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?

No one was laughing now. It was different when it was your own.

The spreadsheets were back on the bed. One hundred and eighty-three days over a seven-month span. A total of 2,197 events. There was a new page next to them in Dixon’s handwriting. She had extrapolated the numbers out to three hundred and fourteen days and 3,766 events in a complete year. Reacher guessed she had invited the others to brainstorm about what kind of a thing happens 3,766 times over three hundred and fourteen days in a year. But the rest of the page was blank. Nobody had come up with anything. The sheet with the five names was on the pillow. It was lying at a careless angle, like someone had been studying it and then thrown it down in frustration.

“There must be more than this,” O’Donnell said.

“What exactly do you want?” Reacher said back. “Cliffs Notes?”

“I’m saying there isn’t enough here for four people to have died for it.”

Reacher nodded.

“I agree,” he said. “It ain’t much. Because the bad guys got practically everything. His computers, his Rolodex, his client list, his phone book. All we’ve got is the tip of the iceberg. Fragments. Like archaeological remains. But we better get used to it, because this kind of thing is all we’re ever going to get.”

“So what do we do?”

“Break the habit.”

“What habit?”

“Asking me what to do. I might not be here tomorrow. I imagine those deputies are gearing up right now. You’re going to have to start thinking for yourselves.”

“Until then what do we do?”

Reacher ignored the question. Turned instead to Karla Dixon and asked, “When you rented your car, did you get the extra insurance?”

She nodded.

“OK,” Reacher said. “Take another break. Then we’ll go get some dinner. My treat. Maybe like the last supper. I’ll meet you in the lobby in an hour.”

Reacher got Dixon’s Ford from the valets and drove east on Hollywood Boulevard. He passed the Entertainment Museum and Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Made the left on Highland. He was two blocks west of Hollywood and Vine, which was where the bad stuff had traditionally been. Now the bad stuff seemed to have migrated, which was usually the way. Law enforcement never really won. It just shoved stuff around, a block here, a block there.

Reacher pulled to the curb. There was a wide alley behind the wax museum. Really a vacant half-lot, gravel surface, unfenced, colonized by cars into a turning loop, recolonized by dealers into a drive-through facility. The operation was organized in the conventional triangulated manner. A buyer would drive in and slow up. A kid not more than eleven years old would approach. The driver would place his order and hand over his cash. The kid would run the cash to a bag man and then continue to a stash man and pick up the product. Meanwhile the driver would be crawling through a slow half-circle, ready to meet the kid again on the other side of the lot. Whereupon the transfer would be made and the driver would leave. The kid would run back to where he began and wait to start all over again.

A smart system. Complete separation of product and money, easy instant dispersal in three different directions if necessary, and no one was seen with anything except someone way too young to be prosecuted. The stash would be refreshed often, leaving the stash man holding the bare minimum at any one time. The cash bag would be emptied frequently, reducing potential losses and the bag man’s vulnerability.

A smart system.

A system Reacher had seen before.

A system he had exploited before.

The bag man was literally a bag man. He was sitting on a concrete block in the middle of the lot with a black vinyl duffel at his feet. He was wearing sunglasses and would be armed with whatever was the handgun of choice that week.

Reacher waited.

A black Mercedes ML slowed and pulled into the lot. A pretty SUV, tinted windows, California vanity plates spelling out an acronym Reacher didn’t understand. It paused at the entry and the kid ran up. His head barely reached the driver’s window. But his hand did. It snaked up and came back down with a folded wad. The Mercedes eased forward and the kid ran over to the bag man. The wad went into the bag and the kid headed for the stash man. The Mercedes was beginning to turn its slow half-circle.

Reacher put Dixon’s Ford in gear. Checked north, checked south. Hit the gas and turned the wheel and slammed into the lot. Ignored the worn circular path and aimed straight for the center of the space.

Straight for the bag man, accelerating, front wheels spraying gravel.

The bag man froze.

Ten feet before hitting him head-on Reacher did three things. He twitched the wheel. He stamped on the brake. And he opened his door. The car slewed right and the front wheels washed into the loose stones and the door swung out through a moving arc and caught the guy like a full-on punch. It smacked him solidly from his waist up to his face. He went over backward and the car stopped dead and Reacher leaned down and grabbed the vinyl duffel left-handed from the floor. Pitched it into the passenger seat and hit the gas and slammed his door shut and pulled a tight U-turn inside the slow Mercedes. Roared back out of the lot and bounced over the curb onto Highland. In the mirror he saw dust in the air and confusion and the bag man flat on his back and two guys running. Ten yards later he was behind the bulk of the wax museum. Then he was through the light, back on Hollywood Boulevard.

Twelve seconds, beginning to end.

No reaction. No gunshots. No pursuit.

Nor would there be any, Reacher guessed. They would have clocked the plain-vanilla Ford and the appalling shirt and the short hair and put it down to an LAPD freelance looking to supplement his pension fund. The cost of doing business. And the Mercedes driver couldn’t afford to say a word to anyone.

Yeah baby, you do not mess with the special investigators.

Reacher slowed and caught his breath and made a right and drove a complete counterclockwise scenic circle. Nichols Canyon Road, Woodrow Wilson Drive, and back on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Nobody was behind him. He stopped on a deserted hairpin up high and emptied the bag and ditched it on the shoulder. Then he counted the money. Close to nine hundred dollars, mostly in twenties and tens. Enough for dinner. Even with Norwegian water. And a tip.

He got out and checked the car. The driver’s door was a little dented, right in the center. The bag man’s face. No blood. He got back in and buckled up. Ten minutes later he was in the Chateau Marmont’s lobby, sitting in a faded velvet armchair, waiting for the others.

Twelve hundred miles northeast of the Chateau Marmont, the dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Alan Mason was riding the underground train from his arrival gate to the Denver airport’s main terminal. He was alone in the car, sitting down, tired, but smiling all the same at the crazy bursts of jug-band music that preceded the station announcements. He figured they had been specified by a psychologist to reduce travel stress. In which case they were working. He felt fine. A lot more relaxed than he had any right to be.