Bad Luck and Trouble

for the boss?”
    “Eventually.”
    “Get him started on it. The license plate on this car, too.”
    Neagley used her own cell to call her office. Reacher lifted the center armrest console and found nothing except a ballpoint pen and a car charger for the phone. He checked the rear compartment. Nothing there. He got out and checked the trunk. Spare tire, jack, wrench. Apart from that, empty.
    “No luggage,” he said. “This guy didn’t plan on a long trip. He thought we were going to be easy meat.”
    “We nearly were,” Dixon said.
    Neagley closed the dead guy’s phone and handed it back to Reacher. Reacher dropped it on the passenger seat next to the wallet.
    Then he picked it up again.
    “This is an ass-backward situation,” he said. “Isn’t it? We don’t know who sent this guy, or from where, or for why.”
    “But?” Dixon said.
    “But whoever it was, we’ve got his number. We could call him up and say hello, if we wanted to.”
    “Do we want to?”
    “Yes, I think we do.”

53
    They got in the parked Chrysler, for quiet. The doors were thick and heavy and closed tight and gave the kind of vacuum hush a luxury sedan was supposed to. Reacher opened the dead guy’s phone and scrolled through the call log to the last call made and then pressed the green button to make it all over again. Then he cupped the phone to his ear and waited. And listened. He had never owned a cell phone but he knew how they were used. People felt them vibrate in their pockets or heard them ring and fished them out and looked at the screen to see who was calling and then decided whether or not to answer. Altogether it was a much slower process than picking up a regular phone. It could take five or six rings, at least.
    The phone rang once.
    Twice.
    Three times.
    Then it was answered in a real hurry.
    A voice said, “Where the hell have you been?”
    The voice was deep. A man, not young. Not small. Behind the exasperation and the urgency there was a civilized West Coast accent, professional, but with a faint remnant of streetwise edge still in it. Reacher didn’t reply. He listened hard for background sounds from the phone. But there were none. None at all. Just silence, like a closed room or a quiet office.
    The voice said, “Hello? Where the hell are you? What’s happening?”
    “Who is this?” Reacher asked, like he had every right to know. Like he had gotten an accidental wrong number.
    But the guy didn’t bite. He had seen the caller ID.
    “No, who are you?” he asked back, slowly.
    Reacher paused a beat and said, “Your boy failed last night. He’s dead and buried, literally. Now we’re coming for you.”
    There was a long moment of silence. Then the voice said, “Reacher?”
    “You know my name?” Reacher said. “Doesn’t seem fair that I don’t know yours.”
    “Nobody ever said life was fair.”
    “True. But fair or not, enjoy what’s left of it. Buy yourself a bottle of wine, rent a DVD. But not a box set. You’ve got about two days, max.”
    “You’re nowhere.”
    “Look out your window.”
    Reacher heard sudden movement. The rustle of jacket tails, the oiled grind of a swivel chair. An office. A guy in a suit. A desk facing the door.
    Only about a million of those in the 310 area code.
    “You’re nowhere,” the voice said again.
    “We’ll see you soon,” Reacher said. “We’re going to take a helicopter ride together. Just like you did before. But with one big difference. My friends were reluctant, presumably. But you won’t be. You’ll be begging to jump out. You’ll be pleading. I can absolutely promise you that.”
    Then he closed the phone and dropped it in his lap.
    Silence in the car.
    “First impressions?” Neagley asked.
    Reacher breathed out.
    “An executive,” he said. “A big guy. A boss. Not dumb. An ordinary voice. A solo office with a window and a closed door.”
    “Where?”
    “Couldn’t tell. There were no background sounds. No traffic, no airplanes. And he didn’t seem too worried that we have his phone number. The registration is going to come back phony as hell. This car, too, I’m sure.”
    “So what now?”
    “We head back to LA. We never should have left.”
    “This is about Swan,” O’Donnell said. “Got to be, right? We can’t make a case for it being about Franz, it’s not about Sanchez or Orozco, so what else is left? He must have gotten into something immediately after he quit New Age. Maybe he had it all lined up and