Bad Luck and Trouble Read online

  “All defense contractors have security issues. Or they think they ought to have, because they want to think what they do is important.”

  Reacher said nothing to that. Just sat and stared out the window. It was getting dark. A long day, nearly over. He said, “Franz didn’t go to his office the morning he disappeared.”

  “You think?”

  “We know. Angela had his set of keys. He left them home. He was going somewhere else that day.”

  Neagley said nothing.

  “And the landlord at the strip mall saw the bad guys,” Reacher said. “Franz’s lock wasn’t broken. They didn’t take Franz’s key from him, because he didn’t have it in his pocket. Therefore they scammed one or bought one from the owner. Therefore the owner saw them. Therefore we need to find him tomorrow, along with everything else.”

  “Franz should have called me,” Neagley said. “I would have dropped everything.”

  “I wish he had called you,” Reacher said. “If you had been there, none of this bad stuff would have happened.”

  Reacher and Neagley ate dinner in the downstairs restaurant, front corner of the lobby, where a bottle of still water from Norway cost eight dollars. Then they said goodnight and split up and headed for their separate rooms. Reacher’s was a chintzy cube two floors below Neagley’s suite. He stripped and showered and folded his clothes and put them under the mattress to press. He got into bed and folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. Thought about Calvin Franz for a minute, in random flashing images, the same way a political candidate’s biography is squeezed into a thirty second television commercial. His memory made some of the pictures sepia and some of them washed out, but in all of them Franz was moving, talking, laughing, full of drive and energy. Then Karla Dixon joined the parade, petite, dark, sardonic, laughing with Franz. Dave O’Donnell was there, tall, fair, handsome, like a stockbroker with a switchblade. And Jorge Sanchez, durable, eyes narrowed, with a hint of a smile that showed a gold tooth and was as close as he ever came to showing contentment. And Tony Swan, as wide as he was high. And Manuel Orozco, opening and closing a Zippo lighter because he liked the sound so much. Even Stan Lowrey was there, shaking his head, drumming his fingers on a table to a rhythm only he could hear.

  Then Reacher blinked all the pictures away and closed his eyes and fell asleep, ten-thirty in the evening, a long day, over.

  Ten-thirty in the evening in Los Angeles was one-thirty the next morning in New York, and the last British Airways flight from London, delayed, had just landed at JFK. The delay meant that the last immigration watch in British Airways’ own terminal had already gone off duty, so the plane taxied to Terminal Four and fed its passengers through the giant arrivals hall there. Third in the visitors’ line was a first-class passenger who had napped in seat 2K for most of the trip. He was medium height, medium weight, expensively dressed, and he radiated the kind of expansive self-confident courtesy typical of people who know how lucky they are to have been rich all their lives. He was perhaps forty years old. He had thick black hair, shiny, beautifully cut, and the kind of mid-brown skin and regular features that could have made him Indian, or Pakistani, or Iranian, or Syrian, or Lebanese, or Algerian, or even Israeli or Italian. His passport was British, and it passed the Immigration agent’s scrutiny with no trouble at all, as did its owner’s manicured forefingers on the electronic fingerprint pad. Seventeen minutes after unclipping his seat belt the guy was out in the shiny New York night, walking briskly to the head of the cab line.

  13

  At six the next morning Reacher went up to Neagley’s suite. He found her awake and showered and guessed she had been working out somewhere for an hour. Maybe in her room, maybe in the hotel gym. Maybe she had been out jogging. She looked sleek and pumped up and vital in a way that suggested there was a whole lot of oxygenated blood doing the rounds inside her.

  They ordered room service breakfast and spent the waiting time on another fruitless round of phone calls. No answer from East LA, none from Nevada, none from New York, none from Washington D.C. They didn’t leave messages. They didn’t redial or try again. And when they hung up, they didn’t talk about it. They just sat in silence until the waiter showed up and then they ate eggs and pancakes and bacon and drank coffee. Then Neagley called down to the valet station and ordered her car.

  “Franz’s place first?” she asked.

  Reacher nodded. “Franz is the focus here.”

  So they rode the elevator down and got in the Mustang together and crawled south on La Cienega to the post office at the tip of Culver City.

  They parked right outside Franz’s trashed office and walked back past the dry cleaner and the nail salon and the discount pharmacy. The post office was empty. A sign on the door said that the lobby had been open a half-hour. Clearly whatever initial rush there had been was over.

  “We can’t do this when it’s empty,” Reacher said.

  “So let’s find the landlord first,” Neagley said.

  They asked in the pharmacy. An old man in a short white coat was standing under an old-fashioned security camera behind the dispensing counter. He told them that the guy who owned the dry cleaner’s store was the landlord. He spoke with the kind of guarded hostility that tenants always use about the people who get their rent checks. He outlined a short success story in which his neighbor had come over from Korea and opened the cleaners and used the profits to leverage the whole strip mall. The American dream in action. Reacher and Neagley thanked him and walked past the nail salon and ducked into the cleaner’s and found the right guy immediately. He was rushing around in a crowded work area heavy with the stink of chemicals. Six big drum machines were churning away. Pressing tables were hissing. Racks of bagged clothes were winding around on a motorized conveyor above head height. The guy himself was sweating. Working hard. It looked like he deserved two strip malls. Or three. Maybe he already had them. Or more.

  Reacher got straight to the point. Asked, “When did you last see Calvin Franz?”

  “I hardly ever saw him,” the guy answered. “I couldn’t see him. He painted over his window, first thing he ever did.” He said it like he had been annoyed about it. Like he had known he was going to have to get busy with a scraper before he could rent the unit again.

  Reacher said, “You must have seen him coming and going. I bet nobody here works longer hours than you.”

  “I guess I saw him occasionally,” the guy said.

  “When do you guess you stopped seeing him occasionally?”

  “Three, four weeks ago.”

  “Just before the guys came around and asked you for his key?”

  “What guys?”

  “The guys you gave his key to.”

  “They were cops.”

  “The second set of guys were cops.”

  “So were the first.”

  “Did they show you ID?”

  “I’m sure they did.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t,” Reacher said. “I’m sure they showed you a hundred dollar bill instead. Maybe two or three of them.”

  “So what? It’s my key and it’s my building.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because we were Mr. Franz’s friends.”

  “Were?”

  “He’s dead. Someone threw him out of a helicopter.”

  The dry cleaner just shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t remember the guys,” he said.

  “They trashed your unit,” Reacher said. “Whatever they paid you for the key won’t cover the damage.”

  “Fixing the unit is my problem. It’s my building.”

  “Suppose it was your pile of smoldering ashes? Suppose I came back tonight and burned the whole place down?”

  “You’d go to prison.”

  “I don’t think so. A guy with a memory as bad as yours wouldn’t have anything to tell the police.”

  The guy nodded. “They were whi
te men. Two of them. Blue suits. A new car. They looked like everybody else I see.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Just white men. Not cops. Too clean and too rich.”

  “Nothing special about them?”

  “I’d tell you if I could. They trashed my place.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m sorry about your friend. He seemed like a nice guy.”

  “He was,” Reacher said.

  14

  Reacher and Neagley walked back to the post office. It was a small, dusty place. Government décor. It had gotten moderately busy again. Normal morning business was in full swing. There was one clerk working and a short line of waiting customers. Neagley handed Reacher Franz’s keys and joined the line. Reacher stepped to a shallow waist-high counter in back and took a random form out of a slot. It was a demand for confirmation of delivery. He used a pen on a chain and bent down and pretended to fill out the form. He turned his body sideways and rested his elbow on the counter and kept his hand moving. Glanced at Neagley. She was maybe three minutes from the head of the line. He used the time to survey the rows of mail boxes.

  They filled the whole end wall of the lobby. They came in three sizes. Small, medium, large. Six tiers of small, then below them four tiers of medium, then three tiers of large closest to the floor. Altogether one hundred eighty of the small size, ninety-six mediums, and fifty-four large. Total, three hundred thirty boxes.

  Which one was Franz’s?

  One of the large ones, for sure. Franz had been running a business, and it had been the kind of business that would have generated a fair amount of incoming mail. Some of it would have been in the form of thick legal-sized packages. Credit reports, financial information, court transcripts, eight-by-ten photographs. Large, stiff envelopes. Professional journals. Therefore, a large box.

  But which large box?

  No way of telling. If Franz had been given a free choice, he would have picked the top row, three up from the floor, right-hand end. Who wants to walk farther than he needs to from the street door and then crouch all the way down on the linoleum? But Franz wouldn’t have been given a free choice. You want a post office box, you take what’s available at the time. Dead men’s shoes. Someone dies or moves away, their box becomes free, you inherit it. Luck of the draw. A lottery. One chance in fifty-four.

  Reacher put his left hand in his pocket and fingered Franz’s key. He figured it would take between two and three seconds to test it in each lock. Worst case, almost three minutes of dancing along the array. Very exposed. Worse than worst case, he could be busy trying a box right in front of its legitimate owner who had just stepped in behind him. Questions, complaints, shouts, calls to the postal police, a potential federal case. Reacher had no doubt at all that he could get out of the lobby unharmed, but he didn’t want to get out empty-handed.

  He heard Neagley say: “Good morning.”

  He glanced left and saw her at the head of the counter line. Saw her leaning forward, commanding attention. Saw the counter clerk’s eyes lock in on hers. He dropped the pen and took the key from his pocket. Stepped unobtrusively to the wall of boxes and tried the first lock on the left, three up from the floor.

  Failure.

  He rocked the key clockwise and counterclockwise. No movement. He pulled it out and tried the lock below. Failure. The one below that. Failure.

  Neagley was asking a long complicated question about air mail rates. Her elbows were on the counter. She was making the clerk feel like the most important guy in the world. Reacher shuffled right and tried again, one box over, three up from the floor.

  Failure.

  Four down, fifty to go. Twelve seconds consumed, odds now improved from one-point-eight-five chances in a hundred to two chances in a hundred. He tried the next box down. Failure. He crouched, and tried the box nearest to the floor.

  Failure.

  He stayed in a crouch and shuffled right. Started the next column from the bottom up. No luck with the lowest. No luck with the one above. No luck with the third up. Nine down, twenty-five seconds elapsed. Neagley was still talking. Then Reacher was aware of a woman squeezing in on his left. Opening her box, high up. Raking out a dense mass of curled junk. Sorting it, as she stood there. Move, he begged her. Step away to the trash receptacle. She backed away. He stepped to his right and tried the fourth row. Neagley was still talking. The clerk was still listening. The key didn’t fit the top box. It didn’t fit the middle box. It didn’t fit the bottom box.

  Twelve down. Odds now one in forty-two. Better, but not good. The key didn’t fit anything in the fifth row. Nor the sixth. Eighteen down. One-third gone. Odds improving all the time. Look on the bright side. Neagley was still talking. He could hear her. He knew that behind her people in the line would be getting impatient. They would be shuffling their feet. They would be looking around, bored and inquisitive.

  He started on the seventh row, at the top. Rocked the key. It didn’t move. No go with the middle box. Nor the lowest. He shuffled right. Neagley had stopped talking. The clerk was explaining something. She was pretending not to understand. Reacher moved right again. The eighth row. The key didn’t fit the top box. The lobby was going quiet. Reacher could feel eyes on his back. He dropped his hand and tried the middle box in the eighth row.

  Rocked the key. The small metallic sound was very loud.

  Failure.

  The lobby was silent.

  Reacher tried the lowest box in the eighth row.

  Rocked the key.

  It moved.

  The lock opened.

  Reacher stepped back a foot and swung the little door all the way open and crouched down. The box was stuffed. Padded envelopes, big brown envelopes, big white envelopes, letters, catalogs, magazines wrapped in plastic, postcards.

  Sound came back to the lobby.

  Reacher heard Neagley say, “Thank you very much for your help.” He heard her footsteps on the tile. Heard the line behind her move up. Sensed people refocusing on their chances of getting their business done before they grew old and died. He slid his hand into the box and raked the contents forward. Butted everything together into a steady stack and clamped it between his palms and stood up. Jammed the stack under his arm and relocked the box and pocketed the key and walked away like the most natural thing in the world.

  Neagley was waiting in the Mustang, three doors down. Reacher leaned in and dumped the stack of mail on the center console and then followed it inside. Sorted through the stack and pulled out four small padded envelopes self-addressed in Franz’s own familiar handwriting.

  “Too small for CDs,” he said.

  He arranged them in date order according to the postmarks. The most recent had been stamped the same morning that Franz had disappeared.

  “But mailed the night before,” he said.

  He opened the envelope and shook out a small silver object. Metal, flat, two inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide, thin, capped with plastic. Like something that would go on a keyring. It had 128 MB printed on it.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Flash memory,” Neagley said. “The new version of floppy discs. No moving parts and a hundred times the storage capacity.”

  “What do we do with it?”

  “We plug it into one of my computers and we see what’s on it.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Unless it’s password-protected. Which it probably will be.”

  “Isn’t there software to help with that?”

  “There used to be. But not anymore. Things get better all the time. Or worse, depending on your point of view.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We spend the drive time making mental lists. Likely choices for his password. The old-fashioned way. My guess is we’ll get