Jack Reacher 01 - Killing Floor

know, the old guitar player, and he said his sister had known the guy, sixty years ago. From that, he’d got mixed up, must have thought I’d said I knew his sister.”
    “So what was the big secret?” he said.
    “He said it wasn’t a thousand dollars a year,” I said. “He said it was a thousand dollars a week.”
    “A thousand dollars a week?” Finlay said. “A week? Is that possible?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “At the time, I assumed the old guy was crazy. But now, I think he was just telling the truth.”
    “A thousand a week?” he said again. “That’s a hell of a business grant. That’s fifty-two thousand bucks a year. That’s a hell of a lot of money, Reacher.”
    I thought about it. Pointed at the total on Gray’s audit.
    “They’d need figures like that,” I said. “If this is how much they’re spending, they’d need figures like that just to get rid of it all.”
    Finlay was pensive. Thinking it through.
    “They’ve bought the whole town,” he said. “Very slowly, very quietly. They’ve bought the whole town for a grand a week, here and there.”
    “Right,” I said. “The Kliner Foundation has become the golden goose. Nobody will run the risk of killing it. They all keep their mouths shut and look away from whatever needs looking away from.”
    “Right,” he said. “The Kliners could get away with murder.”
    I looked at him.
    “They have got away with murder,” I said.
    “So what do we do about it?” Finlay said.
    “First we figure out exactly what the hell they’re doing,” I said.
    He looked at me like I was crazy.
    “We know what they’re doing, right?” he said. “They’re printing a shitload of funny money up in that warehouse.”
    I shook my head at him.
    “No, they’re not,” I said. “There’s no serious manufacture of counterfeit money in the U.S. Joe put a stop to all that. The only place it happens is abroad.”
    “So what’s going on?” Finlay asked. “I thought this was all about counterfeit money. Why else would Joe be involved?”
    Roscoe looked over at us from the bench in the window.
    “It is all about counterfeit money,” she said. “I know exactly what it’s all about. Every last little detail.”
    She held up Gray’s file in one hand.
    “Part of the answer is in here,” she said.
    Then she picked up the barbers’ daily newspaper with the other hand.
    “And the rest of the answer is in here,” she said.
    Finlay and I joined her on the bench. Studied the file she’d been reading. It was a surveillance report. Gray had hidden out under the highway cloverleaf and watched the truck traffic in and out of the warehouses. Thirty-two separate days. The results were carefully listed, in three parts. On the first eleven occasions, he’d seen one truck a day incoming from the south, arriving early in the morning. He’d seen outgoing trucks all day long, heading north and west. He’d listed the outgoing trucks by destination, according to their license plates. He must have been using field glasses. The list of destinations was all over the place. A complete spread, from California all the way up and over to Massachusetts. Those first eleven days, he’d logged eleven incoming trucks and sixty-seven outgoing. An average of one truck a day coming in, six going out, small trucks, maybe a ton of cargo in a week.
    The first section of Gray’s log covered the first calendar year. The second section covered the second calendar year. He’d hid out on nine separate occasions. He’d seen fifty-three outgoing trucks, the same six a day as before, with a similar list of destinations. But the log of incoming trucks was different. In the first half of the year, one truck a day was coming in, like normal. But in the second half of the year, the deliveries picked up. They built up to two trucks a day incoming.
    The final twelve days of his surveillance were different again. They were all from the final five months of his life. Between last fall and February, he was still logging about six trucks a day going out to the same wide spread of destinations. But there were no incoming trucks listed at all. None at all. From last fall, stuff was being moved out, but it wasn’t coming in.
    “So?” Finlay asked Roscoe.
    She sat back and smiled. She had it all figured.
    “It’s obvious, right?” she said. “They’re bringing counterfeit money into the country. It’s printed in Venezuela, some place Kliner set up alongside his new