Make Me

Eventually Chang rolled up on one elbow, and traced her fingers over his chest, to his neck, to his face, and down again, as if learning him, as if memorizing the slabs and contours of his body. In turn he was happy with stillness, his hand on the inside of her thigh, unmoving but alive with the thrill of hot skin, damp but velvet smooth, the muscle under it slack, a tiny pulse ticking against his palm.

She said, “Reacher.”

He said, “Yes?”

“Nothing. I’m just trying it out.”

Her hair was on his shoulder, thick and heavy. Her breasts were crushed against his arm. He could feel the beat of her heart.

She said, “Have you ever been married?”

“No,” he said. “You?”

“Once. But it didn’t last.”

“Like so many.”

She said, “What’s the longest relationship you ever had?”

“Six months,” he said. “Or thereabouts. Postings made it difficult. I got moved too often. It was a lottery. A double lottery, if she was in the service too. Mostly it was like ships that pass in the night.”

Her phone rang.

She pushed off him and twisted upright and padded naked across the room to the desk. She checked the incoming number and answered the call. No small talk. All business. The phone company, presumably. She found a pen, and padded back to the night stand, where there was a pad of motel paper, all brittle and yellowed with age. She carried it back to the desk, and bent down, and started making notes, first on one page, and then on a second, and then on a third. At one point she turned toward him and leaned forward and winked.

He propped himself on his elbows.

She said, “Thank you,” and clicked off her call.

He said, “What?”

She said, “Wait.”

She woke her computer and clicked and typed and her face was lit by cold gray light from the screen. She put her fingertips on the touchpad and swiped and scrolled and zoomed.

Then she smiled.

He said, “What?”

She said, “All three numbers were burner phones. All pre-paid, all bought at pharmacies. The Louisiana phone is recent. From a drugstore in Shreveport. It had to be registered before it could be used. That’s the system now. You buy it, you use it to call an 800 number, it gets assigned an area code local to where you’re calling from, plus an available number. Which all happened. Then it was used eleven times, and then it ran out of minutes, and it wasn’t topped up fast enough, so it lapsed. It was taken off the air. The number will be reissued about six months from now.”

“Who did it call?”

“Westwood, in LA, all eleven times.”

“From where?”

“Shreveport. The same cell tower every time.”

Reacher said nothing.

Chang said, “And the Mississippi phone was exactly the same, more or less, except it’s a little older. It was bought a year ago at a drugstore in Oxford, and registered with a local Mississippi area code, and topped up four times, but eventually abandoned. All usage was in Oxford, all on two towers. Dozens of calls to Westwood, from a school and a dorm, maybe, if he was right, and the guy was a college student.”

“Good to know,” Reacher said. “But not worth a wink and a smile. So tell me about the Arkansas number. I’m guessing that’s where the action is.”

Chang smiled again, still naked, still happy, relieved, satisfied, and excited. She said, “The Arkansas number is different. It’s a drugstore burner like the others, except it’s still on the air, even though it’s originally much, much older. It was part of a huge Wal-Mart order from years ago. Back then they came with numbers already built in and pre-assigned. Hence the Arkansas area code, because Wal-Mart’s HQ is in Arkansas. But it wasn’t sold there. Wasn’t sold anywhere, in fact, at least not by Wal-Mart. It got replaced by a newer model, and earlier this year the last of the unsold stock was auctioned off for ten cents on the dollar. About a hundred units, my guy thinks.”

“Who bought them?”

“A middleman in New Jersey. A kind of broker. A specialist in such things.”

“And he sold them on?”

“That’s what middlemen do.”

“When?”

“Twelve weeks ago.”

“Who did he sell them to?”

Chang’s smile got wider.

She said, “He sold them to a mom-and-pop drugstore in Chicago.”

He said, “Where in Chicago?”

She turned her laptop so he could see its screen. He craned his neck. Gray light and straight lines. Google Maps, he figured, or Google Earth, or whatever kind of Google it was that showed satellite pictures of city streets.

Chang said, “It’s a little ways north of downtown. It’s literally right next door to the Lincoln Park branch of the city library.”