kinds. We could be treading on a lot of different toes.”

  “What category of person might care most of all?”

  Mackenzie didn’t answer.

  Tell whoever sent you.

  In his mind Reacher heard General Simpson’s voice, on the phone from West Point: She might not want to be found.

  Then he thought no, that can’t be right.

  Chapter 30

  Reacher said, “At the beginning the guy said there’s nothing for us here. Then at the end he said the thing about giving it up. It was a politely threatening opening statement, and a politely threatening closing statement. But in the middle he declined to fight. I think for one particular reason. He was unsettled. There was a new factor he hadn’t been briefed on. He was still getting used to it. He had been sent to kick ass, but all of a sudden he realized we were the kind of people who might kick back. He hadn’t been warned about that. Which is weird, because every question we ever asked in this town, we asked it standing up. We weren’t hiding. Who would send a guy with a message without giving him our descriptions?”

  Mackenzie said, “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe someone who never saw us standing up. Maybe someone who never really saw us at all, except as vague shapes slumped down in a car, as she sped past on the dirt road. Hypothetically. It would be the car she remembered, not us. A black Toyota Land Cruiser, with Illinois plates. Maybe she asked three loyal friends to track it down, and run off whoever was in it. Because she doesn’t want to be found.”

  Mackenzie said, “Do you think that’s who they were?”

  “I did for a moment. I told him the U.S. Army was coming, and he reacted. At first I thought he was impressed. Then later I thought no, his reaction might be because the person who sent him was also U.S. Army. He might have been surprised about the weird connection. He might not have known what it meant. He might have wanted to get away and report back.”

  “To Rose,” Mackenzie said. “Those were her friends.”

  “Except they weren’t,” Reacher said. “They were nothing to do with Rose. We know for sure they never even met her. We know that because they didn’t recognize you. How could they be friends with your twin without knowing who you were? That’s why I wanted you close enough to see their faces. So they could see yours. They would have been staring at you, full of confusion. But they weren’t.”

  “So who were they?”

  “I don’t know,” Reacher said.

  They drove back to the hotel. Bramall went straight upstairs. Reacher stayed out in the parking lot. He looked up at the night sky. It was black and huge and dusted with stars. They were very bright, and there were millions of them.

  The American west.

  Mackenzie came out and stood beside him.

  She said, “We could be in the wrong place entirely.”

  Reacher was still looking at the sky.

  “In the universe?” he said.

  “In this state. No one recognizes me, which means no one has seen her. All we know is six weeks ago she was in some part of Billy’s very large territory. When she traded her ring. Why conclude it was this part?”

  “Porterfield’s house. She wasn’t there full-time. The roofer said so. Yet no one ever saw her heading for the turn. Which means she came and went from the other direction.”

  “Two years ago.”

  “Why would she move?”

  “Her boyfriend died. People move, after a thing like that. It’s a shock.”

  “She did five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. She’s had worse shocks. She would have assessed the situation tactically. No one had ever seen her. There was no realistic threat vector against her current billet. Presumably it was a decent place. It had been good enough for Porterfield to come over. Why give it up? Replacing it would be tough.”

  “I would move.”

  “She would stay.”

  “You know her better?”

  “I know how a person lives through five tours.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “We’ll find out tomorrow,” he said. “We know roughly where she is. She can’t hide forever.”

  “I wanted to buy you a drink,” she said. “To thank you. Since you won’t let me pay you. But there’s no bar in this hotel.”

  “No need to thank me either,” Reacher said.

  “I would have enjoyed it.”

  “Me too, I guess.”

  She moved away a couple of steps, and sat down on a concrete bench.

  He sat down beside her.<
br />
  She said, “Are you married?”

  “No,” he said. “But you are.”

  She laughed, short but soft.

  She said, “It was an unconnected question. Just purely out of interest. It wasn’t a Freudian slip.”

  “Tell me about Mr. Mackenzie.”

  “He’s a nice man. We’re a good match.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Can I ask an unconnected question of my own? Just purely out of interest?”

  She said, “I suppose.”

  “It’s kind of weird, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “How does it feel to be so good looking?”

  “Yes, that’s weird.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “How did it feel when those guys wouldn’t fight you?”

  “Useful.”

  “For us it felt like a minimum requirement. Our father had grandiose ideas.”

  “The judge.”

  “He thought he was living in a storybook. Everything had to be picturesque. On sunny days we ran around the woods in white cotton dresses. At first it was mostly about the hair. All sticking out. We looked like nymphs or fairies. We got the faces later. Then he started dreaming about who we would marry. We thought it was all pretty stupid. It was almost the twenty-first century, and we lived in Wyoming. We ignored it, mostly. But if I’m truly honest, deep down it made an impression. I was aware of it. It came to be part of who I am. Deep down I guess I believe being pretty is better than being ugly. Deep down I know I would choose to look like this again. I worry all that deep down stuff makes me shallow. To answer your question, that’s how it feels.”

  “Did Rose feel the same way?”

  Mackenzie nodded.

  She said, “Rose liked things to be perfect. She was smart, and she worked hard, and mostly she made it happen that way. How she looked was the one thing she couldn’t control. But happily she turned out OK in that department. I think deep down she took a lot of satisfaction from it. She wanted to be the absolute best, from any angle. She wanted to be the total package. And she was.”

  “Why did she join the army?”

  “I told you.”

  “You told me she would shoot a guy even before he set a foot on her porch, whereas you would wait a moment longer. She could have stayed home and done that.”

  “I feel like I’m on a psychiatrist’s couch.”

  “Lay back and pretend you’re an actress in a movie. Suppose the hotel had a bar. By now you’d have bought me a cup of coffee. Black, no sugar. Or a beer, if they didn’t have coffee. Domestic, in a bottle. You would have gotten some weird kind of white wine. Because of Lake Forest, Illinois. Right now we’d be at a table, talking. I would be asking why Rose joined the army, and you would be telling me.”

  “She was looking for something worth it. It turned out the storybook was a lie. He wasn’t the wise man of the county. At first we told ourselves certain practices were almost traditional. He was a lawyer, after all, and lawyers always get paid something. For an opinion, perhaps, prior to the filing. But there were whispers. If they were true, it was something worse. We never found out. Rose and I went to college. They sold the place and moved out of state. We were happy about it. It was a weird place for us. We always knew we were acting in someone else’s play. And then the playwright himself turned out to be made up too. We reacted in slightly different ways. It left Rose needing something real, and me needing a real storybook. And we got both of them, I guess.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  “I’m going to bed now,” she said. “Thanks for talking.”

  She left him there, alone in the dark, leaning back on the concrete bench, looking at the stars.

  At that moment, three hundred miles away at an I-90 truck stop not far from Rapid City, South Dakota, a guy in a beat-up old pick-up truck with Wyoming plates and a vinyl camper shell on the back turned into a service road he had been told led to a covered garage. His name was Stackley, and he was thirty-eight years old, a hard worker, maybe not where he should be in life, but always willing to try his best. He had been told the covered garage was half full with idle snowplows and other winter equipment. He had been told the other half was empty. Plenty of space. He had been told they had it all to themselves.

  He had been told there would be a guard at the door.

  There was.

  He slowed to a stop and wound down his window.

  He said, “I’m Stackley. You should have gotten a call from Mr. Scorpio. I’m taking over from Billy.”

  The guard said, “You’re the new Billy?”

  “As of tonight.”

  “Congratulations, Stackley. Drive in and park in slot number five. Forward, on a diagonal. Get out of the truck and open the tailgate.”

  Stackley did what he was told. He drove in, to an echoing corrugated space the size of an aircraft hangar. On the left were ranks of giant yellow machines, mothballed for the summer. On the right was empty space. Someone had chalked diagonal parking bays on the concrete floor. They were numbered one through ten. One was at the far end, and ten was closest. Seven and three were already occupied. Seven had an old Dodge Durango with its rear door up. Three had a rusted Silverado with a roll-up cover on the bed. Stackley stopped his own truck short of it, and nosed into slot number five. He got out and lowered his tailgate.

  Then he checked his watch and waited for midnight. No way to get there faster. The drivers in three and seven were waiting just like him. They nodded, not exactly friendly, not exactly wary. More like a simple same-boat acknowledgment of life’s ups and downs. They were guys not unlike himself. Then an old black four-wheel-drive rolled in, and parked in the number six slot. The driver got out, and nodded all around, and opened his rear hatch door. Then he stood next to it, and waited. He looked just like the others. Late thirties, maybe not where he should be in life.

  Five minutes later all ten slots were full. Ten vehicles, all in a line, ten tailgates raised or lowered, ten drivers waiting. The guard watched from the doorway. Stackley checked the time again. It was close to the top of the hour. He saw the guard take a call on his cell, saw him listen, saw him click off, and heard him call out, “Two minutes, guys. It’s nearly here.”

  Two minutes later a white panel van drove in a door at the far end of the shed. It looked fresh off the highway. Stackley was reminded of a horse, hot and blowing after a long fast gallop. It nosed in and stopped almost at once, with its rear door level with the truck in slot number one. The driver got out and walked around and opened up. He pulled crisp white boxes from the back of his van, and the driver from slot number one took them from him, and twisted away to slide them in the bed of his pick-up.

  The driver got back in the panel van and rolled it forward six or eight feet and stopped again. He repeated the unloading procedure with the driver from slot number two, stacking a teetering pile of crisp white boxes in the guy’s arms, who then rotated away and dumped them in his own truck. Then the van moved on to the guy in slot number three, which gave the guy from slot number one the space to back out, and get straight, and drive out the same door the van had come in through.

  A slick operation, Stackley thought. And very well supplied. From where he was standing he could see what the guy was getting in slot number four. High-dose time-release oxycodone, and transdermal fentanyl patches, the latter in three different strengths. The boxes were made of high-gloss card, antiseptic white, pharmaceutical grade. They had brand names. They were the real thing. Made in America, straight from the factory.

  Solid gold.

  The panel van moved on, and Stackley stepped up. He got what Scorpio had told him he would get, which was the same volume Billy had been moving. Which was a decent quantity, for a rural area with not many people. He put his boxes in the camper shell. He put a blanket over them. Not that anyone could see in his windows. They were vinyl, all cracked and yellow. Be
tter than a tint from a body shop.

  He waited until the panel van was serving the guy in slot number seven, and then he backed up, and got straight, and drove out the door.

  At that moment Gloria Nakamura was sitting in her dark and silent car, watching the alley that ran behind Arthur Scorpio’s laundromat. She could see his back door. It had a rim of light, as if it was standing open an inch. It was a warm night, but not excessive. She had approached on foot, quietly, and looked through the gap, one eye, but she had seen nothing. The angle was too extreme. She walked back to her car. She tried to list the kinds of things that could make a room warm enough to want to open the door for extra ventilation. Tumble dryers, obviously, but not at midnight, and not in the back office.