Bad Luck and Trouble

information like a card player and dealt Reacher two and kept three for herself. Reacher got Tony Swan and Karla Dixon. He used the landline on the credenza and tried Swan first. Thirty, forty rings, no answer. He dabbed the cradle and tried Dixon’s number. A 212 area code, for New York City. No answer. Six rings, and straight to a machine. He listened to Dixon’s familiar voice and waited for the beep and left her the same message he had left earlier: “This is Jack Reacher with a ten-thirty from Frances Neagley at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Get off your ass and call her back.” Then he paused a beat and added: “Please, Karla. We really need to hear from you.” Then he hung up. Neagley was closing her cell phone and shaking her head.
    “Not good,” she said.
    “They could all be on vacation.”
    “At the same time?”
    “They could all be in jail. We were a pretty rough bunch.”
    “First thing I checked. They’re not in jail.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    Neagley said, “You really liked Karla, didn’t you? You sounded positively tender there, on the phone.”
    “I liked all of you.”
    “But her especially. Did you ever sleep with her?”
    Reacher said, “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “I recruited her. I was her CO. Wouldn’t have been right.”
    “Was that the only reason?”
    “Probably.”
    “OK.”
    Reacher asked, “What do you know about their businesses? Is there any good reason why they should all be out of contact for days at a time?”
    “I guess O’Donnell could have to travel overseas,” Neagley said. “His practice is pretty general. Marital stuff could take him to hotels down in the islands, I guess. Or anyplace, if he’s chasing unpaid alimony. Child abductions or custody issues could take him anywhere. People looking to adopt sometimes send detectives to Eastern Europe or China or wherever to make sure things are kosher. There are lots of possible reasons.”
    “But?”
    “I’d have to talk myself into really believing one of them.”
    “What about Karla?”
    “She could be down in the Caymans looking for someone’s money, I guess. But I imagine she’d do that on-line from her office. It’s not like the money is actually there. ”
    “So where is it?”
    “It’s notional. It’s electricity in a computer.”
    “What about Sanchez and Orozco?”
    “They’re in a closed world. I don’t see why they would ever have to leave Vegas. Not professionally.”
    “What do we know about Swan’s company?”
    “It exists. It does business. It files. It has an address. Apart from that, not much.”
    “Presumably it has security issues, or Swan wouldn’t have gotten hired.”
    “All defense contractors have security issues. Or they think they ought to have, because they want to think what they do is important.”
    Reacher said nothing to that. Just sat and stared out the window. It was getting dark. A long day, nearly over. He said, “Franz didn’t go to his office the morning he disappeared.”
    “You think?”
    “We know. Angela had his set of keys. He left them home. He was going somewhere else that day.”
    Neagley said nothing.
    “And the landlord at the strip mall saw the bad guys,” Reacher said. “Franz’s lock wasn’t broken. They didn’t take Franz’s key from him, because he didn’t have it in his pocket. Therefore they scammed one or bought one from the owner. Therefore the owner saw them. Therefore we need to find him tomorrow, along with everything else.”
    “Franz should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have dropped everything.”
    “I wish he had called you,” Reacher said. “If you had been there, none of this bad stuff would have happened.”

    Reacher and Neagley ate dinner in the downstairs restaurant, front corner of the lobby, where a bottle of still water from Norway cost eight dollars. Then they said goodnight and split up and headed for their separate rooms. Reacher’s was a chintzy cube two floors below Neagley’s suite. He stripped and showered and folded his clothes and put them under the mattress to press. He got into bed and folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. Thought about Calvin Franz for a minute, in random flashing images, the same way a political candidate’s biography is squeezed into a thirty second television commercial. His memory made some of the pictures sepia and some of them washed out, but in all of them Franz was moving, talking, laughing,