The Midnight Line Read online

  Plus style points.

  The right-hand guy went down late and slowly, like a street light in an auto wreck. Reacher heard the slap of linoleum, and the thump of bone.

  He stood there like nothing had happened.

  He said, “Just you and me now.”

  Scorpio said nothing.

  Reacher said, “Is the cop getting out of her car?”

  Scorpio didn’t answer.

  Reacher ducked down, left and right, and took guns out of pockets. Both the same. Smith & Wesson Chief’s Specials, both looking older than he was. He put them in his own pockets.

  He said, “Is she out of her car yet?”

  Scorpio said, “No.”

  “Is she on the phone?”

  “No.”

  “The radio?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s she doing?”

  “Just watching.”

  “Remember what I said about running a test?”

  Scorpio didn’t answer.

  Nakamura saw the sentries close ranks in front of Scorpio, who was leaning back in his lawn chair, like some kind of emperor on a throne. Reacher was facing the three of them. Up close. An arm’s length away. There was some verbal back and forth. Two questions, two answers. Short sentences. Brief and to the point. Then Reacher scratched his head. Then he seemed to have some kind of violent physical spasm, and for no apparent reason the sentries fell over.

  He had hit them.

  She scrabbled for her door release.

  She stopped.

  That’s good news anyway.

  Don’t intervene.

  She took a deep breath, and watched.

  Reacher sat down in the lawn chair next to Scorpio’s. He stretched out and got comfortable and stared straight ahead at an inert Maytag. Scorpio was silent beside him. They looked like two old men at a ball game. The sentries stayed on the floor, breathing, but not easily.

  Reacher took the West Point ring from his pocket. He balanced it on his palm. He said, “I need to know who you got this from.”

  “I never saw that before,” Scorpio said. “I run a laundromat.”

  “What have you got in your pockets?”

  “Why?”

  “You need to take it all out. I’m going to put you in the tumble dryer. Keys or coins might damage the mechanism.”

  Scorpio glanced at a tumble dryer.

  Couldn’t help himself.

  He said, “I wouldn’t fit.”

  “You would,” Reacher said.

  “I never saw that ring before.”

  “You sold it to Jimmy Rat.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Where I set the temperature dial is up to you. We’ll start on delicates. Then we’ll turn it up. Someone told me it goes all the way to where it can kill a bedbug.”

  Scorpio said nothing.

  “I understand,” Reacher said. “You’re Mr. Rapid City. You’re the man. You got a bunch of networks running. Which is your problem. Maybe they’re all interconnected. In which case, one question might lead to another. The whole thing might unravel. You can’t afford for that to happen. Hence the stone wall. I get it. Perfectly understandable. Except you need to remember two very important things. Firstly, I don’t care. I’m not a cop. I don’t have another question. And secondly, I’ll put you in the tumble dryer. So you’re between a rock and a hard place here. You need to get creative. You ever read a book?”

  “Sure.”

  “What kind?”

  “About the moon landings.”

  “That’s called non-fiction. There’s another kind, called fiction. You make stuff up, perhaps to illuminate a greater central truth. In your case, maybe you could tell me a story about a poor homeless man, maybe from out of town, who came in to launder his clothes, except he had no money, nothing at all except a ring, which you reluctantly traded for a couple of hot-wash cycles and a couple of dryer loads, plus enough left over for a square meal and a bed for the night. All out of the kindness of your generous heart. Detective Nakamura couldn’t argue with that. It would be a fine story.”

  “I would have to admit selling the ring to Jimmy Rat.”

  “Which was perfectly legal. You run a laundromat. You carry quarters to the bank. You don’t know what to do with a ring. Fortunately a guy passing by on his motorcycle offered to buy it from you. Not your fault he turned out to be a bad guy. You’re not your brother’s keeper.”

  “You think that’s a good enough story?”

  “I think it’s a fine story,” Reacher said again. “Just as long as you happen to remember the out-of-towner’s name.”

  “Out of state,” Scorpio said. “That’s exactly what happened. More or less. Some broke guy came in from Wyoming. I helped him out.”

  “When?”

  “Six weeks ago, maybe.”

  “From where in Wyoming?”

  “I believe a small town called Mule Crossing.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I believe it was Seymour Porterfield. I believe he told me people call him Sy.”

  Chapter 11

  Across the street Nakamura was still watching. Reacher stood up and stepped over the left-hand sentry. He looked at a tumble dryer. Bigger than people had in their homes. Good for comforters and other large items. He might have gotten Scorpio in there.

  He said, “You want me to leave through the back door?”

  Scorpio shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Go out the front.”

  So Reacher stepped over the right-hand sentry and pushed out to the sidewalk. The air smelled warm and fresh. He turned right and started walking. He heard Nakamura’s car start up. He heard the wheeze of its steering, and grit under its tires, and then it pulled alongside him and stopped. The same as Scorpio’s, except lower and bluer.

  The window came down.

  Black hair, dark eyes, a severe expression.

  She said, “Get in the car.”

  “You mad at me now?”

  “I told you not to commit a crime inside my jurisdiction.”

  “We were in the laundromat. Does that even count?”

  “That’s not fair. We’re trying.”

  Reacher opened the passenger door and slid inside. He racked the seat backward, for leg room. He said, “I apologize. I know you’re trying. Scorpio is a tough nut to crack.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “The ring came in from a guy in Wyoming named Sy Porterfield. About six weeks ago. Scorpio as good as admitted an onward connection to Jimmy Rat in Wisconsin. So he’s part of a chain, flowing west to east along the I-90 corridor.”

  “Can’t prove it.”

  “Also he pays off restaurant workers for information. Which he claims is only one of many networks he’s running. Maybe he’s the neighborhood bookie. Maybe he lends money.”

  “Can’t prove any of it.”

  “But I’m not sure how successful he is. His personal vehicle is a piece of crap worth about a hundred dollars, and his goons had guns older than you.”

  “Did the car work?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Would the guns have worked?”

  “Probably. Revolvers are usually pretty reliable.”

  “This is South Dakota. People are thrifty. I think Arthur Scorpio is plenty successful.”

  “OK.”

  “Where are the guns now?”

  Reacher took them out of his pockets and dropped them on her rear seat.

  She said, “Thank you.”

  He said, “Also there’s something wrong with his back room. It would have made more sense to talk to me in there. Certainly it would have made more sense for me to leave that way. He must have known you would stop me and ask me questions. Better if I went out through the alley. You wouldn’t have seen me. But he wouldn’t let me. You should check it out.”

  “We’d need a warrant.”

  “You’ve got the tap on his phone. He might say something stupid. A buck get
s ten he’s calling Porterfield in Wyoming right now.”

  “Is that where you’re going?”

  “As soon as I find a map. The town is called Mule Crossing. I never heard of it.”

  Nakamura took out her phone. She swiped and typed and waited, and then she said, “It’s down near Laramie. A wide spot in the road.”

  She held out the phone to show him.

  She said, “That’s the I-80 corridor, not I-90.”

  He said, “Population density drops to nothing west of here. A supply chain would need to branch out, literally. Maybe there are many Porterfields, all over Wyoming and Montana and Idaho. All feeding Scorpio, like a river system. Do you monitor his visitors?”

  “We try, from time to time. We’ve seen cars and bikes in the alley. Some with out-of-state plates. People go in and out his back door.”

  “You need to get a look in his back room. It ain’t full of drums of spare detergent. That’s for damn sure. The guy has no customers.”

  Nakamura was quiet a beat.

  Then she said, “Thanks for the report.”

  He said, “You’re welcome.”

  “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

  “The bus depot, I guess. I’ll take whatever heads west on I-90. I’ll get out in Buffalo and go south to Laramie.”

  “That would be the Seattle bus.”

  “Yes,” Reacher said. “I thought it might be.”

  He got out of Nakamura’s car at the depot and said goodbye and wished her luck. He didn’t expect to see her again. He bought a ticket as far as Buffalo, and sat down to wait, with about twenty other people. They were the usual mixture. The room had pale inoffensive walls, and fluorescent squares in the ceiling. Out the picture window was an empty asphalt space, where sooner or later the Seattle bus would show up. It was on its way from Sioux Falls.

  Nakamura called her friend the tech, and asked him to check with his pal at the phone company, to see who Scorpio had called in the last hour, with special focus on outgoing attempts to the 307 area code, which was Wyoming.

  No need to check, the guy told her. The lieutenant had re-upped electronic surveillance too. Everything on Scorpio’s land line and personal cell was going straight to a hard drive, accessible from her desktop computer.

  Only one problem, the guy said.

  Scorpio had made no calls at all.

  Reacher saw South Dakota change to Wyoming through the bus window. He was in his favorite spot, on the left, over the rear axle. Most people avoided that location, because they feared a bumpy ride. It was everyone else’s last choice. Which made it his first.

  He liked Wyoming. For its heroic geography, and its heroic climate. And its emptiness. It was the size of the United Kingdom, but it had fewer people in it than Louisville, Kentucky. The Census Bureau called most of it uninhabited. What people there were tended to be straightforward and pleasant. They were happy to leave a person alone.

  Reacher country.

  The first part of the state was high plains. Fall had already started. He gazed across the immense tawny distances, to the specter of the mountains beyond. The highway was a dark blacktop ribbon, mostly empty. From time to time trucks would pass the bus, slowly, sometimes spending a whole minute alongside, edging ahead imperceptibly. Reacher was eye to eye with their drivers, across their empty cabs. Old men, all of them.

  My wife would say you feel guilty about something.

  He looked the other way, across the aisle, at the other horizon.

  Nakamura walked the length of the corridor to her lieutenant’s corner suite. He looked up, all glittering eyes and restlessness.

  “Bigfoot left,” she said. “Scorpio answered his question. Next stop Wyoming.”

  “What’s in Wyoming?”

  “The ring was supplied to Scorpio by a man named Porterfield from a town named Mule Crossing. About six weeks ago.”

  “How did Bigfoot make Scorpio tell him all that?”

  “He decked the muscle. I suppose Scorpio knew he was next.”

  “Did you see it happen?”

  “Not really,” Nakamura said. “It was over very fast. I couldn’t swear to exactly what took place. Not precisely enough for a courtroom.”

  “So we’re nowhere,” the lieutenant said. “In fact we’re back a step. Scorpio’s phones have gone quiet. Which means he went to the pharmacy and bought a burner and some pre-paid minutes. Which means from now on we have no idea who or where he’s calling.”

  The lieutenant said nothing more. He returned to his email. Nakamura walked back to her desk, quiet and alone.

  More than eight hundred miles east, in an expensive kitchen in a big Tudor house on the Gold Coast north of Chicago, a woman named Tiffany Jane Mackenzie dialed Terry Bramall’s cell number. It rang and rang and wasn’t picked up. A recorded voice came on and asked her to leave a message.

  She said, “Mr. Bramall, this is Mrs. Mackenzie. I’m wondering if you’ve made any progress. So far, I mean. Or not, I suppose. I would like to hear either way, so please call me back as soon as you can. Thank you. Goodbye.”

  Then Mrs. Mackenzie used her phone to check her email, and her bookmarked web pages, and her chat rooms, and her message boards.

  Nothing.

  Reacher got out of the bus at the Buffalo stop. His onward options were limited. There was no direct service to Laramie. There was a departure to nearby Cheyenne, but not until the next day. So he set out walking, following signs to the highway south, with his thumb out, hoping to get a ride before he hit the on-ramp. About fifty-fifty, he figured. Heads or tails. In his favor was a friendly population not given to irrational fears. Against him was almost no traffic at all. The friendly population was thinly spread. Wyoming. Mostly uninhabited.

  But even so, he came up heads within half a mile. A dusty pick-up stopped alongside him, and the driver leaned across and said he was going to Casper, which was about halfway to both Cheyenne and Laramie, straight south on I-25. Reacher climbed in and got comfortable. The truck was a Toyota. It was raised up on its suspension and tricked out with all kinds of heavy-duty components. It looked fit for service on the back side of the moon. Certainly it handled I-25 with no trouble at all. It droned along pretty fast. The driver was a rangy guy in work boots and off-brand jeans. A carpenter, he said, busy fixing roof beams before the winter. Also a rock crawler, he said, on the weekends. If he got weekends. Reacher asked him what a rock crawler was. Turned out to mean driving off-road vehicles over extreme boulder-strewn terrain, or along rocky rapids in dried-up mountain streams. Reacher was at best a reluctant driver, so any assessment was necessarily theoretical, but he was inclined to admit it sounded fun, if pointless.

  Nakamura drove her Chevy back to Scorpio’s block, but on a hunch she stopped short of the laundromat and parked outside the convenience store