need less gravel.”
“You volunteering?” Reacher said.
“I’ve got a good suit on. And I did all the hard work so far.”
So Reacher shrugged and vaulted down into the pit. Kicked the guy onto his back and stamped him flat and got him partway embedded in the gravel that was already there. Then he hauled himself back out and O’Donnell handed him a shovel. Between them they had to make ten trips to the gravel pile before the guy was adequately hidden. Neagley found a standpipe and unrolled a hose and turned on the water. She rinsed the sidewalk and chased watery blood into the gutter. Then she waited and followed the others out backward and hosed away their footprints from the construction site’s sand. Reacher pulled the fence back into shape. Turned a full circle and checked the view. Not perfect, but reasonable. He knew there would be plenty a competent CSI team could get its teeth into, but there was nothing that would attract anyone’s attention in the short term. They had a margin of safety. A few hours, at least. Maybe longer. Maybe concrete would get poured right at the start of the work day and the guy would become just one more missing person. Not the only person missing in a building’s foundation, he guessed, in Las Vegas.
He breathed out.
“OK,” he said. “Now we take the rest of the night off.”
They dusted themselves down and formed up and resumed their walk down the Strip, slowly, four abreast, ready to relax. But Wright was waiting for them in the hotel lobby. The house security manager. For a Vegas guy, he didn’t have a great poker face. It was clear that he was uptight about something.
47
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.
48
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 coll
ective 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.
“Two hundred eleven clear days a year in Vegas,” Dixon said.
“Summer high of a hundred and six degrees,” O’Donnell said.
“Winter low of thirty-six.”
“Four inches of rain a year.”
“One inch of snow, sometimes.”
“I still didn’t get to my guide book,” Neagley said.
By the time the clock in Reacher’s head hit twenty to twelve, people started showing up for work. They came down the street in loose knots, separated out into ones and twos, men and women moving slowly without visible enthusiasm. As they passed by, Reacher asked all the women if they were called Milena. They all said no.
Then the sidewalk went quiet again.
At nine minutes to twelve another bunch showed up. Reacher realized he was watching the bus timetable in action. Three women walked past. Young, tired, dressed down, with big white sneakers on their feet.
None of them was called Milena.
The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around. One minute to twelve. Neagley checked her watch.
“Worried yet?” she asked.
“No,” Reacher said, because beyond her shoulder he had seen a girl he knew had to be the one. She was fifty yards away, hurrying a little. She was short and slim and dark, dressed in faded low-rider blue jeans and a short white T-shirt. She had a winking jewel lodged in her navel. She was carrying a blue nylon backpack on one shoulder. She had long jet black hair that fell forward and framed a pretty face that looked about seventeen. But judging by the way she moved she was nearer to thirty. She looked tired and preoccupied.
She looked unhappy.
Reacher got up off the wall when she was ten feet away and said, “Milena?” She slowed with the kind of sudden wariness any woman should feel when randomly accosted in the street by a giant of a stranger. She glanced ahead at the bar’s door and then across at the opposite sidewalk as if assessing her options for a fast escape. She stumbled a little as if caught between the need to stop and the urge to run.
Reacher said, “We’re friends of Jorge’s.”
She looked at him, and then at the others, and then back at him. Some kind of slow realization dawned on her face, first puzzlement, then hope, then disbelief, and then acceptance, the same sequence Reacher imagined a poker player must experience when a fourth ace shows up in his hand.
Then there was some kind of muted satisfaction in her eyes, as if contrary to all expectations a comforting myth had proved to be true.
“You’re from the army,” she said. “He told me you’d come.”
“When?”
“All the time. He said if he ever had trouble, you’d show up sooner or later.”
“And here we are. Where can we talk?”
“Just let me tell them I’m going to be late today.” She smiled a little shyly and skirted around them all and headed inside the bar. Came out again two minutes later, moving faster, standing taller, with her shoulders straighter, like a weight had been taken off them. Like she was no longer alone. She looked young but capable. She had clear brown eyes and fine skin and the kind of thin sinewy hands a person gets after working hard for ten years.
“Let me guess,” she said. She turned to Neagley. “You must be Neagley.” Then she moved on to Dixon and said, “Which makes you Karla.” She turned to Reacher and O’Donnell and said, “Reacher and O’Donnell, right? The big one and the handsome one.” O’Donnell smiled at her and she turned back to Reacher and said, “They told me you were here last night looking for me.”
Reacher said, “We wanted to talk to you about Jorge.”
Milena took a breath and swallowed and said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Probably,” Reacher said. “We know for sure Manuel Orozco is.”
Milena said, “No.”
Reacher said, “I’m sorry.”
Dixon asked, “Where can we go to talk?”
“We should go to Jorge’s place,” Milena said. “His home. You should see it.”
“We heard it was wrecked.”
“I cleaned it up a little.”
“Is it far?”
“We can walk.”
They walked back down the Strip, all five of them, side by side. The construction zone was still deserted. No activity. But no commotion, either. No cops. Milena asked twice more whether Sanchez was dead, as if repeating the question might eventually yield the answer she wanted to hear. Both times Reacher answered, “Probably.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“His body hasn’t been found.”
“But Orozco’s has?”
“Yes. We saw it.”
“What about Calvin Franz and Tony Swan? Why aren’t they here?”
“Franz is dead. Swan too, probably.”
“For sure?”