Bad Luck and Trouble

Las Vegas. I’m telling you this purely as a courtesy. So stay exactly where you are. No independent action, remember?”

42
    They decided to drive to Vegas, not fly. Faster to plan and easier to organize and no slower door to door. No way could they take the Hardballers on a plane, anyway. And they had to assume that firepower would be necessary sooner or later. So Reacher waited in the lobby while the others packed. Neagley came down first and checked them out. She didn’t even look at the bill. Just signed it. Then she dumped her bag near the door and waited with Reacher. O’Donnell came down next. Then Dixon, with her Hertz key in her hand.
    They loaded their bags into the trunk and slid into their seats. Dixon and Neagley up front, Reacher and O’Donnell behind them. They headed east on Sunset and fought through the tangle of clogged freeways until they found the 15. It would run them north through the mountains and then north of east out of state and all the way to Vegas.
    It would also run them close to where they knew a helicopter had hovered more than three weeks previously, at least twice, three thousand feet up, dead of night, its doors open. Reacher made up his mind not to look, but he did. After the road brought them out of the hills he found himself looking west toward the flat tan badlands. He saw O’Donnell doing the same thing. And Neagley. And Dixon. She took her eyes off the road for seconds at a time and stared to her left, her face creased against the setting sun and her lips clamped and turned down at the corners.

    They stopped for dinner in Barstow, California, at a miserable roadside diner that had no virtues other than it was there and the road ahead was empty. The place was dirty, the service was slow, the food was bad. Reacher was no gourmet, but even he felt cheated. In the past he or Dixon or Neagley or certainly O’Donnell might have complained or heaved a chair through a window, but none of them did that night. They just suffered through three courses and drank weak coffee and got back on the road.

    The man in the blue suit called it in from the Chateau Marmont’s parking lot: “They skipped out. They’re gone. All four of them.”
    His boss asked, “Where to?”
    “The clerk thinks Vegas. That’s what she heard.”
    “Excellent. We’ll do it there. Better all around. Drive, don’t fly.”

    The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Andrew MacBride stepped out of the jetway inside the Las Vegas airport and the first thing he saw was a bank of slot machines. Bulky black and silver and gold boxes, with winking neon fascias. Maybe twenty of them, back to back in lines of ten. Each machine had a vinyl stool in front of it. Each machine had a narrow gray ledge at the bottom with an ashtray on the left and a cup holder on the right. Perhaps twelve of the twenty stools were occupied. The men and women on them were staring forward at the screens with a peculiar kind of fatigued concentration.
    Andrew MacBride decided to try his luck. He decided to designate the result as a harbinger of his future success. If he won, everything would be fine.
    And if he lost?
    He smiled. He knew that if he lost he would rationalize the result away. He wasn’t superstitious.
    He sat on a stool and propped his briefcase against his ankle. He carried a change purse in his pocket. It made him faster through airport security, and therefore less noticeable. He took it out and poked around in it and took out all the quarters he had accumulated. There weren’t many. They made a short line on the ledge, between the ashtray and the cup holder.
    He fed them to the machine, one by one. They made satisfying metallic sounds as they fell through the slot. A red LED showed five credits. There was a large touch pad to start the game. It was worn and greasy from a million fingers.
    He pressed it, again and again.
    The first four times, he lost.
    The fifth time, he won.
    A muted bell rang and a quiet whoop-whoop siren sounded and the machine rocked back and forth a little as a sturdy mechanism inside counted out a hundred quarters. They rattled down a chute and clattered into a pressed metal dish near his knee.

    Barstow, California, to Las Vegas, Nevada, was going to be about two hundred miles. At night on the 15, with due deference to one state’s Highway Patrol and the other’s State Police, that was going to take a little over three hours. Dixon said she was happy to drive all the way. She lived in