Bad Luck and Trouble

caught it and passed it to Mauney.
    “Good luck,” he said.
    “Pointers?” Mauney asked.
    “It’ll be numbers,” Reacher said. “Franz was a numbers type of guy.”
    “OK.”
    “It wasn’t an airplane, you know.”
    “I know,” Mauney said. “That was just hick stuff to get you interested. It was a helicopter. You know how many private helicopters there are within cruise range of the place we found him?”
    “No.”
    “More than nine thousand.”
    “Did you check Swan’s office?”
    “He was canned. He didn’t have an office.”
    “Did you check his house?”
    “Through the windows,” Mauney said. “It hadn’t been tossed.”
    “Bathroom window?”
    “Pebbled glass.”
    “So one last question,” Reacher said. “You checked on Swan and sent the Nevada Staties after Sanchez and Orozco. Why didn’t you call D.C. and New York and Illinois about the rest of us?”
    “Because at that point I was dealing with what I had.”
    “Which was what?”
    “I had all four of them on tape. Franz, Swan, Sanchez, and Orozco. All four of them together. Video surveillance, the night before Franz went out and didn’t come back.”

33
    Curtis Mauney didn’t wait to be asked. He raised the lid of his briefcase again and took out another clear plastic page protector. In it was a copy of a still frame from a black and white surveillance tape. Four men, shoulder to shoulder in front of some kind of a store counter. Upside down and from a distance, Reacher couldn’t make out much detail.
    Mauney said, “I made the IDs by comparing a bunch of old snapshots from a shoe box in Franz’s bedroom closet.” Then he passed the photograph to his right, to Neagley. She studied it for a moment, nothing in her face except light reflected off the shiny plastic. She passed it counterclockwise, to Dixon. Dixon looked at it for ten long seconds and blinked once and passed it to O’Donnell. O’Donnell took it and studied it and shook his head and passed it to Reacher.
    Manuel Orozco was on the left of the frame, glancing to his right, caught by the camera in his perpetual state of restlessness. Then came Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then came Tony Swan, front and center, looking straight ahead. On the right was Jorge Sanchez, in a buttoned-up shirt, no tie, with a finger hooked under his collar. Reacher knew that pose. He had seen it a thousand times before. It meant that Sanchez had shaved about ten hours previously, and the stubble on his throat was growing back and beginning to irritate him. Even without the time code burned into the lower right of the shot Reacher would have known he was looking at a picture taken early in the evening.
    They all looked a little older. Orozco’s hair was gray at the temples and his eyes were lined and weary. Franz had maybe lost a little weight. Some of the muscle was gone from his shoulders. Swan was as wide as ever, barrel-chested, thicker in the gut. His hair was short and had crept backward maybe half an inch. Sanchez’s scowl had settled into a tracery of permanent down-turned lines running from his nose to his chin and framing his mouth.
    Older, but maybe a little wiser, too. There was a lot of talent and experience and capability right there in the picture. And an easy camaraderie and a mutual trust still floating on recent renewal. Four tough guys. In Reacher’s opinion, four of the best eight in the world.
    Who or what had beaten them?
    Behind them, running away from the camera, were narrow store aisles that looked familiar.
    “Where is this?” Reacher asked.
    Mauney said, “The pharmacy in Culver City. Next to Franz’s office. The guy behind the counter remembered them. Swan was buying aspirin.”
    “That doesn’t sound like Swan.”
    “For his dog. It had arthritis in its hips. He gave it a quarter-tab of aspirin a day. The pharmacist said that’s a pretty common practice with dogs. Especially big dogs.”
    “How much aspirin did he buy?”
    “The economy bottle. Ninety-six pills, generic.”
    Dixon said, “At a quarter-tab a day, that’s a year and nineteen days’ worth.”
    Reacher looked at the picture again. Four guys, relaxed poses, no urgency, all the time in the world, a routine purchase, a provision on behalf of a pet animal designed to stretch more than a year into the future.
    They never even saw it coming.
    Who or what had beaten them?
    “Can I keep this picture?” he asked.
    “Why?” Mauney said. “You see