Bad Luck and Trouble, Page 26

  name. The address on the license would withstand sustained scrutiny, too. It was an actual building, an occupied house, not just a mail drop or a vacant lot. The billing address for the credit cards matched it exactly. Mahmoud had learned a lot over the years.

  He had decided to rent a medium-sized truck. In general he preferred medium options everywhere. They stood out less obviously. Clerks remembered people who demanded the biggest or the smallest of anything. And a medium truck would do the job. His science education had been meager, but he could do simple arithmetic. He knew that volume was calculated by multiplying height by width by length. Therefore he knew a pile containing six hundred and fifty boxes could be constructed by stacking them ten wide and thirteen deep and five high. At first he had thought that ten wide would be a greater dimension than any available truck could accommodate, but then he realized he could reduce the required width by stacking the boxes on their edges. It would all work out.

  In fact he knew it would all work out, because he was still carrying the hundred quarters he had won in the airport.

  They gave their condolences and Curtis Mauney’s name to Tammy Orozco and left her alone on her sofa. Then they walked Milena back to the bar with the fire pit. She had a living to earn and she was already three hours down on the day. She said she could get fired if she missed the happy hour crush later in the afternoon. The Strip had gotten a little busier as the day had worn on. But the construction zone was still deserted. No activity at all. The slick in the gutter had finally dried. Apart from that there was no change. The sun was high. Not blazing, but it was warm enough. Reacher started thinking about how shallow the dead guy was buried. And about decomposition, and gases, and smells, and curious animals.

  “You get coyotes here?” he asked.

  “In town?” Milena said. “I never saw one.”

  “OK.”

  “Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  They walked on. Took the same shortcut they had used before. Arrived outside the bar a little after three o’clock in the afternoon.

  “Tammy’s angry,” Milena said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “It’s to be expected,” Reacher said.

  “She was there when the bad guys came to search. Asleep. They hit her on the head. She was unconscious for a week. She doesn’t remember anything. Now she blames whoever it was who called for all her troubles.”

  “Understandable,” Reacher said.

  “But I don’t blame you,” Milena said. “It wasn’t any of you that called. I guess half of you were involved and half of you weren’t.”

  She ducked inside the bar without looking back. The door closed behind her. Reacher stepped away and sat down on the wall, where he had waited that morning.

  “I’m sorry, people,” he said. “We just wasted a lot of time. My fault, entirely.”

  Nobody answered.

  “Neagley should take over,” he said. “I’m losing my touch.”

  “Mahmoud came here,” Dixon said. “Not LA.”

  “He probably made a connection. He’s probably in LA right now.”

  “Why not fly direct?”

  “Why carry four false passports? He’s cautious, whoever he is. He lays false trails.”

  “We were attacked here,” Dixon said. “Not in LA. Makes no sense.”

  “It was a collective decision to come here,” O’Donnell said. “Nobody argued.”

  Reacher heard a siren on the Strip. Not the bass bark of a fire truck, not the frantic yelp of an ambulance. A cop car, moving fast. He glanced up, toward the construction zone a half-mile away. He stood up and moved right and shaded his eyes and watched the short length of the Strip he could see. One cop was nothing, he thought. If some construction foreman had finally showed up for work and found something, there would be a whole convoy.

  He waited.

  Nothing happened. No more sirens. No more cops. No convoy. Just a routine traffic stop, maybe. He took one step more, to widen his view, to be certain. Saw a wink of red and blue beyond the corner of a grocery store. A car, parked in the sun. A red plastic lens over the tail light. Dark blue paint on a fender.

  A car.

  Dark blue paint.

  He said, “I know where I saw that guy before.”

  52

  They stood around the Chrysler at a cautious and respectful distance, like it was a roped-off exhibit in a modern art museum. A 300C, dark blue, California plates. It was parked tight to the curb, locked up, still and cold, a little travel-stained. Neagley took out the keys that Reacher had found in the dying guy’s pocket and held them at arm’s length like the guy had held the gun, and pressed the remote button once.

  The blue Chrysler’s lights flashed and its doors unlocked with a ragged thunk.

  “It was behind the Chateau Marmont,” Reacher said. “Just waiting. That same guy was in it. His suit matched the sheet metal exactly. I took it for a car service with a gimmick.”

  “The others told them we would come,” O’Donnell said. “At first as a threat, I suppose. And then later as a consolation. So they sent the guy to take us out. He spotted us on the sidewalk, I guess, just after he hit town. We were right there in front of him. He got lucky.”

  “Real lucky,” Reacher said. “May all our enemies have the same kind of extreme good fortune.”

  He opened the driver’s door. The car smelled of new leather and plastic. The interior was unmarked. There were maps in the door pocket, crisp and folded. That was all. Nothing else on show. He slid in and stretched a long arm over to the glove-box lid. Opened it up. Came out with a wallet and a cell phone. That was all that was in there. No registration, no insurance. No instruction manuals. Just a wallet and a phone. The wallet was a slim thing designed to be carried in a trouser pocket. It was a stiff rectangle made of black leather with a money clip built in on one side and a credit card pocket built in on the other. There was a wad of folded cash in the clip. More than seven hundred dollars, mostly fifties and twenties. Reacher took it all. Just pulled it out of the clip and stuffed it in his own pants pocket.

  “That’s two more weeks before I need to find a job,” he said. “Every cloud has a silver lining.”

  He turned the wallet over. The credit card section was jammed. There was a current California driver’s license and four credit cards. Two Visas, an Amex, and a MasterCard. Expiration dates all far in the future. The license and all four cards were made out to a guy by the name of Saropian. The address on the license had a five-digit house number and a Los Angeles street name and a zip that meant nothing to Reacher.

  He dropped the wallet on the passenger seat.

  The cell phone was a small silver folding item with a round LCD window on the front. It was getting great reception but its battery was low. Reacher opened it up and a larger window lit up in color. There were five voice messages waiting.

  He handed the phone to Neagley.

  “Can you retrieve those messages?” he asked.

  “Not without his code number.”

  “Look at the call log.”

  Neagley scrolled through menus and selected options.

  “All the calls in and out are to and from the same number,” she said. “A 310 area code. Which is Los Angeles.”

  “Landline or cell?”

  “Could be either.”

  “A grunt calling his boss?”

  Neagley nodded. “And vice versa. A boss issuing orders to a grunt.”

  “Could your guy in Chicago get a name and address for the boss?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Get him started on it. The license plate on this car, too.”

  Neagley used her own cell to call her office. Reacher lifted the center armrest console and found nothing except a ballpoint pen and a car charger for the phone. He checked the rear compartment. Nothing there. He got out and checked the trunk. Spare tire, jack, wrench. Apart from that, empty.

  “No luggage,” he said. “This guy didn’t plan on a long
trip. He thought we were going to be easy meat.”

  “We nearly were,” Dixon said.

  Neagley closed the dead guy’s phone and handed it back to Reacher. Reacher dropped it on the passenger seat next to the wallet.

  Then he picked it up again.

  “This is an ass-backward situation,” he said. “Isn’t it? We don’t know who sent this guy, or from where, or for why.”

  “But?” Dixon said.

  “But whoever it was, we’ve got his number. We could call him up and say hello, if we wanted to.”

  “Do we want to?”

  “Yes, I think we do.”

  53

  They got in the parked Chrysler, for quiet. The doors were thick and heavy and closed tight and gave the kind of vacuum hush a luxury sedan was supposed to. Reacher opened the dead guy’s phone and scrolled through the call log to the last call made and then pressed the green button to make it all over again. Then he cupped the phone to his ear and waited. And listened. He had never owned a cell phone but he knew how they were used. People felt them vibrate in their pockets or heard them ring and fished them out and looked at the screen to see who was calling and then decided whether or not to answer. Altogether it was a much slower process than picking up a regular phone. It could take five or six rings, at least.

  The phone rang once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  Then it was answered in a real hurry.

  A voice said, “Where the hell have you been?”

  The voice was deep. A man, not young. Not small. Behind the exasperation and the urgency there was a civilized West Coast accent, professional, but with a faint remnant of streetwise edge still in it. Reacher didn’t reply. He listened hard for background sounds from the phone. But there were none. None at all. Just silence, like a closed room or a quiet office.

  The voice said, “Hello? Where the hell are you? What’s happening?”

  “Who is this?” Reacher asked, like he had every right to know. Like he had gotten an accidental wrong number.

  But the guy didn’t bite. He had seen the caller ID.

  “No, who are you?” he asked back, slowly.

  Reacher paused a beat and said, “Your boy failed last night. He’s dead and buried, literally. Now we’re coming for you.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Then the voice said, “Reacher?”

  “You know my name?” Reacher said. “Doesn’t seem fair that I don’t know yours.”

  “Nobody ever said life was fair.”

  “True. But fair or not, enjoy what’s left of it. Buy yourself a bottle of wine, rent a DVD. But not a box set. You’ve got about two days, max.”

  “You’re nowhere.”

  “Look out your window.”

  Reacher heard sudden movement. The rustle of jacket tails, the oiled grind of a swivel chair. An office. A guy in a suit. A desk facing the door.

  Only about a million of those in the 310 area code.

  “You’re nowhere,” the voice said again.

  “We’ll see you soon,” Reacher said. “We’re going to take a helicopter ride together. Just like you did before. But with one big difference. My friends were reluctant, presumably. But you won’t be. You’ll be begging to jump out. You’ll be pleading. I can absolutely promise you that.”

  Then he closed the phone and dropped it in his lap.

  Silence in the car.

  “First impressions?” Neagley asked.

  Reacher breathed out.

  “An executive,” he said. “A big guy. A boss. Not dumb. An ordinary voice. A solo office with a window and a closed door.”

  “Where?”

  “Couldn’t tell. There were no background sounds. No traffic, no airplanes. And he didn’t seem too worried that we have his phone number. The registration is going to come back phony as hell. This car, too, I’m sure.”

  “So what now?”

  “We head back to LA. We never should have left.”

  “This is about Swan,” O’Donnell said. “Got to be, right? We can’t make a case for it being about Franz, it’s not about Sanchez or Orozco, so what else is left? He must have gotten into something immediately after he quit New Age. Maybe he had it all lined up and waiting.”

  Reacher nodded. “We need to talk to his old boss. We need to see if he shared any private concerns before he left.” He turned to Neagley. “So set up the thing with Diana Bond again. The Washington woman. About New Age and Little Wing. We need a bargaining chip. Swan’s old boss might talk more if he knows we have something solid to keep quiet about in exchange. Besides, I’m curious.”

  “Me too,” Neagley said.

  They stole the Chrysler. Didn’t even get out. Reacher took the key from Neagley and started it up and drove it around to the hotel. He waited in the drop-off lane while the others went inside to pack. He quite liked the car. It was quiet and powerful. He could see its exterior styling reflected in the hotel’s window. It looked good in blue. It was square and bluff and about as subtle as a hammer. His kind of machine. He checked the controls and the toys and plugged the dead guy’s phone into its charger and closed the armrest lid on it.

  Dixon came out of the lobby first, trailing a bellhop carrying her luggage and a valet sprinting ahead to get her car. Then came Neagley and O’Donnell together. Neagley was stuffing a credit card receipt into her purse and closing her cell phone all at the same time.

  “We got a hit on the license plate,” she said. “It traces back to a shell corporation called Walter, at a commercial mail drop in downtown LA.”

  “Cute,” Reacher said. “Walter for Walter Chrysler. I bet the phone comes back to a corporation called Alexander, for Graham Bell.”

  “The Walter Corporation leases a total of seven cars,” Neagley said.

  Reacher nodded. “We need to bear that in mind. They’ll have major reinforcements waiting somewhere.”

  Dixon said she would drive O’Donnell back in her rental. So Reacher popped the Chrysler’s trunk and Neagley heaved her bags in and then slid in beside him on the passenger seat.

  “Where are we holing up?” Dixon asked, through the window.

  “Somewhere different,” Reacher said. “So far they’ve seen us in the Wilshire and the Chateau Marmont. So now we need a change of pace. We need the kind of place they won’t think to look. Let’s try the Dunes on Sunset.”

  “What is that?”

  “A motel. My kind of place.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “It’s fine. It has beds. And doors that lock.”

  Reacher and Neagley took off first. Traffic was slow all the way out of town and then the 15 emptied and Reacher settled in for the cruise across the desert. The car was quiet and swift and civilized. Neagley spent the first thirty minutes playing phone tag around Edwards Air Force Base, trying to get Diana Bond on the line before her cell coverage failed. Reacher tuned her out and concentrated on the road ahead. He was an adequate driver, but not great. He had learned in the army and had never received civilian instruction. Never passed a civilian test, never held a civilian license. Neagley was a much better driver than he was. And much