by Lee Child
The construction zone halfway down the Strip was quiet, too.
Deserted.
No activity.
“Is it Sunday today?” Reacher asked.
“No,” O’Donnell said.
“A holiday?”
“No.”
“So why aren’t they working?”
There were no cops there. No crime-scene tape. No big investigation. Just nothing. Reacher could see where he had bent the fence panel the night before. Beyond it, the dirt and the sand were muddied where Neagley had hosed them off. The old sidewalk had a huge dry stain on it. The old roadbed’s gutter had the last of a thin damp slick running to a drain. A mess, for sure, but no construction zone was ever tidy. Not perfect, but reasonable. There was nothing overt that could have attracted anyone’s attention.
“Weird,” Reacher said.
“Maybe they ran out of money,” O’Donnell said.
“Pity. That guy’s going to start to smell soon.”
They walked on. This time they knew exactly where they were going, and in the daylight they found a shortcut through the mess of curved streets. They came up on the bar with the fire pit from a different direction. It wasn’t open yet. They sat on a low wall and waited and squinted in the sun. It was very warm, almost hot.
“Two hundred eleven clear days a year in Vegas,” Dixon said.
“Summer high of a hundred and six degrees,” O’Donnell said.
“Winter low of thirty-six.”
“Four inches of rain a year.”
“One inch of snow, sometimes.”
“I still didn’t get to my guide book,” Neagley said.
By the time the clock in Reacher’s head hit twenty to twelve, people started showing up for work. They came down the street in loose knots, separated out into ones and twos, men and women moving slowly without visible enthusiasm. As they passed by, Reacher asked all the women if they were called Milena. They all said no.
Then the sidewalk went quiet again.
At nine minutes to twelve another bunch showed up. Reacher realized he was watching the bus timetable in action. Three women walked past. Young, tired, dressed down, with big white sneakers on their feet.
None of them was called Milena.
The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around. One minute to twelve. Neagley checked her watch.
“Worried yet?” she asked.
“No,” Reacher said, because beyond her shoulder he had seen a girl he knew had to be the one. She was fifty yards away, hurrying a little. She was short and slim and dark, dressed in faded low-rider blue jeans and a short white T-shirt. She had a winking jewel lodged in her navel. She was carrying a blue nylon backpack on one shoulder. She had long jet black hair that fell forward and framed a pretty face that looked about seventeen. But judging by the way she moved she was nearer to thirty. She looked tired and preoccupied.
She looked unhappy.
Reacher got up off the wall when she was ten feet away and said, “Milena?” She slowed with the kind of sudden wariness any woman should feel when randomly accosted in the street by a giant of a stranger. She glanced ahead at the bar’s door and then across at the opposite sidewalk as if assessing her options for a fast escape. She stumbled a little as if caught between the need to stop and the urge to run.
Reacher said, “We’re friends of Jorge’s.”
She looked at him, and then at the others, and then back at him. Some kind of slow realization dawned on her face, first puzzlement, then hope, then disbelief, and then acceptance, the same sequence Reacher imagined a poker player must experience when a fourth ace shows up in his hand.
Then there was some kind of muted satisfaction in her eyes, as if contrary to all expectations a comforting myth had proved to be true.
“You’re from the army,” she said. “He told me you’d come.”
“When?”
“All the time. He said if he ever had trouble, you’d show up sooner or later.”
“And here we are. Where can we talk?”
“Just let me tell them I’m going to be late today.” She smiled a little shyly and skirted around them all and headed inside the bar. Came out again two minutes later, moving faster, standing taller, with her shoulders straighter, like a weight had been taken off them. Like she was no longer alone. She looked young but capable. She had clear brown eyes and fine skin and the kind of thin sinewy hands a person gets after working hard for ten years.
“Let me guess,” she said. She turned to Neagley. “You must be Neagley.” Then she moved on to Dixon and said, “Which makes you Karla.” She turned to Reacher and O’Donnell and said, “Reacher and O’Donnell, right? The big one and the handsome one.” O’Donnell smiled at her and she turned back to Reacher and said, “They told me you were here last night looking for me.”
Reacher said, “We wanted to talk to you about Jorge.”
Milena took a breath and swallowed and said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Probably,” Reacher said. “We know for sure Manuel Orozco is.”
Milena said, “No.”
Reacher said, “I’m sorry.”
Dixon asked, “Where can we go to talk?”
“We should go to Jorge’s place,” Milena said. “His home. You should see it.”
“We heard it was wrecked.”
“I cleaned it up a little.”
“Is it far?”
“We can walk.”
They walked back down the Strip, all five of them, side by side. The construction zone was still deserted. No activity. But no commotion, either. No cops. Milena asked twice more whether Sanchez was dead, as if repeating the question might eventually yield the answer she wanted to hear. Both times Reacher answered, “Probably.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“His body hasn’t been found.”
“But Orozco’s has?”
“Yes. We saw it.”
“What about Calvin Franz and Tony Swan? Why aren’t they here?”
“Franz is dead. Swan too, probably.”
“For sure?”
“Franz for sure.”
“But not Swan?”
“Not for sure.”
“And not Jorge for sure?”
“Not for sure. But probably.”
“OK.” She walked on, refusing to surrender, refusing to give up hope. They passed the high-end hotels one by one, moving through sketched facsimiles of the world’s great cities all in the space of a few hundred yards. Then they saw apartment buildings. Milena led them through a left turn, and then a right, onto a parallel street. She stopped under the shade of an awning that led to the lobby of a building that might have been the best place in town four generations of improvements ago.
“This is it,” she said. “I have a key.”
She slipped her backpack off her shoulder and rooted through it and came out with a change purse. She unzipped it and took out a door key made of tarnished brass.
“How long did you know him?” Reacher asked.
She paused for a long moment, trapped into contemplating the use of the past tense, and trying to find a way of making it seem less than definitive.
“We met a few years ago,” she said.
She led them into the lobby. There was a doorman behind a desk. He greeted her with a degree of familiarity. She led them to the elevator. They went up to the tenth floor and turned right on a faded corridor. Stopped outside a door painted green.
She used her key.
Inside, the apartment wasn’t a breathtaking spread, but it wasn’t small, either. Two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen. Plain décor, mostly white, some bright colors, a little old-fashioned. Generous windows. Once the place must have had a fine view of the desert but now it looked straight at a newer development a block away.
It was a man’s place, simple, unadorned, undesigned.
It was a real mess.
It had been through the same kind of trauma as Calvin Franz’s office. The walls and
the floor and the ceiling were solid concrete, so they hadn’t been damaged. But other than that, the treatment had been similar. All the furniture was ripped up and torn apart. Chairs, sofas, a desk, a table. Books and papers had been dumped everywhere. A TV set and stereo equipment had been smashed. CDs were littered everywhere. Rugs had been lifted and thrown aside. The kitchen had been almost demolished.
Milena’s cleaning up had been limited to piling some of the debris around the perimeter and stuffing some of the feathers back into a few of the cushions. She had stacked a few of the books and papers near the broken shelves they had come from.
Apart from that, there hadn’t been much she could do. A hopeless task.
Reacher found the kitchen trash, where Curtis Mauney had said the crumpled napkin had been found. The pail had been torn off its mounting under the sink and booted across the room. Some stuff seemed to have fallen out, and some hadn’t.
“This was more about anger than efficiency,” he said. “Destruction, almost for its own sake. Like they were just as much mad as worried.”
“I agree,” Neagley said.
Reacher opened a door and moved on to the master bedroom. The bed was wrecked. The mattress had been destroyed. In the closet, clothes were dumped everywhere. The rails had been torn down. The shelves had been smashed. Jorge Sanchez had been a neat person to start with, and his neatness had been reinforced by years of living with military restraints and standards. There was nothing left of him in his apartment. No shred, no echo.
Milena was moving around the space, listlessly, putting more stuff in tentative piles, stopping occasionally to leaf through a book or look at a picture. She used her thigh to butt the ruined sofa back to its proper position, even though no one would ever sit on it again.
Reacher asked her, “Have the cops been here?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Did they have any conclusions?”
“They think whoever came here dressed up as phony contractors. Cable, or phone.”
“OK.”
“But I think they bribed the doorman. That would be easier.”
Reacher nodded. Vegas, a city of scams. “Did the cops have an opinion as to why?”
“No,” she said.
He asked her, “When did you last see Jorge?”
“We had dinner,” she said. “Here. Chinese takeout.”
“When?”
“His last night in Vegas.”
“You were here then?”
“It was just the two of us.”
Reacher said, “He wrote something on a napkin.”
Milena nodded.
“Because someone called him?”
Milena nodded again.
Reacher asked, “Who called him?”
Milena said, “Calvin Franz.”
49
Milena was looking shaky, so Reacher used his forearm to clear shards of broken china off the kitchen countertop, to give her a place to sit. She boosted herself up and sat with her elbows turned out and her hands laid flat on the laminate, palms down, trapped under her knees.
Reacher said, “We need to know what Jorge was working on. We need to know what caused all this trouble.”
“I don’t know what it was.”
“But you spent time with him.”
“A lot.”
“And you knew each other well.”
“Very well.”
“For years.”
“On and off.”
“So he must have talked to you about his work.”
“All the time.”
“So what was on his mind?”
Milena said, “Business was slow. That’s what was on his mind.”
“His business here? In Vegas?”
Milena nodded. “It was great in the beginning. Years ago, they were always busy. They had a lot of contracts. But the big places dropped them, one by one. They all set up in-house operations. Jorge said it was inevitable. Once they reach a certain size, it makes more sense.”
“We met a guy at our hotel who said Jorge was still busy. ‘Like a one-armed paperhanger.’ ”
Milena smiled. “The guy was being polite. And Jorge put a brave face on it. Manuel Orozco, too. At first they used to say, We’ll fake it until we make it. Then they said, We’ll fake it now we’re not making it anymore. They kept up a front. They were too proud to beg.”
“So what are you saying? They were going down the tubes?”
“Fast. They did a bit of muscle work here and there. Doormen at some of the clubs, running cheats out of town, stuff like that. They did some consulting for the hotels. But not much anymore. Those people always think they know better, even when they don’t.”
“Did you see what Jorge wrote on the napkin?”
“Of course. I cleared dinner away after he left. He wrote numbers.”
“What did they mean?”
“I don’t know. But he was very worried about them.”
“What did he do next? After Franz’s call?”
“He called Manuel Orozco. Right away. Orozco was very worried about the numbers, too.”
“How did it all start? Who came to them?”
“Came to them?”
Reacher asked, “Who was their client?”
Milena looked straight at him. Then she turned and twisted and looked at O’Donnell, and then Dixon, and then Neagley.
“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “They didn’t really have clients. Not anymore.”
“Something must have happened,” Reacher said.
“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 sa
id.
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.