by Lee Child
“A technicality,” the guy said. It took him a couple of tries before he got the whole word out. He had trouble with the harsh consonants. “Me or you or anybody can’t sell or give a gun to someone else without all the formalities.”
“But?”
“Me or you or anybody is entitled to loan one out. A temporary and infrequent loan lasting less than thirty days is OK.”
“Is that right?” Reacher said.
“It’s in the statute.”
“Interesting.”
“Like between family members,” the guy said. “Husband to wife, father to daughter.”
“I can see that.”
“Or like between friends,” the guy said. “A friend can loan a gun to a friend, thirty days, temporary.”
“Are we friends?” Reacher asked.
“We could be,” the guy said.
Reacher asked, “What kind of things do friends do for one another?”
The guy said, “Maybe they loan each other things. Like one loans out a gun, and the other loans out some money.”
“But only temporarily,” Reacher said. “Thirty days.”
“Loans can go bad. Sometimes you just have to write them off. It’s a risk. People move away, they fall out. You can never tell with friends.”
Reacher left the money where it was. Stepped away to the wired glass cabinet. There was some junk in there. But some good stuff, too. About fifty-fifty revolvers and automatics. The automatics were about two-thirds cheap and one-third premium brands. The premium brands ran about one-in-four nine-millimeter.
Total choice, thirteen suitable pistols. From a stock of about three hundred. Four and a third percent. Worse than his breakfast calculation, by a factor of close to two.
Seven of the suitable pistols were Glocks. Clearly they had been fashionable once, but weren’t anymore. One of them was a 19. The other six were 17s. In terms of visual condition they ranged from good to mint.
“Suppose you loaned me four Glocks,” Reacher said.
“Suppose I didn’t,” the guy said.
Reacher turned around. The money was gone from the counter. Reacher had expected that. There was a gun in the guy’s hand. Reacher had not expected that.
We’re old, we’re slow, and we’re rusty, Neagley had said. We’re a million miles from what we used to be.
Roger that, Reacher thought.
The gun was a Colt Python. Blued carbon steel, walnut grips, .357 Magnum, eight-inch barrel. Not the biggest revolver in the world, but not very far from it. Certainly it wasn’t the smallest revolver in the world. And it was maybe one of the most accurate.
“That isn’t very friendly,” Reacher said.
“We ain’t friends,” the guy said.
“It’s also kind of dumb,” Reacher said. “I’m in a very bad mood right now.”
“Suck it up. And keep your hands where I can see them.”
Reacher paused, and then he raised his hands, halfway, palms out, fingers spread, unthreatening. The guy said, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”
The store was narrow. Reacher was all the way in back. The guy was behind the counter, a third of the way to the door. The aisle was cramped. The sunlight was bright in the window.
The guy said, “Leave the building, Elvis.”
Reacher stood still for a moment. Listened hard. Glanced left, glanced right, checked behind him. There was a door in the back left corner. Probably just a bathroom. Not an office. There was paperwork piled behind the counter. Nobody piles paperwork behind the counter if they have a separate room for it. Therefore the guy was alone. No partner, no backup.
No more surprises.
Reacher put the kind of look on his face that he had seen in Vegas. The rueful loser. It was worth a try, you got to be in it to win it. Then he kept his hands up at his shoulders and stepped forward. One pace. Two. Three. His fourth pace put him directly level with the guy. Just the width of the counter between them. Reacher was facing the door. The guy was ninety degrees to his left. The counter was maybe thirty inches deep. Two and a half feet.
Reacher’s left arm moved, straight out sideways from the shoulder.
The boxer Muhammad Ali’s reach was reckoned to be about forty inches and his hands were once timed at an average eighty miles an hour as they moved through it. Reacher was no Ali. Not even close. Especially not on his weaker side. His left hand moved at about sixty miles an hour, maximum. That was all. But sixty miles an hour was the same thing as a mile a minute, which was the same thing as eighty-eight feet per second. Which meant that Reacher’s left hand took a little less than thirty-thousandths of a second to cross the counter. And halfway through its travel it bunched into a fist.
And thirty-thousandths of a second was way too brief an interval for the guy to pull the Python’s trigger. Any revolver is a complex mechanical system and one as big as the Python is heavier in its action than most. Not very susceptible to accidental discharge. The guy’s finger didn’t even tighten. He took Reacher’s fist in his face before his brain had even registered that it was moving. Reacher was a lot slower than Muhammad Ali but his arms were a lot longer. Which meant that the guy’s head accelerated through a whole extra foot and a half before Reacher’s arm was fully extended. And then the guy’s head kept on accelerating. It kept on accelerating right until it crashed against the wall behind the counter and shattered the glass over the gun dealer’s license.
At that point it stopped accelerating and started a slow downward slide to the floor.
Reacher was over the counter before the guy had even settled. He kicked the Python away and used his heel to break the guy’s fingers. Both hands. Necessary in a weapons-rich environment, and faster than tying wrists. Then he reclaimed Neagley’s cash from the guy’s pocket and found his keys. Vaulted back over the counter and stepped to the back of the store and opened the wired glass cabinet. Took all seven Glocks and pulled a suitcase out of a display of used luggage and piled the guns inside. Then he wiped his fingerprints off the keys and his palm prints off the counter and headed outside to the sunshine.
They stopped at a legitimate firearms dealer in Tustin and bought ammunition. Plenty of it. There seemed to be no restrictions on that kind of purchase. Then they headed back north. Traffic was slow. About level with Anaheim, they took a call from O’Donnell in East LA.
“Nothing’s happening here,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“No activity at all. You shouldn’t have made that call from Vegas. It was a bad mistake. You threw them into a panic. They’ve gone into full-on lockdown mode.”
61
Reacher and Dixon stayed on the 101 all the way to Hollywood and dumped the Chrysler in the motel lot and took a Honda each for the trek out to East LA. Reacher’s was a silver Prelude coupe with a chipped and nervous four-cylinder motor. It had wide tires that tramlined on bad asphalt and a throaty muffler note that entertained him for the first three blocks and then started to annoy him. The upholstery stank of detailing fluid and there was a crack in the windshield that lengthened perceptibly every time he hit a bump. But the seat racked back far enough for him to get comfortable and the air conditioning worked. Altogether not a bad surveillance vehicle. He had driven far worse, many times.
They got a four-way conference call going on the cell phones and parked far from one another. Reacher was two blocks from the New Age building and had a partial view of the front entrance, from about sixty yards on a diagonal between a document storage facility and a plain gray warehouse. New Age’s gate was shut and the lot looked pretty much empty. The reception area doors were closed. The whole place looked quiet.
“Who’s in there?” Reacher asked.
“Maybe nobody,” O’Donnell said. “We’ve been here since five and nobody’s gone in.”
“Not even the dragon lady?”
“Negative.”
“No receptionist?”
“Negative.”
“Do we have
their phone number?”
Neagley said, “I have their switchboard number.” She recited it and Reacher clicked off and thumbed it into his phone and hit the green button.
Ring tone.
But no reply.
He dialed back into the conference call.
“I was hoping to follow someone over to the manufacturing plant.”
“Not going to happen,” O’Donnell said.
Silence on the phones. No action at the glass cube.
Five minutes. Ten. Twenty.
“Enough,” Reacher said. “Back to base. Last one there buys lunch.”
Reacher was the last one back. He wasn’t a fast driver. The other three Hondas were already in the lot when he got there. He put his Prelude in an inconspicuous corner and took the suitcase of stolen guns out of the Chrysler’s trunk and locked it in his room. Then he walked down to Denny’s. First thing he saw there was Curtis Mauney’s unmarked car in the parking lot. The Crown Vic. The LA County sheriff. Second thing he saw was Mauney himself, through the window, inside the restaurant, sitting at a round table with Neagley and O’Donnell and Dixon. It was the same table they had shared with Diana Bond. Five chairs, one of them empty and waiting. Nothing on the table. Not even ice water or napkins or silverware. They hadn’t ordered. They hadn’t been there long. Reacher went in and sat down and there was a moment of tense silence and then Mauney said, “Hello again.”
A gentle tone of voice.
Quiet.
Sympathetic.
Reacher asked, “Sanchez or Swan?”
Mauney didn’t answer.
Reacher said, “What, both of them?”
“We’ll get to that. First tell me why you’re hiding.”
“Who says we’re hiding?”
“You left Vegas. You’re not registered at any LA hotel.”
“Doesn’t mean we’re hiding.”
“You’re in a West Hollywood dive under false names. The clerk gave you up. As a group you’re fairly distinctive, physically. It wasn’t hard to find you. And it was an easy guess that you’d come in here for lunch. If not, I was prepared to come back at dinner time. Or breakfast time tomorrow.”
Reacher said, “Jorge Sanchez or Tony Swan?”
Mauney said, “Tony Swan.”
62
Mauney said, “We’ve learned a thing or two, over the last few weeks. We let the buzzards do the work for us now. We’re out there like ornithologists, anytime we get a spare half hour. You get up on the roof of your car with your binoculars, you can usually see what you need. Two birds circling, it’s probably a snake-bit coyote. More than two, it’s probably a bigger deal.”
Reacher asked, “Where?”
“Same general area.”
“When?”
“Some time ago.”
“Helicopter?”
“No other way.”
“No doubt about the ID?”
“He was on his back. His hands were tied behind him. His fingerprints were preserved. His wallet was in his pocket. I’m very sorry.”
The waitress came over. The same one they had seen before. She paused near the table and sensed the mood and went away again.
Mauney asked, “Why are you hiding?”
“We’re not hiding,” Reacher said. “We’re just waiting for the funerals.”
“So why the false names?”
“You brought us here as bait. Whoever they are, we don’t want to make it easy for them.”
“Don’t you know who they are yet?”
“Do you?”
“No independent action, OK?”
“We’re on Sunset Boulevard here,” Reacher said. “Which is LAPD turf. Are you speaking for them?”
“Friendly advice,” Mauney said.
“Noted.”
“Andrew MacBride disappeared in Vegas. Arrived, didn’t check in anywhere, didn’t rent a car, didn’t fly out. Dead end.”
Reacher nodded. “Don’t you just hate that?”
“But a guy called Anthony Matthews rented a U-Haul.”
“The last name on Orozco’s list.”
Mauney nodded. “Endgame.”
“Where did he take it?”
“I have no idea.” Mauney slid four business cards out of his top pocket. He fanned them out and placed them carefully on the table. His name and two phone numbers were printed on them. “Call me. I mean it. You might need help. You’re not up against amateurs here. Tony Swan looked like a real tough guy. What was left of him.”
Mauney went back to work and the waitress came over again five minutes later and hovered. Reacher guessed no one was very hungry anymore, but they all ordered anyway. Old habits. Eat when you can, don’t risk running out of energy later. Swan would have approved. Swan ate anywhere, anytime, all the time. Autopsies, exhumations, crime scenes. In fact Reacher was pretty sure that Swan had been eating a roast beef sandwich when they discovered Doug, the decomposed dead guy with the shovel in his head.
Nobody confirmed it.
Nobody talked at all. The sun was bright outside the window. A beautiful day. Blue sky, small white clouds. Cars passed by on the boulevard, customers came and went. Phones rang, landlines in the kitchen and cells in other people’s pockets. Reacher ate methodically and mechanically without the slightest idea what was on his plate.
“Should we move?” Dixon asked. “Now that Mauney knows where we are?”
“I don’t like it that the clerk gave us up,” O’Donnell said. “We should steal his damn TV remotes.”
“We don’t need to move,” Reacher said. “Mauney is no danger to us. And I want to know about it when they find Sanchez.”
“So what next?” Dixon asked.
“We rest up,” Reacher said. “We go out again after dark. We pay New Age a visit. We’re not getting anywhere with surveillance, so it’s time to go proactive.”
He left ten bucks on the table for the waitress and paid the check at the register. Then they all stepped outside to the sunshine and stood blinking in the lot for a moment before heading back to the Dunes.
Reacher fetched the suitcase and they gathered in O’Donnell’s room and checked over the stolen Glocks. Dixon took the 19 and said she was happy with it. O’Donnell sorted through the remaining six 17s and picked out the best three among them. He paired them with the magazines from the rejects so that he and Neagley and Reacher would have fast reloads the first time around. Dixon would have to reload manually after her first seventeen shots. Not a huge issue. If a handgun engagement wasn’t over inside seventeen shots, then someone wasn’t paying attention, and Reacher trusted Dixon to pay attention. She always had, in the past.
Reacher asked, “What kind of security can we expect around their building?”
“State of the art locks,” Neagley said. “An intruder alarm on the gate. I imagine the door opener at reception will be wired as a proximity sensor at night. Plus another intruder alarm, probably. Plus motion sensors all over the place inside. Plus intruder alarms on some of the individual office doors, maybe. All hard-wired out through the phone lines. Possibly with wireless backup, maybe even a satellite uplink.”
“And who’s going to respond?”
“That’s a very good question. Not the cops, I think. Too low-rent. My guess is it will all pipe straight through to their own security people.”
“Not the government?”
“That would make sense, for sure. The Pentagon is spending zillions there, you’d think the government would want to be involved. But I doubt if they are. Not everything makes sense nowadays. They gave airport security to private contractors. And the nearest DIA office is a long way away. So I think New Age’s security will be handled in-house, however cool Little Wing is.”
“How long will we have after we breach the gate?”
“Who says we’re going to? We don’t have keys and you can’t pick a lock like that with a rusty nail. I don’t think we’ll be able to beat any of the locks.”
“I’ll worry
about the locks. How long will we have, after we’re inside?”
“Two minutes,” Neagley said. “A situation like that, the two-minute rule is the only thing we can rely on.”
“OK,” Reacher said. “We’ll go at one in the morning. Dinner at six. Get some rest.”
The others headed for the door. He followed them out, with the keys to the captured Chrysler in his hand. Neagley looked at him, quizzically.
“We don’t need it anymore,” he said to her. “I’m going to give it back. But first I’m going to have it washed. We should try to be civilized.”
Reacher drove the Chrysler back to Van Nuys Boulevard, north of the Ventura Freeway. The auto strip, where there were car-related enterprises of every kind lined up side by side, one after the other. Dealers, obviously, new and used, cheap and expensive, gaudy and restrained, but also tire shops, wheel shops, paintless dent repair, lube franchises, muffler-and-shock shops, and accessory stores.
And car washes.
There was a huge choice. Machine washing, brushless hand washing, underbody steam cleaning, three-stage waxing, full service detailing. He drove a mile up and a mile back and picked out four places that offered everything. He stopped at the first of them and asked for the total treatment. A swarm of guys in coveralls took over and he stood in the sun and watched them work. First the interior was vacuumed out and then the whole car was dragged through a glass tunnel on a moving chain and was sprayed by a sequence of nozzles with water and all kinds of foams and fluids. Guys with sponges washed the sheet metal and guys on plastic steps lathered the roof. Then the car passed under a roaring air dryer and was driven out to the apron, where other guys waited to attack the interior with aerosols and rags. They went over every inch and left it gleaming and immaculate and damp with oily residue. Reacher paid and tipped and pulled his gloves out of his pocket and put them on and drove the car away.
He stopped a hundred yards farther on, at the second place he had picked out, and asked for the whole process to be repeated all over again. The receptionist looked puzzled for a second and then shrugged and waved a crew over. Reacher stood in the sun again and watched the show. The vacuum, the shampoo, the interior, the aerosols, and the towels. He paid and tipped and put his gloves back on and drove back to the motel.