Bad Luck and Trouble, Page 30

  condition and maintenance made it harder again. During his first cup of coffee of the day he ran an idle calculation. The 9mm Parabellum was certainly a popular load, but there were still plenty of .380s and .45s and .22s and .357s and .40s on the street, in all their many different variations. So if there was, say, a one-in-four chance that any particular robbery would yield a pistol that used 9mm Parabellums, and a one-in-three chance that the prize wasn’t already trashed beyond redemption, they would have to stage forty-eight separate thefts to guarantee getting what they wanted. They would be at it all day. It would be a crime wave all its own.

  Then he thought about finding a bent army quartermaster. Fort Irwin wasn’t far away. Or better still, a bent Marine quartermaster. Camp Pendleton was farther away than Irwin, but the roads were better, and therefore it was closer in a sense. And there was an institutional belief among Marines that the Beretta M9 was an unreliable weapon. Armorers were very ready to condemn them as faulty. Some were, some weren’t. The ones that weren’t went out the back door for a hundred bucks each. Same principle as New Age’s own scam. But setting up a buy could take days. Even weeks. Trust had to be gained. Not easy. Years ago he had done it undercover, several times. A lot of work for not very much of a tangible gain.

  Karla Dixon thought she had a better idea. She ran through it over breakfast. Obviously she dismissed the notion of going to a store and buying guns legally. Neither she nor Reacher knew the exact details relevant to California, but they both assumed there would be registration and an ID requirement and maybe some kind of cooling-off period involved. So Dixon proposed driving out of LA County into a neighboring county heavier with Republican voters, which in practical terms meant south into Orange. Then she proposed finding pawn shops and using generous applications of Neagley’s cash to get around whatever lesser regulations might apply down there. She thought enhanced local respect for the Second Amendment plus enhanced profit margins would do the trick. And she figured there would be a big choice of merchandise. They could cherry-pick exactly what they wanted.

  Reacher wasn’t as confident as she was, but he agreed anyway. He suggested she change out of her denims and into her black suit. He suggested they take the blue Chrysler, not one of the beat-up Hondas. That way she would look like a concerned middle-class citizen. Fewer alarm bells would ring. She would buy one piece at a time. He would pose as her adviser. Her neighbor, maybe, calling on some relevant weapons experience from his past.

  “The others got this far, didn’t they?” Dixon asked.

  “Further,” Reacher said.

  She nodded. “They knew it all. Who, what, where, why, and how. But something brought them down. What was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Reacher said. He had been asking himself the same question for days.

  They left for Orange County right after breakfast. They didn’t know what time pawn shops opened for business, but they guessed they would be quieter earlier in the day than later. Reacher drove, the 101 and then the 5, the same way O’Donnell’s GPS had led them down to Swan’s house. But this time they stayed with the freeway a little longer and exited on the other side, to the east. Dixon wanted to try Tustin first. She had heard bad things about it. Or good things, depending on your point of view.

  She asked, “What are you going to do when this is over?”

  “Depends if I survive.”

  “You think you won’t?”

  “Like Neagley said, we’re not what we used to be. The others weren’t, for sure.”

  “I think we’ll be OK.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Feel like dropping by New York afterward?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “But?”

  “I don’t make plans, Karla.”

  “Why not?”

  “I already had this conversation with Dave.”

  “People make plans.”

  “I know. People like Calvin Franz. And Jorge Sanchez and Manuel Orozco. And Tony Swan. He planned to give his dog an aspirin every day for the next fifty-four and a half weeks.”

  They nosed around the surface streets that ran parallel with the freeway. Strip malls and gas stations and drive-through banks lay stunned and sleepy under the morning sun. Mattress dealers and tanning salons and furniture outlets were doing no business at all.

  Dixon asked, “Who needs a tanning salon in southern California?”

  They found their first pawn shop next to a book store in an upmarket strip mall. But it was all wrong. First, it was closed. Metal lattice shutters were down over the windows. Second, it dealt in the wrong kind of stuff. The displays were full of antique silver and jewelry. Flatware, fruit bowls, napkin rings, pins, pendants on fine chains, ornate picture frames. Not a Glock to be seen. No SIG-Sauers, no Berettas, no H&Ks.

  They moved on.

  Two spacious blocks east of the freeway they found the right kind of place. It was open. Its windows were full of electric guitars, and chunky men’s rings made of nine-carat gold inset with small diamonds, and cheap watches.

  And guns.

  Not in the window itself, but clearly visible in a long glass display case that stood in for a counter. Maybe fifty handguns, revolvers and automatics, black and nickel, rubber grips and wooden, all in a neat line. The right kind of place.

  But the wrong kind of owner.

  He was an honest man. Law-abiding. He was white, somewhere in his thirties, a little overweight, good genes ruined by too much eating. He had a gun dealer’s license displayed on the wall behind his head. He ran through the obligations it imposed on him like a priest reciting liturgy. First, a purchaser would have to obtain a handgun safety certificate, which was like a license to buy. Then she would have to submit to three separate background checks, the first of which was to confirm that she wasn’t trying to buy more than one weapon in the same thirty-day period, the second of which was to comb through state records for evidence of criminality, and the third of which was to do exactly the same thing at the federal level via the NCIC computer.

  Then she would have to wait ten days before collecting her purchase, just in case she was contemplating a crime of passion.

  Dixon opened her purse and made sure the guy got a good look at the wad of cash inside. But he wasn’t moved. He just glanced at it and glanced away.

  They moved on.

  Thirty miles away, north of west, Azhari Mahmoud was standing in the sun, sweating lightly, and watching as his shipping container emptied and his U-Haul filled. The boxes were smaller than he had imagined. Inevitable, he supposed, because the units they contained were no bigger than cigarette packs. To book them down as home theater components had been foolish, he thought. Unless they could be passed off as personal DVD players. The kind of thing people took on airplanes. Or MP3 players, maybe, with the white wires and the tiny earphones. That would have been more plausible.

  Then he smiled to himself. Airplanes.

  Reacher drove east, navigating in a random zigzag from one off-brand billboard to the next, searching for the cheapest part of town. He was sure that there was plenty of financial stress all the way from Beverly Hills to Malibu, but it was hidden and discreet up there. Down in parts of Tustin it was on open display. As soon as the tire franchises started offering four radials for less than a hundred bucks he started paying closer attention. And he was rewarded almost immediately. He spotted a place on the right and Dixon saw a place on the left simultaneously. Dixon’s place looked bigger so they headed for the next light to make a U and along the way they saw three more places.

  “Plenty of choice,” Reacher said. “We can afford to experiment.”

  “Experiment how?” Dixon asked.

  “The direct approach. But you’re going to have to stay in the car. You look too much like a cop.”

  “You told me to dress like this.”

  “Change of plan.”

  Reacher parked the Chrysler where it wasn’t directly visible from inside the store. He took Neagley’s wad f
rom Dixon’s bag and jammed it in his pocket. Then he hiked over to take a look. It was a big place for a pawn shop. Reacher was more used to dusty single-wide urban spaces. This was a double-fronted emporium the size of a carpet store. The windows were full of electronics and cameras and musical instruments and jewelry. And rifles. There were a dozen sporting guns racked horizontally behind a forest of vertical guitar necks. Decent weapons, although Reacher didn’t think of them as sporting. Nothing very fair about hunting a deer by hiding a hundred yards away behind a tree with a box of high-velocity bullets. He figured it would be much more sporting to strap on a set of antlers and go at it head to head. That would give the poor dumb animal an even chance. Or maybe better than an even chance, which he figured was why hunters were too chicken to try it.

  He stepped to the pawn shop’s door and glanced inside. And gave it up, immediately. The place was too big. Too many staff. The direct approach only worked with a little one-on-one privacy. He walked back to the car and said, “My mistake. We need a smaller place.”

  “Across the street,” Dixon said.

  They pulled out of the lot and headed west a hundred yards and pulled a U at the light. Came back and bumped up into a cracked concrete lot in front of a beer store. Next to it was a no-name vitamin shop and then another pawnbroker. Not urban, but single-wide and dusty, for sure. Its window was full of the usual junk. Watches, drum kits, cymbals, guitars. And visible in the inside gloom, a wired-glass case all across the back wall. It was full of handguns. Maybe three hundred of them. They were all hanging upside down off nails through their trigger guards. There was a lone guy behind the counter, all on his own.

  “My kind of place,” Reacher said.

  He went in alone. At first glance the proprietor looked very similar to the first guy they had met. White, thirties, solid. They could have been brothers. But this one would have been the black sheep of the family. Where the first one had glowing pink skin, this one had a gray pallor from unwise consumption choices and smudged blue and purple tattoos from reform school or prison. Or the Navy. He had reddened eyes that jumped around in his head like he was wired with electricity.

  Easy, Reacher thought.

  He pulled most of Neagley’s wad from his pocket and fanned the bills out and butted them back together and dropped them on the counter from enough of a height to produce a good solid sound. Used money in decent quantities was heavier than most people thought. Paper, ink, dirt, grease. The proprietor held his vision together long enough to take a good long look at it and then he said, “Help you?”

  “I’m sure you can,” Reacher said. “I just had a civics lesson down the street. Seems that if a person wants to buy himself four pistols he has to jump through all kinds of hoops.”

  “You got that right,” the guy said, and pointed behind him with his thumb. There was a gun dealer’s license on the wall, framed and hung just the same as the first guy’s.

  “Any way around those hoops?” Reacher asked. “Or under them, or over them?”

  “No,” the guy said. “Hoops is hoops.” Then he smiled, like he had said something exceptionally profound. For a second Reacher thought about taking him by the neck and using his head to break the glass in the cabinet. Then the guy looked down at the money again and said, “I got to obey the California statutes.” But he said it in a certain way and his eyes hit a sweet spot of focus and Reacher knew something good was coming.

  “You a lawyer?” the guy asked.

  “Do I look like a lawyer?” Reacher asked back.

  “I talked to one once,” the guy said.

  Many times more than once, Reacher thought. Mostly in locked rooms where the table and chairs are bolted to the floor.

  “There’s a provision,” the guy said. “In the statutes.”

  “Is there?” Reacher asked.

  “A technicality,” the guy said. It took him a couple of tries before he got the whole word out. He had trouble with the harsh consonants. “Me or you or anybody can’t sell or give a gun to someone else without all the formalities.”

  “But?”

  “Me or you or anybody is entitled to loan one out. A temporary and infrequent loan lasting less than thirty days is OK.”

  “Is that right?” Reacher said.

  “It’s in the statute.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Like between family members,” the guy said. “Husband to wife, father to daughter.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Or like between friends,” the guy said. “A friend can loan a gun to a friend, thirty days, temporary.”

  “Are we friends?” Reacher asked.

  “We could be,” the guy said.

  Reacher asked, “What kind of things do friends do for one another?”

  The guy said, “Maybe they loan each other things. Like one loans out a gun, and the other loans out some money.”

  “But only temporarily,” Reacher said. “Thirty days.”

  “Loans can go bad. Sometimes you just have to write them off. It’s a risk. People move away, they fall out. You can never tell with friends.”

  Reacher left the money where it was. Stepped away to the wired glass cabinet. There was some junk in there. But some good stuff, too. About fifty-fifty revolvers and automatics. The automatics were about two-thirds cheap and one-third premium brands. The premium brands ran about one-in-four nine-millimeter.

  Total choice, thirteen suitable pistols. From a stock of about three hundred. Four and a third percent. Worse than his breakfast calculation, by a factor of close to two.

  Seven of the suitable pistols were Glocks. Clearly they had been fashionable once, but weren’t anymore. One of them was a 19. The other six were 17s. In terms of visual condition they ranged from good to mint.

  “Suppose you loaned me four Glocks,” Reacher said.

  “Suppose I didn’t,” the guy said.

  Reacher turned around. The money was gone from the counter. Reacher had expected that. There was a gun in the guy’s hand. Reacher had not expected that.

  We’re old, we’re slow, and we’re rusty, Neagley had said. We’re a million miles from what we used to be.

  Roger that, Reacher thought.

  The gun was a Colt Python. Blued carbon steel, walnut grips, .357 Magnum, eight-inch barrel. Not the biggest revolver in the world, but not very far from it. Certainly it wasn’t the smallest revolver in the world. And it was maybe one of the most accurate.

  “That isn’t very friendly,” Reacher said.

  “We ain’t friends,” the guy said.

  “It’s also kind of dumb,” Reacher said. “I’m in a very bad mood right now.”

  “Suck it up. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Reacher paused, and then he raised his hands, halfway, palms out, fingers spread, unthreatening. The guy said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

  The store was narrow. Reacher was all the way in back. The guy was behind the counter, a third of the way to the door. The aisle was cramped. The sunlight was bright in the window.

  The guy said, “Leave the building, Elvis.”

  Reacher stood still for a moment. Listened hard. Glanced left, glanced right, checked behind him. There was a door in the back left corner. Probably just a bathroom. Not an office. There was paperwork piled behind the counter. Nobody piles paperwork behind the counter if they have a separate room for it. Therefore the guy was alone. No partner, no backup.

  No more surprises.

  Reacher put the kind of look on his face that he had seen in Vegas. The rueful loser. It was worth a try, you got to be in it to win it. Then he kept his hands up at his shoulders and stepped forward. One pace. Two. Three. His fourth pace put him directly level with the guy. Just the width of the counter between them. Reacher was facing the door. The guy was ninety degrees to his left. The counter was maybe thirty inches deep. Two and a half feet.

  Reacher’s left arm moved, straight out sideways from the shoul
der.

  The boxer Muhammad Ali’s reach was reckoned to be about forty inches and his hands were once timed at an average eighty miles an hour as they moved through it. Reacher was no Ali. Not even close. Especially not on his weaker side. His left hand moved at about sixty miles an hour, maximum. That was all. But sixty miles an hour was the same thing as a mile a minute, which was the same thing as eighty-eight feet per second. Which meant that Reacher’s left hand took a little less than thirty-thousandths of a second to cross the counter. And halfway through its travel it bunched into a fist.

  And thirty-thousandths of a second was way too brief an interval for the guy to pull the Python’s trigger. Any revolver is a complex mechanical system and one as big as the Python is heavier