The Midnight Line (Jack Reacher #22)

‘That would be a glass half empty type of interpretation. But it’s why I asked if you wanted polite or uncomfortable.’

‘I said truth. You’re speculating.’

‘Agreed,’ Reacher said. ‘And I sincerely hope I’m wrong about all of it.’

She was quiet a beat.

Then she said, ‘You’re a kind man.’

‘Not a word that gets used often.’

‘Thank you for being here.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said, and it was. It was a concrete bench in a blacktop lot, but a yard above the ground it was spectacular. The stars were better than he had ever seen. The air was cool and soft and hummed with silence. Beside him on the bench was a woman who looked like the back of a shiny magazine. He figured she would feel firm and lithe and cool to the touch, except maybe the small of her back, which might be damp.

She asked him, ‘Do you remember what I said about my husband?’

‘You said he’s a nice man and you’re a good match.’

‘You have a very precise memory.’

‘It was yesterday.’

‘I should have told you he keeps a mistress and ignores me.’

Reacher smiled.

He said, ‘Good night, Mrs Mackenzie.’

She left him there, the same as the night before, alone in the dark, on the concrete bench, looking at the stars.

At that moment a mile away, Stackley clicked off a phone call and parked his beat-up old pick-up truck in a lot behind an out-of-business retail enterprise three blocks from the centre of town. Earlier in his life he had favoured expensive haircuts, and one time when waiting in the salon he had read a magazine that said success in business depended entirely on ruthless control of costs. Thus wherever possible he slept in his truck. Hence the camper shell. A motel would take what he made on two pills. Why give it away?

The old gal across the Snowy Range had bought a box of fentanyl patches, but he had given her one he had already opened, an hour before, very carefully, so he could skim out a patch all his own, for his pocket, for later. The old gal would never notice. If she did, she would assume she was too stoned to count right. A natural reaction. Addicts learned to blame themselves. The same the world over.

He took scissors from his glove box, and he cut a quarter-inch strip off the patch, and he slipped it under his tongue. Sublingual, it was called. Another magazine in the same salon said it was the best method of all.

Stackley couldn’t argue.

At that moment sixty miles away, in the low hills west of town, Rose Sanderson was putting herself to bed. She had pulled down her hood, and taken off her silver track suit top. Under it was a T-shirt, which she took off, and a bra, likewise. She peeled the foil off her face. She used her toothbrush handle to scrape excess ointment off her skin. She buttered it back on the foil. With luck she might get one more day out of it.

She ran her sink full of cool water. She took a breath, and held her face under the surface. Her record was four minutes. She came up and shook her head. Her hair had grown back in. She had cut it the week before West Point. She had to get a hat on. There were regulations. She had kept it short for thirteen years. Now it was back. With coarse threads of grey. Like barbed wire in a hay bale.

The least of her problems.

She took scissors from her cabinet, and she cut a quarter-inch strip off her patch, and she stuck it behind her bottom lip. A maintenance dose. It would keep her asleep all night. It would keep her warm, and gentle, and relaxed, and at peace, and cradled, and happy.

At that moment three hundred miles away, in Rapid City, South Dakota, Gloria Nakamura was sitting in her car, watching Arthur Scorpio’s back door. Once again it was showing a rim of light. It was propped open an inch. Another warm night. He had been in there more than two hours. She had been working on her list of what might make a room hot enough for extra ventilation. Electronic equipment, maybe. She knew a guy with a home cinema. He had a closet full of black boxes, that gave out a penetrating kind of heat. It was thin and fierce and smelled faintly of grease and silicon. The guy had a fan in there, whirring all the time.

Her cell phone rang.

Her friend in Computer Crimes.

Who said, ‘Give me a yes or no answer. Do we assume it was Scorpio who got the text message about the new Billy?’

She said, ‘We couldn’t take it to court.’

‘That wasn’t a yes or no answer.’

‘Yes, we can assume it was Scorpio.’

‘The same signal just got a voice mail from a tower in Laramie, Wyoming. From someone by the name of Stackley. He called Scorpio Mr Scorpio. He said all was well, but there were stories about two men and a woman poking around, asking questions. One of the men was a very big guy and they were in a black Toyota.’

Reacher, she thought.

Her friend said, ‘Then Scorpio called back and left a voice mail in return. He told this guy Stackley the same thing he told Billy. He wants the big guy out of the picture. He was ordering a homicide again.’

‘Wait,’ Nakamura said.

Scorpio’s door was opening. He stepped out to the alley and turned back and locked up. Then he headed for his car.

‘I’m going to follow him,’ she said.

‘Waste of gas,’ her friend said.

She clicked off and started her motor.

Scorpio went home.

He went home every time.

At that moment six hundred miles away, in a small town named Sullivan, in the Oklahoma panhandle, Billy ran a red light. He was in a six-hundred-dollar Ford Ranger pick-up truck, more than twenty years old. He was out to get a second six-pack. He was mildly buzzed from the first. His pal from Montana was back at the motel, waiting in the room. The next day in the afternoon they were due to meet a guy who had connections in Amarillo, Texas. The employment situation was looking good.

The light he ran had a cop parked on it. The guy lit up his roof bar and yelped his siren once. Billy froze and kept on rolling. Dumb. He had nothing to hide. The buzz, maybe, but hey, this was the panhandle. A couple of beers was probably a minimum requirement to get behind the wheel. Apart from that he was respectable. He couldn’t run anyway. Not in a six-hundred-dollar piece of shit.

He hit the brake and pulled in at the kerb.

Like all humans the cop was prey to small subliminal emotions. Billy’s failure to stop right away kind of pissed him off. He found it cocky and disrespectful. Normally he might just have pulled alongside and dropped his far window and told the guy to take it easy. But now he felt a hot bite of annoyance, and it kind of puffed him up and set his jaw, and he found himself launching into the whole big performance.

He pulled up behind the pick-up, and left his lights flashing. He put on his hat. He counted to twenty and got out the car. He unlatched his holster and put his hand on his gun. He walked forward slowly, and stopped level with the old Ford’s load bed, and he called out loud and clear, ‘Sir, please step out of the vehicle.’

The door opened.

Billy got out.