Bad Luck and Trouble

New York, and driving was a novelty for her. O’Donnell dozed in the back. Reacher stared out the window. Neagley said, “Damn, we forgot all about Diana Bond. She’s coming down from Edwards. She’s going to find us gone.”
    “Doesn’t matter now,” Dixon said.
    “I should call her,” Neagley said. But she couldn’t get a signal on her cell phone. They were way out in the Mojave, and coverage was patchy.

    They arrived in Las Vegas at midnight, which Reacher figured was exactly when the place looked its absolute best. He had been there before. In daylight, Vegas looked absurd. Inexplicable, trivial, tawdry, revealed, exposed. But at night with the lights full on, it looked like a gorgeous fantasy. They approached from the bad end of the Strip and Reacher saw a plain cement bar with peeled paint and no windows and an unpunctuated four-word sign: Cheap Beer Dirty Girls. Opposite was a knot of dusty swaybacked motels and a single faded high-rise hotel. That kind of neighborhood was where he would have started hunting for rooms, but Dixon drove on without a word, toward the glittering palaces a half-mile ahead. She pulled in at one with an Italian name, and a swarm of valets and bellmen came straight at them and grabbed their bags and drove their car away. The lobby was full of tile and pools and fountains and loud with the chatter of slot machines. Neagley headed to the desk and paid for four rooms. Reacher watched over her shoulder.
    “Expensive,” he said, reflexively.
    “But a possible shortcut,” Neagley said back. “Maybe they knew Orozco and Sanchez here. Maybe they even gave them their security contract.”
    Reacher nodded. From the big green machine to this. In which case, this had been a huge step up, at least in terms of potential salary. The whole place dripped money, literally. The pools and the fountains were symbolic. So much water in the middle of the desert spoke of breathtaking extravagance. The capital investment must have been gigantic. The cash flow must have been immense. It had been quite something if Sanchez and Orozco had been in the middle of it all, safeguarding this kind of massive enterprise. He realized he was intensely proud of his old buddies. But simultaneously puzzled by them. When he had quit the army he had been fully aware that what faced him was the beginning of the rest of his life, but he had seen ahead no further than one day at a time. He had made no plans and formed no visions.
    The others had.
    How?
    Why?
    Neagley handed out the key cards and they arranged to freshen up and meet again in ten minutes to start work. It was after midnight, but Vegas was a true twenty-four-hour town. Time had no relevance. There were famous clichés about the lack of windows and clocks in the casinos, and they were all true, as far as Reacher knew. Nothing was allowed to slow down the cash flow. Certainly nothing as mundane as a player’s bedtime. There was nothing better than a tired guy who kept on losing all night long.
    Reacher’s room was on the seventeenth floor. It was a dark concrete cube tricked out to look like a centuries-old salon in Venice. Altogether it was fairly unconvincing. Reacher had been to Venice, too. He opened his folding toothbrush and stood it upright in a glass in the bathroom. That was the sum total of his unpacking. He splashed water on his face and ran a palm across his bristly head and went back downstairs to take a preliminary look around.
    Even in such an upmarket joint, most of the first-floor real estate was devoted to slot machines. Patient, tireless, microprocessor-controlled, they skimmed a small but relentless percentage off the torrent of cash fed into them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bells were ringing and beepers were sounding. Plenty of people were winning, but slightly more were losing. There was very light security in the room. No real opportunity to steal or cheat either way around, given a slot’s mechanistic nature and the Nevada Gaming Board’s close scrutiny. Reacher made only two people as staff out of hundreds in the room. A man and a woman, dressed like everyone else, as bored as everyone else, but without the manic gleam of hope in their eyes.
    He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on slots.
    He moved onward, to huge rooms in back where roulette and poker and blackjack were being played. He looked up, and saw cameras. Looked left and right and ahead, and saw high rollers and security