The Midnight Line (Jack Reacher #22)

Mackenzie said, ‘How bad?’

‘Can’t tell,’ Reacher said. ‘Right now it’s just the name of a medal. Lots of people have them. As a matter of fact I have one. Truth is none of them come cheap. Most of them leave a mark. But you heal up and you walk away. Almost always. Certainly a big percentage. Doesn’t have to be bad news.’

Mackenzie said, ‘Iraq and Afghanistan was all bad news.’

She looked ahead at her sleek red car.

She said, ‘I’m not going home. I’m staying here. She’s close. You said so yourself. She’s in trouble. Maybe she lost an arm. Maybe she’s a disabled veteran with nowhere to live and nothing to eat.’

She told them to follow her back to the Hertz office, and then take her to see Billy’s place.

Nakamura carried her laptop down the corridor to her lieutenant’s corner suite. She played the captured voice mail. We just got a message from Montana. They sent a rider down especially. They have a Fed up there asking questions. He just left Billings.

She said, ‘I saw the rider from Montana. He was there four minutes.’

Her lieutenant said, ‘Does this get us anywhere?’

‘My friend in the lab is doing great work with predicting the phone numbers.’

‘What does he want, the Medal of Honor?’

‘A pat on the back would be good. You know, stick your head in, say hi.’

‘What do you want?’

‘It would be good to know what kind of Fed they had up there in Billings. And it would be good to know who sent the warning. Was it a subsidiary, an affiliate, a franchise, or just a friendly bunch of guys all loosely in the same boat?’

‘What do you want me to do about it?’

‘Call the Billings PD and ask them who was in town last night. They’ll know, because they’ll have gotten a courtesy call ahead of time.’

‘And this guy is going to Wyoming next? Remind me again, why should I care?’

‘Because Scorpio got one of his tentacles trodden on. If we knew exactly who he’s scared of, maybe we could work out exactly what he’s doing.’

The lieutenant called through a closed hutch to his secretary, and told her to get a number for whatever captain or commissioner or other fancy rank was top boy in the Billings PD, over in Montana. And then to dial it, and put it on line one.

They got to Billy’s place in the late afternoon. The sun was over the distant mountains. The pronghorns were throwing shadows taller than they were. The colours were different.

The place was still empty.

They went in the kitchen door, and up to the slept-in bedroom. To the closet. Reacher put the shoeboxes on the bed. Mackenzie whirred her finger down the wadded cash, and then poked through the jewellery, pushing her nail through the inch of clinking metal, gathering necklace chains as fine as hair, tumbling high school rings aside, and brassy wise-guy pinkie-finger signet rings, with black onyx faces and tiny off-centre chips of diamond.

She said, ‘Was the pawn shop window like this?’

‘Exactly like that,’ Reacher said.

‘Poor Rose.’

‘Do you know this area?’

‘I know Laramie. Or I used to. Down here was all railroad land. Before the track was laid they used mules. Hence the name, probably.’

‘No old friends or relatives?’

‘Seven months of the year the road is closed. This was the other side of the world to us.’

‘Nowhere she would remember?’

‘From later on, probably bars and restaurants downtown. Some stores, possibly. Sometimes we went out to the university. For music, or whatever. But I don’t think she would want to live out there now. We’re thirty-five years old.’

‘So where?’

‘Forget what I said. Ignore familiarity. I was wrong. I was desperate. Every idea looked like a good idea. Maybe she chose unfamiliarity instead. Somewhere she didn’t know at all.’

‘She knows Wyoming.’

‘Exactly. To have both is just right. Familiarity and unfamiliarity.’

Reacher checked the view from the bedroom window. There was dust on the dirt road. A long cloud, vivid red in the softening light, spiralling and drifting. A tiny dot at its head, winking in the low sun.

Six minutes, maybe.

‘Coming here?’ Bramall said.

‘Maybe,’ Reacher said. ‘Maybe not. But I hope so. I hope it’s Billy. He knows where Rose lives. From ploughing her driveway, if nothing else.’

‘He might have his deer rifle.’

‘Has he listened to his voice mail yet?’

‘We didn’t check. I guess he could have snuck home at some point. A fast in and out. We’ve been gone for hours.’

‘OK,’ Reacher said.

‘How do you want to do this?’

‘Inside, obviously. Downstairs would be best. There’s a poker on the fireplace. I’ll head in that direction. You take the other side. Find what you can. Look for steak knives. Often in a sideboard drawer.’

Mackenzie said, ‘What should I do?’

‘You go check if the phone is still there. On the desk in the back parlour. If it is, it should say one new message. That’s how Mr Bramall left it. If it’s there but it’s showing a regular screen, that means Billy came back and listened to it, but left the phone home again for whatever reason. So check it out and tell us which. Shout it out good and loud. Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with here. We’ll know how hard to hit the guy.’

‘If it’s Billy,’ Bramall said.

‘Hope for the best,’ Reacher said.

They went down the stairs, Reacher first, heading left, then Bramall, heading right, and last Mackenzie, looping back toward the parlour. Reacher took a look out the front window. The dust was closer. It was lit up from within by the setting sun. Four minutes, maybe. He moved on to the fireplace and picked up the poker. The yard of iron, with the hook at the end, like a hitchhiker’s thumb.

Mackenzie called out, ‘The phone is still here and now it says two new messages.’

Reacher paused a beat.

Then he called back, ‘Listen to the second one.’

He heard a static whisper from the distant earpiece as the first message was skipped, and then more as the second was played. He figured there might be some kind of urgency behind the faint breathy cadence.

Mackenzie called out, ‘It’s Arthur Scorpio leaving another voice mail for Billy. They got a warning about a federal agent leaving Montana for parts unknown. And Scorpio wants Billy to call him back. He sounds mad. He said, don’t make me worried, Billy. Not in a nice way.’

Bramall said, ‘Got to be either ATF or DEA in Montana. They both have western task forces.’

Reacher said, ‘I don’t care.’

They waited.