Ли Чайлд - The Midnight Line

So who was he?

One sure way to find out.

She sat down across from him, and took her badge from her purse. It was in a department-issued vinyl wallet, opposite a photo ID behind a plastic window. Nakamura, Gloria, Detective , and her signature and her picture.

The guy took a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses from an inside pocket, and put them on. He glanced at the ID, and glanced away. He took a small notebook from another inside pocket. He opened it with his thumb. He glanced at it, changed pages, and glanced away.

He said, ‘You’re with Property Crimes.’

‘You got us all listed in there?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘I like to know who does what in a place.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘My job.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Bramall,’ the guy said. ‘First name Terrence, but you can call me Terry.’

‘And what’s your job, Mr Bramall?’

‘I’m a private investigator.’

‘From where?’

‘Chicago.’

‘What brings you to Rapid City?’

‘A private investigation.’

‘Of Arthur Scorpio?’

‘I’m afraid I’m bound by a certain degree of confidentiality. Unless and until I believe a crime has been or is about to be committed. Which I don’t at this moment.’

Nakamura said, ‘I need to know whether you’re for him or against him.’

‘Like that, is it?’

‘He won’t be voted citizen of the year.’

‘He’s not my client, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Who is?’

‘Can’t say.’

Nakamura asked, ‘Do you have a partner?’

‘Romantically?’ Bramall said. ‘Or professionally?’

‘Professionally.’

‘No.’

‘Are you part of an agency?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘We heard someone was on his way here. Not you. Someone else. He was in Wisconsin yesterday. I wondered if he was an associate.’

‘Not mine,’ Bramall said. ‘I’m a one-man band.’

Nakamura took a business card from her purse. She put it on the table, near Bramall’s coffee cup. She said, ‘Call me if you need me. Or if you decide to take the confidentiality stick out of your ass. Or if you need advice. Scorpio is a dangerous man. Never forget that.’

‘Thank you,’ Bramall said, his eyes on the window.

Nakamura walked back to her car, with the guy at the laundromat door watching her all the way. She drove to work, and got there early. She woke her computer and opened a search engine. She typed Bramall, Terrence, private investigator, Chicago . She got a bunch of hits. The guy was sixty-seven years old. He was retired FBI. A long and distinguished career. Many successful cases. Senior rank. Multiple medals and awards. Now he was in business on his own account. He was high end. He didn’t advertise. He was hard to get. He was expensive. He was a true specialist. He offered only one service. All he did was find missing persons.

REACHER WOKE HIMSELF up when he figured the lunch rush would be over. He felt OK, after his exertions the previous evening. No real aches or pains. He checked the mirror. He had a light bruise on his forehead, from head-butting the fourth guy. And his right forearm was tender. It had dispatched three of them all by itself. Fully fifty per cent. Along the bone there was nothing to bruise, but the skin looked about twice as thick as normal. And red, with tiny puncture wounds here and there. Even through his shirtsleeve. Which happened. Teeth, usually, or chips of bone from broken noses, or eye sockets. Collateral damage. But really nothing to worry about. He was in good shape. Same old same old, on another lonely day.

He showered and dressed and walked over to the emptying restaurant and ate off the all-day breakfast menu. He asked for quarters in his change and stopped at a pay phone near the door. He dialled an ancient number from memory.

It rang twice and was answered.

‘West Point,’ a woman’s voice said. ‘Superintendent’s office. How may I help you?’

‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ Reacher said. ‘I’m a graduate of the academy, and I have an enquiry I’m sure will end up in your office anyway, so I figured I might as well start there.’

‘May I have your name, sir?’

Reacher gave it, and his date of birth, and his service number, and his graduation year. He heard the woman write it all down.

She said, ‘What is the nature of your enquiry?’

‘I need to identify a female cadet from the class of 2005. Her initials were S.R.S. and she was small. That’s all I’ve got so far.’

He heard her write it down.

She said, ‘Are you a journalist?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Do you work in law enforcement?’

‘Not currently.’

‘Then why do you need to make this identification?’

‘I have lost property to return.’

‘You can send it here. We can forward it.’

‘I know you can,’ Reacher said. ‘And I know why you’re suggesting we do it that way. You have all kinds of security issues to worry about now. Privacy rights too. Not like it was when I was there. I understand that completely. You really shouldn’t tell me anything. Which is fine. I don’t want to put you on the spot, believe me.’

‘Then we seem to understand each other.’

‘Just do me one favour. Look her up, and then look me up. Consider all the possible circumstances. Either you’ll be kind of happy you didn’t give me a name, or you’ll be kind of sorry. I’ll call you back sometime and you can tell me which it was. Purely out of interest.’

‘Why would I be sorry I followed procedure?’

‘Because in the end you’ll realize that right now was the first faint whisper you ever heard that a West Pointer with the initials S.R.S was in some kind of trouble somewhere. Maybe alone and in need of help. Afterwards you’ll wish you’d taken it seriously from the beginning. You’ll be sorry you didn’t tell me sooner.’

‘Who are you exactly?’

‘Look me up,’ Reacher said.

The voice said, ‘Call me back.’

Reacher walked the length of the motel to an area near the fuel pumps, where a kind of unofficial hitchhiking market was being run, by a homeless-looking guy wearing a coat tied up with rope. He would collect the desired destination from each new arriving hitchhiker, and then he would walk around shouting it out to the drivers in line for the pumps, and sooner or later one or another would wave and agree to some particular destination, and the lucky hitchhiker would tip the shouting guy a dollar and climb up in the cab.

Good business. Reacher was happy to pay a buck. Not that he would need help or luck. Every single driver was going to Rapid City. It was 350 miles away, but it was the first stop. There wasn’t much before it. After it there were choices. Wyoming, Montana, Idaho. But everyone had to pass through Rapid City first.

He got a ride inside about a minute and a half, in a huge red truck pulling a white boxed-in trailer. The cab had a quadruple sleeper pod behind the seats, bigger than some accommodations Reacher had been raised in. For cross-country house-moving jobs, the driver said. The whole crew could sleep in the vehicle. Saved on motels.

The guy was old, like a lot of drivers. Maybe it was a fading profession. Maybe it had gotten too hard. Reacher thought the last of the frontier would die with it. Those guys were the final generation. The end of the DNA. Now people wanted to be home every night.

The guy said it would be five hours and five minutes to Rapid City. He said it with the kind of confidence that comes from having done it a thousand times before. They rolled out, sitting way up high, with a clear view to the horizon, and they ground up through the gears, and up, and up, until they were bowling along at more than seventy on the flat, and faster still on the down grades. The mile markers flashed past. Five hours and five minutes seemed dead-on plausible.