The Midnight Line

Chapter 27

Bramall swung off the shoulder and took off in pursuit like the highway patrol. The truck up ahead was still moving fast. The road ran straight for long stretches, then dipped through hollows, and rose over knolls, and curved out of sight, but the dust cloud was always there, showing the way. The big Toyota growled along, pattering hard over the rough surface, going plenty fast itself, but their quarry wasn’t slowing any. In fact it was speeding up. At times the cloud between them grew half a mile long.

And then it was gone.

The Toyota came leaning out of a long fast curve, through the last of the dust, into clear air, pure and bright and empty for miles ahead.

No truck. Nothing there.

Behind them the severed cloud swayed in the wind, and pulled off the road, and died in the scrub.

Bramall stopped.

“She turned off,” Reacher said. “There’s no dust on the ranch roads. What’s back there?”

Bramall made a U-turn, shoulder to shoulder, and went back to see.

“Driveway on the left,” Mackenzie said. “I think. It’s hard to be sure.”

“The pie lady,” Reacher said. “Porterfield’s neighbor. We were here yesterday. We almost missed it then.”

“But the pie lady is out. We saw her go.”

Bramall turned in on the track and drove, the same way as the day before, but faster, twisting and rising through the trees, more than three miles, during which distance they saw nothing and no one, and then as before all of a sudden the trees opened up and the Toyota burst out on the flat acre with the long view east, and the one-story house, with its brown boards, and its ancient millwork, and its old church pew.

Nothing there.

No battered old SUV, caked with dust.

Nothing moving.

No sound.

Mackenzie said, “There must be other ways out of here. Like the places I showed you yesterday.”

Bramall drove on, in a wide bumpy circle, all the way around the house, around the outbuildings, always tight to the tree line. They saw three separate forest tracks running onward through the trees. One went due west, one went south, and one split the difference between. They were like trails for hikers or hunters, all worn and beaten down, all gnarled with roots and rocks, all dappled with gentle sunlight, all curving out of sight.

All narrow.

But good enough for a boxy old SUV.

It was impossible to say which one had just been used. The ground was bone dry. There were tire tracks everywhere, sharp in the dust.

“Want to gamble?” Bramall said.

“Waste of time,” Reacher said. “These trails have too many turns. The odds would get impossible. Plus your truck is bigger than hers. We’d get stuck.”

“If it was her,” Bramall said.

“Suppose it was.”

“Doesn’t matter which way she went,” Mackenzie said. “The question is why she went. What happened?”

“We scared her,” Reacher said. “We were waiting on the shoulder. We could have been state police. She didn’t want us to catch her. So she pulled off the road and tracked back on some weird forest service route only she knows. Now she’s laying low someplace, trying to figure out what she wants to do next.”

“Where?”

“Within about a thousand square miles of right here. In a spot we’ll never find.”

Mackenzie was quiet a beat.

Then she said, “Did you see the silver?”

Bramall said, “An impression.”

“What did you make of it?”

“A coat,” Bramall said. “With a hood.”

“But tight,” Reacher said. “I thought like athletic wear. The kind of thing they peel off before the race.”

“Did it look like foil?”

“Partly,” Bramall said. “Maybe the trim.”

Mackenzie said, “Why didn’t she want us to catch her?”

“She didn’t know it was you,” Reacher said. “She didn’t see your face. Her windows were dusty, and so were ours, and when she came by head-on, she was looking the other way. It wasn’t an emotional decision. It was practical. She thought we were cops. Maybe she’s the kind of person who can’t let a cop see the inside of her car.”

“If it was her,” Bramall said.

“Because she’s an addict,” Mackenzie said.

“Worst case,” Reacher said.

“Which happens.”

“More than never, less than always.”

“Which way are you leaning?”

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“Seriously.”

“I’m thinking about Seymour Porterfield,” Reacher said. “We’re assuming Billy took over his business, whereupon that kind of thing usually triggers some kind of vigorous expansion afterward, which seems to be the whole reason businesses get taken over in the first place, all because someone else sees missed opportunities. And this is not a type of business that ever gets smaller anyway. It only gets bigger. Therefore, long story short, on a theoretical basis, for a number of reasons, we could expect law enforcement to see Billy as a bigger proposition now than Porterfield ever was. But the Boy Detective as good as told us he isn’t even interested in a person like Billy. He said he was going to put his face in the system. That’s code for letting him walk away. Because he’s too boring to talk to. Whereas on the other hand, the even less interesting Seymour Porterfield has his own sealed file at the Pentagon.”

Bramall said, “Could be nothing. He might once have had small-time connections in Central America. The military wrote everything down. His file might be one word long. You know what that stuff was like. You were probably there.”

“Why would a one-word file be sealed?”

Bramall said, “I don’t know.”

“What do we actually know for sure about Porterfield?”

“Very little.”

“What impression did you get?”

“Like the neighbor said. A rich guy from out of state, come to find himself, maybe writing a novel.”

“Nice life.”

“You bet.”

“You liked his house.”

“I could live there.”

“He had everything a person could need,” Reacher said. “Including granite countertops and his very own file at the Pentagon. In fact he had three files at the Pentagon. One of which seems to cover some kind of a joint enterprise with an unspecified woman, during the last six months of his life. On top of which is the broken window in his house. Which looked like government work. Which is ridiculous. Until it isn’t. Plus the guy got eaten by a bear. Or a mountain lion. Either of which is highly unlikely. And all of which lead to wild speculations about what exactly happened during those last six months. Especially toward the end. Maybe Rose ran just now because a year and a half ago she learned not to trust expensive black vehicles full of people. So to answer Mrs. Mackenzie’s original question, I guess right now I’m leaning slightly away from the worst case. Worst cases are usually very banal. This thing feels more complex than that.”

Mackenzie said, “You think Porterfield wasn’t the man you thought he was?”

“He could have been ten times worse. Now I don’t know for sure. Which is the interesting part. It makes it equally possible he was ten times better.”

Bramall said, “If he was, how would Arthur Scorpio know his name?”

“Through Billy, maybe. Billy was Porterfield’s neighbor, just as much as the pie lady. They all talk. Maybe Scorpio liked to hear neighborhood gossip.”

“He had ten grand in a shoebox.”

“Maybe to live on while he wrote his novel.”

Bramall didn’t answer. His phone rang. He answered, and listened, and gave the phone to Reacher.

“It’s General Simpson,” he said. “For you.”

Reacher put the phone to his ear.

The supe said, “Porterfield was a U.S. Marine.”