Bad Luck and Trouble

happened,” Reacher said. “Angela told them it was Neagley she had gotten on the phone, they put Neagley’s name on a watch list, they picked her up when she got to town, they tailed her and lay back in the weeds and watched the rest of us show up one by one. And they’ve been watching everything we’ve been doing ever since. Police work by proxy. That’s what Angela wasn’t telling us. The deputies asked her to set us up as stalking horses and she agreed. And that’s why I’m still here. There’s no other explanation. They figure a busted nose is the price of doing business.”
    “That’s nuts.”
    “Only one way to find out. Take a walk around the block and talk to the deputy.”
    “You think?”
    “Dixon should go. She wasn’t with us in Santa Ana. So if I’m wrong the guy probably won’t shoot her.”

31
    Dixon went. She left the room without a word. O’Donnell said, “I don’t think Angela was hiding anything today. So I don’t think Franz had a client at all.”
    “How hard did you press her?” Reacher asked.
    “We didn’t need to press her. It was all right out there. She had nothing to tell us. It’s inconceivable that Franz would have gotten into a thing like this for anyone except a big-deal regular customer who went back years, and it’s inconceivable he could have had such a guy without Angela at least hearing a name.”
    Reacher nodded. Then he smiled, briefly. He liked his old team. He could rely on them, absolutely. No second-guessing. If Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell went out with questions, they came back with answers. Always, whatever the issue, whatever it took. He could send them to Atlanta and they would come back with the Coke recipe.
    Neagley asked, “What next?”
    “Let’s talk to the deputies first,” Reacher said. “Specifically let’s see if they went out to Vegas.”
    “To Sanchez and Orozco’s office? Dixon was just there. It hadn’t been disturbed.”
    “She didn’t check their homes.”

    Dixon came back thirty minutes later. Said, “He didn’t shoot me.”
    “That’s good,” Reacher said.
    “I certainly thought so.”
    “Did he ‘fess up to anything?”
    “He didn’t confirm or deny.”
    “Is he mad about his face?”
    “Livid.”
    “So what’s the story?”
    “He called his boss. They want to meet with us. Here, an hour from now.”
    “Who’s his boss?”
    “A guy called Curtis Mauney. LA County Sheriff’s Department.”
    “OK,” Reacher said. “We can do that. We’ll see what the guy has got. We’ll treat him like some asshole provost marshal. All take and no give.”

    They waited the hour downstairs in the lobby. No stress, no strain. Military service teaches a person how to wait. O’Donnell sprawled on a sofa and cleaned his fingernails with his switchblade. Dixon read the seven spreadsheets over and over and then put them away and closed her eyes. Neagley sat alone in a chair against a wall. Reacher sat under an old framed photograph of Raquel Welch. The picture had been taken outside the hotel late in the afternoon and the light was as golden as her skin. The magic hour, photographers called it. Brief, glowing, lovely. Like fame itself, Reacher figured.

    The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was waiting, too. He was waiting to take a clandestine meeting in his room in the Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver. He was uncharacteristically nervous and out of sorts. Three reasons. First, his room was dim and shabby. Not at all what he had been expecting. Second, he had a suitcase stacked against the wall. It was a dark gray hard-shell Samsonite, carefully selected like all his accessories, expensive enough to blend with his air of affluence but not ostentatious enough to attract undue attention. Inside it were bearer bonds and cut diamonds and Swiss bank access codes worth a lot of money. Sixty-five million U.S. dollars, to be exact, and the people he was going to be meeting with were not the kind of people a prudent person would trust around portable and untraceable assets.
    And third, he hadn’t slept well. The night air had been full of an unpleasant smell. He had run through a mental checklist until he had identified it as dog food. Clearly there was a factory nearby and the wind was blowing in an unfortunate direction. Then he had lain awake and worried about the dog food’s ingredients. Meat, obviously. But he knew that smell was a physical mechanism that depended on the impact of