The Midnight Line

by Lee Child

  “OK,” Reacher said. “We know what we’re doing. By the numbers now. One, two, three, and out of here.”

  Step one was Mackenzie visiting every vehicle except the Durango, including the guard’s old car outside, and adding all the keys to her bag. Most of the cars were old enough to hot-wire, but the pharmaceutical van was a brand new Mercedes, with a chip in the key. It was going nowhere. Which was good. The Boy Detective needed to see it, sitting there stranded, inert, caught out and shamefaced. It explained everything, all by itself. It was the master clue.

  Step two was Mackenzie and Bramall getting in the Toyota and driving away.

  Which they did.

  Step three was Reacher coming close and central, with the Smith aimed two-handed, low, at their waists, or lower, and then Sanderson backing off, step by cautious step, toward the Durango, feeling one-handed behind her for the handle, getting in, starting up. She backed out of the angled slot, and then couldn’t go forward because of the panel van in the way, so she reversed all the way out through the front door.

  And was gone.

  Reacher waited. On his own. Eleven guys penned up. He felt them stir. A flicker of anger. At themselves, at first. Eleven to one. Ridiculous. What were they, pussies? Which was a bad kind of thing to think. They were going to make trouble for themselves. He had seen it before. Sooner or later he would have to shoot one of them in the leg. To get their attention. It would be their own fault.

  Behind him in the corner of his eye he saw Sanderson back the Durango in through the same door the panel van had used. Now she was on the right side of it, and facing in the right direction. Ten yards from him. He heard the transmission clunk. From reverse back to drive. Engine idling. Foot on the brake. Ready to go.

  He backed away, raising his aim a little as he went, but not much, randomly scouting side to side, to the guy on the left, to the guy on the right. Then back to center mass, getting further away, step by backward step, hearing the Durango’s passenger door squeal open behind him, no doubt Sanderson leaning across inside. He got there and backed into the seat, still with the Smith held level, but the guys had given up. No weapons, no phones, no transportation. They were already thinking ahead, about how to get the hell out before the hammer came down.

  “Go,” Reacher said.

  Sanderson hit the gas, and she jinked the wheel twice, first right, then left, and she met the start of the westbound ramp doing about sixty miles an hour.

  Chapter 47

  Sanderson eased off a beat, to let a guy one lane over get well out the way, and then she merged on the highway, and crept back to sixty. Four and a half minutes to the rest area. The car felt rough and noisy. Not up to Bramall’s standards. But possibly better than her ancient Bronco.

  She said, “How much did we get?”

  The thing that mattered most.

  “More than two weeks’ worth,” he said. “That’s for damn sure. You owe me the story now.”

  “I did all the hard work.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You said you would tell me the story if we won tonight. No difference who did the work.”

  “When I’ve seen it,” she said. “When I’ve seen more than two weeks’ worth.”

  “It’s way more.”

  “I want to bathe in it.”

  “You should. You did well tonight.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you still doing well?”

  “Did you see the way those guys looked at my sister?”

  “Yes,” Reacher said.

  “Did you see the way they looked at me?”

  “Yes,” Reacher said. “I saw.”

  “That’s how I’m doing.”

  They pulled off again, just a short hop, into the rest area. They rolled past the gas and the diesel, and the fast food, and the highway patrol, and the highway department weighbridge. All the way to the chain motel. Where Bramall had scouted two main advantages. It had private parking in back, so the Toyota would be hidden from casual view. And it was so absurdly close to the scene of the crime that no one would think to look there. They were in South Dakota. There was infinite space all around. Every instinct would be to search the far end of a radius that was growing by sixty miles every hour. No one would look close to home.

  Sanderson drove around the back and found the Toyota waiting. Bramall and Mackenzie were standing one either side of the tailgate. Which was open. They had been tidying the load.

  Which was spectacular.

  There were dozens and dozens of boxes. They were stacked in a block a yard high and a yard wide and a yard deep. There were brand names and pictures. There were quantities. There were tens, and twenties, and fifties, and hundreds. Over and over again. One box had twenty packs of twenty patches. Some kind of pharmacy size. Four hundred items right there.

  “More than two weeks,” Sanderson said.

  She leaned in and pulled out a box. She opened it up and took out a foil pack the size of a fat playing card. Twenty patches. She put it in her pocket. The richest woman in the world. The new gold standard for affluence. An addict with more than one hit.

  She turned to Reacher and said, “Now I’ll tell you the story.”

  “Later,” he said. “First I’m going to pay Arthur Scorpio a visit.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said. “Scorpio has a place in the story.”

  They trawled through Mackenzie’s bag and found the phone they had taken from the guard at the door. There was an old batch of text messages from three days before, ending with the guard telling Scorpio All good tonight including the new Billy. The current batch was not as happy, and it was very one-sided. Since a quarter past midnight Scorpio had been sending increasingly frequent and urgent demands for information. What is going on? Must hear back from you immediately.

  Reacher said, “Tell him there was a delay. Tell him the guy will come over to the laundromat and explain in person as soon as he can. Write it so it sounds like him.”

  Mackenzie did the texting. She seemed most at home with it.

  Sanderson traded her last-round Ruger for Bramall’s three-round Colt.

  Then she got back in the Durango with Reacher, and they drove away.

  Gloria Nakamura saw the whole thing through the trees. In the end she had figured the Toyota was parked where it was for the same reason everyone else was parked where they were. Why give themselves an extra walk? The folks from the Toyota had wanted to hike the other way. Not toward the restrooms, but into the trees. Toward nothing, unless the maintenance depot was there. Which it had to be, or else who would want to hike in that direction? Circular logic, but it made sense to her.

  She followed.

  She stopped ten feet short.

  She saw Bigfoot. She saw Terrence Bramall from Chicago. The private investigator. Who had taken her table in the breakfast place. Two times. She saw a pretty woman. She saw a second woman, horribly disfigured. Immediately she knew this was the owner of the ring. She sensed it. The ring she had worn herself, just briefly. West Point 2005. The black stone.

  She watched. Bramall and the normal woman walked back through the trees. They passed twenty feet from her, but they didn’t notice. Then nothing happened for nearly an hour. Then vehicles started to show up, and finally the white panel van, New Jersey plates, fast and furious, just as she had predicted. Running wild, technically not there at all, erased from the record.

  Then there was a gunshot, and the black Toyota showed up again, and drove in and drove out, and then a Dodge Durango, and then it all went quiet again, until about a dozen different guys crept out and started milling around.

  They looked sheepish.

  She stepped out of the trees, with her badge in one hand and her gun in the other.

  They ran, hard and fast, in eleven different directions.

  She called it in, but she knew it was hopeless. The highway belonged to the state troopers, not the PD’s traffic division, plus late at night any number of guys could run across all three
lanes undetected, and then they could disappear beyond the shoulder to either the north or the south, into space so big it was effectively infinite.

  They were gone.

  She looked at the empty panel van, and the eight parked vehicles, and then she walked back through the trees, and drove back to town. She wanted to see what Scorpio was doing.

  Sanderson and Reacher took the four-lane south past Klinger’s restaurant. She was chewing steadily all the way. Not partying or bathing yet. She was maintaining. She was getting herself where she wanted to be, and she was keeping herself there. He thought the huge quantity they had gotten from the panel van had changed her. He guessed part of being an addict was always being anxious. The next buck, the next hit, the next day, the next hour. She was no longer anxious. She would not be anxious for a very long time. Maybe ever again, if it worked out with the sister. So was she still an addict? Not the same way. Now it was all upside. The highs, literally, and none of the lows.

  He could see the highs were worth having. Her face was not expressive. It didn’t work that way. But her eyes were alive. And her body. She looked like she was having the best day of her life. Without a near-fatal dose. Once necessary, maybe, to obliterate how bad it was for the other twelve hours of the day. But not anymore. Now she could take it easy. Maybe she would be OK.

  Not his area of expertise.

  He said, “The supe told me why you were on the road outside the small town.”

  She said, “I told you.”

  “You told me you were representing the support operation. Representing is a real five-dollar word. Maybe you could use it, if you were asked to stand in by a senior officer. But you were already a major. We didn’t need a colonel to figure out how to haul ass up a hill. So there was no senior officer, which makes it a weird choice of word.”

  She was quiet for a moment.

  Then she said, “How did the supe know?”

  “A shrink wrote a paper.”

  “He saw it?”

  “He’s been looking for you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He’s calling in favors.”

  “For me?”

  “He said you felt betrayed.”

  “By the shrink.”

  “He meant by the situation.”

  Again she was quiet.

  She said, “I was in the hospital a long time, and I got to know a lot of people. Missing an arm or a leg. Believe me, no one had it easy. But I hated those guys. They wore shorts. They could make the best of it. I would have been OK with a leg. Even for doing a favor. I was overseas five times. Some shit was going to happen. Even an arm. But not my face. You saw how those guys looked at me.”

  Reacher said nothing.

  She said, “They wrote it down wrong. All they did was check a box. I never felt betrayed. Truth is I felt unlucky. Literally for the first time ever. At first I didn’t even know what it was. It was new to me. It was like getting a lifetime of bad luck all in one day. Every rotten thing. Of course the guy who asked me to go for him was out catching a disease. He had to be. It was inevitable. I’m surprised he wasn’t doing something worse.”

  He said, “Now tell me Porterfield’s story.”

  She ducked her head and looked up at the street signs.

  She said, “Do you know where we are?”

  He said, “We make a right up ahead. Then a left somewhere.”

  “I’m going to pull over.”

  “Why?”

  “To tell you the story. Before we get there.”

  Nakamura eased to a stop on the cross street, and then rolled forward until her view was perfect. Scorpio’s back door was open. She could see the rim of light.

  She turned the engine off.

  She got out of the car, and walked halfway there. The Supreme Court said if she was reasonably sure a crime was afoot in a public place, then she could intervene without a warrant. But Scorpio’s back office was not a public place. The Court said therefore she would need evidence tantamount to an emergency. Gunshots or screams or cries for help.

  The alley was silent.

  She crept closer.

  She heard Scorpio’s voice, talking low. A composed sentence. A monologue. He was leaving a message. He sounded worried. He wanted answers. The guard at the gate, no doubt. His man on the spot. Who couldn’t answer. Reacher had taken their phones. She had heard him, even in the trees. She had absolutely believed he would shoot them through the back of the knee.

  She crept closer.

  Now Scorpio was off the phone. There was no discernable sound at all. Maybe a low hum. Maybe the noise of a fan. Certainly no gunshots or screams or cries for help.

  She crept closer.

  She put her eye to the gap.

  No angle.

  She put her fingertips on the door and pushed it open.

  Sanderson pulled over in a strip mall lot. She put the lever in park, but she kept the engine running. The Durango was full of gas. It was ready for a long trip somewhere. A sales trip. Idaho, maybe, or Washington state.

  She said, “Turns out there are a lot of nerves in the groin.”

  “Who knew?” Reacher said.

  “Sy was in pain all the time. Also addicted, of course. At first he got treatment direct from the Marine Corps. Then they stopped prescribing. No reason was given. At first he thought it was medical caution. These were powerful opiates, after all. But he needed them. He argued about it, but it got him nowhere. So he started doctor shopping. He drove all over. Then he started buying. Which was easy enough. Back then there was plenty to go around. Which made him mad. Every other faucet was wide open. Why was the Corps being cautious? He got back to them. They let something slip. Turned out it wasn’t caution about prescribing. Their inventory was all screwed up. They were running out.”

  “Someone was stealing.”

  “Sy made it his life’s work to find out who. On behalf of himself and his brother Marines. He was made for the job. He was already buying, after all. He was already in the network. All he had to do was poke around a little. Eventually he figured it out and wrote it up and sent it to the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

  “Why them?”

  “He had a theory. DIA spanned all the services. Better than sending it direct to the Marine Corps. They might bury it.”

  “What happened?”

  “We waited. We figured five or six days. The mails are slow from here. But he was sure they would get back to us immediately. What actually happened was we heard nothing for six months. Then he got the arrest warrant.”

  “Someone was covering his ass.”

  “That’s what Sy thought. He gave it up, there and then. You win some, you lose some. You can’t fight city hall. We went up to the high woods, because it was the start of spring. The first tiny shoots were out. He was happy as can be. He was an East Coast guy, really, quite reserved in his nature, but he was messing around that day and chewing on a stick and pretending to be a mountain man. We lay down on the ground. We had stuff in our pockets. A day like that, we both knew we were going to chase it. We were going to hit it hard. We were a couple who shared a hobby. We wanted to make it epic together.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died.”

  Nakamura pushed the door. Six inches, eight, ten, twelve. She leaned in the room. Scorpio had his back to her. He was sitting alone at a long bench covered with humming computers. Tower units, screens, keyboards, mice. The room was hot. A fan was running. She took out her badge and her gun. She pushed the door all the way open.

  Scorpio heard it. Or felt the air, or sensed her presence.

  He turned around.

  “Stay where you are,” she said. “Let me see your hands.”

  He said, “You’re trespassing.”

  “You’re committing a crime.”

  “You’re harassing me.”

  She took a step and raised her gun.