Bad Luck and Trouble

uniform, of sorts. Nobody admitted it but Reacher knew they all felt good. Focused, energized, in motion, up against high stakes. They talked about the past. Escapades, capers, scandals, outrages. Years fell away and Reacher’s mind’s eye swapped the gray for green and Pasadena for Heidelberg or Manila or Seoul.
    The old unit, back together.
    Almost.

    Back on Sunset two hours later, O’Donnell and Neagley volunteered to take first watch at New Age. They planned to get there before five the next morning. Reacher and Dixon were left with the task of buying guns. Before he went to bed, Reacher took the dead guy’s phone out of the captured Chrysler and redialed the number he had spoken to from Vegas. There was no answer. Just voice mail. Reacher didn’t leave a message.

60
    In Reacher’s experience the best way to get hold of a random untraceable gun was to steal it from someone who had already stolen it. Or from someone who owned it illegally. That way there were no official comebacks. Sometimes there could be unofficial comebacks, like with the guys behind the wax museum, but they could be handled with minimal hassle.
    But to get hold of four specific weapons was a taller order. Groups were always harder to supply than individuals. Limiting the ammunition requirement made it harder still. Concerns about condition and maintenance made it harder again. During his first cup of coffee of the day he ran an idle calculation. The 9mm Parabellum was certainly a popular load, but there were still plenty of .380s and .45s and .22s and .357s and .40s on the street, in all their many different variations. So if there was, say, a one-in-four chance that any particular robbery would yield a pistol that used 9mm Parabellums, and a one-in-three chance that the prize wasn’t already trashed beyond redemption, they would have to stage forty-eight separate thefts to guarantee getting what they wanted. They would be at it all day. It would be a crime wave all its own.
    Then he thought about finding a bent army quartermaster. Fort Irwin wasn’t far away. Or better still, a bent Marine quartermaster. Camp Pendleton was farther away than Irwin, but the roads were better, and therefore it was closer in a sense. And there was an institutional belief among Marines that the Beretta M9 was an unreliable weapon. Armorers were very ready to condemn them as faulty. Some were, some weren’t. The ones that weren’t went out the back door for a hundred bucks each. Same principle as New Age’s own scam. But setting up a buy could take days. Even weeks. Trust had to be gained. Not easy. Years ago he had done it undercover, several times. A lot of work for not very much of a tangible gain.
    Karla Dixon thought she had a better idea. She ran through it over breakfast. Obviously she dismissed the notion of going to a store and buying guns legally. Neither she nor Reacher knew the exact details relevant to California, but they both assumed there would be registration and an ID requirement and maybe some kind of cooling-off period involved. So Dixon proposed driving out of LA County into a neighboring county heavier with Republican voters, which in practical terms meant south into Orange. Then she proposed finding pawn shops and using generous applications of Neagley’s cash to get around whatever lesser regulations might apply down there. She thought enhanced local respect for the Second Amendment plus enhanced profit margins would do the trick. And she figured there would be a big choice of merchandise. They could cherry-pick exactly what they wanted.
    Reacher wasn’t as confident as she was, but he agreed anyway. He suggested she change out of her denims and into her black suit. He suggested they take the blue Chrysler, not one of the beat-up Hondas. That way she would look like a concerned middle-class citizen. Fewer alarm bells would ring. She would buy one piece at a time. He would pose as her adviser. Her neighbor, maybe, calling on some relevant weapons experience from his past.
    “The others got this far, didn’t they?” Dixon asked.
    “Further,” Reacher said.
    She nodded. “They knew it all. Who, what, where, why, and how. But something brought them down. What was it?”
    “I don’t know,” Reacher said. He had been asking himself the same question for days.

    They left for Orange County right after breakfast. They didn’t know what time pawn shops opened for business, but they guessed they would be quieter earlier in the