Bad Luck and Trouble

two minutes later, moving faster, standing taller, with her shoulders straighter, like a weight had been taken off them. Like she was no longer alone. She looked young but capable. She had clear brown eyes and fine skin and the kind of thin sinewy hands a person gets after working hard for ten years.
    “Let me guess,” she said. She turned to Neagley. “You must be Neagley.” Then she moved on to Dixon and said, “Which makes you Karla.” She turned to Reacher and O’Donnell and said, “Reacher and O’Donnell, right? The big one and the handsome one.” O’Donnell smiled at her and she turned back to Reacher and said, “They told me you were here last night looking for me.”
    Reacher said, “We wanted to talk to you about Jorge.”
    Milena took a breath and swallowed and said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “Probably,” Reacher said. “We know for sure Manuel Orozco is.”
    Milena said, “No.”
    Reacher said, “I’m sorry.”
    Dixon asked, “Where can we go to talk?”
    “We should go to Jorge’s place,” Milena said. “His home. You should see it.”
    “We heard it was wrecked.”
    “I cleaned it up a little.”
    “Is it far?”
    “We can walk.”

    They walked back down the Strip, all five of them, side by side. The construction zone was still deserted. No activity. But no commotion, either. No cops. Milena asked twice more whether Sanchez was dead, as if repeating the question might eventually yield the answer she wanted to hear. Both times Reacher answered, “Probably.”
    “But you don’t know for sure?”
    “His body hasn’t been found.”
    “But Orozco’s has?”
    “Yes. We saw it.”
    “What about Calvin Franz and Tony Swan? Why aren’t they here?”
    “Franz is dead. Swan too, probably.”
    “For sure?”
    “Franz for sure.”
    “But not Swan?”
    “Not for sure.”
    “And not Jorge for sure?”
    “Not for sure. But probably.”
    “OK.” She walked on, refusing to surrender, refusing to give up hope. They passed the high-end hotels one by one, moving through sketched facsimiles of the world’s great cities all in the space of a few hundred yards. Then they saw apartment buildings. Milena led them through a left turn, and then a right, onto a parallel street. She stopped under the shade of an awning that led to the lobby of a building that might have been the best place in town four generations of improvements ago.
    “This is it,” she said. “I have a key.”
    She slipped her backpack off her shoulder and rooted through it and came out with a change purse. She unzipped it and took out a door key made of tarnished brass.
    “How long did you know him?” Reacher asked.
    She paused for a long moment, trapped into contemplating the use of the past tense, and trying to find a way of making it seem less than definitive.
    “We met a few years ago,” she said.
    She led them into the lobby. There was a doorman behind a desk. He greeted her with a degree of familiarity. She led them to the elevator. They went up to the tenth floor and turned right on a faded corridor. Stopped outside a door painted green.
    She used her key.
    Inside, the apartment wasn’t a breathtaking spread, but it wasn’t small, either. Two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen. Plain décor, mostly white, some bright colors, a little old-fashioned. Generous windows. Once the place must have had a fine view of the desert but now it looked straight at a newer development a block away.
    It was a man’s place, simple, unadorned, undesigned.
    It was a real mess.
    It had been through the same kind of trauma as Calvin Franz’s office. The walls and the floor and the ceiling were solid concrete, so they hadn’t been damaged. But other than that, the treatment had been similar. All the furniture was ripped up and torn apart. Chairs, sofas, a desk, a table. Books and papers had been dumped everywhere. A TV set and stereo equipment had been smashed. CDs were littered everywhere. Rugs had been lifted and thrown aside. The kitchen had been almost demolished.
    Milena’s cleaning up had been limited to piling some of the debris around the perimeter and stuffing some of the feathers back into a few of the cushions. She had stacked a few of the books and papers near the broken shelves they had come from.
    Apart from that, there hadn’t been much she could do. A hopeless task.
    Reacher found the kitchen trash, where Curtis Mauney had said the crumpled napkin had been found. The pail had been torn off its