“Does it matter?” Reacher said.
“Shouldn’t have happened.”
“Don’t feel bad about it. He didn’t stand a chance. It was three-on-one. Even though one of the three was a girl.”
Neagley gave him a look that would have blinded him if looks were knives. Mauney shook his head and said, “I’m not criticizing my guy’s self-defense capabilities. I’m saying you don’t come down here and start hitting cops.”
Reacher said, “He was outside of his jurisdiction, he hadn’t identified himself, and he was acting in a suspicious manner. He was asking for it.”
“Why are you here anyway?”
“For our friend’s funeral.”
“The body hasn’t been released yet.”
“So we’ll wait.”
“Was it you who hit my guy?”
Reacher nodded. “I apologize. But all you had to do was ask.”
“For what?”
“For our help.”
Mauney looked blank. “You think we brought you here to help?” “Didn’t you?”
Mauney shook his head. “No,” he said. “We brought you here as bait.”
32
Thomas Brant stayed on his feet, surly, unwilling to make the kind of social gesture that sitting down as part of the group would represent. But his boss, Curtis Mauney, took a chair. He sat down and tucked his briefcase between his ankles and put his elbows on his knees.
“Let’s get a couple of things straight,” he said. “We’re LA County sheriffs. We’re not hicks from the sticks, we’re not idiots, and we’re nobody’s poor relations. We’re fast and smart and proactive and light on our feet. We knew every detail of Calvin Franz’s life within twelve hours of finding his body. Including the fact that he was one of eight survivors of an elite military unit. And within twenty-four hours we knew for sure that three other members of that unit were missing also. One from right here in LA, and two from Vegas. Which calls into question exactly how elite you all were, wouldn’t you say? You’re fifty percent MIA in the blink of an eye.”
Reacher said, “I would need to know who the opposition was before I came to any performance conclusions.”
“Whoever, it wasn’t the Red Army.”
“We never fought the Red Army. We fought the U.S. Army.”
“So I’ll ask around,” Mauney said. “I’ll check if the 81st Airborne just won any major victories.”
“Your thesis is someone’s hunting all eight of us?”
“I don’t know what my thesis is. But that’s certainly a possibility. Therefore, flushing you four out was a win-win for me. If you don’t show up, maybe they’ve already got you, which adds pieces to the puzzle. If you do show up, then you’re bait, and maybe I can use you to flush them out.”
“What if they’re not hunting all eight of us?”
“Then you can hang around here and wait for the funerals. No skin off my nose.”
“Did you go to Vegas?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know the two from Vegas are missing?”
“Because I called,” Mauney said. “We work with the Nevada Staties a lot, and they work with the Vegas cops a lot, and your guys Sanchez and Orozco went missing three weeks ago and both their apartments have been royally trashed. So that’s how I know. The telephone system. Useful technology.”
“Trashed as bad as Franz’s office?”
“Similar handiwork.”
“They miss anything?”
“Why would they?”
“People miss things.”
“Did they miss something at Franz’s place? Did we?”
Reacher had said: We’ll treat him like some asshole provost marshal. All take and no give. But Mauney was better than any asshole provost marshal. That was clear. He looked like a pretty good cop. Not dumb. But maybe playable. So Reacher nodded and said, “Franz was mailing computer files back and forth to himself for security. They missed them. You missed them. We got them.”
“From out of his post office box?”
Reacher nodded.
“That’s a federal crime,” Mauney said. “You should have gotten a warrant.”
“I couldn’t have,” Reacher said. “I’m retired.”
“Then you should have butted out.”
“So arrest me.”
“I can’t,” Mauney said. “I’m not federal.”
“What did they miss in Vegas?”
“Are we trading here?”
Reacher nodded. “But you go first.”
“OK,” Mauney said. “In Vegas they missed a napkin with writing on it. It was the kind of paper napkin you get with Chinese delivery. It was balled up and greasy in Sanchez’s kitchen trash. My guess is Sanchez was eating and the phone rang. He scribbled down a note to himself and transferred it later to a book or a file that we don’t have. Then he threw the napkin in the trash because he didn’t need it anymore.”
“How do we know it’s got anything to do with anything?”
“We don’t,” Mauney said. “But the timing is suggestive. Ordering that Chinese delivery seems to be about the last thing Sanchez ever did in Las Vegas.”
“What does the note say?”
Mauney bent down and hauled his battered briefcase up on his knees and clicked the latches. Lifted the lid. Took out a clear plastic page protector with a color photocopy in it. The photocopy was edged with smudged black where the napkin hadn’t filled the platen. It showed the creases and the grease stains and the pimpled paper texture. And a scrawled half-line in Jorge Sanchez’s familiar handwriting: 650 at $100k per. Bold, confident, forward-leaning, done with a blue fiber-tipped pen, vivid against the unbleached beige of the paper.
650 at $100k per.
Mauney asked, “What does it mean?”
Reacher said, “Your guess is as good as mine.” He was looking at the numbers, and he knew Dixon would be, too. The k abbreviation meant thousand and was fairly standard among U.S. Army personnel of Sanchez’s generation, coming either from math or engineering school or from having served long years overseas where distances were measured in kilometers instead of miles. A kilometer was nick-named a klick and measured a thousand meters, about sixty percent of a mile. Therefore $100k meant one hundred thousand dollars. The per was a standard Latin preposition meaning for each, as in miles per gallon or miles per hour.
“I think it’s an offer or a bid,” Mauney said. “Like, you can have six hundred and fifty of something for a hundred grand each.”
“Or a market report,” O’Donnell said. “Like six hundred and fifty of something were sold at a hundred grand each. Overall value, sixty-five million dollars. Some kind of a fairly big deal. Certainly big enough for people to get killed over.”
“People can get killed for sixty-five cents,” Mauney said. “Doesn’t always take millions of dollars.”
Karla Dixon was silent. Still, quiet, preoccupied. Reacher knew she had seen something in the number 650 that he hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine what. It wasn’t an interesting number.
650 at $100k per.
“No bright ideas?” Mauney asked.
Nobody spoke.
Mauney said, “What did you get from Franz’s post office box?”
“A flash memory chip,” Reacher said. “For a computer.”
“What’s on it?”
“We don’t know. We can’t break the password.”
“We could try,” Mauney said. “There’s a lab we use.”
“I don’t know. We’re down to the last attempt.”
“Actually, you don’t have a choice. It’s evidence, and therefore it’s ours.”
“Will you share the information?”
Mauney nodded. “We’re in sharing mode here, apparently.”
“OK,” Reacher said. He nodded to Neagley. She put her hand in her tote bag and came out with the silver plastic sliver. Tossed it underhand to him. He caught it and passed it to Mauney.
“Good luck,” he said.
&nb
sp; “Pointers?” Mauney asked.
“It’ll be numbers,” Reacher said. “Franz was a numbers type of guy.”
“OK.”
“It wasn’t an airplane, you know.”
“I know,” Mauney said. “That was just hick stuff to get you interested. It was a helicopter. You know how many private helicopters there are within cruise range of the place we found him?”
“No.”
“More than nine thousand.”
“Did you check Swan’s office?”
“He was canned. He didn’t have an office.”
“Did you check his house?”
“Through the windows,” Mauney said. “It hadn’t been tossed.”
“Bathroom window?”
“Pebbled glass.”
“So one last question,” Reacher said. “You checked on Swan and sent the Nevada Staties after Sanchez and Orozco. Why didn’t you call D.C. and New York and Illinois about the rest of us?”
“Because at that point I was dealing with what I had.”
“Which was what?”
“I had all four of them on tape. Franz, Swan, Sanchez, and Orozco. All four of them together. Video surveillance, the night before Franz went out and didn’t come back.”
33
Curtis Mauney didn’t wait to be asked. He raised the lid of his briefcase again and took out another clear plastic page protector. In it was a copy of a still frame from a black and white surveillance tape. Four men, shoulder to shoulder in front of some kind of a store counter. Upside down and from a distance, Reacher couldn’t make out much detail.
Mauney said, “I made the IDs by comparing a bunch of old snapshots from a shoe box in Franz’s bedroom closet.” Then he passed the photograph to his right, to Neagley. She studied it for a moment, nothing in her face except light reflected off the shiny plastic. She passed it counterclockwise, to Dixon. Dixon looked at it for ten long seconds and blinked once and passed it to O’Donnell. O’Donnell took it and studied it and shook his head and passed it to Reacher.
Manuel Orozco was on the left of the frame, glancing to his right, caught by the camera in his perpetual state of restlessness. Then came Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then came Tony Swan, front and center, looking straight ahead. On the right was Jorge Sanchez, in a buttoned-up shirt, no tie, with a finger hooked under his collar. Reacher knew that pose. He had seen it a thousand times before. It meant that Sanchez had shaved about ten hours previously, and the stubble on his throat was growing back and beginning to irritate him. Even without the time code burned into the lower right of the shot Reacher would have known he was looking at a picture taken early in the evening.
They all looked a little older. Orozco’s hair was gray at the temples and his eyes were lined and weary. Franz had maybe lost a little weight. Some of the muscle was gone from his shoulders. Swan was as wide as ever, barrel-chested, thicker in the gut. His hair was short and had crept backward maybe half an inch. Sanchez’s scowl had settled into a tracery of permanent down-turned lines running from his nose to his chin and framing his mouth.
Older, but maybe a little wiser, too. There was a lot of talent and experience and capability right there in the picture. And an easy camaraderie and a mutual trust still floating on recent renewal. Four tough guys. In Reacher’s opinion, four of the best eight in the world.
Who or what had beaten them?
Behind them, running away from the camera, were narrow store aisles that looked familiar.
“Where is this?” Reacher asked.
Mauney said, “The pharmacy in Culver City. Next to Franz’s office. The guy behind the counter remembered them. Swan was buying aspirin.”
“That doesn’t sound like Swan.”
“For his dog. It had arthritis in its hips. He gave it a quarter-tab of aspirin a day. The pharmacist said that’s a pretty common practice with dogs. Especially big dogs.”
“How much aspirin did he buy?”
“The economy bottle. Ninety-six pills, generic.”
Dixon said, “At a quarter-tab a day, that’s a year and nineteen days’ worth.”
Reacher looked at the picture again. Four guys, relaxed poses, no urgency, all the time in the world, a routine purchase, a provision on behalf of a pet animal designed to stretch more than a year into the future.
They never even saw it coming.
Who or what had beaten them?
“Can I keep this picture?” he asked.
“Why?” Mauney said. “You see something in it?”
“Four of my old friends.”
Mauney nodded. “So keep it. It’s a copy.”
“What next?”
“Stay here,” Mauney said. He dropped the lid of his case and clicked the latches, loud in the silence. “Stay visible, and call me if you see anyone sniffing around. No more independent action, OK?”
“We’re just here for the funeral,” Reacher said.
“But whose funeral?”
Reacher didn’t reply to that. Just stood up and turned and looked at Raquel Welch’s picture again. The glass in the frame was reflective and behind him he saw Mauney getting out of his chair, and the others standing up with him. When a seated person stands up, he slides forward to do it, so that when a seated group stands up they all end up temporarily closer to one another than they were when they were sitting down. Therefore their next communal move is to shuffle backward, turning, dispersing, widening the circle, respecting space. Neagley was first and fastest, of course. Mauney turned toward the door and set himself to thread through the limited space between the chairs. O’Donnell stepped the other way, toward the interior of the hotel. Dixon paralleled him, small, deft, nimble, side-stepping a coffee table.
But Thomas Brant moved the other way.
Inward.
Reacher kept his eye on the glass in front of Raquel. Watched Brant’s tan reflection. He knew instantly what was going to happen. Brant was going to tap him on his right shoulder with his left hand. Whereupon Reacher was supposed to turn inquiringly and take a massive straight right to the face.
Brant stepped closer. Reacher focused on the gold ring between the two halves of Raquel’s bikini top. Brant’s left hand snaked forward and his right hand eased back. His left hand had the index finger extended and his right hand was bunched into a fist the size of a softball. Good but not great technique. Reacher sensed that Brant’s feet were not perfectly placed. Brant was a brawler, not a fighter. He was hobbling himself about fifty percent.
Brant tapped Reacher on the shoulder.
Because he was expecting it Reacher turned much faster than he might have done and caught the incoming straight right in his left palm a foot in front of his face. Like snaring a line drive barehanded in the infield. It was a hefty blow. A lot of weight behind it. It made a hell of a smack. It stung Reacher’s palm all the way down to the tendons.
Then it was all about superhuman self-control.
Every ounce of Reacher’s animal instinct and muscle memory dictated a head butt to Brant’s damaged nose. It was a no-brainer. Use the adrenaline. Jerk forward from the waist, plenty of snap, bury that forehead deep. A move that Reacher had perfected at the age of five. A reaction that was almost mandatory a lifetime later.
But Reacher held off.
He just stood still, gripping Brant’s bunched fist. He looked into Brant’s eyes, breathed out, and shook his head.
“I apologized once,” he said. “And I’m apologizing again, right now. If that’s not good enough for you, then wait until after this is all over, OK? I’ll stick around. You can get a couple of buddies and jump me three-on-one when I’m not looking for it. That’s fair, right?”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” Brant said.
“You should. But choose your buddies carefully. Don’t pick anyone who can’t afford six months in the hospital.”
“Tough guy.”
“I ain’t the one wearing the splint here.”
Curtis Mauney came over
and said, “No fighting. Not now, not ever.” He hauled Brant away by the collar. Reacher waited until they were both out the door and then grimaced and shook his left hand wildly and said, “Damn, that stings.”
“Put some ice on it,” Neagley said.
“Wrap it around a cold beer,” O’Donnell said.
“Get over it and let me tell you about the number six hundred and fifty,” Dixon said.
34
They went up to Dixon’s room and she arranged the seven spreadsheets neatly on the bed. Said, “OK, what we have here is a sequence of seven calendar months. Some kind of a performance analysis. For simplicity’s sake let’s just call them hits and misses. The first three months are pretty good. Plenty of hits, not too many misses. An average success rate of approximately ninety percent. A hair over eighty-nine point five-three percent, to be precise, which I know you want me to be.”
“Move along,” O’Donnell said.
“Then in the fourth month we fall off a cliff and we get worse.”
“We know that already,” Neagley said.
“So for the sake of argument let’s take the first three months as a baseline. We know they can hit ninety percent, give or take. They’re capable of it. Let’s say they could have or should have continued that level of performance indefinitely.”
“But they didn’t,” O’Donnell said.
“Exactly. They could have, but they didn’t. What’s the result?”
Neagley said, “More misses later than earlier.”
“How many more?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do,” Dixon said. “On this volume if they had continued their baseline success rate through the final four months they would have saved themselves exactly six hundred and fifty extra misses.”
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 427
