‘Owe you,’ Nakamura said, and hung up. Her email dinged. She clicked on the message, and clicked on a file, and dabbed her volume button. She heard what sounded like a bar room, and then a nervous voice speaking fast. It said, ‘Arthur, this is Jimmy. I just had a guy enquiring about an item I got from you. He seems set on working his way along the chain of supply. I didn’t tell him anything, but he already found me somehow, so what I’m thinking is maybe he’ll somehow find you too. If he does, take him seriously. That’s my advice. This guy is like Bigfoot come out of the forest. Heads up, OK?’
Then there was a plastic rattle as a big old receiver was fumbled back in its cradle. Maybe a pay phone on a wall. In a bar in Wisconsin. The Arthur Scorpio file was already three inches thick. Nothing ever stuck. But Rapid City’s CID never quit. Every scrap of intelligence was logged. Sooner or later something would click. Nakamura wrote it up. After the narrative summary she added her notes. No smoking gun, but persuasive about the existence of a supply chain. Then she opened a search engine and typed Bigfoot. She got the gist. A mythic ape-man, hairy, seven feet tall, from the Northwest woods. She reopened her document and added: Maybe Bigfoot will shake something loose! She emailed a copy to her lieutenant.
Afterwards she felt bad about the exclamation point. It looked girlish. But it had to. Really she meant for her boss to read her note and order an immediate resumption of surveillance. Just in case Scorpio’s incoming visitor proved significant. A no-brainer, surely. Obviously Jimmy from Wisconsin was lying when he said he didn’t tell the guy anything. That claim wasn’t logical. A guy scary enough to warrant a heads-up voice mail was scary enough to elicit the answer to just about any question he wanted to ask. So obviously the guy was already on his way. Time was therefore of the essence. But her boss claimed all executive authority as his own. Nudging was counterproductive. Hence the giggly deflection, to take the sting away. To make the guy think it was his own idea all along.
Then the night shift came in, and Nakamura went home. She decided she would swing by Scorpio’s laundromat in the morning. On her way back to work. Thirty minutes or an hour. Just to take a look. It was possible Bigfoot might have arrived by then.
Reacher had no reason to doubt the county cop when he said western Wisconsin was populated by friendly folks. The problem was quantity, not quality. It was a lonely rural road, in the middle of nowhere, and by that point it was late in the evening. There was no traffic. Or almost none, to be exact. A Dodge pick-up truck had blasted by in a howl of warm wind, and five minutes after that a Ford F-150 had slowed down to take a look, before speeding up again and driving on without stopping. Now the eastern horizon was stubbornly dark and silent. But Reacher remained optimistic. It only took one. And there was plenty of time. There was no big strategic hurry. The ring had been in the pawn shop for a month. There was no red-hot trail to follow.
A buck gets ten there’s no story at all.
Reacher waited, and eventually he saw distant headlights in the east, just dim twinkles like faraway stars. For a whole minute they seemed to get no closer, because of the head-on perspective, but then the picture sharpened. A pick-up truck, he thought, or an SUV. Because of the height and the spacing of the lights. He stood a yard inside the traffic lane and stuck out his thumb. He turned half sideways, like a Hollywood pose, so his profile was presented at an angle, so visually his bulk was minimized. Nothing he could do about his height. But the less threatening the better. He was an experienced hitchhiker. He knew he was subject to snap decisions.
It was a pick-up truck. A big one. A crew cab. Japanese. Lots of chrome and lots of shiny paint. It slowed down. Came close. The driver’s face was lit up red, from the instrument panel. Not going to happen, Reacher thought. The driver was a woman. She’d have to be nuts.
The truck stopped.
It was a Honda. Dark red metallic. The window buzzed down. There was a dog on the back seat. Like a German shepherd, but bigger. About the size of a pony. Maybe a freak mutation. It had teeth the size of rifle ammunition. The woman leaned across the console. She had dark hair up in a knot. She was wearing a dark red shirt. She was about forty-five years old.
She said, ‘Where are you headed?’
Reacher said, ‘I need to get on I-90.’
‘Hop right in. That’s near where I’m going.’
‘You sure?’
‘About where I’m going?’
‘About me hopping in. From the safety point of view. You don’t know me. As a matter of fact I’m not a threat, but I would say that anyway, right?’
‘I have a savage dog in here.’
‘I might be armed. The obvious play would be shoot the dog first. Or cut its throat. And then start on you. That’s what I would be worried about. Professionally speaking, I mean.’
‘You a cop?’
‘I was in the military police.’
‘You armed?’
‘No.’
‘Then hop in.’
She was a farmer, she said, with a lot of dairy cattle on a lot of acres. Doing well, Reacher figured, judging by her car. It felt about as wide as a Humvee inside. It was upholstered in quilted leather. It was as silent as a limousine. They talked. He asked if she had always been a farmer, and she said yes, four generations. She asked him what he did for a living, and he said he was between jobs. The giant dog followed the conversation from the back seat, turning its wicked head one way, and then the other.
An hour later she stopped and let him out at the I-90 cloverleaf. He thanked her and waved her away. She was a nice person. One of the random encounters that made his life what it was.
Then he walked to the westbound ramp and started over, standing at an angle, one foot on the rumble strip, the other in the traffic lane, with his thumb out wide.
Nearly seven hundred miles away, in his office behind his laundromat in Rapid City, Arthur Scorpio was clearing the last of the day’s texts and emails and voice mails off his phone. He got to Jimmy Rat’s message, and heard I didn’t tell him anything, but he already found me somehow, so what I’m thinking is maybe he’ll somehow find you too. Which, translated into plain English, meant I snitched on you and a guy is definitely on his way. So, in the long term, no more business for Jimmy Rat, and in the short term, defensive measures might have to be considered.
Scorpio called his secretary at home. She was on her way to bed. He asked her, ‘Who or what is Bigfoot?’
She said, ‘He’s a giant ape-man who lives in the woods. On the slopes in the Northwest. About seven feet tall and covered in hair. Eats bears and cattle. One rancher lost a thousand head, over the years.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Nowhere,’ the secretary said. ‘It’s imaginary. Like a fairy tale.’
Scorpio said, ‘Huh.’
Then he disconnected, and made two more calls, both to reliable guys he knew, and then he locked up his laundromat and drove himself home.
SIX