Lee Child - The Midnight Line

He waited until the panel van was serving the guy in slot number seven, and then he backed up, and got straight, and drove out the door.

—

At that moment Gloria Nakamura was sitting in her dark and silent car, watching the alley that ran behind Arthur Scorpio’s laundromat. She could see his back door. It had a rim of light, as if it was standing open an inch. It was a warm night, but not excessive. She had approached on foot, quietly, and looked through the gap, one eye, but she had seen nothing. The angle was too extreme. She walked back to her car. She tried to list the kinds of things that could make a room warm enough to want to open the door for extra ventilation. Tumble dryers, obviously, but not at midnight, and not in the back office.

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.