The Midnight Line by Lee Child Page A

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.”
    â€œHow many people live there?”
    The guy took another pull on his bottle.
    He said, “Five or six, maybe.”
    â€œThat all?”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œWhere is it exactly?”
    â€œForty 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.
    â€œSleep mode,” he said. “All is well.”
    â€œYou got the number?”
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œAnd are the phone numbers sequential?”
    â€œIt would help.”
    â€œLet’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?”
    â€œI would do them one at a time. Those pegs are awkward.”
    â€œStarting where? Front or back of the box?”
    â€œFront,” she said.
    â€œWhich peg first?”
    â€œThe further one.