Bad Luck and Trouble

tied with rough twine that had bitten deep. The arms were behind the back. The head and the shoulders were grievously damaged. Almost unrecognizable as human.
    “He fell head first,” Reacher said, softly. “He would, I guess, tied up like that. If you’re right about the helicopter.”
    “No tracks to or from,” Mauney said.
    Further medical details were hard to discern. Decomposition was well advanced, but due to the desert heat and dryness it looked more like mummification. The body was shrunken, diminished, collapsed, leathery. It looked empty. There was some animal damage, but not much. Contact with the gully’s walls had prevented more.
    Mauney asked, “Do you recognize him?”
    “Not really,” Reacher said.
    “Check the tattoo.”
    Reacher just stood there.
    Mauney said, “Want me to call an orderly?”
    Reacher shook his head and put a hand under the corpse’s icy shoulder. Lifted. The body rolled awkwardly, all of a piece, stiff, like a log or a stump. It settled facedown, the arms flung upward, tied and contorted as if the desperate struggle for freedom had continued until the very last.
    Which it undoubtedly had, Reacher thought.
    The tattoo was a little folded and creased and wrinkled by the sloughing looseness of the skin and the unnatural inward pressure of the upper arms.
    It was a little faded by time.
    But it was unmistakable.
    It said: Orozco, M.
    Under it was a nine-digit service number.
    “It’s him,” Reacher said. “It’s Manuel Orozco.”
    Mauney said, “I’m very sorry.”
    There was silence for a moment. Nothing to hear, except cooled air forcing its way through aluminum vents. Reacher asked, “Are you still searching the area?”
    “For the others?” Mauney said. “Not actively. It’s not like we’ve got a missing child.”
    “Is Franz in here, too? In one of these damn drawers?”
    “You want to see him?” Mauney asked.
    “No,” Reacher said. Then he looked back at Orozco and asked, “When is the autopsy?”
    “Soon.”
    “Is the string going to tell us anything?”
    “It’s probably too common.”
    “Do we have an estimate on when he died?”
    Mauney half-smiled, cop to cop. “When he hit the ground.”
    “Which was when?”
    “Three, four weeks ago. Before Franz, we think. But we may never know for sure.”
    “We will,” Reacher said.
    “How?” Mauney asked.
    “I’ll ask whoever did it. And he’ll tell me. By that point he’ll be begging to.”
    “No independent action, remember?”
    “In your dreams.”

    Mauney stayed to process paperwork and Reacher and Neagley and Dixon and O’Donnell took the elevator back down to warmth and sunlight. They stood in the lot, saying nothing. Doing nothing. Just crackling and trembling and twitching with suppressed rage. It was a given that soldiers contemplate death. They live with it, they accept it. They expect it. Some of them even want it. But deep down they want it to be fair. Me against him, may the best man win. They want it to be noble. Win or lose, they want it to arrive with significance.
    A soldier dead with his arms tied behind him was the worst kind of outrage. It was about helplessness and submission and abuse. It was about powerlessness.
    It took away all the illusions.
    “Let’s go,” Dixon said. “We’re wasting time.”

37
    At the hotel Reacher sat for a moment with the photograph Mauney had given him. The video surveillance frame. The pharmacy. Four men in front of the counter. Manuel Orozco on the left, glancing right, restless. Then Calvin Franz, hands in his pockets, patience on his face. Then Tony Swan, looking straight ahead. Then Jorge Sanchez, on the right, his finger hooked under his collar.
    Four friends.
    Two down for sure.
    Presumably all four down.
    “Shit happens,” O’Donnell said.
    Reacher nodded. “And we get over it.”
    “Do we?” Neagley said. “Will we this time?”
    “We always have before.”
    “This never happened before.”
    “My brother died.”
    “I know. But this is worse.”
    Reacher nodded again. “Yes, it is.”
    “I was hoping the other three were still OK somehow.”
    “We all were.”
    “But they’re not. They’re all gone.”
    “Looks that way.”
    “We need to work,” Dixon said. “That’s all we’ve got now.”

    They went up to Dixon’s room, but work was a relative term. They were dead-ended. They had nothing to go on. Those feelings didn’t improve any when they transferred to Neagley’s room and found an e-mail