The Midnight Line by Lee Child Read Free Book Online

trailer. The cab had a quadruple sleeper pod behind the seats, bigger than some accommodations Reacher had been raised in. For cross-country house moving jobs, the driver said. The whole crew could sleep in the vehicle. Saved on motels.
    The guy was old, like a lot of drivers. Maybe it was a fading profession. Maybe it had gotten too hard. Reacher thought the last of the frontier would die with it. Those guys were the final generation. The end of the DNA. Now people wanted to be home every night.
    The guy said it would be five hours and five minutes to Rapid City. He said it with the kind of confidence that comes from having done it a thousand times before. They rolled out, sitting way up high, with a clear view to the horizon, and they ground up through the gears, and up, and up, until they were bowling along at more than seventy on the flat, and faster still on the down grades. The mile markers flashed past. Five hours and five minutes seemed dead-on plausible.
    As always the driver wanted to know where his temporary passenger was traveling to, and why. As if in payment. A long story, for a long distance. For some reason Reacher told him the truth. The pawn shop, the ring, his compulsion to find out what connected the two. Which he said he couldn’t entirely explain.
    The driver chewed on it all for ten whole miles.
    Then he said, “My wife would say you feel guilty about something.”
    Reacher didn’t answer.
    â€œShe reads books,” the driver said. “She thinks about things.”
    â€œI don’t even know who this woman is. I don’t know her name. I never met her. How could I feel guilty about her? All I know is she sold her ring.”
    â€œDoesn’t have to be about her. There’s a word. Transference, I think. Or projection, although that might be something different. My wife would say you feel guilty about a separate issue.”
    â€œWould it have to be related?”
    â€œBroadly, I suppose. Not necessarily that you made some other woman sell her jewelry too. Doesn’t have to be obvious. My wife would say it might be some other failure or injustice.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    â€œMy wife would ask if you had a wife or girlfriend to talk things over with.”
    Chang would be halfway through her first full day back to work. Maybe she had new cases. Maybe she was already back at the airport.
    â€œTell your wife to keep on reading,” Reacher said. “She sounds like a very smart woman.”
    As so often, getting from the highway to the city was the hardest part of the trip. The red truck was too big for downtown. Reacher got out at the cloverleaf, at ten to eight in the evening, after five hours and five minutes exactly. He stretched and breathed and set out looking for a local ride. There was plenty of traffic. Plenty of pick-up trucks, and SUVs, and regular cars. But there was the wrong frame of mind. They were all coming off the highway. They were all on their last lap. All almost home. Almost there. Almost to the bar. Almost to the girlfriend’s house. Almost to wherever. They all sped past. No one was in the mood to offer a ride. Not then. Did not compute. Rides were offered at the start of a journey. Not at the end.
    Best hope in such a situation would always be a guy who had shaken his head three hundred miles ago, and then regretted it all the way since. Mostly a self-image thing. Such a guy was cooler than that. Such a guy would stop in his last few miles, maybe secretly hoping his limited offer would get a rueful refusal, thereby salving his conscience at zero personal cost, but also weirdly happy to actually go ahead and pick a guy up and drive him five or ten miles. In Reacher’s experience, given the traffic density, such a guy would come along about every twenty or twenty-five minutes. Visibility was key. The earlier they saw you, the better your chances. More time for the cool-guy thing to kick back in. Enough space to glide to a