He said, ‘What was the date three days ago?’
Mackenzie told him. He riffed through the flimsy paper, checking dates. Some receipts were a year old. Some were brittle and yellowed. He learned to look at the crisp items first.
Bramall said, ‘Let me help.’
In the end they split the drift of paper four separate ways. They all stood around the pick-up’s hood, and licked their thumbs, and speeded through the piles, like bank tellers with dollar bills around a counting table.
‘Got one,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Three days ago, in the evening. Not a gas station. I think it’s a diner or a restaurant.’
‘I got gas here,’ Bramall said. ‘Three days ago, also in the evening.’
They clipped them under the pick-up’s windshield wiper, like parking tickets. They scanned through the rest. They found nothing more.
‘OK,’ Reacher said. ‘Let’s take a look.’
The diner check was for thirteen dollars and change, paid in cash at 10.57 p.m., three days before. The gas receipt was for forty bucks even. Most likely prepaid in cash before lifting the nozzle, two twenties on the greasy counter. At 11.23 the same night.
Reacher said, ‘He had a late dinner, and was done by eleven. He drove twenty minutes and got gas. Done by eleven-thirty. Then he drove to the secret warehouse and waited for midnight.’
The gas receipt had Exxon Mobil at the top, but no address except a location code. The diner was called Klinger’s, and it had a phone number. The area code was 605.
‘South Dakota,’ Bramall said.
He walked away to the head of the ravine, where his cell worked better. He called the number. He came back and said, ‘It’s a mom-and-pop on a four-lane coming north out of Rapid City.’
Mackenzie and Bramall and Sanderson went to pack their stuff in the Toyota. Reacher’s toothbrush was already in his pocket, and his passport was back where it belonged. He found Stackley’s Colt and picked up the other three disassembled guns. He told the cowboys to put Stackley in the camper shell and drive the truck somewhere remote. An abandoned ranch, maybe. He told them to park it in a barn and leave it there. He pictured Stackley ten years from then, all dried up and mummified, discovered by chance with the remains of his head in an empty fentanyl box. The whole story, right there. A cold case that would stay cold for ever.
The cowboys drove away, leaving no trace behind except blood and small flecks of bone and brain tissue on the gravel. Reacher figured they would be gone an hour after the clearing went quiet. You got hundreds of other species already lining up and licking their lips.
Bramall brought the Toyota around. The women had taken the rear seat. Mackenzie had her travelling bags in the trunk next to Bramall’s. Sanderson had nothing to bring with her except a canvas tote bag. She was looking around, already separated from her home of three years by the thick tinted glass in the Toyota’s windows. Not that she cared. Nothing to stay for. Her dealer wouldn’t be stopping by any time soon. That was for sure.
She settled back and faced forward, breathing shallow.
Reacher got in the front next to Bramall, who put the car in gear and set out down the driveway. Four miles of roots and rocks, and then the dirt road out of there.
FORTY-ONE
GLORIA NAKAMURA WALKED the length of the corridor to her lieutenant’s corner suite. She had been summoned. She didn’t know why. When she got there the guy was looking at his computer screen. Not email. A law enforcement database.
He said, ‘The federal DEA have custody of a guy with the first name Billy and a home address in Mule Crossing, Wyoming. He was arrested in Oklahoma for running a light. He is thought to have fled Wyoming because of a warning from a friend about a DEA operation in Montana. So no need to call the two men or the county dog. Billy’s days of shooting people from behind a tree are over.’
Not Reacher after all, she thought.
For some reason she felt disappointed.
‘But here’s the thing,’ her lieutenant said. ‘The feds don’t know about Scorpio. The report makes that clear. They’re asking us all to cross-check Billy’s name against our open files, to help them figure out who’s running him. They don’t know.’
‘Are you going to tell them?’
‘Hell no. I don’t want a bunch of fancy-pants federal agents swooping in here to grab the glory. Scorpio belongs to the Rapid City Police Department. He always has. We’re going to get him.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Nakamura said. ‘We know Scorpio already replaced Billy. Inadmissible evidence, but there’s a new guy out there.’
Her lieutenant said, ‘There’s another DEA request on the system. Looks completely separate, but I don’t think it is. It was posted just afterwards. They’re asking if anyone in the western region is seeing domestic packaged prescription oxycodone or fentanyl. Lots of it, like in the old days.’
‘I thought that was over.’
‘It is over. Every truck that leaves the factory is logged in the computer, and followed on GPS, plus they know exactly what was in it to start with, so in theory if they wanted to they could track down every single separate pill.’
‘So why are they worried?’
‘Something must not be working right. Or Scorpio is smarter than we thought. Either way, we can’t let the feds get him first. So whatever you’re doing now, I want you to do it ten times harder. Put your other cases on the back burner. I don’t want federal agents coming in here.’