“So?”
“Are those the kind of numbers you would recognize?”
“As what?”
“As a rip-off.”
“What’s that in a year? Almost two hundred million?”
“Hundred and ninety-five,” Reacher said.
“Conceivable,” Wright said. “We try to keep wastage below eight percent. That’s like an industry target. So we lose way more than two hundred million in a year. But having said that, two hundred million in one specific scam would be a hell of a large proportion all in one go. Unless it was something new, over and above. In which case our eight percent target is shot all to hell. In which case you’re starting to worry me.”
“It worried them,” Reacher said. “We think it killed them.”
“It would be a very big deal,” Wright said. “Sixty-five million in four months? They’d need to recruit dealers and pit bosses and security people. They’d need to jinx cameras and erase tapes. They’d have to keep the cashiers quiet. It would be industrial-scale scamming.”
“It might have happened.”
“So why aren’t the cops talking to me?”
“We’re a little ways ahead of them.”
“The Vegas PD? The Gaming Board?”
Reacher shook his head. “Our guys died across the line, in LA County. Couple of sheriffs out there are dealing with it.”
“And you’re ahead of them? What does that mean?”
Reacher said nothing. Wright was quiet for a beat. Then he looked at each face in turn. First Neagley, then Dixon, then O’Donnell, then Reacher.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t tell me. The army? You’re the special investigators. Their old unit. They talked about it all the time.”
Reacher said, “In which case you understand our interest. You worked with people.”
“If you find something, will you cut me in?”
“Earn it,” Reacher said.
“There’s a girl,” Wright said. “She works in some awful place with a fire pit. A bar, near where the Riviera used to be. She’s tight with Sanchez.”
“His girlfriend?”
“Not exactly. Maybe once. But they’re close. She’ll know more than I do.”
44
Wright went back to work and Reacher checked with the concierge as to where the Riviera had been. He got directions back to the cheap end of the Strip. They walked. It was a warm dry desert night. The stars were out, on the far horizon, beyond the pall of smog and the wash of the streetlights. The sidewalks were matted with discarded full-color postcards advertising prostitutes. It seemed like the free market had driven the base price down to a penny under fifty bucks. Although Reacher had no doubt that sum would inflate pretty fast once some hapless punter actually got a girl to his room. The women in the pictures were pretty, although Reacher had no doubt they weren’t real. They were probably library shots of innocent swimsuit models from Rio or Miami. Vegas was a city of scams. Sanchez and Orozco must have been permanently busy. Like one-armed paperhangers, Wright had said, and Reacher was completely ready to believe him.
They got level with the peeling cement bar with the cheap beer and the dirty girls and turned right into a mess of curving streets flanked by one-story tan stucco buildings. Some were motels, some were grocery stores, some were restaurants, some were bars. All had the same kind of signs, white boards behind glass on tall poles, with horizontal racks for slot-in black letters. All the letters were in the same pinched vertical style, so it required concentration to tell one type of establishment from another. Groceries advertised six-packs of soda for $1.99, motels boasted about air and pools and cable, restaurants had all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets twenty-four hours a day. The bars majored on happy hours and permanent low prices for well shots. They all looked the same. They walked past five or six before they found one with a sign that said: Fire Pit.
The sign was outside a plain stucco shoe box short on windows. It didn’t look like a bar. It could have been anything at all. It could have been an STD clinic or a fringe church. But not inside. Inside it was definitely a Vegas bar. It was a riot of décor and noise. Five hundred people drinking, shouting, laughing, talking loud, purple walls, dark red banquettes. Nothing was straight or square. The bar itself was crowded and long and curved into an S-shape. The tail of the S curled around a sunken pit. In the center of the pit was a round fake fireplace. The flames were represented by jagged lengths of orange silk blown upright by a hidden fan. They swayed and moved and danced in beams of bright red light. Away from the fire the room was divided into plush velvet booths. All the booths were full of people. The fire pit was packed. People were standing everywhere. Music played from hidden speakers. Waitresses in abbreviated outfits threaded expertly through the crowds with trays held high.
“Lovely,” O’Donnell said.
“Call the taste police,” Dixon said.
“Let’s find the girl and take her outside,” Neagley said. She was uncomfortable in the press of people. But they couldn’t find the girl. Reacher asked at the bar for Jorge Sanchez’s friend and the woman he was talking to seemed to know exactly who he meant but said she had gone off duty at midnight. She said the girl’s name was Milena. For safety’s sake Reacher asked two of the waitresses the same question and got the same answers from both of them. Their colleague Milena was tight with a security guy called Sanchez, but she was gone for the night, home, to sleep, to get ready for another hard twelve-hour shift the next day.
Nobody would tell him where home was.
He left his name with all three women. Then he fought his way back to the others and they threaded their way out to the sidewalk. Vegas at one in the morning was still lit up and humming, but after the inside of the bar it felt as quiet and peaceful as the cold gray surface of the moon.
“Plan?” Dixon said.
“We get back here at eleven-thirty in the morning,” Reacher said. “We catch her on her way in to work.”
“Until then?”
“Nothing. We take the rest of the night off.”
They walked back to the Strip and formed up four abreast on the sidewalk for the slow stroll back to the hotel. Forty yards behind them in the traffic a dark blue Chrysler sedan braked sharply and pulled over and came to a stop by the curb.
45
The man in the dark blue suit called it in immediately: “I found them. Unbelievable. They just popped up right in front of me.”
His boss asked: “All four of them?”
“They’re right here in front of me.”
“Can you take them?”
“I think so.”
“So get it done. Don’t wait for reinforcements. Get it done and get back here.”
The guy in the suit ended the call and moved his car off the curb and swerved it across four lanes of traffic and stopped again in a side street outside a grocery that offered the cheapest cigarettes in town. He climbed out and locked up and headed down the Strip, on foot, fast, with his right hand in his coat pocket.
Las Vegas had more hotel rooms per square inch than any other place on the planet, but Azhari Mahmoud wasn’t in any of them. He was in a rented house in a suburb three miles from the Strip. The house had been leased two years ago for an operation that had been planned but not executed. It had been safe then, and it was safe now.
Mahmoud was in the kitchen, with the Yellow Pages open on the counter. He was leafing through the truck rental section, trying to figure out how big a U-Haul he was going to need.
The Strip had a permanent redevelopment tide that slopped back and forth like water in a bathtub. Once upon a time the Riviera had anchored the glamour end. It had sparked investment that had raced down the street block by block. By the time the improvements had reached the other extremity, the stakes had been raised way high and the Riviera had suddenly looked old and dowdy by comparison with the newer stuff. So the investment had bounced right back again, racing block by block in the reverse direction. The result was a perpetually moving
block-long construction site that separated the brand-new stuff that had just been built from the slightly older stuff that was just about to be demolished again. The roadway and the sidewalks were being straightened as the work progressed. The new lanes continued uninterrupted. The old route looped through rubble. The city felt briefly quiet and deserted there, like an uninhabited no man’s land.
That uninhabited no man’s land was exactly where the man in the blue suit came up behind his targets. They were walking four abreast, slowly, like they had a place to go but all the time in the world to get there. Neagley was on the left, Reacher and then O’Donnell were in the center, and Dixon was on the right. Close together, but not touching. Like a marching formation, across the whole width of the sidewalk. Collectively, they made a target maybe nine feet wide. It had been Neagley who had chosen the old sidewalk. She had followed it as if by arbitrary choice and the others had simply followed her.
The man in the suit took his gun out of his right-hand pocket. The gun was a Daewoo DP-51, made in South Korea, black, small, illegally obtained, unregistered, and untraceable. Its magazine held thirteen 9mm Parabellums. It was being carried in what its owner’s long training had taught him was the only safe-transport mode: chamber empty, safety on.
He held the gun right-handed and dry-fired against the locked trigger and rehearsed the sequence. He decided to prioritize and put the biggest targets down first. In his experience that always worked best. So, center-mass into Reacher’s back, then a small jog to the right into O’Donnell’s back, then a radical swing left to Neagley, then all the way back to Dixon. Four shots, maybe three seconds, from twenty feet, which was close enough to be sure of hitting without being so close that the deflections left and right would be extreme. Maximum traverse would be a little more than twenty degrees. Simple geometry. A simple task. No problem.
He glanced all around.
Clear.
He looked behind.
Clear.
He pushed the safety down and gripped the Daewoo’s barrel in his left hand and racked the slide with his right. Felt the first fat shell push upward, neatly into the chamber.
The night was not quiet. There was a lot of urban ambient noise. Traffic on the Strip, distant rooftop condensers roaring, extractors humming, the muted rumble of a hundred thousand people playing hard. But Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears it was a complete complex split-second symphony, and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a fleshy palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger, the grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass-cased shell socketing home, the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them.
His life and his history lacked many things. He had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came, for exactly what they were. Therefore he heard the slide rack back and felt no disabling shock. No panic. No stab of disbelief. It seemed entirely natural and reasonable to him that he should be walking down a street at night and listening to a man preparing to shoot him in the back. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing, no self-doubt, no inhibition. There was just evidence of a purely mechanical problem laid out behind him like an invisible four-dimensional diagram showing time and space and targets and fast bullets and slow bodies.
And then there was reaction, another thirtieth of a second later.
He knew where the first bullet would be aimed. He knew that any reasonable attacker would want to put the biggest target down first. That was nothing more than common sense. So the first shot would be aimed at him.
Or possibly at O’Donnell.
Better safe than sorry.
He used his right arm and shoved O’Donnell hard in the left shoulder and sent him sprawling into Dixon and then fell away in the opposite direction and crashed into Neagley. They both stumbled and as he was going down to his knees he heard the gun fire behind him and felt the bullet pass through the V-shaped void of empty air where the center of his back had been just a split second before.
He had his hand on his Hardballer before he hit the sidewalk. He was calculating angles and trajectories before he had it out of the waistband of his pants. The Hardballer had two safeties. A conventional lever at the left rear of the frame, and a grip safety released when the butt was correctly held.
Before he had either one set to fire he had decided not to shoot.
Not immediately, anyway.
He had fallen on top of Neagley toward the inside edge of the sidewalk. Their attacker was in the center of the sidewalk. Any angle vectoring from the inside of the sidewalk through the center would launch a bullet out toward the roadway. If he missed the guy, he could hit a passing car. Even if he hit the guy, he could still hit a passing car. A jacketed .45 could go right through flesh and bone. Easily. Lots of power. Lots of penetration.
He made a split-second decision to wait for O’Donnell.
O’Donnell’s angle was better. Much better. He had fallen on top of Dixon, toward the curb. Toward the gutter. His line of sight was inward. Toward the construction. A miss or a through-and-through would do no harm at all. The bullet would spend itself in a pile of sand.
Better to let O’Donnell fire.
Reacher twisted as he hit the ground. He was in that zone where his mind was fast but the physical world was slow. He felt like his body was mired in a vat of molasses. He was screaming at it to move move move but it was responding with extreme reluctance. Beyond him Neagley was thumping dustily to earth with slow-motion precision. In the corner of his eye he saw her shoulder hitting the ground and then her momentum moving her head like a rag doll’s. He moved his own head with enormous effort, like it was strapped with heavy weights, and he saw Dixon sprawling underneath O’Donnell.
He saw O’Donnell’s left arm moving with painful slowness. Saw his hand. Saw his thumb dropping the Hardballer’s safety lever.
Their attacker fired again.
And missed again. With a preplanned shot into empty air where O’Donnell’s back had been. The guy was following a sequence. He had rehearsed. Fire-move-fire, Reacher and O’Donnell first. A sound plan, but the guy was unable to react to unexpected contingencies. He was a slow, conventional thinker. His brain had vapor-locked. Good, but not good enough.
Reacher saw O’Donnell’s hand tighten around the grip of his gun. Saw his finger squeeze the slack out of the trigger. Saw the gun move up, up, up.
Reacher saw O’Donnell fire.
A snapshot, taken from an untidy uncompleted sprawl on the sidewalk. Taken before his body mass had even settled.
Too low, Reacher thought. That’s a leg wound at best.
He forced his head around. He was right. It was a leg wound. But a leg wound from a high-velocity jacketed .45 was not a pretty thing. It was like taking a high-torque power drill and fitting it with a foot-long half-inch masonry bit and drilling right through a limb. All in a lot less than a thousandth of a second. The damage was spectacular. The guy took the slug in the lower thigh and his femur exploded from the inside like it had been strapped with a bomb. Immense trauma. Paralyzing shock. Instant catastrophic blood loss from shattered arteries.
The guy stayed vertical but his gun hand dropped and O’Donnell was instantly on his feet. He scrambled up and his hand went in and out of his pocket and he covered the twenty feet full tilt and slammed the guy in the face with his knuckles. A straight right, with two hundred pounds of charging body mass behind it. Like hitting a watermelon with a sledgehammer.
The guy went down on his back. O’Donnell kicked his gun away and crouched at his side and jammed the Hardballer into his throat.
Game over, right
there.
46
Reacher helped Dixon up. Neagley got up on her own. O’Donnell was scooting around in a tight circle, trying to keep his feet out of the big welling puddle of blood coming from the guy’s leg. Clearly his femoral artery was wide open. A healthy human heart was a pretty powerful pump and this guy’s was busy dumping the whole of his blood supply onto the street. A guy his size, there had been probably fifteen pints in there at the beginning. Most of them were already gone.
“Step away, Dave,” Reacher called. “Let him bleed out. No point ruining a pair of shoes.”
“Who is he?” Dixon asked.
“We may never know,” Neagley said. “His face is a real mess.”
She was right. O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster had done its work well. The guy looked like he had been attacked with hammers and knives. Reacher walked a wide circle around his head and grabbed his collar and pulled him backward. The lake of blood changed to a teardrop shape. Reacher took advantage of dry pavement and squatted down and checked through his pockets.
Nothing in any of them.
No wallet, no ID, no nothing.
Just car keys and a remote clicker, on a plain steel ring.
The guy was pale and turning blue. Reacher put a finger on the pulse in his neck and felt an irregular thready beat. The blood coming out of his thigh was turning foamy. There was major air in his vascular system. Blood out, air in. Simple physics. Nature abhors a vacuum.
“He’s on the way out,” Reacher said.
“Good shooting, Dave,” Dixon said.
“Left-handed, too,” O’Donnell said. “I hope you noticed that.”
“You’re right-handed.”
“I was falling on my right arm.”
“Outstanding,” Reacher said.
“What did you hear?”
“The slide. It’s an evolution thing. Like a predator stepping on a twig.”
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 432