Bad Luck and Trouble

onto six sheets, not seven. So it’s seven separate categories of something.”
    “Separate but similar,” Reacher said. “It’s a descriptive sequence.”
    “The scores get worse,” Dixon said.
    “Radically.”
    “And quite suddenly. They’re OK, and then they fall off a cliff.”
    “But what are they?”
    “No idea.”
    Reacher asked, “What can be measured like that, repetitively?”
    “Anything can, I guess. Could be mental health, answers to simple questions. Could be physical performance, coordination tasks. It could be that errors are being recorded, in which case the numbers are actually getting better, not worse.”
    “What are the categories? What are we looking at? Seven of what?”
    Dixon nodded. “That’s the key. We need to understand that first.”
    “Can’t be medical tests. Can’t be any kind of tests. Why stick twenty-seven questions in the middle of a sequence where everything else is twenty-six questions? That would destroy consistency.”
    Dixon shrugged and stood up straight. She took off her jacket and dumped it on a chair. Walked to the window and pulled a faded drape aside and looked out and down. Then up at the hills.
    “I like LA,” she said.
    “Me too, I guess,” Reacher said.
    “I like New York better.”
    “Me too, probably.”
    “But the contrast is nice.”
    “I guess.”
    “Shitty circumstances, but it’s great to see you again, Reacher. Really great.”
    Reacher nodded. “Likewise. We thought we’d lost you. Didn’t feel good.”
    “Can I hug you?”
    “You want to hug me?”
    “I wanted to hug all of you at the Hertz office. But I didn’t, because Neagley wouldn’t have liked it.”
    “She shook Angela Franz’s hand. And the dragon lady’s, at New Age.”
    “That’s progress,” Dixon said.
    “A little,” Reacher said.
    “She was abused, way back. That was always my guess.”
    “She’ll never talk about it,” Reacher said.
    “It’s sad.”
    “You bet.”
    Karla Dixon turned to him and Reacher took her in his arms and hugged her hard. She was fragrant. Her hair smelled of shampoo. He lifted her off her feet and spun her around, a complete slow circle. She felt light and thin and fragile. Her back was narrow. She was wearing a black silk shirt, and her skin felt warm underneath it. He set her back on her feet and she stretched up tall and kissed his cheek.
    “I’ve missed you,” she said. “Missed you all, I mean.”
    “Me too,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much.”
    “You like life after the army?” she asked.
    “Yes, I like it fine.”
    “I don’t. But maybe you’re reacting better than me.”
    “I don’t know how I’m reacting. I don’t know whether I’m reacting at all. I look at you people and I feel like I’m just treading water. Or drowning. You all are swimming.”
    “Are you really broke?”
    “Almost penniless.”
    “Me too,” she said. “I earn three hundred grand a year and I’m on the breadline. That’s life. You’re well out of it.”
    “I feel that way, usually. Until I have to get back in it. Neagley put a thousand and thirty bucks in my bank account.”
    “Like a ten-thirty radio code? Smart girl.”
    “And for my airfare. Without that I’d still be on my way down here, hitch-hiking.”
    “You’d be walking. Nobody in their right mind would pick you up.”
    Reacher glanced at himself in an old spotted mirror. Six-five, two-fifty, hands as big as frozen turkeys, hair all over the place, unshaven, torn shirtcuffs up on his forearms like Frankenstein’s monster.
    A bum.
    From the big green machine to this.
    Dixon said, “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Go ahead.”
    “I always wished we had done more than just work together.”
    “Who?”
    “You and me.”
    “That was a statement, not a question.”
    “Did you feel the same way?”
    “Honestly?”
    “Please.”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “So why didn’t we do more?”
    “Wouldn’t have been right.”
    “We ignored all kinds of other regulations.”
    “It would have wrecked the unit. The others would have been jealous.”
    “Including Neagley?”
    “In her way.”
    “We could have kept it a secret.”
    Reacher said, “Dream on.”
    “We could keep it a secret now. We’ve got three hours.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    Dixon said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that all of this bad stuff makes me feel that life is so short.”
    Reacher said, “And the unit is wrecked now anyway.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Don’t you have a