Milena’s cleaning up had been limited to piling some of the debris around the perimeter and stuffing some of the feathers back into a few of the cushions. She had stacked a few of the books and papers near the broken shelves they had come from.
Apart from that, there hadn’t been much she could do. A hopeless task.
Reacher found the kitchen trash, where Curtis Mauney had said the crumpled napkin had been found. The pail had been torn off its mounting under the sink and booted across the room. Some stuff seemed to have fallen out, and some hadn’t.
“This was more about anger than efficiency,” he said. “Destruction, almost for its own sake. Like they were just as much mad as worried.”
“I agree,” Neagley said.
Reacher opened a door and moved on to the master bedroom. The bed was wrecked. The mattress had been destroyed. In the closet, clothes were dumped everywhere. The rails had been torn down. The shelves had been smashed. Jorge Sanchez had been a neat person to start with, and his neatness had been reinforced by years of living with military restraints and standards. There was nothing left of him in his apartment. No shred, no echo.
Milena was moving around the space, listlessly, putting more stuff in tentative piles, stopping occasionally to leaf through a book or look at a picture. She used her thigh to butt the ruined sofa back to its proper position, even though no one would ever sit on it again.
Reacher asked her, “Have the cops been here?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Did they have any conclusions?”
“They think whoever came here dressed up as phony contractors. Cable, or phone.”
“OK.”
“But I think they bribed the doorman. That would be easier.”
Reacher nodded. Vegas, a city of scams. “Did the cops have an opinion as to why?”
“No,” she said.
He asked her, “When did you last see Jorge?”
“We had dinner,” she said. “Here. Chinese takeout.”
“When?”
“His last night in Vegas.”
“You were here then?”
“It was just the two of us.”
Reacher said, “He wrote something on a napkin.”
Milena nodded.
“Because someone called him?”
Milena nodded again.
Reacher asked, “Who called him?”
Milena said, “Calvin Franz.”
49
Milena was looking shaky, so Reacher used his forearm to clear shards of broken china off the kitchen countertop, to give her a place to sit. She boosted herself up and sat with her elbows turned out and her hands laid flat on the laminate, palms down, trapped under her knees.
Reacher said, “We need to know what Jorge was working on. We need to know what caused all this trouble.”
“I don’t know what it was.”
“But you spent time with him.”
“A lot.”
“And you knew each other well.”
“Very well.”
“For years.”
“On and off.”
“So he must have talked to you about his work.”
“All the time.”
“So what was on his mind?”
Milena said, “Business was slow. That’s what was on his mind.”
“His business here? In Vegas?”
Milena nodded. “It was great in the beginning. Years ago, they were always busy. They had a lot of contracts. But the big places dropped them, one by one. They all set up in-house operations. Jorge said it was inevitable. Once they reach a certain size, it makes more sense.”
“We met a guy at our hotel who said Jorge was still busy. ‘Like a one-armed paperhanger.’”
Milena smiled. “The guy was being polite. And Jorge put a brave face on it. Manuel Orozco, too. At first they used to say, We’ll fake it until we make it. Then they said, We’ll fake it now we’re not making it anymore. They kept up a front. They were too proud to beg.”
“So what are you saying? They were going down the tubes?”
“Fast. They did a bit of muscle work here and there. Doormen at some of the clubs, running cheats out of town, stuff like that. They did some consulting for the hotels. But not much anymore. Those people always think they know better, even when they don’t.”
“Did you see what Jorge wrote on the napkin?”
“Of course. I cleared dinner away after he left. He wrote numbers.”
“What did they mean?”
“I don’t know. But he was very worried about them.”
“What did he do next? After Franz’s call?”
“He called Manuel Orozco. Right away. Orozco was very worried about the numbers, too.”
“How did it all start? Who came to them?”
“Came to them?”
Reacher asked, “Who was their client?”
Milena looked straight at him. Then she turned and twisted and looked at O’Donnell, and then Dixon, and then Neagley.
“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “They didn’t really have clients. Not anymore.”
“Something must have happened,” Reacher said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, someone must have come to them with a problem. On the job somewhere, or at the office.”
“I don’t know who came to them.”
“Jorge didn’t say?”
“No. One day they were sitting around doing nothing, the next day they were as busy as blue-assed flies. That’s what they used to call it. Blue-assed flies, not one-armed paperhangers.”
“But you don’t know why?”
Milena shook her head. “They didn’t tell me.”
“Who else might know?”
“Orozco’s wife might know.”
50
The wrecked apartment went very quiet and Reacher stared straight at Milena and said, “Manuel Orozco was married?”
Milena nodded. “They have three children.”
Reacher looked at Neagley and asked, “Why didn’t we know that?”
“I don’t know everything,” Neagley said.
“We told Mauney the next of kin was the sister.”
Dixon asked, “Where did Orozco live?”
“Down the street,” Milena said. “In a building just like this.”
Milena led them another quarter mile away from the center of town to an apartment house on the other side of the same street. Orozco’s place. It was very similar to Sanchez’s. Same age, same style, same construction, same size, a blue sidewalk awning where Sanchez’s had been green.
Reacher asked, “What is Mrs. Orozco’s name?”
“Tammy,” Milena said.
“Will she be home?”
Milena nodded. “She’ll be asleep. She works nights. In the casinos. She gets home and gets the children on the school bus and then she goes right to bed.”
“We’re going to have to wake her up.”
It was the building’s doorman who woke her up. He called upstairs on the house phone. There was a long wait and then there was a reply. The doorman announced Milena’s name, and then Reacher’s, and Neagley’s, and Dixon’s, and O’Donnell’s. The guy had picked up on the mood and he used a serious tone of voice. He left no doubt that the visit wasn’t good news.
There was another long wait. Reacher guessed Tammy Orozco would be matching the four new names with her husband’s nostalgic recollections, and putting two and two together. Then he guessed she would be putting on a housecoat. He had visited widows before. He knew how it went.
“Please go on up,” the doorman said.
They rode the elevator to the eighth floor, packed tight in a small car. Turned left on a corridor and stopped at a blue door. It was already standing open. Milena knocked anyway and then led them inside.
Tammy Orozco was a small hunched figure on a sofa. Wild black hair, pale skin, a patterned housecoat. She was probably forty but right then she could have passed for
a hundred. She looked up. She ignored Reacher and O’Donnell and Dixon and Neagley completely. Didn’t look at them at all. There was some hostility there. Not just jealousy or vague resentment, like Angela Franz had shown. There was real anger instead. She looked directly at Milena and said, “Manuel is dead, isn’t he?”
Milena sat down beside her and said, “These guys say so. I’m very sorry.”
Tammy asked, “Jorge too?”
Milena said, “We don’t know yet.”
The two women hugged and cried. Reacher waited it out. He knew how it went. The apartment was a larger unit than Sanchez’s. Maybe three bedrooms, a different layout, facing a different direction. The air was stale and smelled of fried food. The whole place was battered and untidy. Maybe because it had been tossed three weeks ago, or maybe it was always in a state of chaos with two adults and three children living in it. Reacher didn’t know much about children, but he guessed Orozco’s three were young, from the kind of books and toys and scattered clothing he saw lying around. There were dolls and bears and video games and complex constructions made from plastic components. Therefore the children were maybe nine, seven, and five. Approximately. But all recent. All postservice. Orozco hadn’t been married in the service. Reacher was fairly sure of that, at least.
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.”
51
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.”
52
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 parke
d 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.
“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.
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