Bad Luck and Trouble

"It’s this year," she said. "It’s the last seven calendar months. Right up to the end of last month. Take out the Sundays, you get three twenty-six-day months, then one twenty-seven-day month, and then three more twenty-six-day months."

"There you go," Reacher said. "Some kind of six-day-a-week figures got worse and worse over the last seven months. Some kind of results. We’re halfway there."

"The easy half," Dixon said. "Now tell me what the figures mean."

"Something was supposed to happen nine or ten or twelve or thirteen times a day Monday through Saturday and didn’t always come out right."

"What kind of something?"

"I don’t know. What kind of a thing happens ten or twelve times a day?"

"Not Model-T Ford production, that’s for sure. It’s got to be something small scale. Or professional. Like a dentist’s appointments. Or a lawyer’s. Or a hairdresser’s."

"There was a nail salon near Franz’s office."

"They do more than that in a day. And how would nails relate to four people disappearing and a Syrian with four aliases?"

"I don’t know," Reacher said.

"Me either," Dixon said.

"We should shower and get dressed."

"After."

"After what?"

Dixon didn’t answer. Just walked back to the bed and pinned him to the pillow and kissed him again.

Two thousand horizontal and seven vertical miles away from them the dark-haired forty-year-old currently calling himself Alan Mason was in the front cabin of a United Airlines Boeing 757, en route from LaGuardia, New York, to Denver, Colorado. He was in seat 3A, with a glass of sparkling mineral water beside him on the armrest tray and a newspaper open on his lap. But he wasn’t reading it. He was gazing out the window instead, at the bright white clouds below.

And eight miles south of them the man in the dark blue suit in the dark blue Chrysler was tailing O’Donnell and Neagley back from the LAX Hertz lot. He had picked them up leaving the Beverly Wilshire. He had guessed they were flying out, so he had positioned himself to follow them to the airport terminals. When O’Donnell had swung back north on Sepulveda he had needed to scramble fast to get behind them. As a result he was ten cars back all the way. Which was good, he figured, in terms of inconspicuous surveillance.

27

O’Donnell said, "We’re nowhere at all," and Neagley said, "We need to face facts. The trail is stone cold and we have virtually no useful data."

They were in Karla Dixon’s bedroom. Leonardo DiCaprio’s old crib. The bed was made. Reacher and Dixon were showered and dressed and their hair was dry. They were standing well apart from each other. The seven spreadsheets were laid out on the dresser with the diary next to them. No one disputed that they represented the last seven calendar months. But no one saw how that information helped them, either.

Dixon looked at Reacher and asked, "What do you want to do, boss?"

"Take a break," Reacher said. "We’re missing something. We’re not thinking straight. We should take a break and come back to it."

"We never used to take breaks."

"We used to have five more pairs of eyes."

The man in the dark blue suit called it in: "They moved to the Chateau Marmont. And there’s four of them now. Karla Dixon showed up. So they’re all present and correct and accounted for." Then he listened to his boss’s reply, and pictured him smoothing his tie over the front of his shirt.

Reacher went for a walk west on Sunset, alone. Solitude was still his natural condition. He took his money out of his pocket and counted it. Not much left. He ducked into a souvenir store and found a rail of discounted shirts. Last year’s styles. Or the last decade’s. On one end of the rail was a bunch of blue items with white patterns, shiny, some kind of a man-made material. Spread collars, short sleeves, square hems. He picked one out. It was like something his father might have worn to go bowling in the 1950s. Except three sizes larger. Reacher was much bigger than his father had been. He found a mirror and jammed the hanger up under his chin. The shirt looked like it might fit him. It was probably wide enough in the shoulders. The short sleeves would solve the problem of trying to find something to accommodate the length of his arms. His arms were like a gorilla’s, only longer and thicker.

With tax, the garment cost nearly twenty-one dollars. Reacher paid the guy at the register and then bit off the tags and stripped off his old shirt and put the new one on right there and then. Left it untucked. Tugged it down at the bottom and rolled his shoulders. With the top button open it fit pretty well. The sleeves were tight around his biceps but not so bad that his blood flow was imperiled.

"Got a trash can?" he asked.

The guy ducked down and came back with a round metal canister lined with a white plastic bag. Reacher balled up his old shirt and tossed it in.

"Barbershop near here?" he asked.

"Two blocks north," the guy said. "Up the hill. Shoeshines and haircuts in the corner of the grocery store."

Reacher said nothing.

"Laurel Canyon," the guy said, like an explanation.

The grocery store sold beer out of ice chests and coffee out of press-top flasks. Reacher took a medium cup of house blend, black, and headed for the barber’s chair. It was an old-fashioned thing covered in red speckled vinyl. There were straight razors on the sink and a shoeshine chair nearby. A thin guy in a white wife-beater was sitting in it. He had needle tracks up and down his arms. He looked up and concentrated, like he was assessing the size of the task ahead of him.

"Let me guess," he said. "Shave and a haircut?"

"Two bits?" Reacher said.

"Eight dollars," the guy said.

Reacher checked his pocket again.

"Ten," he said. "To include a shoeshine and the coffee."

"That all would be twelve."

"Ten is what I’ve got."

The guy shrugged and said, "Whatever."

Laurel Canyon, Reacher thought. Thirty minutes later he was down to his last dollar but his shoes were clean and his face was as smooth as it had ever been. His head was shaved almost as close. He had asked for a standard army buzz cut but the guy had given him something a whole lot closer to the Marine Corps version. Clearly not a veteran. Reacher paused a beat and checked the guy’s arms again.

He asked, "Where can a person score around here?"

"You’re not a user," the guy said.

"For a friend."

"You don’t have any money."

"I can get some."

The guy in the wife-beater shrugged and said, "There’s usually a crew behind the wax museum."

Reacher walked back to the hotel by staying in the low canyon streets for two blocks and then coming on it from the rear. Along the way he passed a dark blue Chrysler 300C parked on the curb. A guy in a dark blue suit was behind the wheel. The suit matched the sheet metal, more or less exactly. The engine was off and the guy was just waiting. Reacher assumed it was a livery car. A limo. He figured some enterprising car service owner had gotten a better price from the Chrysler dealership than the Lincoln dealership and had switched away from Town Cars. Figured he had dressed the drivers in matching suits, looking for an edge. Reacher knew that LA was a tough market, in the limousine business. He had read about it somewhere.

Dixon and Neagley were polite about his new shirt but O’Donnell laughed at it. They all laughed at his haircut. Reacher didn’t care. He caught sight of it in Dixon’s spotted old mirror and had to agree it was a little extreme. It was a real whitewall. And he was happy to provide a moment of levity. They weren’t going to get any light relief anyplace else, that was for sure. Together they had handled two years’ worth of crimes, some of them gruesome, some of them merely venal, some of them cruel, some of them appalling, and they had joked their way through like cops everywhere. Black humor. The universal refuge. One time they had found a partially decomposed dead guy with a gardening shovel buried in what was left of his head and immediately rechristened the corpse Doug and laughed like drains. Later, in the court-martial proceeding, Stan Lowrey had slipped and used the nickname instead of the real name. A JAG defender hadn’t understood the reference. Lowrey had laughed all over again on the witness stand and said, Like, dug? Shovel in his head? Get it?