The Midnight Line (10 page)

“Why's that?”

“He's dead.”

“Since when?”

“About eighteen months ago, I guess. Around the start of spring last year.”

“Someone told me he was seen in South Dakota six weeks ago.”

“Then someone was lying to you. There's no doubt about it. It was a big sensation. He was found in the hills, mostly eaten up. Killed by a bear, they thought. Maybe waking up after hibernation. They're hungry then. Other folks thought a mountain lion. His guts were all ripped out, which is what mountain lions do. Then the ravens came, and the crows, and the raccoons. He was scattered all over the place. They made the ID with his teeth. And the keys in his pocket. April, I think. April last year.”

“How old was he?”

“He could have been forty.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“Come on in,” Headley said. “I've got coffee brewing.”

Reacher followed him up a narrow stair, to a long A-shaped attic that had been paneled with pine boards, and boxed off into separate rooms. There was an aluminum percolator thumping away on the stove. All the furniture was small. No sofas. The staircase was too narrow and the turns too tight to get them in. Headley poured two cups and handed one over. The coffee was thick and inky and smelled a little scorched.

“What did Porterfield do for a living?” Reacher asked again.

“No one knew for sure,” Headley said. “But he always had money in his pocket. Not a whole lot, but a little more than made any kind of sense.”

“Where did he live?”

“He had a log house up in the hills,” Headley said. “Twenty miles away, maybe, on one of the old ranches. All by himself. He was pretty much a loner.”

“West of here?”

Headley nodded. “Follow the dirt road. I guess his place is empty now.”

“Who else lives out in that direction?”

“Not sure. I see folks driving by. I don't necessarily know who they are. This ain't the post office anymore.”

“Were you here when it was?”

“Man and boy.”

“How many folks do you see driving by?”

“Could be ten or twenty total.”

“I was told four or five.”

“Who pay their taxes and sign their names. But there are plenty of abandoned places. Plenty of unofficial residents.”

Reacher said, “You know a woman, also ex-army, very small, name of Serena Sanderson?”

Headley said, “No.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty much.”

“Maybe she got married. You know any kind of a Serena?”

“No.”

“What about Rose? Maybe she goes by her middle name.”

“No.”

“OK,” Reacher said.

“What is this about exactly?”

Reacher took the ring out of his pocket. The gold filigree, the black stone, the tiny size.
West Point 2005
. He said, “This is hers. I want to return it. I was told Sy Porterfield sold it in Rapid City six weeks ago.”

“He didn't.”

“Evidently.”

“What's the big deal?”

“Would your boy have given up his Ranger tab?”

“Not after what he went through to get it.”

“Exactly.”

“I can't help you,” Headley said. “Except I can promise you Sy Porterfield didn't sell that ring in Rapid City six weeks ago, on account of getting ate up by a bear or a mountain lion more than a year before in another state entirely.”

“So someone else sold it.”

“From here?”

“Possibly. Fifty-fifty maybe. Mule Crossing was mentioned. Either true or false.”

“I see folks drive by. I don't know who they are.”

“Who would?”

Headley squirmed around in his chair, as if gazing west through the wall, as if picturing the dirt road rolling away into the darkness. He turned back and said, “The guy who runs the snowplow in the winter lives in the first place on the left. About two miles in. I guess he knows who lives where, from seeing their tire tracks, and maybe towing them out from time to time.”

“Two real miles in, or two Wyoming miles?”

“It's about a five minute drive.”

Which even on a dirt road could be more than two real miles. At an average speed of thirty, it would be two and a half. At forty, it would be more than three. And then back again.

“You got a car?” Reacher asked.

“I got a truck.”

“Can I borrow it?”

“No, you can't.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “What's the guy's name, with the snowplow?”

“I don't know his second name. Not sure I ever heard it. But I know his first name is Billy.”

Reacher let himself out and walked down to where the dirt road met the two-lane. In the pitch dark there was nothing to see. No lights in the distance. Underfoot the surface felt like sand and fine gravel. Not hard to walk on. Except for the darkness. There was no clue at all as to direction, or curves, or turns, or camber, or gradient, or anything. He would be like a blind man, staggering slowly, blundering into fences, falling into ditches. Two miles was too far, in the gloom of night. He would have been a severe disappointment as a mail carrier.

He turned around. He crossed the two-lane and waited on the shoulder going north. Back to Laramie. Too soon to get the same students coming home again. But there would be others. Earlier birds, or regular folk coming back from shopping or a blue-plate special. He waited. The first two cars blew by without slowing, five minutes apart. The third stopped. It was a battered sedan with the hubcaps missing. The driver was a guy about forty, wearing a denim jacket. He said he was going to Laramie. Reacher asked him what he knew about motels in town. The guy said there were three types of place. Chain hotels south of the highway, or the same thing near the university, where people stayed for the football games, or dumpy mom-and-pop fleapits on the main drag north of the center. All Reacher wanted was a bed and a pay phone, so he said the guy should let him out wherever was the most convenient. Which turned out to be the chains south of the highway. They were right there, on a service road parallel with the two-lane, across a grassy strip.

He paid for a room, and found a phone in an alcove off the lobby. He dug in his pocket and took out Nakamura's business card.
Those are my numbers. Office and cell. Call me if you need to talk. Scorpio is a dangerous man
.

He dialed her cell.

She answered.

He said, “This is Reacher.”

She said, “Are you OK?”

She sounded worried.

“I'm fine,” he said. “Why?”

“Where are you?”

“Laramie, Wyoming.”

“Don't go to Mule Crossing.”

“I just did.”

“Scorpio made a call. He set you up.”

“I already know he lied to me about Seymour Porterfield. The guy died a year and a half ago. So I want you to give Scorpio a message. If you get the chance. Tell him one day I'm going to come back to Rapid City and pay him a visit.”

“I'm serious, Reacher.”

“So am I.”

“He told a man named Billy to shoot you on sight. From behind a tree with a deer rifle.”

“A man named what?”

“Billy.”

Reacher said, “I just heard that name.”

“Don't go to Mule Crossing,” Nakamura said again. “No point going there anyway, if he lied about it.”

“He lied about Porterfield. I don't know if he lied about Mule Crossing too. Depends how fast he was thinking. He was under pressure at the time. I was going to put him in a tumble dryer. How would he even know the name Mule Crossing? It's not a famous place. It's nothing but a flea market and a firework store on a two-lane road in the middle of nowhere. It's possible Scorpio told me the wrong person but the right place. Maybe Porterfield used to be in business with him. Maybe this guy Billy took over.”

“Scorpio's call implied Billy gets privileges of some kind. So they might be in business together.”

“What sort of business?”

“I don't know. But the threat to you was very clear. In my opinion he was ordering a homicide. I'm going to call the local sheriff in the morning.”

“Don't,” Reacher said. “That would only complicate things.”

“I'm a police officer. I have to.”

“What exactly did Scorpio say on the phone?”

“It was a voicemail again. He called it weird shit going on. He said you were a strange piece of bad luck. The implication was there was something taking place on an ongoing basis, but you knew nothing about it, because you were just a random passerby. He said he gave you Porterfield's name to get rid of you. Then he told Billy to kill you. He said not to mess with you, because you're like the Incredible Hulk. He said to use a deer rifle from behind a tree. He was ordering a homicide, Reacher. Clear as day. I have to put it in the system.”

“The Incredible Hulk? I thought I was Bigfoot. These guys need to make up their minds.”

“This isn't funny.”

“Did he mention Mule Crossing?”

“Not in the voicemail. Not specifically.”

“Was it a Mule Crossing number he called?”

“No, it was another drugstore burner. We can't trace it.”

“Then wait a day, OK? Wouldn't mean much to the sheriff without an exact location. Wyoming is a big state. I wouldn't want to waste anyone's time.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” Reacher said. “I want to know where the ring came from. That's all.”

Nakamura didn't reply to that, and they hung up. Room service was nothing more than a Xeroxed sheet of paper with a phone number for pizza delivery, so Reacher dialed again and ordered a large pie with extra pepperoni and anchovies. He waited for it in the lobby. An old habit. He didn't like people to know which room was his.

He woke the next morning with the sunrise, and went out in search of coffee. Which meant walking through the hotel's parking lot to get back to the two-lane. There was a black SUV parked near the door. It was a Toyota Land Cruiser. A serious vehicle. He had seen them in dusty and rugged parts of the world. The United Nations used them. This particular example was fairly new, and basically clean, but a little travel-stained.

It had Illinois plates.

He ducked back to the phone in the lobby and dialed Terry Bramall's cell number from memory. The private eye from Chicago. Last seen leaving Rapid City in a black SUV with Illinois plates. There was ring tone, but no answer. A voice came on and invited him to leave a message. He didn't. He just shrugged and set out again for coffee.

He found coffee along with breakfast in a diner on Third Street. He asked the waitress where the county sheriff was based. She said right there in town, about half a mile away. Not hard to find. The sky was blue and the sun was shining but the air was cool. He stopped in at a clothing store. In his experience the West was better than the East for tall guys. He found jeans the right length, and a flannel shirt, and a thin canvas jacket. As always he changed in the cubicle and had the clerk dump his old stuff in the trash. Then he walked onward to the spot the waitress had told him, and found the sheriff's office. It was a single-wide storefront, with the bottom part of the window painted over. Above that was a gold pinstripe, and above that was a gold star about two feet wide and two feet high, with the county's name in a curve above, and
Sheriff's Department
in a curve below. The design looked a little bit like the West Point ring.

He went in. There was a woman in civilian clothes at the reception desk. He asked to see the sheriff, and she asked why he wanted to. He said he had a question about an old case. She asked his name, and he told her. She asked if his visit was in some way official. Whether he worked in law enforcement. He said not currently, but he had been an MP in the army for thirteen years. She told him to go ahead upstairs to the sheriff's office, which was the last door on the left. No hesitation. In his experience the West was better than the East for veterans.

He went upstairs. According to gold writing on the last door on the left the sheriff's name was Connelly. Reacher knocked and entered. The office was a dusty wood-framed room gone a golden hue with age, and Sheriff Connelly himself turned out to be a solid leathery guy of about fifty. He was wearing blue jeans and a tan shirt and a Stetson hat. Clearly the woman at the desk had called ahead, because Connelly already knew his name. He said, “How can I help you, Mr. Reacher?”

Reacher said, “I came to Wyoming to look up a guy named Seymour Porterfield, but I'm told he got eaten up by a bear a year and a half ago. I was hoping you could tell me what you know about that.”

Connelly said, “Take a seat, Mr. Reacher.”

Reacher sat down, on an old-fashioned wooden visitor chair polished to a high shine by a thousand pairs of pants. Connelly looked at him without speaking. A level gaze, equal parts suspicion and the benefit of the doubt. He said, “What was your connection with Seymour Porterfield?”

“None at all,” Reacher said. “I'm looking for someone else, and I was told Porterfield might be able to point me in the right direction.”

“Who told you that?”

“A guy in South Dakota.”

“Who is the someone else you're looking for?”

Reacher took the ring out of his new pants pocket, and said, “I want to return this to its rightful owner.”

“A woman,” Connelly said.

“Name of Serena Rose Sanderson. You know her?”

The guy shook his head. “She a friend of yours?”

“Never met her. But we look after our own.”

“You a West Pointer too?”

“A long time ago.”

“Where did you find the ring?”

“In a pawn shop in Wisconsin. I traced it back to Rapid City, South Dakota. I was told it was brought there from Wyoming by Porterfield.”

“When?”

“After he was dead.”

“So how can I help you?”

“You can't,” Reacher said. “But I'm curious. Getting eaten by a bear seems a little extreme.”

“Could have been a mountain lion.”

“How likely is that?”

“Not very,” Connelly said. “Either thing would be rare.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“A practical man would say the guy was gut shot or knifed in the stomach and then dumped in the woods. It was the end of winter. Bears or mountain lions might have been hungry enough to scavenge the corpse. Birds would have, for sure. Also raccoons and what-not. But there was zero evidence either way. We confirmed all the parts were Porterfield, but he was real torn up. We didn't find a bullet. Didn't find a knife. There were marks on the bones, but they were all animal teeth. I had folks at the university take a good long look. All inconclusive. We called it an accident, and maybe it was.”

Reacher said, “What do you know about the guy himself?”

“Very little. This is Wyoming. We leave people alone. No one inquires into other people's business. He lived by himself. He had a fairly new car with a lot of miles on it. So he got around some. He had cash in a shoebox in the back of his closet. That's all we found out.”

“How much cash?”

“Nearly ten grand.”

“Not bad.”

“I agree. I wish I had ten grand in the back of my closet. But it wasn't enough to get all excited about.”

“Except you formed the impression he was the type of guy who could get gut shot or knifed in the stomach.”

“I try to keep an open mind, both ways around.”

“No friends or relatives showing up asking questions?”

“Not a peep.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “Thanks.”

“You're welcome,” Connelly said. “I hope you find who you're looking for.”

“I plan to,” Reacher said.