Lee Child - The Midnight Line

She said, “Where does he go to get more?”

He said, “The conversation didn’t get that far.”

“Arthur Scorpio’s place, right?”

“No,” Reacher said. “There’s no traffic at Scorpio’s place. No loading or unloading. Whatever Scorpio does, he does it by remote control.”

“What exactly did Stackley tell you?”

“He said there’s a warehouse, where they drive in and line up and wait until midnight.”

“Where?”

“He said he gets a text message on a burner phone. He said the phone is in there.”

He heard the click of catches and the muted thump of compartment doors being opened and shut. Maybe twelve of them. The camper shell had lockers all over it. Like living on a boat.

“There’s no phone in here,” she said.

“There never was,” he said. “It was a decoy. It was a way to get to his gun.”

“So how do we know where to go?”

“We don’t.”

She just stood there. Tiny, slumped, defeated. She was a drug addict. She had just shot and killed her dealer. Catastrophe. Like jumping off a building. Right then she was in mid-air, falling fast, the hiss of terror loud in her ears.

She was going to panic.

Reacher said, “Forget the phone. The phone was a trick. He invented it. They couldn’t possibly work it that way. A warehouse big enough to drive in and line up can’t be a moveable feast. It can’t be a last-minute arrangement. It must be a permanent location. Fixed and secure. Hidden away somewhere.”

Rose said, “But where?”

Bramall said, “Where is his regular phone?”

He ducked down, a small meticulous figure amid the gore. He dug through Stackley’s crumpled pockets. He came out with a Samsung smartphone about the size of a paperback book. It had a cracked screen. No password. Bramall dabbed and swiped.

“He replaced Billy three days ago,” he said. “Obviously he would have had to pick up supplies.”

There were no text messages from three days before. No emails. But there was a voicemail. Bramall played it, and listened, and narrated as he went.

He said, “There’s a service road leading to a covered garage. The covered garage is for snowplows and other winter equipment. There’s plenty of space and they have it all to themselves. There will be a guard at the door.”

Reacher said, “Where?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“It must. Stackley was new.”

“It doesn’t. Maybe it’s somewhere he was already familiar with. Maybe they already told him the general area.”

“Who left the message?”

“Sounds like a transportation captain. He’s all about the details.”

“Is there an area code?”

“Blocked number.”

“Terrific.”

Rose Sanderson went back to the camper shell. She leaned in and came out with the three wrapped patches. She gave one each to the cowboys. For old times’ sake, Reacher figured. A parting gift. And like a good officer. Always make sure your men are OK. She kept one patch for herself. She took another from her pocket. The last of yesterday’s purchase. She butted them together, and then fanned them out, like a tiny hand of cards. She counted them. One, two. Then again, in case something had magically changed. One, two. Then again, obsessively. Same result.

She said, “This is not good.”

Reacher said, “How long?”

“I’ll be getting sick by tonight.”

“Where would we find snowplows?”

“Are you kidding? Everywhere. Billy had a snowplow.”

“At his house. I mean big machines stored in a covered garage.”

“An airport?” Bramall said. “Denver, maybe.”

Reacher said nothing.

Then he said, “Three days ago.”

He stepped over the leaking body and leaned in the pick-up’s cab. Sandwich wrappers. Gas receipts. He threw the wrappers on the driver’s seat and piled the gas receipts on the passenger seat. He checked the floor and emptied the door cubbies.

He said, “What was the date three days ago?”

Mackenzie told him. He riffed through the flimsy paper, checking dates. Some receipts were a year old. Some were brittle and yellowed. He learned to look at the crisp items first.

Bramall said, “Let me help.”

In the end they split the drift of paper four separate ways. They all stood around the pick-up’s hood, and licked their thumbs, and sped through the piles, like bank tellers with dollar bills around a counting table.

“Got one,” Mackenzie said. “Three days ago, in the evening. Not a gas station. I think it’s a diner or a restaurant.”

“I got gas here,” Bramall said. “Three days ago, also in the evening.”

They clipped them under the pick-up’s windshield wiper, like parking tickets. They scanned through the rest. They found nothing more.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Let’s take a look.”

The diner check was for thirteen dollars and change, paid in cash at 10:57pm, three days before. The gas receipt was for forty bucks even. Most likely prepaid in cash before lifting the nozzle, two twenties on the greasy counter. At 11:23pm the same night.

Reacher said, “He had a late dinner, and was done by eleven. He drove twenty minutes and got gas. Done by eleven-thirty. Then he drove to the secret warehouse and waited for midnight.”

The gas receipt had Exxon Mobil at the top, but no address except a location code. The diner was called Klinger’s, and it had a phone number. The area code was 605.

“South Dakota,” Bramall said.

He walked away to the head of the ravine, where his cell worked better. He called the number. He came back and said, “It’s a mom-and-pop on a four-lane coming north out of Rapid City.”

—

Mackenzie and Bramall and Sanderson went to pack their stuff in the Toyota. Reacher’s toothbrush was already in his pocket, and his passport was back where it belonged. He found Stackley’s Colt and picked up the other three disassembled guns. He told the cowboys to put Stackley in the camper shell and drive the truck somewhere remote. An abandoned ranch, maybe. He told them to park it in a barn and leave it there. He pictured Stackley ten years from then, all dried up and mummified, discovered by chance with the remains of his head in an empty fentanyl box. The whole story, right there. A cold case that would stay cold forever.

The cowboys drove away, leaving no trace behind except blood and small flecks of bone and brain tissue on the gravel. Reacher figured they would be gone an hour after the clearing went quiet. You got hundreds of other species already lining up and licking their lips .

Bramall brought the Toyota around. The women had taken the rear seat. Mackenzie had her traveling bags in the trunk, next to Bramall’s. Sanderson had nothing to bring with her except a canvas tote bag. She was looking around, already separated from her home of three years by the thick tinted glass in the Toyota’s windows. Not that she cared. Nothing to stay for. Her dealer wouldn’t be stopping by anytime soon. That was for sure.

She settled back and faced forward, breathing shallow.

Reacher got in the front next to Bramall, who put the car in gear and set out down the driveway. Four miles of roots and rocks, and then the dirt road out of there.

Chapter 41

Gloria Nakamura walked the length of the corridor to her lieutenant’s corner suite. She had been summoned. She didn’t know why. When she got there the guy was looking at his computer screen. Not email. A law enforcement database.

He said, “The federal DEA have custody of a guy with the first name Billy and a home address in Mule Crossing, Wyoming. He was arrested in Oklahoma for running a light. He is thought to have fled Wyoming because of a warning from a friend about a DEA operation in Montana. So no need to call the two men or the county dog. Billy’s days of shooting people from behind a tree are over.”