Lee Child - The Midnight Line

Mackenzie said in the long term the accommodations were no problem at all. But in the short term they didn’t exist yet. She and her husband owned no beach houses or hunting cabins. There was an original staff apartment over their stable block, but it would need new heat and a new bathroom.

Reacher said, “Do you have a guest suite?”

“Two, but they’re in the house.”

“With you and Mr. Mackenzie, a nice man and a good match. Is he going to be a problem with all of this?”

“No, he’s going to be totally on board.”

“Are you sure?”

“Completely.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “How about Rose lives in a guest suite until further notice. Put her in the east wing, facing the lake. You got a six-acre yard and I’m sure it’s a quiet leafy street. Not like living in the middle of Times Square. We need to make fast decisions here. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Mackenzie looked at Rose, who nodded. She agreed. She could afford to. It was about the future. Which wasn’t coming. The second item on the list meant they could never get there.

Mackenzie said, “We need to be realistic about the doctor. We haven’t even started looking yet. I’m sure they’re thin on the ground. I suppose the internet will help. But we might have to wait for an appointment. And I’m sure they at least go through the motions. They’ll want an initial consultation. Or else right now the right guy is on Anguilla playing golf. You know what this crap is like.”

“I don’t,” Reacher said.

“Two weeks,” she said. “I live in that world. Trust me. This feels like a two-week thing, absolute bare minimum.”

No one answered.

From deep in her hood Rose said, “You’re all very polite people. So I’ll say it myself. I’m the big problem. How are you going to bridge the gap? How are you going to hook me up every day for two weeks? Some of which will be spent on the road. A different town every night. You can’t do it.”

Again no one answered. The questions hung in the air. How are you going to bridge the gap? How are you going to hook me up? It was the snag in every plan. Like a splinter in a banister rail. The rest was easy. Reacher could picture it all. Except for that. The quantities were staggering. It would be a full-time job.

To fill the silence Mackenzie talked for a spell about Lake Forest, Illinois. It sounded like a very nice place. Their house was a grand old Tudor, with ancient bricks and leaded windows, and a long sloping lawn, and a stone dock, with a small boat, and the glittering lake beyond, as big as an ocean. Then Reacher realized she wasn’t just filling the silence. Or bragging on her real estate. She was spinning some kind of shared twin fantasy from long ago, about the lives they were going to have, and what would be in them, like an ideal dream. He could understand how girls in landlocked Wyoming would want a waterfront. Now Mackenzie was saying she had made it happen. It was right there for the taking. She was saying come live in your dream for the rest of your life. With its damp lawns and its mossy bricks. It was a masterpiece of gauzy seduction. Reacher could only imagine how much more power it had, from one twin to another, down on some unknown level of intimacy. It was enticing. Irresistible. Worth sacrificing for. Great psy-ops. Except he was left with a couple of questions.

How are you going to bridge the gap? How are you going to hook her up?

—

Down in Denver Kirk Noble had gotten caught up in some other thing, and then he had gotten dragged into a meeting about something else entirely, so in the end he left Billy to sweat way longer than two hours. Closer to four. He stopped and looked in the one-way window. Good and carefully. He prided himself on reading the signs. Right away he saw Billy was a hardscrabble country boy, maybe forty years old, lean and furtive, like a fox and a squirrel had a kid, and spent half the time baking it in the sun, and the other half beating it with a stick. He wasn’t sweating and he wasn’t shaking. He wasn’t drumming his toe or picking a nail. Not a user. Not even a smoker.

Such a guy would give nothing up. Except by accident. Foxes and squirrels had numerous admirable qualities, but they didn’t get college degrees. There would be some kind of side door. Some kind of trigger. Maybe approval. Billy was the type of guy who most likely never had much. Maybe he could be stroked into prideful reminiscences, about the deals he had done. Maybe using the granular-priced jewelry as a show-and-tell example. He could recall how he came by each item. He could say, yeah, some chick had no money so she gave me this.

In exchange for what, Billy?

Noble sent a runner to his office for the shoebox of jewelry.

—

The impromptu conference broke up, and Reacher went out on the porch. Then Bramall came out. Reacher imagined Sanderson would replace him in the armchair. He imagined the sisters would talk. Not too long, he hoped.

Bramall said, “We can’t fix this.”

“There must be a way,” Reacher said.

“When you figure it out, be sure to let me know.”

“You sure you want me to? You have more rules than me.”

“One of which makes me delinquent if I don’t prepare a plan B on behalf of my client. At least a mental sketch. In this case it would have to start with hospitalization privileges for Rose. No federal lock-up. A private facility of our own choice. Secured, if they want, at our expense. Obviously the guy to talk to would be Noble, down in Denver. He has the discretion. We already have a relationship. I should maintain it. I should have answered his call. I’ll have to answer the next one. I might need him in the future.”

“We don’t need plan B yet.”

“Better to lay the ground.”

“If you answer the phone to him now, you’ll have to tell him where Rose is. Which will lead straight to plan C, which is the whole thing falls apart. Or you’ll have to lie to him, which is technically a felony.”

Bramall didn’t answer.

Reacher said, “Will you do me a favor?”

“Depends what it is.”

“Go ask Mrs. Mackenzie if her sister mentioned whether Stackley is coming by again tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“I want to know.”

Bramall went in, but a minute later it was Rose Sanderson herself who came out. She sat where she had before, on the step, hooded, a yard away.

She said, “My sister gave me money. I told Stackley to come back every day until it’s gone. Or until he runs out of product.”

Reacher said, “What happens when he does?”

“Sometimes they miss a day. I guess they go somewhere and get more. We’re real happy to see them come back.”

“I can imagine.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. We both took the same history class.”

She nodded, inside her hood.

She said, “Morphine dates from 1805. The hypodermic syringe dates from 1851. A great combination, just in time for the Civil War, which left hundreds of thousands of addicts. Then World War One, same thing. Literally millions of addicts in the 1920s.”

“The army likes tradition.”

“World War One was also the start of large-scale facial injuries. Millions of them, by the end. The French called them the mutilés . The mutilated. Which is a good word, because that’s how it feels, and because it sounds like mutated, which is also how it feels. You feel yourself become a different person. There was an early type of plastic surgery back then, but mostly they wore tin masks. Artists would match them to their skin color. But nothing really worked. City parks had benches painted blue, where the public was trained to look away. That’s where they sat. But most of them never went out. Most of them never saw daylight, ever again. Most of them died of infections or killed themselves.”