The Midnight Line (29 page)

“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.

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.”

Not Reacher after all, she thought.

For some reason she felt disappointed.

“But here's the thing,” her lieutenant said. “The Feds don't know about Scorpio. The report makes that clear. They're asking us all to cross-check Billy's name against our open files, to help them figure out who's running him. They don't know.”

“Are you going to tell them?”

“Hell no. I don't want a bunch of fancy-pants federal agents swooping in here to grab the glory. Scorpio belongs to the Rapid City Police Department. He always has. We're going to get him.”

“Yes, sir,” Nakamura said. “We know Scorpio already replaced Billy. Inadmissible evidence, but there's a new guy out there.”

Her lieutenant said, “There's another DEA request on the system. Looks completely separate, but I don't think it is. It was posted just afterward. They're asking if anyone in the western region is seeing domestic packaged prescription oxycodone or fentanyl. Lots of it, like in the old days.”

“I thought that was over.”

“It is over. Every truck that leaves the factory is logged in the computer, and followed on GPS, plus they know exactly what was in it to start with, so in theory if they wanted to they could track down every single separate pill.”

“So why are they worried?”

“Something must not be working right. Or Scorpio is smarter than we thought. Either way, we can't let the Feds get him first. So whatever you're doing now, I want you to do it ten times harder. Put your other cases on the back burner. I don't want federal agents coming in here.”

Bramall's navigation screen showed their best route would be Laramie to Cheyenne on the highway, and then straight north on a state road, all the way. So they turned at Mule Crossing, off the dirt road, onto the two-lane, past the post office, past the firework store, past the bottle rocket billboard, and all the way up to the highway, where they turned east. Mackenzie looked anxious all the way. She had jumped off the same building as her sister. They had jumped hand in hand. They had committed to the same problems, one from the inside and one from the outside. Sanderson herself was sitting with her head turned, watching out her window. Her hands were clasped together. To keep them from shaking, Reacher thought. She was pushing herself hard. She was rationing. Maybe she had set a target. A hundred miles, maybe. Before the next quarter inch. Or five red trucks, or a rest area, or a hybrid car.

Reacher checked the guns. The Smith & Wesson 39, the Ruger .22, the Springfield P9, and the Colt .45. All four were scratched and battered. But they probably all worked. All were only part loaded. The Smith had four Parabellum rounds in it, and the Springfield had five. He liked the Smith better, so he put all nine rounds in it, eight in the mag and one in the chamber. He dumped the empty Springfield in the door cubby. He put the Smith in his coat pocket. The Ruger was an ancient thing, a Standard, maybe dating all the way back to 1949, when it was the company's first product. It had just two rounds in it, .22 Long Rifle rimfires. Not Reacher's favorite caliber, so he dumped it in the door cubby along with the empty Springfield. The Colt was a military M1911, and judging by the style of its engravings and markings it could have been even older than the Ruger. It had three rounds in it. He held it by the barrel and half turned in his seat and offered it to Sanderson.

She was sitting behind Bramall, at that moment turned toward him at an angle where he saw more of the left side of her face than the right. Amazing work, Bramall had said. A virtuoso performance. But actually pretty lousy. Reacher thought all three things were true. She was sewn together from pieces the size of a postage stamp on a regular first-class letter. He could only imagine the immense skill and care employed in the surgery. Hours and hours of precision work. Reattaching nerves and muscles. But some hadn't taken. There were dead spots. And each postage-stamp piece was thickened and scarred at the edges, and lumpy with sutures. There had been some guesswork about what went where. Her nostril was stitched to her cheek at an odd angle. He couldn't compare it to the other side, because of the foil.

She said no to the gun. Not in words, but by unclasping her hands and holding them up. He saw a faint tremor. Nothing terrible. But it was still early. He turned back and offered the gun to Bramall. Who had different problems. More rules than Reacher, and a license from the state of Illinois. He thought for a moment, and then he took the gun, but he put it in the door cubby, not his coat pocket. Some kind of an ethical compromise.

Nakamura saw Scorpio go in his back door just as late morning turned into lunchtime. She was parked on the cross street, at just the right angle. Scorpio left the door open again. Just an inch. Another warm day. A cloudless sky, above the tangle of cables on their leaning poles. Power lines and phone wires. Some thick, some thin. Some old, some new. Some very new. Maybe fiber optics, for the internet.

She took out her phone and dialed her friend.

She said, “Look out for that signal again. Scorpio just went in his office.”

Her friend said, “It's not an exact science.”

“You got it right last time, about the new Billy. There was a DEA bulletin.”

“I saw it.”

“Plus another one, posted just afterward, about prescription medication. Which is weird, because they already track that stuff. They log the trucks as they leave the factory, and they log their routes by GPS, and they match invoices to payments. So where's the leakage?”

“That's your job. I'm just a humble tech.”

“Which is why I call you all the time. So I don't make a fool of myself.”

“What's the wild idea this time?”

“The computer guys at the factory could erase a whole truck, right? They could just delete it completely. They could erase its inventory and its GPS track. Like the departure never existed. Like that particular truck was in the shop that day. Or parked in the lot.”

“That suggests corruption among computer guys. I may not be the person to ask.”

“Is it possible?” she said.

“They would have to erase the invoice too. Also the original order. They would have to amend the factory production records, otherwise it would look like they were making more pills than went out the door. If they did all that, then everything would balance. The unrecorded surplus would be a kind of ghost quantity, floating out there somewhere.”

“Could they do all that?” she said.

“Of course they could,” her friend said. “A computer does what it's told. The result depends on who's doing the telling.”

“What about someone not in the factory? Could they do it by remote control?”

“A hacker, you mean? Sure, if they breached security. Which would be tough, since we're talking pharmaceuticals and the DEA. But not impossible. You can buy software from Russia.”

“What kind of equipment would he need?”

“In the end nothing more than a laptop. But getting there would involve a lot of high-speed number crunching. There would be a lot of stuff running at once. He would have a couple of racks at least. Like his own server.”

“Hot, right?”

“We use max AC down here.”

“Thanks,” she said.

She clicked off, and looked at the wires overhead, and Scorpio's open door.

Bramall's cell phone rang just north of a place named Defiant, which had a John Deere dealership and not much else. Bramall fumbled the phone up out of his pocket and checked the screen. He offered it to Reacher, the same way Reacher had offered him the Colt.

The screen said West Point Superintendent's Office.

Reacher said, “How does it know?”

“I programmed it,” Bramall said. “When he called the first time.”

“You can take the boy out of the FBI,” Reacher said.

He answered the phone.

The same woman.

She said, “Major Reacher, please.”

“Ma'am, this is Reacher.”

“Please hold for General Simpson.”

The supe came on and said, “Major.”

Reacher said, “General.”

“Progress report?”

“We're in the car.”

“Can she hear what you're saying?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Is she OK?”

“So far.”

“We're still working on the roadside bomb. Those files are sealed up pretty tight. But we got something new on Porterfield. Through the Marine Corps side. They had a stray copy classified at a lower level.”

“What did you get?”

“There was an arrest warrant out on him. Sworn a week before he died.”

“By who?”

“Defense Intelligence Agency.”

“Have you seen it?”

“No point. The DIA never says why.”

“Did it feel like a big deal?”

“It was DIA. That's always a big deal.”

“Do you know anyone there?”

“Forget it,” Simpson said. “I want to retire in Florida, not Leavenworth.”

“Understood,” Reacher said. “Thank you, general.”

He clicked off and passed the phone back to Bramall. As he turned he saw Sanderson's eyes on him, from under her hood. She knew something was up. He had asked, what did you get? She wasn't dumb. She knew what was out there.

He said nothing.

She said, “Let's talk later.”

Then she turned away to look out the window. Reacher faced front. Bramall drove on.