The Midnight Line

Chapter 34

The magic hour was the last part of the sun’s daily travel, like a sixty-minute farewell performance, when it was low in the sky, shining sideways through the atmosphere, which reddened its colors and lengthened its shadows. Reacher sat on the porch step and watched the tawny plain go gold, then ochre, then chili-pepper red. Bramall was below him, on a rock at the edge of the ravine. The guys from the crew-cab were sitting in the dirt, leaning their backs on trees.

The door opened and Mackenzie stepped out.

Reacher stood up, and she came down the steps past him, onto the path through the scrub. Meanwhile the guys from the crew-cab all got up and dusted themselves off. Mackenzie met them at the end of the path. She shook their hands, one by one, and thanked them for caring about her sister.

Then she said to Bramall, “Back to the hotel.”

Mackenzie felt weird, she said, leaving her sister where she was, but Rose would have it no other way. She liked it there, she said, and she had everything she needed. She refused to leave, categorically, even for one night, even to see a doctor. She refused even to consider going to the hospital, or the Veterans Administration, or looking at a clinic, or a rehab center, or living in Lake Forest, Illinois.

“Give her time,” Bramall said.

They made the turn at the old Mule Crossing post office, and drove back to Laramie on the two-lane. They ate in town, and drove back out to the hotel, where Bramall parked and said good night. Reacher stayed out in the lot again. The night sky was still there. Still huge and black and dusted with millions of bright stars. Microscopically changed, he supposed, since the night before. But not because of his tiny dramas. It was completely indifferent.

Mackenzie came out and sat down on the bench.

He sat down beside her.

She said, “She’s only halfway addicted.”

He said, “I had a brother. Not a twin, but we were close growing up. Now I’m asking myself, if this was him, what would I want from people? Something polite, or something uncomfortable? I’m not making a point here. I really don’t know. Help me out.”

“I want the truth,” she said.

“She looked a lot more than halfway addicted to me.”

“I meant her reasons. She’s in pain. Partly she needs it. She’s not doing it just for fun.”

“What’s with the aluminum foil?”

“The infection. She scrounges up antibiotics if she can, and grinds them down, and mixes them with antiseptic salve from the first-aid aisle. She spreads it on the foil like butter. If she can spare one, she mixes in an oxycodone pill.”

“Not the life she expected.”

“You knew last night. When you asked how we felt about being pretty.”

“It was the only thing that fit.”

“She’s doing OK, I think.”

“Me, too.”

“I even liked the house, in a way. I was surprised. For some reason I thought it would be dark inside.”

“Me, too,” he said again.

“Now tell me what happens next.”

“I wish I knew.”

“Seriously,” she said. “I need to figure out how to handle this.”

“She’s doing OK because she gets high every day. You could give her money, I suppose, and most likely she would continue to do OK, as long as this new guy Stackley keeps on showing up on time, and as long as the Boy Detective doesn’t plug the last leak and put everyone out of business.”

“Which could happen.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” Reacher said. “Her situation out there is not as secure as she thinks it is.”

“Even if it was, I couldn’t leave her there.”

“How are you going to move her out?”

“That’s what I’m asking. I’m open to ideas.”

Reacher said, “Is she getting no treatment at all?”

“At the beginning she was in the hospital a whole year. She ran out of patience. She hasn’t seen anyone since. She won’t. She refuses to.”

“Instead she lives quietly and self-medicates. She does it well enough we both just agreed she’s doing OK. We should respect that. The only way to get her out of there is promise her the exact same thing someplace else. Or even better. As many pills and patches as she wants. You would have to find the right kind of doctor. You would have to find her a quiet place to live. You would have to promise her no hassle. And you would have to mean it. Nothing for a year at least. Which is OK. This kind of thing is a very long game.”

“She doesn’t like people to see her.”

“Then she’s better off here than Illinois.”

“They don’t have the right kind of doctors here.”

“How big is your yard?”

“I think six acres.”

“You could build her a cabin. With a high fence. You could throw her prescriptions over. Leave her alone for a year. See what happens.”

“So the only way to help her is to be a better pusher.”

“The Boy Detective said we shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of an opiate high. I’m sure she’s real pleased to see you, but you should assume getting what she needs right now feels more important to her.”

“That’s tough to accept. Not about me. That she’s so far gone.”

“She needs you on her side right now. Proving that is your job one. Don’t disapprove of her. What choice does she have? Just bite your lip and shovel pills down her throat. Don’t forget she’s tough underneath. She’s a combat veteran. Sooner or later she’ll realize she needs to shape up or ship out, and then she’ll want to talk. To you especially, because you were the one who treated her right. That’s when you can help her.”

“I hope I can.”

“There are books about it. You can spend the first year reading.”

“Did you take classes?”

“Not enough curriculum time,” Reacher said. “In the MPs it was all rubber hoses and nightsticks. But the medics had good people. Psychiatrists in uniform. The weirdest thing you ever saw. Always some inflated rank. I knew a couple. They would tell you a bunch of things.”

“Like what?”

“They would tell you to figure out what’s upsetting her deep down.”

“That’s obvious, surely.”

“But they’re shrinks, and they’re in the army. They would say a person can have two things wrong at once. They would say they know what infantry officers are like. They would want more detail on the incident with the roadside bomb.”

“Why?”

“Specifically they would want to know if there were other American casualties. If so, they would assume Rose is taking it hard. She was an infantry officer. She got her people killed. The facts don’t count. She could have been already wounded and unconscious before anything else even happened. Doesn’t matter. They’re her people. It’s her fault. That’s how infantry officers think. Small words, but they mean a lot to those guys. The top boy at West Point said she led her soldiers well. That’s the hall of fame right there. You could put that on your tombstone. She led her soldiers well. An infantry officer couldn’t hear finer words than those. Because it’s hard to do. Ultimately it works because you make an unspoken promise not to get them killed. It becomes a thing in your head.”

Mackenzie said, “She won’t talk about it.”

Reacher said, “The shrinks would also want to know the status of the mission. Was it a routine kind of thing ordered from above? Or was there an element of initiative involved? In which case, they would assume she was taking it even harder. She led her soldiers into harm’s way, literally.”

“They’re shrinks. You said so yourself. They overcomplicate things. If you hear hoof beats, you look for horses, not zebras. Rose is upset deep down because someone stuck her face in a blender and smeared it with dog shit.”

Reacher said nothing.

Mackenzie said, “What?”

“I’m sure that’s most of it. How could it not be?”

“But?”

“I think like a cop. I can’t help it. Her final rank was major. The guy at West Point told me on her last tour she was doing a pretty big job. Which for a major means desk time and briefings. She had limited opportunities to get out and about. Why would she choose to go look at the side of a road outside a small town? She wouldn’t. She was bored with that kind of stuff four tours ago. She went because her command presence was required. She had some kind of operation running. She had captains below her, and lieutenants below them, all covering their own ass, so we can be certain the protective detail around her was thick on the ground. We can be certain lots of people were involved. Was she the only one hurt? Unlikely, but we don’t know for sure. The files are sealed. Which means most likely her operation was a failure. Perhaps with multiple U.S. casualties. So her face may not be all of it.”

Mackenzie said, “I don’t know if you’re trying to cheer me up, or bring me down.”

“It’s all bad,” Reacher said. “Whichever way around. Let’s not be Pollyanna. But she had a boyfriend. Sy Porterfield. There were two dents in the bed. That says something about how she sees herself. It’s a glimmer of what might be possible.”

“She won’t talk about him. I told her about the comb you found, and she didn’t deny it. She said it was safer I didn’t know. Whatever that means.”

“She thought I was an investigator come to ask questions about him.”

“No one believes the bear story.”

“Which could be an additional traumatizing factor. She really doesn’t know what happened to her boyfriend. She really isn’t sure which would be worse, the bear or not. The shrinks would throw a party. They would tell you it’s a whole big mixture of things.”

“In other words it could be worse than just her face.”

“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 center of town. Earlier in his life he had favored 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 gray. 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 voicemail 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 voicemail 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 curb.

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 of 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.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I guess I was daydreaming. I guess it was a good thing no one else was around.”

The cop was pretty sure the air coming off the guy smelled like beer.

He said, “License.”

Billy dug in his pocket and handed it over.

The cop said, “Sir, please wait there.”

He walked back to his car, as slowly as he could. He got in. He had a computer terminal on a swan neck, bolted to the tunnel near the shifter. Courtesy of the last new mayor. All kinds of budget promises.

He typed in Billy’s details.

Up came a code from the western division of the federal DEA.

He got out of the car again. He walked back to Billy, as slowly as he could, and when he got there he spun him around, and banged his head on the old Ford’s roof, and cuffed his hands behind his back.