Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Eventually Tammy Orozco looked up and asked, “How did it happen?”

Reacher said, “The police have all the details.”

“Did he suffer?”

“It was instantaneous,” Reacher said, as he had been trained to long ago. All service KIAs were said to have been killed instantly, unless it could be definitively proved otherwise. It was considered a comfort to the next of kin. And in Orozco’s case it was technically true, Reacher thought. After the capture, that was, and the mistreatment and the starvation and the thirst and the helicopter ride and the writhing, screaming, twenty-second free fall.

“Why did it happen?” Tammy asked.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“You should. It’s the very least you can do.”

“It’s why we’re here.”

“But there are no answers here.”

“There must be. Starting with the client.”

Tammy glanced at Milena, tearstained, puzzled.

“Client?” she said. “Don’t you already know who it was?”

“No,” Reacher said. “Or we wouldn’t be here asking.”

“They didn’t have clients,” Milena said, as if on Tammy’s behalf. “Not anymore. I told you that.”

“Something started this,” Reacher said. “Someone must have come to them with a problem, at their office, or out in one of the casinos. We need to know who it was.”

“That didn’t happen,” Tammy said.

“Then they must have stumbled over the problem on their own. In which case we need to know where and when and how.”

There was a long silence. Then Tammy said, “You really don’t understand, do you? This was nothing to do with them. Nothing at all. It was nothing to do with Vegas.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.”

“So how did it start?”

“They got a call for help,” Tammy said. “That’s how it started. One day, suddenly, out of the blue. From one of you guys in California. From one of their precious old army buddies.”

Azhari Mahmoud dropped Andrew MacBride’s passport in a Dumpster and became Anthony Matthews on his way to the U-Haul depot. He had a wad of active credit cards and a valid driver’s license in that 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.”

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.