Lee Child - The Midnight Line

The room was quiet and the crowd was thin, and the barman had time on his hands. Reacher asked him directions to Mule Crossing. The guy said he had never heard of it.

“Where are you looking for?” some other guy called out. He had foam on his lip, from a long hard pull on a long-neck bottle. Maybe a helpful guy, maybe a busybody into everyone’s business, maybe a local expert eager to show off his specialist knowledge.

Or a mixture of all three.

“Mule Crossing,” Reacher said.

“Nothing there,” the guy said. “Except a firework store.”

“I heard it was a small town.”

“This is a small town. Mule Crossing is a wide spot in the road. There was a post office, but it closed twenty years ago. I think there’s a flea market in there now. Maybe you can get soda and potato chips. No gas, that’s for sure.”

“How many people live there?”

The guy took another pull on his bottle.

He said, “Five or six, maybe.”

“That all?”

“The flea market guy, for sure. Probably not the firework guy. Who would live above a firework store? Probably wouldn’t sleep a wink. I bet he drives in from somewhere else. But there’s a dirt road into the hills. People have cabins. Maybe four or five of them. According to the postal service it’s all officially Mule Crossing. Which is why they had a post office there, I guess. The Zip Code is about the size of Chicago. With five people. But hey, welcome to Wyoming.”

“Where is it exactly?”

“Forty minutes south. Take the state road out toward Colorado. Look for a billboard about bottle rockets.”

—

Reacher walked back to the corner of Third and Grand. He was optimistic about getting a ride. To his left was a university and straight ahead an hour away was legal weed. But it was getting dark. Might not be much to see. Clearly Mule Crossing was no kind of a bustling metropolis.

On the other hand, the flea market guy lived there.

He probably had a doorbell.

No time like the present.

Reacher walked south on Third Street, in the gutter, with his thumb out.

—

Gloria Nakamura rode the elevator two floors down to Computer Crimes, where she found her friend in his cubicle. He had torn her two phones out of their packaging. Now they were side by side on his desk above his keyboard. Their screens were blank.

“Sleep mode,” he said. “All is well.”

“You got the number?”

“You have to act it out. Pretend you’re a Chinese assembly worker. In fact don’t, because your job was just automated and now you’re not there at all. Pretend you’re a machine instead. The phone numbers are carried on the SIM cards, bought in bulk from the service providers, and installed fairly late in the process, I would think. Then the heat-sealed packaging goes on, with the cardboard insert, and the packages slide off the line one after the other into shipping cartons, which are taken away by another conveyor belt. How many in a box, do you think?”

Nakamura thought about it, and said, “Ten, probably. A place like that convenience store wouldn’t want more than ten at a time. Mom-and-pop pharmacies would be the same. The manufacturers must know their market. So it’s a small box. Bigger than a shoebox, but not by much.”

“And are the phone numbers sequential?”

“It would help.”

“Let’s assume they are. Why wouldn’t they be? There are plenty of new numbers to go around. So they fall off the line and go into the box in numerical order, one, two, three, all the way up to ten. So far so good. But we don’t know what happens when they’re unpacked. This is where you need to act it out. You slit the tape and you rest the box on the counter, and then you hang the contents on two pegs on a board behind the register. Talk me through it.”

Nakamura glanced at an imaginary counter, and then over her shoulder at a pair of imaginary pegs. She said, “First I would rotate the box so the plastic blisters were facing toward me. So that I could pick them up, and turn a 180, and place them on the pegs face-out. Any other way would be a contortion.”

The tech said, “And presumably they rode the conveyor belt with the blister upward and the flat side down, for stability. So if you have the blisters toward you, number one is nearest and number ten is farthest away. How many would you pick up at once?”

“I would do them one at a time. Those pegs are awkward.”

“Starting where? Front or back of the box?”

“Front,” she said.

“Which peg first?”

“The further one. More satisfying to fill that first. The nearer one is easier. Like a reward.”

“So what do you get on the right-hand peg?”

“Numbers six through ten, in reverse order. Number ten will get bought first. Then nine, then eight, and so on. What were my numbers?”

“They weren’t sequential,” the tech said. “There was a two-digit gap. You gave me a seven and a four, essentially. Or a four and a seven. I don’t know which came off the peg first.”

“I’m sorry,” Nakamura said. “I should have marked the order.”

“Don’t worry. Let’s make another assumption. Let’s say the convenience store guy gets his satisfaction a different way than you. Maybe he fills the pegs left, right, left, right. Perhaps he likes that better.”

“Then numbers four and seven couldn’t be together on the same peg.”

“So let’s make another assumption, based on the fact that you have the smallest hands in the world, and the convenience store guy is reasonably dexterous, working as he does with knives and what-not, so perhaps he hung them two at a time.”

“Yes,” she said. “That would put three and four on the right, immediately behind seven and eight. If I bought seven and four, then Scorpio bought eight. His phone number is one higher than mine.”

“And listen to what my buddy at the phone company found,” her friend said. He shuffled his mouse and his screen lit up. He clicked on an email, and then on an audio file, and jagged green bandwidth spiked on the screen, and Scorpio said, “Billy, this is Arthur. We got some weird shit going on.”

—

Reacher got a ride from two kids pulling out of a gas station on the southern edge of town. A boy and a girl. Grad students, probably, or undergrads with great ID. They said they were headed to Fort Collins, across the state line. Shopping, they said, but not for what. Their car was a tidy little sedan. Unlikely to attract a trooper’s attention. Safe enough, for the return leg of their journey.

They said they knew the bottle rocket billboard. And sure enough, after forty minutes on a gentle two-lane road, there it was, on the right shoulder, caught square in the high beams. It was bright yellow, half urgent, and half quaint. The students pulled over, and Reacher got out. The students drove away, and Reacher stood alone in the silence. The firework store itself was dark and closed up tight. Beyond it fifty yards south was a ramshackle building with a light in a small square upstairs window. The flea market, presumably. The former post office.

Reacher walked toward it.

—

Nakamura carried her laptop to her lieutenant’s office, and played him the voicemail. Use a deer rifle from behind a tree. Your privileges are suspended till I hear back from you .

“He’s ordering a homicide,” she said.

Her lieutenant said, “His lawyer will say talk is cheap. And he’ll point out we don’t have a warrant. Not for the new number.”

Nakamura said nothing.

Her lieutenant said, “Anything else?”

“Scorpio mentioned privileges. I don’t know what that means.”

“A business relationship of some kind, I suppose. Discount, priority, or access.”