Bad Luck and Trouble

“Suppose I had gotten ahold of the others. Suppose I hadn’t bothered to try that thing with your bank. Suppose you found out years from now that Franz had been murdered and the six of us had just gone ahead and fixed it without you. How would you feel then?”
    Reacher shrugged. Paused a beat.
    “Bad, I guess,” he said. “Cheated, maybe. Left out.”
    Neagley said nothing.
    Reacher said, “OK, we’ll try to find the others. But we won’t wait forever.”

    Neagley had a rental car in the lot. She paid the diner check and led Reacher outside. The car was a red Mustang convertible. They climbed in together and Neagley hit a button and dropped the top. She took a pair of sunglasses from the dash and put them on. Backed out of her slot and turned south off Sunset at the next light. Headed for Beverly Hills. Reacher sat quietly beside her and squinted in the afternoon sun.

    Inside a tan Ford Crown Victoria thirty yards west of the restaurant a man called Thomas Brant watched them go. He used his cell phone and called his boss, a man named Curtis Mauney. Mauney didn’t answer, so Brant left a voice mail.
    He said, “She just picked up the first one of them.”

    Parked five cars behind Brant’s Crown Victoria was a dark blue Chrysler sedan containing a man in a dark blue suit. He too watched the red Mustang disappear into the haze, and he too used a cell phone.
    He said, “She just picked up the first one of them. I don’t know which one it is. Big guy, looks like a bum.”
    Then he listened to his boss’s reply, and pictured him smoothing his necktie over the front of his shirt, one-handed, while he held the phone with the other.

9
    Like its name suggested, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was on Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of Beverly Hills, directly opposite the mouth of Rodeo Drive. It was made up of two large limestone buildings, one behind the other, one old and ornate, the other new and plain. They were separated by a valet lane that ran parallel to the boulevard. Neagley nosed the Mustang into it and stopped close to a knot of black Town Cars and Reacher said, “I can’t afford to stay here.”
    “I already booked your room.”
    “Booked it or paid for it?”
    “It’s on my card.”
    “I won’t be able to pay you back.”
    “Get over it.”
    “This place has got to be hundreds a night.”
    “I’ll let it slide for now. Maybe we’ll take some spoils of war down the track.”
    “If the bad guys are rich.”
    “They are,” Neagley said. “They have to be. How else would they afford their own helicopter?”
    She left the key in and the motor running and opened the heavy red door and slid out. Reacher did the same thing on his side. A guy ran up and gave Neagley a valet stub. She took it and tracked around the hood of the car and took the steps up to the back of the hotel’s main lobby. Reacher followed. Watched her move. She floated, like she was weightless. She ghosted through a crowded dogleg corridor and came out in a reception area the size and shape of a baronial hall. There was a check-in desk, a bell desk, a concierge desk, all separate. There were pale velvet armchairs with beautifully dressed guests in them.
    Reacher said, “I look like a bum in here.”
    “Or like a billionaire. Nowadays you can’t tell.”
    She led him to the counter and checked him in. She had reserved his room under the name Thomas Shannon, who had been Stevie Ray Vaughan’s giant bass player back in the day, and one of Reacher’s favorites. He smiled. He liked to avoid paper trails, whenever possible. He always had. Pure reflex. He turned to Neagley and nodded his thanks and asked, “What are you calling yourself here?”
    “My real name,” she said. “I don’t do that stuff anymore. Too complicated now.”
    The clerk handed over a key card and Reacher put it in his shirt pocket. He turned away from the desk and faced the room. Stone, dim chandeliers, thick carpet, flowers in huge glass vases. Perfumed air.
    “Let’s make a start,” he said.

    They started in Neagley’s room, which was actually a two-room suite. The living room portion was tall and square and stately and had been done up in blues and golds. It could have been a room in Buckingham Palace. There was a desk in the window with two laptop computers on it. Next to the laptops was an empty cell phone cradle and next to that was an open spiral-bound notebook, new, letter-size, the kind of thing a high school student might buy in