The Midnight Line

Chapter 15

Forty minutes later Reacher was alone on the two-lane’s shoulder, watching the pick-up truck drive away. The mouth of the forest road was overgrown with sagebrush, and it had a heavy chain slung across it, dipping low between two weathered posts. He stepped over it and set out hiking. The altitude was more than eight thousand feet above sea level, and the air was thin. The effort made him breathe hard, and left him light-headed. The forest was mostly fir and pine, dappled with sun, blazing here and there with bright yellow groves of aspen. His normal rule of thumb for walking north through a wood was to look for moss on the tree trunks. Less of it would be facing east, south and west. Regular daylight would see to that. But the mountain air was bone dry and there was no moss at all. So he navigated by the sun. It was mid-morning, so he kept it forty-five degrees behind his right shoulder. He kept his shadow ahead and to the left. He angled west where he could, and felt the ground rise under his feet. An hour or less, he figured, before he got to the back side of the U-shaped ridge. He pictured Billy, watching the wrong horizon. He trudged on, panting.

Nakamura walked the corridor to her lieutenant’s corner suite, and said, “Reacher called me last night.”

Her lieutenant said, “Who?”

“Bigfoot,” she said. “The Incredible Hulk.”

“And?”

“He asked me to hold off a day before calling the sheriff in Wyoming.”

“Why would he?”

“He pointed out there was no specific location mentioned in Scorpio’s voicemail, and therefore he felt a warning wouldn’t mean much to law enforcement out there. He didn’t want to waste anyone’s time.”

“That’s very scrupulous of him.”

“I got the impression he wants freedom of action.”

“Do you think he should have it?”

“That’s not for me to say. Or him, either.”

“We work for the people of Rapid City, and no one else. Certainly not a bunch of cowboys out west.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Therefore, on that basis, what helps Rapid City most?”

Nakamura said nothing.

“Well?”

“I checked him out,” Nakamura said. “I made some calls. He was an elite MP. He has medals. He’s possibly better prepared than the average person.”

“Can he help us with Scorpio?”

You could put him in a zoo.

She said, “I really don’t see how he could hurt.”

“OK then,” the lieutenant said. “Wait a day.”

Then he said, “No, wait two days.”

Reacher found what had to be the lower back slope of the U-shaped ridge after fifty minutes of hiking. The dirt underfoot was thin and gritty. There were pine cones everywhere, some of them the size of softballs. He climbed slowly, with short choppy steps, kicking his toes into the dirt for grip. He got close to the top and found what might have been a fox trail that led him the rest of the way to the summit. He dropped to his knees and took a look.

He was a couple hundred yards east of where he needed to be. He dropped back to the fox trail and went west, three minutes at a slow pace, arms out for balance.

He took another look.

Now Billy’s place was directly below him, fifty yards away.

It was a log house, stained dull brown, with a log barn, both structures surrounded by beaten-down brush and dusty red dirt. A rutted driveway ran away through the woods, appearing and reappearing in the gaps between the trees. On the right the land fell away and flattened into wide empty plains. The old post office was visible in the far distance, and the firework store, and the two-lane road. There was a grazing herd of pronghorns about a mile away. The dirt road was vivid ochre, neatly scraped, nicely cambered. On the left the land rose into low jagged peaks, like miniature mountain ranges, like premonitions of what would come for real a hundred miles farther west. The air was still and unnaturally clear. The sky was deep blue. There was absolute silence.

Billy’s house had a green metal roof, and small windows with no light inside. Not a trophy cabin. Not a weekend place. But not a mess, either. No junk in the yard. No rusted washing machines. No cars up on blocks. No pit bull on a chain. Just a workaday house.

No people.

Reacher eased down the near slope, slowly, from tree to tree. Forty yards away. Thirty. A pine cone rolled ahead of him and hit a bump and kicked up in the air.

He froze.

No reaction.

He kept on going, stepping sideways for grip, staying where the trees were thickest. Twenty yards away. Ten. He could see Billy’s back door. Footsteps had beaten a path from it to a similar door in the back of the barn.

He stopped five yards inside the tree line. Safe enough. All was quiet. He waited. He figured Billy wouldn’t have taken Scorpio’s voicemail literally. The guy wouldn’t be hiding behind an actual tree with his rifle at his shoulder. He was more likely sitting in a chair on his front porch. With his rifle on the boards beside him. He could see twenty miles. He would figure he would get plenty of early warning.

Reacher moved east through the trees and lined up with the back of the barn. His first port of call. He took a breath and stepped out.

No reaction.

He crossed the open space, controlled, not fast, not slow, with tiny slaps and crunches from his feet on the grit and the gravel.

No reaction.

He pressed up against the back of the barn. There were no windows. The personnel door was ten feet to his left. He crabbed sideways and tried the handle. Locked. Which was a pity. Barns were usually good for useful stuff. Hammers, hatchets, wrenches, knives. He crabbed back to where he started, and onward to the corner. The house was twenty feet away. Still quiet. The side facing him was made of heavy logs, and it had two small windows on the first floor and two on the second. All four were backed by half-closed sun-faded drapes.

He took another breath and crossed the open space. He pressed his back hard against the logs. The first-floor window sills were about level with his shoulder. He inched closer and risked a one-eyed look inside. He saw a powder room, with a closed door. He moved on. Checked the second window. Saw a small alcove at the foot of a staircase. Beyond it was the front half of a living room. Two more windows, a front door, a stone fireplace, well-worn armchairs. Log walls, stained dark.

No people.

The front door would lead to a front porch.

Which would be around the next exterior corner.

He moved on, slow and cautious. He stopped a foot short of the corner and listened hard. Heard nothing except silence, and the tiniest eddy of breeze through the trees, and the caw of a rook far in the distance. No breathing, no movement, no creak of wood. Nothing at all.

One more half step.

He peered around the corner. Saw a covered porch, with a railing, and two heavy wooden chairs, and a swing seat hanging motionless on four thick chains.

No people.

No rifle resting on the boards.

No Billy.

Reacher shuffled sideways to the rear corner of the house. He paused a beat, and slid around, and moved along the back wall. He checked the first window he came to. A kitchen. Still and quiet and no one in it. Next to the kitchen window was a kitchen door. Solid wood. No glass. He passed it by and checked a second window. A small back parlor. A desk, a chair. Still and quiet and no one in it.

Silence.

He crept back to the kitchen door. Now logic said Billy was upstairs. He had been warned. His view would be marginally better from a second-floor window. He would see a mile or more of the two-lane beyond the old post office. He would get six or seven minutes, even if an incoming vehicle was driving fast.

Reacher tried the door handle.

It turned.

The door opened.

He pushed it gently, with spread fingers. The kitchen air smelled still and stale. There were dark wood cabinets and a cold stove. Yesterday’s dishes were in the sink. There was tile on the floor. The inside door was open to the living room. No people. Last winter’s ash was still in the fireplace. A poker and a brush and a long-handled shovel were propped together in a stand on the hearth stones.

Slowly, carefully, he eased the poker out of the stand. It was iron, about a yard long, and it had a vicious hook at the end, jutting out like a hitchhiker’s thumb.

Better than nothing.

He crept to the foot of the stairs. Listened hard. The log construction was massive and solid. No sound. Nothing at all.

He started up the stairs. The moment of maximum vulnerability. Nothing to be done if Billy showed up shooting in the upstairs hallway. Short of swinging the poker at the bullet like a slugger going after a high fastball. Unlikely to work. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The stairs were sawn half-logs about ten inches thick. No danger of creaking. He held his breath.

He made it to the top. Directly ahead of him was a half-open door to a bathroom, directly above the kitchen. No one in it. Ahead and to his right was a half-open door to a back bedroom, above the back parlor. No one in it. He turned in the hallway and faced two front bedrooms. One had a wide-open door. No one in it.

One had a closed door.

Reacher held the poker across his body, at port arms.

You and me, Billy, he thought.

There was a rag rug in the upstairs hallway. He stepped onto it and walked slowly, carefully, silently. He stopped four feet short of the door. He was a big believer in shock and awe and surprise and overwhelming force. What used to be called common sense, before the Pentagon pointy-heads started dreaming up fancy names for simple concepts. He set his feet and rocked back and forth, back and forth, like a high-jumper going for a record, and then he smashed through the door with the sole of his boot and exploded into the room with the poker scything through the air in front of him.

The room was empty.

No Billy.

Just an unmade bed, and the sour smell of sleep, and a three-pane window with a perfect view to the horizon. Nothing out there except the herd of pronghorns, grazing unconcerned a mile away.

Reacher had searched a lot of houses, and he found the barn keys in the first place he looked, on a nail in the wall near the kitchen door. The barn was a big one-story space that smelled of dust and wood stain and cold motor oil. There were bald tires and all kinds of mechanical junk and a detached snowplow blade stacked on the floor. No actual vehicles. Nothing else of interest. He went back to the house and stood on the front porch and checked the view. He traced the route, along the driveway, along the dirt road, bit by bit, his eyes moving like a finger on a map, all the way out past the old post office and the firework store.

Nothing coming.

No dust on the dirt road.

He started downstairs and searched the house methodically, running a clock in his head, returning to the porch every sixty seconds to check the horizon. There was nothing of significance in the kitchen. Nothing in the living room. Billy seemed to be a guy with neat but not obsessive habits. The place was reasonably tidy and reasonably clean. The stuff in it was neither obviously expensive nor obviously cheap. It was clear he lived alone.

The back parlor was set up as an office. A desk, a chair, a file cabinet. On the desk was a cell phone. A simple thing. Old fashioned but not old. It was plugged in to a charger. The battery icon said a hundred percent. The screen said New Message.

Sixty seconds. Reacher slipped out to the porch and checked the view. Nothing coming. He went back to the office. He had never owned a cell phone, but he had used one from time to time. He knew how they worked. At the bottom of the screen were the words Menu and Play, and below them were two slim bar-shaped buttons. He pressed the bar below Play.

He heard a nervous breath and a throat being cleared.

Then he heard Scorpio’s voice.

It said, “Billy, this is Arthur. We got some weird shit going on. Nothing real serious. Just a strange piece of bad luck. Some guy showed up chasing a ring.”

Sixty seconds. Reacher stepped out to the front porch again and checked the view. Still nothing coming. He went back in and up the stairs to the slept-in bedroom. First thing he looked at was the closet. Just for fun. Against the back wall behind a rail of hanging pants he found four shoeboxes. They were neatly stacked two on two. The top two held shoes. White athletic sneakers on the left, and rubber soled black leather dress items on the right. The kind of thing a country boy might wear to a wedding or a funeral or a visit with the loan officer at the bank. Both pairs had been worn, but not often. Both pairs were size eight and a half. The hanging pants were all thirty-two waist and thirty leg.

Billy was a small guy.

Sixty seconds. He checked out the window.

There was a long dust plume on the dirt road.

A hanging ochre cloud, long, spiraling, and drifting. A vehicle, coming on fast. Still just a tiny dot in the distance. Too far away to see what it was.

Six minutes, maybe.

He went back in the closet. Checked the bottom pair of boxes.

One was full of money.

Tens and twenties and fifties, used and creased, sour and greasy, done up in inch-thick bricks with rubber bands. Maybe ten grand in total. Maybe more.

The other box was full of trinkets. Mostly gold. Gold crosses on thin tangled chains, gold earrings, gold bracelets, gold charms, gold chokers.

And gold rings.

Some were wedding rings.

Some were class rings.

Reacher stepped back to the window and watched. The dust plume was a mile long, hanging in the motionless air. At the head of it was a tiny dark dot, quivering, bobbing, bouncing. The pronghorn herd rippled, uneasy.

The tiny dot looked black.

It was hammering and juddering right to left in front of him. It was doing maybe forty miles an hour. Maybe more. Some kind of familiarity with the terrain, or some kind of urgency, or some kind of both.

He waited.

It slowed.

The dust cloud caught up with it.

It turned in at the driveway.

Billy’s ride would be a pick-up truck, Reacher figured. Snowplows usually were. Winter tires, chains, a hydraulic mechanism for the blade, extra spotlights mounted high. All detached in the summer, leaving a familiar silhouette. Hood, cab, bed.

Which Reacher didn’t see.

It wasn’t a pick-up truck.

It was big and square and boxy. An SUV. A black SUV. Travel stained and dusty. It flashed in and out of sight through the trees. Then it pulled clear and drove the last hundred yards over the beaten red dirt.

It slowed and turned and came to a stop.

It was a Toyota Land Cruiser.

It had Illinois plates.