Bad Luck and Trouble

place on the left simultaneously. Dixon’s place looked bigger so they headed for the next light to make a U and along the way they saw three more places.
    “Plenty of choice,” Reacher said. “We can afford to experiment.”
    “Experiment how?” Dixon asked.
    “The direct approach. But you’re going to have to stay in the car. You look too much like a cop.”
    “You told me to dress like this.”
    “Change of plan.”
    Reacher parked the Chrysler where it wasn’t directly visible from inside the store. He took Neagley’s wad from Dixon’s bag and jammed it in his pocket. Then he hiked over to take a look. It was a big place for a pawn shop. Reacher was more used to dusty single-wide urban spaces. This was a double-fronted emporium the size of a carpet store. The windows were full of electronics and cameras and musical instruments and jewelry. And rifles. There were a dozen sporting guns racked horizontally behind a forest of vertical guitar necks. Decent weapons, although Reacher didn’t think of them as sporting. Nothing very fair about hunting a deer by hiding a hundred yards away behind a tree with a box of high-velocity bullets. He figured it would be much more sporting to strap on a set of antlers and go at it head to head. That would give the poor dumb animal an even chance. Or maybe better than an even chance, which he figured was why hunters were too chicken to try it.
    He stepped to the pawn shop’s door and glanced inside. And gave it up, immediately. The place was too big. Too many staff. The direct approach only worked with a little one-on-one privacy. He walked back to the car and said, “My mistake. We need a smaller place.”
    “Across the street,” Dixon said.
    They pulled out of the lot and headed west a hundred yards and pulled a U at the light. Came back and bumped up into a cracked concrete lot in front of a beer store. Next to it was a no-name vitamin shop and then another pawnbroker. Not urban, but single-wide and dusty, for sure. Its window was full of the usual junk. Watches, drum kits, cymbals, guitars. And visible in the inside gloom, a wired-glass case all across the back wall. It was full of handguns. Maybe three hundred of them. They were all hanging upside down off nails through their trigger guards. There was a lone guy behind the counter, all on his own.
    “My kind of place,” Reacher said.
    He went in alone. At first glance the proprietor looked very similar to the first guy they had met. White, thirties, solid. They could have been brothers. But this one would have been the black sheep of the family. Where the first one had glowing pink skin, this one had a gray pallor from unwise consumption choices and smudged blue and purple tattoos from reform school or prison. Or the Navy. He had reddened eyes that jumped around in his head like he was wired with electricity.
    Easy, Reacher thought.
    He pulled most of Neagley’s wad from his pocket and fanned the bills out and butted them back together and dropped them on the counter from enough of a height to produce a good solid sound. Used money in decent quantities was heavier than most people thought. Paper, ink, dirt, grease. The proprietor held his vision together long enough to take a good long look at it and then he said, “Help you?”
    “I’m sure you can,” Reacher said. “I just had a civics lesson down the street. Seems that if a person wants to buy himself four pistols he has to jump through all kinds of hoops.”
    “You got that right,” the guy said, and pointed behind him with his thumb. There was a gun dealer’s license on the wall, framed and hung just the same as the first guy’s.
    “Any way around those hoops?” Reacher asked. “Or under them, or over them?”
    “No,” the guy said. “Hoops is hoops.” Then he smiled, like he had said something exceptionally profound. For a second Reacher thought about taking him by the neck and using his head to break the glass in the cabinet. Then the guy looked down at the money again and said, “I got to obey the California statutes.” But he said it in a certain way and his eyes hit a sweet spot of focus and Reacher knew something good was coming.
    “You a lawyer?” the guy asked.
    “Do I look like a lawyer?” Reacher asked back.
    “I talked to one once,” the guy said.
    Many times more than once, Reacher thought. Mostly in locked rooms where the table and chairs are bolted to the floor.
    “There’s a provision,” the guy said. “In the