Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Wright hurried over to them when they came in and led them away to the same quiet corner of the lobby that they had used before.

“Azhari Mahmoud isn’t in any Las Vegas hotel,” he said. “That’s definitive. Also negative on Andrew MacBride and Anthony Matthews.”

Reacher nodded.

“Thanks for checking,” he said.

Wright said, “And I made a few panic calls to my opposite numbers. Better that than lying awake all night, worrying. And you know what I found? You guys are completely full of shit. No way is this town down sixty-five million dollars in the last four months. It just isn’t happening.”

“Can you be sure?”

Wright nodded. “We all ran emergency cash-flow audits. And there’s nothing going on. The usual bits and pieces, that’s all. Nothing else. I’m going to send you my Prozac bill. I practically overdosed tonight.”

They found a bar off the lobby and bought one another beers and sat in a line in front of four idle slots. Reacher’s was simulating a big jackpot win, over and over again, like a tempting advertisement. Four reels were clicking to a stop on four cherries and lights were flashing and strobing and chasing themselves all over the front. Four reels, eight symbols on each. Astronomical odds, even without the microprocessor’s covert intervention. Reacher tried to calculate the tonnage of quarters a player would need to get through before he could expect his first win. But he didn’t know exactly how much a quarter weighed. Some small fraction of an ounce, obviously, which would add up fast. Tendon damage would be involved, muscle strain, repetitive stress injury. He wondered if casino owners had stock in orthopedic clinics. Probably.

Dixon said, “Wright already figured it would have to be industrial-scale scamming. He came right out and said so. Dealers, pit bosses, security guys, cameras, tapes, cashiers. It’s not much more of a leap to imagine that apparent cash flow could be massaged. They could have installed a phony program that makes everything look kosher for as long as they need it to. It’s exactly what I would do.”

Reacher asked, “When would they find out?”

“When they do their books at the end of their financial year. By that point the money is either there or it’s not.”

“How would Sanchez and Orozco find out ahead of that?”

“Maybe they tapped in lower down the food chain and extrapolated backward.”

“Who would need to be involved?”

“Key people.”

“Like Wright himself?”

“Possibly,” Dixon said.

O’Donnell said, “We talked to him and a half-hour later someone was trying to shoot us in the back.”

“We need to find Sanchez’s friend,” Neagley said. “Before someone else does.”

“We can’t,” Reacher said. “No bar is going to give out a girl’s address to a bunch of complete strangers.”

“We could tell them she’s in danger.”

“Like they haven’t heard that before.”

“Some other way,” Dixon said. “The UPS thing.”

“We don’t have her second name.”

“So what do we do?”

“We suck it up and wait for morning.”

“Should we move hotels? If Wright could be a bad guy?”

“No point. He’ll have buddies all over town. Just lock your door.”

Reacher followed his own advice when he got back to his room. He clicked the security lever and put the chain on. No real defense against a determined opponent, but it would buy a second or two, and a second or two was generally all that Reacher needed.

He put the Hardballer in the bedside drawer. Put his clothes under the mattress to press and took a long hot shower. Then he started thinking about Karla Dixon.

She was alone.

Maybe she didn’t like that.

Maybe she would appreciate a little safety in numbers.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded over to the phone. But before he got to it there was a knock at his door. He changed course. Ignored the peephole. He didn’t like to put his eye to the glass undefended. Easiest thing in the world for an assailant in the corridor to wait for the lens to darken and then fire a large-caliber handgun straight through it. Such a move would make a hell of a mess. The bullet, plus shards and fragments of glass and steel, all of them through the eye and into the brain and out the back of the skull. Peepholes were a very bad idea, in Reacher’s opinion.

He took off the chain and undid the extra lock. Opened the door.

Karla Dixon.

She was still fully dressed. She would be, he guessed, for a walk through the corridors and a ride in the elevator. Black suit, no shirt.

“Can I come in?” she said.

“I was just about to call you,” Reacher said.

“Right.”

“I was on my way to the phone.”

“Why?”

“Lonely.”

“You?”

“Me for sure. You, I hoped.”

“So can I come in?”

He held the door wide. She came in. Within a minute he discovered a shirt wasn’t the only thing she wasn’t wearing under the suit.

Neagley called on the bedside phone at nine-thirty in the morning.

“ Dixon ’s not in her room,” she said.

“Maybe she’s working out,” Reacher said. “Jogging or something.”

Dixon smiled and moved at his side, warm and lazy.

Neagley said, “ Dixon doesn’t work out.”

“Then maybe she’s in the shower.”

“I’ve tried her twice.”

“Relax. I’ll try her. Breakfast in a half-hour, downstairs.”

He hung up with Neagley and gave the phone to Dixon and told her to count to sixty and then call Neagley’s room and say she had just gotten out of the bath. Thirty minutes later they were all eating breakfast together in a lounge restaurant full of the noise of slot machines. An hour after that they were back on the Strip, heading for the bar with the fire pit again.

Vegas in the morning looked flat and small and exposed under the hard desert sun. The light was pitiless. It showed up every fault and compromise. What by night had looked like inspired impressionism looked like silly fakery by day. The Strip itself could have been any worn-out four-lane in America. This time they walked it in a quadrant of four, two ahead, two behind, a smaller collective target, alert and always aware of who was ahead and who was behind them.

But there was nobody ahead and nobody behind. Traffic on the street was thin and the sidewalks were empty. Vegas in the morning was as close as it ever got to quiet.

The construction zone halfway down the Strip was quiet, too.

Deserted.

No activity.

“Is it Sunday today?” Reacher asked.

“No,” O’Donnell said.

“A holiday?”

“No.”

“So why aren’t they working?”

There were no cops there. No crime-scene tape. No big investigation. Just nothing. Reacher could see where he had bent the fence panel the night before. Beyond it, the dirt and the sand were muddied where Neagley had hosed them off. The old sidewalk had a huge dry stain on it. The old roadbed’s gutter had the last of a thin damp slick running to a drain. A mess, for sure, but no construction zone was ever tidy. Not perfect, but reasonable . There was nothing overt that could have attracted anyone’s attention.

“Weird,” Reacher said.

“Maybe they ran out of money,” O’Donnell said.

“Pity. That guy’s going to start to smell soon.”

They walked on. This time they knew exactly where they were going, and in the daylight they found a shortcut through the mess of curved streets. They came up on the bar with the fire pit from a different direction. It wasn’t open yet. They sat on a low wall and waited and squinted in the sun. It was very warm, almost hot.