Bad Luck and Trouble (Page 47)

"I don’t know what you mean."

"I mean, someone must have come to them with a problem. On the job somewhere, or at the office."

"I don’t know who came to them."

"Jorge didn’t say?"

"No. One day they were sitting around doing nothing, the next day they were as busy as blue-assed flies. That’s what they used to call it. Blue-assed flies, not one-armed paperhangers."

"But you don’t know why?"

Milena shook her head. "They didn’t tell me."

"Who else might know?"

"Orozco’s wife might know."

50

The wrecked apartment went very quiet and Reacher stared straight at Milena and said, "Manuel Orozco was married?"

Milena nodded. "They have three children."

Reacher looked at Neagley and asked, "Why didn’t we know that?"

"I don’t know everything," Neagley said.

"We told Mauney the next of kin was the sister."

Dixon asked, "Where did Orozco live?"

"Down the street," Milena said. "In a building just like this."

Milena led them another quarter mile away from the center of town to an apartment house on the other side of the same street. Orozco’s place. It was very similar to Sanchez’s. Same age, same style, same construction, same size, a blue sidewalk awning where Sanchez’s had been green.

Reacher asked, "What is Mrs. Orozco’s name?"

"Tammy," Milena said.

"Will she be home?"

Milena nodded. "She’ll be asleep. She works nights. In the casinos. She gets home and gets the children on the school bus and then she goes right to bed."

"We’re going to have to wake her up."

It was the building’s doorman who woke her up. He called upstairs on the house phone. There was a long wait and then there was a reply. The doorman announced Milena’s name, and then Reacher’s, and Neagley’s, and Dixon’s, and O’Donnell’s. The guy had picked up on the mood and he used a serious tone of voice. He left no doubt that the visit wasn’t good news.

There was another long wait. Reacher guessed Tammy Orozco would be matching the four new names with her husband’s nostalgic recollections, and putting two and two together. Then he guessed she would be putting on a housecoat. He had visited widows before. He knew how it went.

"Please go on up," the doorman said.

They rode the elevator to the eighth floor, packed tight in a small car. Turned left on a corridor and stopped at a blue door. It was already standing open. Milena knocked anyway and then led them inside.

Tammy Orozco was a small hunched figure on a sofa. Wild black hair, pale skin, a patterned housecoat. She was probably forty but right then she could have passed for a hundred. She looked up. She ignored Reacher and O’Donnell and Dixon and Neagley completely. Didn’t look at them at all. There was some hostility there. Not just jealousy or vague resentment, like Angela Franz had shown. There was real anger instead. She looked directly at Milena and said, "Manuel is dead, isn’t he?"

Milena sat down beside her and said, "These guys say so. I’m very sorry."

Tammy asked, "Jorge too?"

Milena said, "We don’t know yet."

The two women hugged and cried. Reacher waited it out. He knew how it went. The apartment was a larger unit than Sanchez’s. Maybe three bedrooms, a different layout, facing a different direction. The air was stale and smelled of fried food. The whole place was battered and untidy. Maybe because it had been tossed three weeks ago, or maybe it was always in a state of chaos with two adults and three children living in it. Reacher didn’t know much about children, but he guessed Orozco’s three were young, from the kind of books and toys and scattered clothing he saw lying around. There were dolls and bears and video games and complex constructions made from plastic components. Therefore the children were maybe nine, seven, and five. Approximately. But all recent. All postservice. Orozco hadn’t been married in the service. Reacher was fairly sure of that, at least.

Eventually Tammy Orozco looked up and asked, "How did it happen?"

Reacher said, "The police have all the details."

"Did he suffer?"

"It was instantaneous," Reacher said, as he had been trained to long ago. All service KIAs were said to have been killed instantly, unless it could be definitively proved otherwise. It was considered a comfort to the next of kin. And in Orozco’s case it was technically true, Reacher thought. After the capture, that was, and the mistreatment and the starvation and the thirst and the helicopter ride and the writhing, screaming, twenty-second free fall.

"Why did it happen?" Tammy asked.

"That’s what we’re trying to find out."

"You should. It’s the very least you can do."

"It’s why we’re here."

"But there are no answers here."

"There must be. Starting with the client."

Tammy glanced at Milena, tearstained, puzzled.

"Client?" she said. "Don’t you already know who it was?"

"No," Reacher said. "Or we wouldn’t be here asking."

"They didn’t have clients," Milena said, as if on Tammy’s behalf. "Not anymore. I told you that."

"Something started this," Reacher said. "Someone must have come to them with a problem, at their office, or out in one of the casinos. We need to know who it was."

"That didn’t happen," Tammy said.

"Then they must have stumbled over the problem on their own. In which case we need to know where and when and how."

There was a long silence. Then Tammy said, "You really don’t understand, do you? This was nothing to do with them. Nothing at all. It was nothing to do with Vegas."

"It wasn’t?"

"No."

"So how did it start?"

"They got a call for help," Tammy said. "That’s how it started. One day, suddenly, out of the blue. From one of you guys in California. From one of their precious old army buddies."

51

Azhari Mahmoud dropped Andrew MacBride’s passport in a Dumpster and became Anthony Matthews on his way to the U-Haul depot. He had a wad of active credit cards and a valid driver’s license in that name. The address on the license would withstand sustained scrutiny, too. It was an actual building, an occupied house, not just a mail drop or a vacant lot. The billing address for the credit cards matched it exactly. Mahmoud had learned a lot over the years.

He had decided to rent a medium-sized truck. In general he preferred medium options everywhere. They stood out less obviously. Clerks remembered people who demanded the biggest or the smallest of anything. And a medium truck would do the job. His science education had been meager, but he could do simple arithmetic. He knew that volume was calculated by multiplying height by width by length. Therefore he knew a pile containing six hundred and fifty boxes could be constructed by stacking them ten wide and thirteen deep and five high. At first he had thought that ten wide would be a greater dimension than any available truck could accommodate, but then he realized he could reduce the required width by stacking the boxes on their edges. It would all work out.

In fact he knew it would all work out, because he was still carrying the hundred quarters he had won in the airport.

They gave their condolences and Curtis Mauney’s name to Tammy Orozco and left her alone on her sofa. Then they walked Milena back to the bar with the fire pit. She had a living to earn and she was already three hours down on the day. She said she could get fired if she missed the happy hour crush later in the afternoon. The Strip had gotten a little busier as the day had worn on. But the construction zone was still deserted. No activity at all. The slick in the gutter had finally dried. Apart from that there was no change. The sun was high. Not blazing, but it was warm enough. Reacher started thinking about how shallow the dead guy was buried. And about decomposition, and gases, and smells, and curious animals.