Bad Luck and Trouble (45 page)

“We’re stuck on the 210,” he said. “There’s a stalled car up ahead.”

“Bullshit,” Lamaison said. “You’re right here in the neighborhood. You’ve been throwing gasoline bombs over my fence.” His voice was loud and angry. Over the cellular circuits it came through edgy and penetrating. A little grating and distorted. Reacher slipped the pad of his index finger over the earpiece perforations and glanced up at the searchers. They were a hundred and twenty yards away. They hadn’t reacted.

“What bombs?” he said, into the phone.

“You heard me.”

“We’re on the freeway. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit, Reacher. You’re right here. You started a fire. But it was pathetic. It took them all of five minutes to put it out. I’m sure you saw them do it.”

Eight minutes, actually,
Reacher thought.
Give me some damn credit.
But he said nothing. Just watched his pair of searchers. They were a hundred and ten yards away.

“The deal is off,” Lamaison said.

“Wait,” Reacher said. “I’m still thinking about the deal. But I’m not an idiot. I want a proof of life. You could have shot them already.”

“They’re still alive.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“I’ll call you when we’re through this traffic. You can bring them to the gate.”

“No way. They stay where they are.”

“Then we can’t do business.”

Lamaison said, “I’ll ask them a question for you.”

The searchers were ninety yards away.

“What question?” Reacher said.

“Think of a question only they can answer. We’ll ask them and call you back.”

“I’ll call you back,” Reacher said. “I don’t answer the phone when I’m driving.”

“You’re not driving. What’s the question?”

Reacher said, “Ask them who they were with before they joined the 110th MP.” Then he clicked the phone off and put it back in his pocket.

The searchers were about seventy yards away. Reacher crawled another twenty yards inward, slow and cautious, parallel with the fence. The searchers managed another ten yards while he was doing it. Now they were forty yards away, coming on slowly, five feet apart, scuffing the grass, peering outward at the fence, checking for breaches.

Reacher saw light at the front of the main building. The door, opening. A tall shape stepped out. Parker, probably. He closed the door behind him and hustled around the near gable wall and headed for the distant shack thirty yards away. He unlocked the door and went in and less than a minute later he came back out and locked up again.

The prison,
Reacher thought.
Thank you.

The searchers were twenty yards away. Eighteen and a quarter meters, sixty feet, 720 inches, one-point-one-three percent of a mile. Reacher shuffled ahead a little and closed the gap. The searchers stumbled on. Now they were ten yards ahead, on a diagonal, maybe eight yards to Reacher’s left.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

He hauled it out and cupped it in his hand. The caller ID said Dixon, which meant Lamaison. The answers to his question, recently relayed by Parker.

I said I’d call you,
Reacher thought.
Can’t talk now.

He jammed the phone back in his pocket and waited. The searchers were almost dead level with him, eight yards to his left. They moved on. Reacher squirmed around, a silent half-circle on the ground. The searchers walked on. Reacher completed the circle. Now he was behind them. He got silently to his feet. Took short quiet strides, stepping high to keep his soles from brushing the grass with telltale rustles. He fell in behind the two guys, ten feet back, then eight, then six, centered exactly between them. They were a decent size. Maybe six-two, two-ten, pale and meaty. Blue suits, white shirts, crew cuts. Broad shoulders, thick necks.

He hit the first guy with a massive straight right, dead-center in the back of the neck, two hundred and fifty pounds and days of rage behind the blow. The guy’s neck snapped forward and his skull snapped back and bounced straight off Reacher’s fist and smashed forward again until his chin smacked his chest. Whiplash. Like a crash test dummy rear-ended by a speeding truck. The guy went straight down in a heap and his buddy turned toward him in shock and Reacher danced through a short shuffle step and headbutted him full in the face. He knew it was a great one by the sound alone. Bone, gristle, muscle, flesh, the unmistakable crunch of serious damage. The guy stayed vertical but unconscious for a second and then went down flat.

Reacher rolled the first guy on his back and sat on his chest and pinched his nose with one hand and blocked his mouth with his other palm. Then he waited until the guy suffocated. It didn’t take long. Less than a minute. Then he did the same thing with the other guy. Another minute.

Then he checked their pockets. The first guy had a cell phone and a gun and a wallet full of cash money and credit cards. Reacher took the gun and the cash money, left the cell phone and the credit cards. The gun was a SIG P226, nine-millimeter. The cash money was a little less than two hundred dollars. The second guy had another phone, another SIG, another wallet.

Plus Dave O’Donnell’s ceramic knuckleduster.

It was right there in his jacket pocket. Either a reward for good work at the hospital takedown, or a stolen souvenir. Spoils of war. Reacher put it in his own pocket and jammed the SIGs in his waistband and the cash in his back pocket. Then he wiped his hands on the second guy’s jacket and crawled away, low and fast, peering into the dark where he imagined Neagley to be. He had heard nothing from that direction. Nothing at all. But he wasn’t worried. Neagley against two guys in the dark was about as reliable as the sun setting in the west.

He found another broad dip in the grass and lay down on his elbows and pulled out his phone. Called Dixon’s number.

“Where the hell were you?” Lamaison asked him.

“I told you,” Reacher said. “I don’t pick up when I’m driving.”

“You’re not driving.”

“So why didn’t I pick up?”

“Whatever,” Lamaison said. “Where are you now?”

“Close by.”

“Before the 110th Dixon says she was with the 53rd MP and O’Donnell says he was with the 131st.”

“OK,” Reacher said. “I’ll call you back in ten. When we arrive.”

He clicked off and sat up cross-legged in the dirt. He had his proof-of-life answers. Only problem was, neither one of them was even remotely true.

75

Reacher crawled south through the grass, looking for Neagley in the dark. He made it through fifty fast yards and found a corpse instead. He blundered right into it, hands and then knees. It was a man, cooling fast. Blue suit, white shirt. Broken neck.

“Neagley?” he whispered.

“Here,” she whispered back.

She was twenty feet away, lying on her side, propped up on one elbow.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Feeling good.”

“Was there another one?”

“Behind you,” she said. “To your right.”

Reacher turned. Same kind of guy, same kind of suit, same kind of shirt.

Same kind of injury.

“Any problems?” he asked.

“Easy,” she said. “And quieter than you. I heard that head butt all the way over here.”

They bumped fists in the dark, the old ritual, about as much physical contact as she liked to permit.

“Lamaison thinks we’re on the outside looking in,” Reacher said. “He’s trying to scam us with a deal. If we surrender they’ll lock us all up for a week and then let us go when the heat dies down.”

“Like we’d believe that.”

“One of my guys had Dave’s knuckleduster.”

“That’s not a good sign.”

“They’re OK so far. I asked for a proof of life. Personal questions. Dixon says she was with the 53rd MP and O’Donnell says he was with the 131st.”

“That’s bullshit. There was no 53rd MP. And Dave was posted to the 110th straight out of Officer Candidate School.”

“They’re talking to us,” Reacher said. “Fifty-three is a prime number. Karla knew I’d pick up on that.”

“So?”

“Five and three make eight. She’s telling us there are eight hostiles.”

“Four left, then. Lennox, Parker, and Lamaison. Plus one. Who’s the fourth?”

“That’s Dave’s message. He’s a words guy. One-three-one. Thirteenth letter of the alphabet, first letter of the alphabet.”

“
M
and
A,
” Neagley said.

“Mauney,” Reacher said. “Curtis Mauney is here.”

“Excellent,” Neagley said. “Saves hunting him down later.”

They bumped fists again. Then cell phones started to ring. Loud and piercing and insistent. Two of them, different tones, unsynchronized. One each in the dead guys’ pockets. Reacher had no doubt at all the same thing was happening fifty yards away. Two more dead guys, two more pockets, two more ringing phones. A conference call. Lamaison was touching base with his foot patrol.

Something unpredictable.

The phones rang six times each and stopped. Silence came back.

“What would you do now?” Reacher asked. “If you were Lamaison?”

Neagley said, “I’d get guys in those Chryslers and turn the head-lights on bright and fix myself a little motor patrol. I’d run us down in less than a minute.”

Reacher nodded. Against a man on foot, the lot felt big. Against a car, it would feel small. Against more than one car it would feel tiny. In the dark it felt safe. With xenon beams blazing away it would feel like a goldfish bowl. He pictured cars bouncing over the rough ground, pictured himself trapped in their lights, darting left, darting right, shading his eyes, one car chasing, two cars converging.

He glanced at the fence.

“Correct,” Neagley said. “The fence keeps us in just as well as it kept us out. We’re two balls on a pool table and someone’s about to turn on the lights and pick up a cue.”

“What are they going to do if they don’t find us?”

“How are they not going to find us?”

“Suppose.”

Neagley shrugged and said, “They’re going to assume we got out somehow.”

“And then?”

“They’re going to panic.”

“How?”

“They’re going to kill Karla and Dave and hunker down.”

Reacher nodded.

“That’s my guess, too,” he said.

He got up and ran. Neagley followed.

76

Reacher ran straight for the helicopter. It was sixty yards away, large and white and luminous in the city’s nighttime glow. Neagley jogged at his side, patiently. Reacher was no kind of a sprinter. He was slow and heavy. And he had stuff bouncing around in his pockets. Any college athlete would have done the sixty yards in six or seven seconds. Neagley would have done it in eight. Reacher took closer to fifteen. But he got there in the end. He got there just as the main building’s door burst open and light and men spilled out. He dodged left and kept the chopper between him and them. Neagley crowded in at his elbow. Three guys were heading for the parking lot, fast and urgent. Parker and Lennox. And Lamaison. They were all hurrying. For every yard they covered, Reacher and Neagley moved a corresponding inch around the Bell, clockwise, touching its belly lightly with their fingertips, using its bulk as a shield. It was cold and dewed over with night mist, like a car parked on the street. It felt slimy. It smelled of oil and kerosene.

Thirty yards away three Chryslers started up. Three V-8 engines, suddenly loud in the stillness. Three transmissions slammed into gear. Three pairs of headlights flicked on. They were unbelievably bright in the darkness. They were crisp, focused, hard-edged, and superwhite. Then they got worse. One by one they switched to high beam. New lenses lit up. Huge cones of dazzling light swayed and bounced as the cars began to move. Reacher and Neagley slid around the Bell’s long pointed nose and hugged the other flank. The cars separated like a shell burst and accelerated and headed off in random changing directions.

Within ten seconds they had found all four dead guys.

The cars slewed to a stop at the two sites fifty yards apart. One car where Neagley had been, two where Reacher had been. Their lights went still and threw long grotesque quadruple shadows off the four humped shapes. Three distant figures ran around, flashing instantly from extreme brightness into total darkness as they moved through the beams.

“We can’t stay here,” Neagley said. “They’re going to come back this way and light us up like we’re on stage at the Hollywood Bowl.”

“How long have we got?”

“They’re going to check the fence pretty thoroughly. Four minutes, maybe.”

“Start counting,” Reacher said. He pushed off the helicopter’s flank and ran for the main building. Forty yards, ten seconds. The door had been left ajar. Lights had been left on. Reacher paused. Then he walked straight in, very quietly, with his hand on his Glock in his pocket. Saw nobody inside. The place seemed to be deserted. There were small walled-off offices on the right and a big open-plan work area on the left, behind a floor-to-ceiling plate glass screen. The work area had long laboratory benches and bright lights and complex extraction ducts on the ceiling to control dust and a grounded metal grid on the floor to control static electricity. A sliding door in the screen was open. The air coming out smelled of warm silicon boards. Like a brand-new TV.