The Midnight Line

Chapter 24

They left Noble in the house, and drove back to Laramie, with Reacher sprawled across the rear seat, and Mackenzie upright in the front, and Bramall at the wheel, one-handed. They agreed on the chain hotel Reacher and Bramall had used the night before. It had proved adequate, except for no coffee. Reacher said the diner he had found was a good substitute. Bramall agreed. He had found it, too. He said breakfast there was excellent.

“But then what?” Mackenzie said. “What do we do after breakfast? What’s our next move? We have nothing now.”

“Thanks to the DEA,” Bramall said. “Trust them to start a stampede.”

“We have more than some folks,” Reacher said. “I agree, losing Billy is an inconvenience. But it’s worse for others. Like that lady up near the old homestead. Even all the way out there. She needed something bad today. She was getting scratchy. She was waiting for Billy. But he isn’t coming. So what next for her? Tomorrow she’ll be desperate. She’ll come looking, surely. She’ll come to town. They all will. If Rose is an addict, she’ll come to us.”

They met in the lobby at eight in the morning. Bramall was in a fresh shirt and Mackenzie was in a fresh blouse. Reacher’s clothes were a day old, but he felt OK in their company. He had used a whole bar of soap in the shower. They walked up to the diner and got a table. Mackenzie was OK with it.

She said, “Maybe six weeks ago the price of pills had gone especially high, and that’s why she had to sell her ring. To afford them.”

“Maybe,” Reacher said.

“I want it to be pills,” she said. “Not needles in a toilet stall.”

“Of course.”

“I’m sure Special Agent Noble was speaking broadly when he said there are no pills on the black market anymore. There must be some.”

Reacher said nothing.

Mackenzie said, “Before this is over, I’ll want to know why it happened.”

“Probably our fault,” Reacher said. “Depends on the wound she got. Could have been a scratch, but if it was something serious on the battlefield, with the medics under fire and so on, then she’ll have gotten a morphine jab ahead of a rough evacuation. Then maybe another morphine jab ahead of triage, and another while she was waiting for surgery. And then she got two weeks in a recovery room with a big tub of opioid pain medication by the bed. She was probably an addict before she left the hospital.”

“Depending on the wound. Maybe it’s still painful. Maybe that’s why she needs the pills. Or the powder, now. With the needles in the toilet stall. If Agent Noble is right.”

“Did your sister wear silver clothes?”

“Why?”

“Porterfield’s neighbor might have seen her in his car. She remembers a silvery color.”

“Was it winter?”

“A month before the start of spring.”

“You can get winter coats in silver. Almost like foil. Like a high-tech material.”

“Would she wear that color?”

“I might,” Mackenzie said.

Reacher thought about it. The hair, the eyes, the face, with a silver foil coat. She would look like the picture on the back of a shiny magazine.

An exact replica.

They drove to the university geography department and took another look at the giant book of maps. They traced the settlements westward, from the Mule Crossing turn. First came Billy’s place, south of the dirt road, and then Porterfield’s, north of it, and then his neighbor’s, south again. They had seen all of those. Beyond them lay twelve more places. Six each side of the road, altogether stretching forty long miles into the mountains. Then the dirt road ended. No way out, except to turn around. Not really a bowl, not really a valley. Just a chain of rising foothills, with a road that quit when the mountains came.

Mackenzie said, “You think she’s in there somewhere.”

Reacher said, “She was either living with Porterfield, or she was visiting with him on a regular basis, yet no one ever saw her, except maybe one occasion. If she lived anywhere else, she would have to drive in and out through Mule Crossing every single time. More people would have seen her, surely. Maybe even the old guy in the post office. But no one ever did. She must have been driving there and back the other way. Deeper into the hills. A buck gets ten she’s there right now. Where else would she go?”

“She doesn’t own a car,” Bramall said. “Not according to the Wyoming DMV. Or any other state.”

“She camps out in abandoned ranch houses. Either she finds cars or steals them. She doesn’t care whose name is on the title. All a car has to do is start up when she needs it.”

“I want to go there,” Mackenzie said. “Back to Mule Crossing. It’s like the neck of a funnel. If she’s in there, she’s got to come out sooner or later. I want to be there when she does.”

“If I’m right,” Reacher said.

“If you’re wrong, we’ll find her in town tonight. Or tomorrow.”

They pulled over and sat in the car, near the old post office, in a spot where they would get a good head-on view of anything coming down the dirt road. Just before the turn, where everyone would slow right down, and look first one way, and then the other, carefully, before making the left or the right on the pavement. Close enough for faces. At first it was awkward. Reacher figured they were all having the same trouble, picturing exactly what it was they expected to see. They knew the theory. The lack of Billy would draw the addicts out. But what would that look like? Reacher had seen his share of movie trailers. The walking dead. All kinds of zombies. He realized he was expecting some kind of apocalyptic vision.

The first candidate approached out of the west in an ancient pick-up truck that was lurching and bouncing and trailing a dust cloud a mile long. Not Rose Sanderson. The driver turned out to be a thin-faced man, with a turned-down mouth, as disapproving as an old-time preacher. Maybe an addict, maybe not. He looked left and right and turned toward Colorado.

The dust cloud settled.

They waited.

From the back seat, Reacher asked Mackenzie, “Where were you, when Rose was at West Point?”

She turned around.

“University of Chicago,” she said. “Then Princeton, for postgrad.”

“Studying what?”

“English literature. Different, I know.”

“Not so different. Some of them can read at West Point now. If you take it slow and point to the letters.”

She smiled.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “I know Rose is as smart as I am. Obviously. It’s a scientific fact. I meant she was prepared to kill people, and I wasn’t.”

“That was the big dispute?”

“It was never a big dispute. We never fell out. But things happened so fast back then. All of a sudden Rose was in the army. And that was a serious thing. Our resources were stretched thin. She was hardly ever home for nine years. I was never told where she was. I couldn’t go visit. Most of the time I couldn’t even call. Meanwhile I was working. I got married. That’s how it was. We had real lives. Like everyone else with a sibling.”

“Except she was prepared to kill people, and you weren’t.”

“I don’t mean she wanted to, or planned to. It was an ethical discussion. That’s all. We were eighteen. I wasn’t saying it had to be all or nothing. In fact it never is. No one says always or never. Everyone says sometimes. But her sometimes were not the same as mine. She would pull the trigger before I would. Which was OK. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was naïve. It wasn’t the difference of opinion that bothered me. We always had different opinions. It was that she had thought about it, seriously, carefully, and decided yes, she could do it. For real. Which changed her a little. She changed herself, by deciding it. For the first time ever I felt not the same as her.”

Reacher said nothing.

She turned back.

They waited.

The second candidate for the apocalypse was the woman who had given the strawberry pie to Sy Porterfield. His neighbor. Second place on the left. She was in a battered Jeep SUV. She looked left and right and turned toward Laramie. Maybe heading to the market. Maybe planning to spend time in the fruit aisle.

The third vehicle they saw came from behind them. It turned in off the two-lane, and passed them by, and set out down the dirt road west.

It was a pick-up truck.

On the front it had snowplow pistons, bolted to the frame.