The Midnight Line, Page 9

  instead. She went in and looked around. An inventory check. She saw all kinds of canned and packaged foods, and coolers full of soda and juice and beer in bottles, and rolls of paper towel, and potato chips and candy, and a deli counter, and behind the register a wall of small stuff, including over-the-counter medications, and vitamin pills, and batteries, and phone chargers.

  And phones.

  She saw no-contract cell phones, in plastic bubble packs. Lots of them, in two rows, on two pegs, left and right, next to a faded sign saying pregnant women shouldn’t drink too much.

  She pointed and asked, “Did Arthur Scorpio just buy one of those?”

  The counterman said, “Oh, Jesus.”

  “No big deal if he did. You’re not in trouble. Information is all I need.”

  The counterman said, “Yes, he bought one. And some painkillers.”

  “Which one?”

  “Which painkiller?”

  “Which phone? Left peg or right peg?”

  The counterman thought about it. He pointed.

  “Right peg,” he said. “More convenient for me.”

  “Give me the next two.”

  The guy took down two more bubble packs and Nakamura handed over her credit card. When she was back in her car she called her friend in Computer Crimes. She said, “Scorpio bought a burner in the convenience store. I got the next two off the rack. I’m going to bring them to you. I need you to figure out if the numbers run in some kind of predictable sequence. If they do, maybe we can put Scorpio back on the radar.”

  “I’ll try my best,” her friend said.

  Terry Bramall let himself into his motel room, and hung his suit coat in the closet. He took his phone from his briefcase and set about answering his messages. The first was from some guy he had never heard of named Reacher. We waited in line together last night for sandwiches and we were briefly in the breakfast place at the same time this morning. And then something to do with Arthur Scorpio and stolen property.

  He hit delete, because he was done with Scorpio.

  The second message was from his client Mrs. Mackenzie. Anxious about progress, understandably. I would like to hear either way, so please call me back as soon as you can. He didn’t. He didn’t like talking on the phone, especially with anxious clients. So he texted back instead, slowly and methodically, using only his right forefinger: Dear Mrs. Mackenzie, progress remains very satisfactory, and I hope to have definitive news very soon. Best wishes, T. Bramall.

  He pressed send.

  In Casper, Reacher had a choice. He could stick with I-25 and head south and east to Cheyenne, whereupon Laramie would be a short hop west again on I-80. Or he could go direct on a state road. Two fast sides of a triangle versus one slow side. The hitchhiker’s eternal dilemma.

  He chose the state road. He was sick of the highway. And he had plenty of time. There was no big hurry. The ring had been out of Wyoming for six weeks. No red-hot trail to follow. He walked west out of town, more than a mile, until the commercial lots left and right petered out into high desert scrub. A hundred yards later he found a head-high sign that said Laramie 152 miles. He set up next to it. He felt it told the story. He watched the horizon for oncoming traffic. There wasn’t much.

  Scorpio gave his sentries twenty bucks and a bottle of Tylenol each, and then sent them home. They went out the front, and he went in the back room. He sat down at a long counter loaded with humming equipment. He tore apart the bubble pack and took out his new phone. He dialed the activation number, and then he dialed a 307 number.

  Wyoming.

  Ring tone.

  No answer.

  A voice invited him to leave a message.

  He 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. He wasn’t a cop. He knew nothing at all. He was just a random passerby, interested in the wrong thing at the wrong time. Turned out he was kind of tough to get rid of, so in the end I gave him Sy Porterfield’s name. Which means sooner or later he’s likely to arrive in your neck of the woods. Don’t mess with him. Use a deer rifle from behind a tree. I’m not kidding about that. He’s like the Incredible Hulk. Don’t even let him see you. But get on it, OK? He’s got to go, because he’s a random loose end. Easier for you to deal with out there than it would be for me here. So get it done.”

  Then he added, “Your privileges are suspended till I hear back from you.”

  He clicked off and dropped the phone in the trash basket.

  Chapter 12

  Reacher arrived in downtown Laramie at six o’clock in the evening, after 152 miles in the passenger seat of an ancient Ford Bronco, driven by a guy who made his living turning logs into sculptures with a chainsaw. He let Reacher out on the corner of Third Street and Grand Avenue, which the guy seemed to regard as some kind of an exact geographic center. Which it might have been. But it was quiet. Everything had closed at five, except the bars and the restaurants, and it was still early for them.

  Reacher turned a full circle and got his bearings. The railroad tracks lay to the west. The university was east. South was a straight shot to Colorado, and north was back toward Casper. He headed west for the tracks and stopped in at the first bar he liked the look of. It had a mirror on the wall with a bullet hole in it. As if some old desperado had come in mad about something. Maybe faked, maybe real. It was all the same to the mirror.

  The room was quiet and the crowd was thin, and the barman had time on his hands. Reacher asked him directions to Mule Crossing. The guy said he had never heard of it.

  “Where are you looking for?” some other guy called out. He had foam on his lip, from a long hard pull on a long-neck bottle. Maybe a helpful guy, maybe a busybody into everyone’s business, maybe a local expert eager to show off his specialist knowledge.

  Or a mixture of all three.

  “Mule Crossing,” Reacher said.

  “Nothing there,” the guy said. “Except a firework store.”

  “I heard it was a small town.”

  “This is a small town. Mule Crossing is a wide spot in the road. There was a post office, but it closed twenty years ago. I think there’s a flea market in there now. Maybe you can get soda and potato chips. No gas, that’s for sure.”

  “How many people live there?”

  The guy took another pull on his bottle.

  He said, “Five or six, maybe.”

  “That all?”

  “The flea market guy, for sure. Probably not the firework guy. Who would live above a firework store? Probably wouldn’t sleep a wink. I bet he drives in from somewhere else. But there’s a dirt road into the hills. People have cabins. Maybe four or five of them. According to the postal service it’s all officially Mule Crossing. Which is why they had a post office there, I guess. The Zip Code is about the size of Chicago. With five people. But hey, welcome to Wyoming.”

  “Where is it exactly?”

  “Forty minutes south. Take the state road out toward Colorado. Look for a billboard about bottle rockets.”

  Reacher walked back to the corner of Third and Grand. He was optimistic about getting a ride. To his left was a university and straight ahead an hour away was legal weed. But it was getting dark. Might not be much to see. Clearly Mule Crossing was no kind of a bustling metropolis.

  On the other hand, the flea market guy lived there.

  He probably had a doorbell.

  No time like the present.

  Reacher walked south on Third Street, in the gutter, with his thumb out.

  Gloria Nakamura rode the elevator two floors down to Computer Crimes, where she found her friend in his cubicle. He had torn her two phones out of their packaging. Now they were side by side on his desk above his keyboard. Their screens were blank.

  “Sleep mode,” he said. “All is well.”

  “You got the number?”

  “You have to act it out. Pretend you’re a Chinese assembly worker. In fact don’t
, because your job was just automated and now you’re not there at all. Pretend you’re a machine instead. The phone numbers are carried on the SIM cards, bought in bulk from the service providers, and installed fairly late in the process, I would think. Then the heat-sealed packaging goes on, with the cardboard insert, and the packages slide off the line one after the other into shipping cartons, which are taken away by another conveyor belt. How many in a box, do you think?”

  Nakamura thought about it, and said, “Ten, probably. A place like that convenience store wouldn’t want more than ten at a time. Mom-and-pop pharmacies would be the same. The manufacturers must know their market. So it’s a small box. Bigger than a shoebox, but not by much.”

  “And are the phone numbers sequential?”

  “It would help.”

  “Let’s assume they are. Why wouldn’t they be? There are plenty of new numbers to go around. So they fall off the line and go into the box in numerical order, one, two, three, all the way up to ten. So far so good. But we don’t know what happens when they’re unpacked. This is where you need to act it out. You slit the tape and you rest the box on the counter, and then you hang the contents on two pegs on a board behind the register. Talk me through it.”

  Nakamura glanced at an imaginary counter, and then over her shoulder at a pair of imaginary pegs. She said, “First I would rotate the box so the plastic blisters were facing toward me. So that I could pick them up, and turn a 180, and place them on the pegs face-out. Any other way would be a contortion.”

  The tech said, “And presumably they rode the conveyor belt with the blister upward and the flat side down, for stability. So if you have the blisters toward you, number one is nearest and number ten is farthest away. How many would you pick up at once?”

  “I would do them one at a time. Those pegs are awkward.”

  “Starting where? Front or back of the box?”

  “Front,” she said.

  “Which peg first?”

  “The further one. More satisfying to fill that first. The nearer one is easier. Like a reward.”

  “So what do you get on the right-hand peg?”

  “Numbers six through ten, in reverse order. Number ten will get bought first. Then nine, then eight, and so on. What were my numbers?”

  “They weren’t sequential,” the tech said. “There was a two-digit gap. You gave me a seven and a four, essentially. Or a four and a seven. I don’t know which came off the peg first.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nakamura said. “I should have marked the order.”

  “Don’t worry. Let’s make another assumption. Let’s say the convenience store guy gets his satisfaction a different way than you. Maybe he fills the pegs left, right, left, right. Perhaps he likes that better.”

  “Then numbers four and seven couldn’t be together on the same peg.”

  “So let’s make another assumption, based on the fact that you have the smallest hands in the world, and the convenience store guy is reasonably dexterous, working as he does with knives and what-not, so perhaps he hung them two at a time.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That would put three and four on the right, immediately behind seven and eight. If I bought seven and four, then Scorpio bought eight. His phone number is one higher than mine.”

  “And listen to what my buddy at the phone company found,” her friend said. He shuffled his mouse and his screen lit up. He clicked on an email, and then on an audio file, and jagged green bandwidth spiked on the screen, and Scorpio said, “Billy, this is Arthur. We got some weird shit going on.”

  Reacher got a ride from two kids pulling out of a gas station on the southern edge of town. A boy and a girl. Grad students, probably, or undergrads with great ID. They said they were headed to Fort Collins, across the state line. Shopping, they said, but not for what. Their car was a tidy little sedan. Unlikely to attract a trooper’s attention. Safe enough, for the return leg of their journey.

  They said they knew the bottle rocket billboard. And sure enough, after forty minutes on a gentle two-lane road, there it was, on the right shoulder, caught square in the high beams. It was bright yellow, half urgent, and half quaint. The students pulled over, and Reacher got out. The students drove away, and Reacher stood alone in the silence. The firework store itself was dark and closed up tight. Beyond it fifty yards south was a ramshackle building with a light in a small square upstairs window. The flea market, presumably. The former post office.

  Reacher walked toward it.

  Nakamura carried her laptop to her lieutenant’s office, and played him the voicemail. Use a deer rifle from behind a tree. Your privileges are suspended till I hear back from you.

  “He’s ordering a homicide,” she said.

  Her lieutenant said, “His lawyer will say talk is cheap. And he’ll point out we don’t have a warrant. Not for the new number.”

  Nakamura said nothing.

  Her lieutenant said, “Anything else?”

  “Scorpio mentioned privileges. I don’t know what that means.”

  “A business relationship of some kind, I suppose. Discount, priority, or access.”

  “To what? Soap powder?”

  “Surveillance should tell us.”

  “We’ve never seen anything that looks like privileged access to something. Never. Nothing goes in or out.”

  “Billy might not agree. Whoever Billy is.”

  “Bigfoot is going to walk right into trouble. We should call someone.”

  Her lieutenant said, “Play the voicemail again.”

  She did. He’s got to go, because he’s a random loose end. Easier for you to deal with out there than it would be for me here. So get it done.

  “He’s ordering a homicide,” she said again.

  Her lieutenant said, “Can we ID Billy from his phone number?”

  Nakamura shook her head. “Another drugstore burner.”

  “Where is Mule Crossing exactly?”

  “In a county measuring seven thousand square miles. Which is run by a sheriff’s department likely no bigger than two men and a dog.”

  “You think we should play the Good Samaritan?”

  “I think we have a duty.”

  “OK, call them in the morning. Fingers crossed the men answer, not the dog. Tell them the story. Ask them if they know a guy named Billy, with a deer rifle and a tree.”

  The ramshackle building looked like a post office. Something about the shape, and the size. It was plain and bureaucratic, but also prideful. As if it was saying the mails could be carried anywhere, even into empty and inhospitable regions. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. All that good stuff. But not anymore. A car passed by on the road and in the wash of its lights Reacher saw less-faded wood where twenty years before stern metal letters had been pried out of the siding: United States Post Office, Mule Crossing, Wyo. Below that was a replacement message, hand-painted in gaudy multicolored foot-high letters: Flea Market.

  The market itself had a sign in the window saying it was closed. It was dark inside. The door was locked. No knocker, no bell. Reacher walked back to where he could see the lit-up window. Below it in the end wall of the building was a door, with a shallow stoop, which had a boot scraper on one side and a garbage can on the other. All very domestic. The entrance to the residence, presumably. To the foot of a staircase direct to the second floor. Where the lit window was. Living above the store, literally.

  There was no doorbell.

  Reacher knocked, hard and loud. Then waited. No response. He knocked again, harder and louder. He heard a voice.

  It roared, “What?”

  A man, not young, not delighted at being disturbed.

  “I want to talk to you,” Reacher called back.

  “What?”

  “I need to ask you a question.”

  “What?”

  Reacher said nothing. He just waited. He knew the guy would come down. He had been an MP for
thirteen years. He had knocked on a lot of doors.

  The guy came down. He opened the door. He was a white man, maybe seventy years old, tall but stooping, with not much flesh over a solid frame.

  He said, “What?”

  Reacher said, “I was told only five or six people live here. I’m looking for one of them. Which makes it about an eighteen percent chance