Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

“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.”

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.