Lee Child - The Midnight Line

Mackenzie said, “You think she’s in there somewhere.”

Reacher said, “She was either living with Porterfield, or she was visiting with him on a regular basis, yet no one ever saw her, except maybe one occasion. If she lived anywhere else, she would have to drive in and out through Mule Crossing every single time. More people would have seen her, surely. Maybe even the old guy in the post office. But no one ever did. She must have been driving there and back the other way. Deeper into the hills. A buck gets ten she’s there right now. Where else would she go?”

“She doesn’t own a car,” Bramall said. “Not according to the Wyoming DMV. Or any other state.”

“She camps out in abandoned ranch houses. Either she finds cars or steals them. She doesn’t care whose name is on the title. All a car has to do is start up when she needs it.”

“I want to go there,” Mackenzie said. “Back to Mule Crossing. It’s like the neck of a funnel. If she’s in there, she’s got to come out sooner or later. I want to be there when she does.”

“If I’m right,” Reacher said.

“If you’re wrong, we’ll find her in town tonight. Or tomorrow.”

—

They pulled over and sat in the car, near the old post office, in a spot where they would get a good head-on view of anything coming down the dirt road. Just before the turn, where everyone would slow right down, and look first one way, and then the other, carefully, before making the left or the right on the pavement. Close enough for faces. At first it was awkward. Reacher figured they were all having the same trouble, picturing exactly what it was they expected to see. They knew the theory. The lack of Billy would draw the addicts out. But what would that look like? Reacher had seen his share of movie trailers. The walking dead. All kinds of zombies. He realized he was expecting some kind of apocalyptic vision.

The first candidate approached out of the west in an ancient pick-up truck that was lurching and bouncing and trailing a dust cloud a mile long. Not Rose Sanderson. The driver turned out to be a thin-faced man, with a turned-down mouth, as disapproving as an old-time preacher. Maybe an addict, maybe not. He looked left and right and turned toward Colorado.

The dust cloud settled.

They waited.

From the back seat, Reacher asked Mackenzie, “Where were you, when Rose was at West Point?”

She turned around.

“University of Chicago,” she said. “Then Princeton, for postgrad.”

“Studying what?”

“English literature. Different, I know.”

“Not so different. Some of them can read at West Point now. If you take it slow and point to the letters.”

She smiled.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I know Rose is as smart as I am. Obviously. It’s a scientific fact. I meant she was prepared to kill people, and I wasn’t.”

“That was the big dispute?”

“It was never a big dispute. We never fell out. But things happened so fast back then. All of a sudden Rose was in the army. And that was a serious thing. Our resources were stretched thin. She was hardly ever home for nine years. I was never told where she was. I couldn’t go visit. Most of the time I couldn’t even call. Meanwhile I was working. I got married. That’s how it was. We had real lives. Like everyone else with a sibling.”

“Except she was prepared to kill people, and you weren’t.”

“I don’t mean she wanted to, or planned to. It was an ethical discussion. That’s all. We were eighteen. I wasn’t saying it had to be all or nothing. In fact it never is. No one says always or never. Everyone says sometimes. But her sometimes were not the same as mine. She would pull the trigger before I would. Which was OK. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was naïve. It wasn’t the difference of opinion that bothered me. We always had different opinions. It was that she had thought about it, seriously, carefully, and decided yes, she could do it. For real. Which changed her a little. She changed herself, by deciding it. For the first time ever I felt not the same as her.”

Reacher said nothing.

She turned back.

They waited.

The second candidate for the apocalypse was the woman who had given the strawberry pie to Sy Porterfield. His neighbor. Second place on the left. She was in a battered Jeep SUV. She looked left and right and turned toward Laramie. Maybe heading to the market. Maybe planning to spend time in the fruit aisle.

The third vehicle they saw came from behind them. It turned in off the two-lane, and passed them by, and set out down the dirt road west.

It was a pick-up truck.

On the front it had snowplow pistons, bolted to the frame.

Chapter 25

Bramall looked a question, and Mackenzie and Reacher both nodded, so he started the engine and bumped up on the dirt road. A unanimous decision. The obvious play. It cost them nothing to follow the pick-up at least as far as Billy’s place. Their eyes would be on the neck of the funnel throughout. Any random driving dead would pass right by, close enough to touch. Certainly close enough to eyeball in great detail. Then in the end if the pick-up kept on going, they could coast to a stop and turn around, and call the snowplow pistons a weird coincidence.

“What if it turns in?” Mackenzie said.

“Maybe it’s a competitor just heard the news,” Reacher said. “Maybe he wants Billy’s Rolodex. Maybe snowplowing is a very competitive business.”

“Suppose it’s Billy himself.”

“I’m sure the Boy Detective changed the locks. Or glued them up, or whatever they do now. Either one of which will make our boy good and mad. He’ll get all cross and frustrated. He’ll go get his deer rifle from his truck, to shoot the locks. He’ll be standing right there on the porch with it when we show up. Finger on the trigger.”

“Only if we turn in, too.”

“He hasn’t heard the phone message. He’ll think we’re Mormons. Or whichever it is let women join in now.”

By that point they had caught up to about a hundred yards behind the pick-up. Which would be considered a very close pursuit, in such a vast landscape, but they were invisible, because of the dust cloud. The pick-up’s mirrors couldn’t see them.

They rolled on, in secret convoy. The pronghorn herd was grazing a new patch of pasture. Two miles gone. Less than a minute remaining, at their current speed.

The pick-up slowed. They saw it loom large and ghostlike in the cloud ahead. Bramall backed off. The pick-up braked, lights flaring, all the way down to walking speed, and then it turned a wide slow left into the mouth of Billy’s driveway.

“Go for it,” Reacher said. “Go after him.”

Bramall looked at Mackenzie.

She hesitated.

Reacher said, “He hasn’t heard the phone message. He doesn’t know who we are. We’re just three random people.”

Mackenzie said, “He knows where Rose is.”

Bramall turned in. No dust on the driveway. It was a forest track, all rock and grit and gravel. Now the Toyota was plainly visible. They hung back. They saw the pick-up through the trees. Two hundred yards ahead of them, flashing through the sun and the shadows.

“Stupid to run and come right back,” Reacher said.

“Maybe he wants his money,” Mackenzie said.

They rolled on, keeping pace. The pick-up drove through the final curve and out of sight. Another fifty yards it would be out of the woods. Then the last hundred, over the beaten red dirt, to the house.

“Let me out here,” Reacher said. “I’ll walk the rest of the way, in the trees. I can cut the corner. I can get there faster.”

“Is that smart?” Bramall said.

“It’s smarter than sticking together. A good squad never bunches up. Too big of a target.”