The Midnight Line

by Lee Child

  Her cell phone rang.

  Her friend in Computer Crimes.

  Who said, “We’ve lost Scorpio again. He must have gone to a big box store and bought up a different batch of phones.”

  Nakamura said, “He’s in his office. Probably making calls. I’m watching him right now.”

  “We caught something that might have been him. You can kind of work out the triangulation backward. You can make a guess about what a signal would look like, if it was coming from his place. In which case he made a call to somewhere north of here, but not very far north. He just got a text back from the same number. It says, all good tonight including the new Billy.”

  “When was this?”

  “Right now. A minute ago.”

  “Wait,” she said.

  The rim of light around the door grew wider. Then died altogether. Arthur Scorpio stepped out into the nighttime gloom. He turned back and locked the door. Then he walked to his car.

  She said, “Should I follow him?”

  “Waste of gas,” her friend said. “He’s going home. He goes home every time.”

  “What did it mean, the new Billy?”

  “I guess something happened to the old Billy.”

  Reacher, she thought.

  Billy hadn’t found a big enough tree.

  Reacher was not a superstitious man. Not given to flights of fancy, or sudden forebodings, or existential dread of any kind. But he woke with the dawn, and he stayed in bed. He felt unwilling to move. He propped himself on the pillow and watched his reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. A distant figure. One of those days. Not just a military thing. Plenty of other professions felt the same way. Sometimes you woke up, and you knew for sure, from history and experience and weary intuition, that the brand new day would bring nothing good at all.

  Chapter 31

  They met in the lobby, at eight, the same as the day before. Bramall was in another new shirt, and Mackenzie was in another new blouse. By that point Reacher’s clothes were two days old, but once again he had used a whole bar of soap in the shower. They walked up to the same diner, and got the same table. They ordered, and Bramall opened the subsequent conversation by asking for a consensus on a certain legal issue, which was that if they accepted Reacher’s hypothesis, then by definition they would be looking exclusively at the old ranches off the dirt road west of Porterfield’s place. Which was a very specific area of investigation. It was precise enough to put in a warrant. Normally a local law enforcement official would be notified. Not required, but expected. A professional courtesy.

  “Are you cautioning me again?” Reacher said. “Explicitly and every step of the way?”

  “Sometimes things bear repeating.”

  “Sheriff Connelly will claim Rose’s place is a potential crime scene. He’ll keep us out. Better not tell him. He still wants to know where Porterfield died. He’ll chase any connection.”

  “Rose’s place is a crime scene,” Mackenzie said. “No potential about it. Trespass, at least. Or illegal occupation of someone else’s land. Wyoming has laws about that. Plus a stolen car, it seems. Plus narcotics, we assume. Plus however she’s paying for them. I don’t want the sheriff to be the one to find her. I can’t let him put her in the system. I might never get her out again. We have to get to her first.”

  “OK,” Bramall said.

  They drove south to Mule Crossing, and turned at the bottle rocket billboard, and headed west on the dirt road. The first three miles were solitary. Then not long after they passed Billy’s place they saw a tiny worm of dust on the far horizon. A vehicle on the road, coming toward them. Two miles away, maybe.

  It’s rare to see another car.

  Like the neighbor told them.

  “Pull over,” Reacher said. “Park on the shoulder. If it’s her, we’ll want to follow. Or her friends. If it isn’t, no harm, no foul.”

  Bramall made the same maneuver he had made the day before, which was to stop dead in the traffic lane, and then back up carefully, like he was in a city garage. He ended up at ninety degrees exactly, which put the westward view through Mackenzie’s window. She buzzed it down and buzzed it up, to wipe the dust away.

  The cloud got closer. It was still early in the day. The air was still cool. No thermals yet. No haze, no shimmer. They could see the oncoming vehicle clearly. It was tiny in the distance. Dark in color. Too far away to say more. Bramall kept the engine running. Transmission in gear, foot on the brake. Ready to go, either left or right.

  The cloud got closer. The vehicle got clearer. It was old or dull or both. No flash of chrome against the morning sun. No gleam of paint.

  “It’s not the friends,” Bramall said. “It’s too small. Their truck was a huge thing.”

  The cloud got closer. The vehicle was brown. Rust or dust or sunbaked paint. Hard to say. It was hugging the road. It looked wider than it was tall.

  “It’s not her,” Mackenzie said. “It’s too low. Hers was way more square.”

  A minute later it blew on by, juddering and bouncing. No one they had seen before. Just a beat-up old pick-up truck, with Wyoming plates and a vinyl camper shell on the back. A guy at the wheel, late thirties maybe, looking straight ahead, paying no attention.

  Nothing.

  “Onward,” Reacher said.

  They drove on west, past Porterfield’s driveway. Then eleven miles later past his neighbor’s, as inconspicuous as ever. They had six more places ahead, three on the left, three on the right. The plan was to look at them all, one by one. Simple in principle. Maybe not in practice. The big book of maps had shown neat brown rectangles for houses and barns, but Mackenzie said over the years such places could have built way more than that. Maybe with the proper permissions, maybe not. There could be garages, and smaller barns, and tractor barns, and wood stores, and generator huts, and hobby huts, and staff cottages, and guest cottages, and in-law cottages. Maybe even summer houses deep in the woods. A hundred places for Rose to hide, Reacher thought. But she would have chosen somewhere civilized. Not a cellar or an attic. Reasonably big. Not up a tree. Porterfield had come by from time to time.

  Hope for the best.

  The first driveway opening was on the left. They took it. It led to a track like the others they had seen, uneven, full of roots and rocks and gravel. The Toyota clawed onward, but slowly, like an overweight goat. There were more conifer trees than before, and aspen, because the elevation was greater, and the terrain more mountainous. The track stayed in the woods all the way, except one bare spot on the shoulder of a hairpin turn, looking east. The pie lady’s place was too far away to see. The nearest neighbor. The curvature of the earth was in the way. Then the track swung back into the woods, and wound ever onward and upward.

  Six miles later they came out on a scruffy five-acre compound full of the kind of buildings Mackenzie had mentioned.

  There was a main house, all log, old, modest in size, nearly matched in its dimensions by a separate log cottage, newer, some distance away. In between were log barns and wood stores and storage structures, some of them big enough for a decent truck, some of them as small as garden sheds or dog houses.

  First thing they did was knock on the door. No one was home. Not a surprise. Reacher figured no one had been home for a couple of years. Maybe more. Every step on the porch raised a puff of dust, from the red sand, blown as fine as talcum.

  Second thing they did was check the surrounding terrain. It was crusted smooth by wind and snowmelt. Undisturbed. Certainly there were no new tire tracks. The Toyota’s own stood out crisp and fresh and vivid. A total contrast. Mackenzie felt that was game over right there. She felt it was impossible to live in Wyoming without a vehicle. Therefore no sign of a vehicle meant no sign of life. Rose wasn’t there. Not camped out in any of the various buildings. Reacher agreed. Bramall agreed.

  They moved on.

  They drove the six miles back down the track, and turned on the dirt road, and headed west again. One down, five to go. Th
e next driveway would most likely be on the right.

  “Look,” Bramall said.

  He pointed.

  Up ahead, still far away, another worm of dust. At its head, another vehicle coming toward them. It was rare to see another car? Not really. It was getting like Times Square.

  They drove on, closing the gap.

  It was a big vehicle coming.

  “That could be her friends,” Mackenzie said. “Same size of truck.”

  “Block the road,” Reacher said. “Make them stop.”

  Bramall took his foot off the gas, and steered left, and straddled the crown of the road. He put his hazard flashers on, and blinked his high beams, and coasted on slowly to a hundred-yard stretch that had a knee-high rock ledge on one side, and a drainage ditch on the other. He came to a stop halfway between them. No way around. The engine idled. The hazard flashers clicked urgently. He pulsed the headlights, fast, slow, randomly, like Morse code.

  Up ahead the big truck slowed. Behind it the dust cloud caught up momentarily, and then thinned out and fell away. The truck stopped three hundred yards west, in the middle of the road itself, like a long-distance showdown.

  “More than one person,” Reacher said. “They can’t agree what to do. They stopped to talk it out.”

  They waited.

  Up ahead the truck moved forward. Slowly. Like cruising a parking lot. It rolled on. Two hundred yards away. One hundred. Fifty yards away.

  It was the same crew-cab they had seen the night before. Huge size, a rumbling exhaust. Three people in it. The same guys. Reacher was sure of it. They came to a stop fifty feet away. Bramall turned off his hazard lights. For a second the tableau was frozen, two trucks facing off, close together, engines idling, on a narrow red ribbon in the middle of a vast version of nowhere.

  Mackenzie got out of the Toyota.

  Bramall moved to do the same, but Reacher put a hand on his shoulder.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Your client. She’s got a tough day ahead.”

  “You know what’s going to happen?”

  “Unfortunately,” Reacher said. “It’s the only thing that fits.”

  But Mackenzie was already turned around, miming impatience, so Bramall slid out to join her, followed by Reacher, three steps behind. From the crew-cab came the guy with the lizard boots, and his two companions. Six people altogether, in two groups of three, all of them eyeing the no-man’s-land between their radiator grilles, their postures subject to ancient instincts. They met in the middle, five polite feet apart, safely longer than a dagger’s thrust, another ancient instinct.

  The guy in the boots said, “The message hasn’t changed.”

  “I thought about that,” Reacher said. “Seemed to me, if you boiled it right down, the main takeaway from the message was we should go back where we came from. Which makes it more of a suggestion, don’t you think? Call it a request, to assume good manners on your part. And hey, plenty of requests are perfectly reasonable. We all know that. I would like to request a million dollars and a dinner date with Miss Wyoming. But the point of a request is that it can be declined. Respectfully, with great regret, and so on. But declined nonetheless. Which is what is happening here.”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “Get used to it. We’re going to stick around, and if any of the actual landowners out here have a problem with it, I’m sure the state has laws that would allow them to seek a remedy.”

  The guy said, “Right now we’re being nice about it.”

  “My advice, you should keep on being nice about it. Even if we lose, we’ll do some damage. Two of you will go to the hospital. Best case. But from what I’ve seen, I have to say, the best case looks unlikely. I don’t think we’ll lose. I think all three of you will go to the hospital.”

  The guy paused a beat.

  Then he said, “OK, it was a request.”

  Reacher said, “I’m glad we got that cleared up.”

  “There’s nothing for you here.”

  “Who made the request?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. This whole thing is about privacy. You don’t get it, do you?”

  Reacher said, “You got a phone?”

  “Who do you want to call?”

  “Take a picture. Video would be better. You got video on your phone?”

  The guy said, “I guess.”

  “All we’ll do is say our names. Maybe add a line of background. On your phone. Then you can take it back and show it to whoever it was who made the request. That would be fair to all concerned.”

  “You might follow us there.”

  “We promise we won’t.”

  “Why would we trust you?”

  “You live in there somewhere. We know that. By now it’s a one-in-five chance. We’ll find you sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time.”

  The guy didn’t answer.

  “But I’d rather do it this way,” Reacher said. “This way is better.”

  The guy didn’t answer. But eventually he nodded. One of the back-row guys stepped up with a phone. He held it horizontal between splayed fingers, and crossed his eyes, and said, “Go.”

  Mackenzie said, “Jane Mackenzie.”

  Bramall said, “Terry Bramall, private detective from Chicago.”

  Reacher said, “Jack Reacher, ex-army, once upon a time CO of the 110th MP.”

  The back-row guy lowered the phone.

  Reacher said, “We’ll wait here.”

  “Could be a couple hours,” the guy with the boots said. “You got water?”

  The other back-row guy carried bottles of water from their truck to the Toyota. Then they backed up and turned around and drove away. The dust cloud picked up behind them, turning, rising, falling, hanging in the air like evidence, showing the way they had gone, like a whoosh in a cartoon strip.

  Bramall said, “Do we follow?”

  “No,” Reacher said. “A professional courtesy. Not required, but expected.”

  Mackenzie said, “You know, don’t you?”

  “I know two things,” Reacher said. “She lives here, and no one recognizes you.”

  Chapter 32

  Bramall backed up to where the rock ledge petered out and the ditch filled in. He parked on the shoulder, a little tilted, facing west. Reacher drank a bottle of donated water, and walked back to the ledge, and sat in the sun. The last of summer. No one talked. Mostly Bramall sat in the car, nothing on his face, a man life had taught to be patient. Mostly Mackenzie stood alone, as far from the car as Reacher, but in the other direction. High overhead ravens circled, and looked, and thought not yet, and soared away.

  In the end it was less than two hours. It was ninety-three minutes, which was an hour and a half and change. Far in the distance a smudge of dust kicked up, with a black dot in front of it, which grew larger, until they could see who it was. It was the three guys in their crew-cab. Back again. Like before, they stopped fifty feet out, and they climbed down, and they walked forward.

  Reacher and Bramall and Mackenzie went to meet them. They all stopped, six people, groups of three, five polite feet apart.

  The guy in the boots said, “Just Mrs. Mackenzie.”

  Reacher waited.

  Mackenzie said, “No, all three of us.”

  The guy said nothing.

  Reacher waited again. For their plan B. He knew they had one. Stupid to come without.

  The guy said, “OK.”

  He turned and walked back and the three of them climbed in their crew-cab again. Bramall and Mackenzie and Reacher climbed in the Toyota. The crew-cab backed up and turned, and drove away west. Bramall followed, hanging back, drifting left, drifting right, trying to miss the worst of the dust.

  The crew-cab turned in on the second track on the right. Bramall followed. The track was wide, but the surface was bad. Roots, rocks, gravel. Up ahead the crew-cab bucked and bounced. Its tires chirped and slid on stones worn smooth by time. Th
ey were trees left and right, mostly conifers, some gnarled by the wind, some stately. There were distant blazes of gold, mostly in the gulches and the gullies, where the