Bad Luck and Trouble (25 page)

“Exactly. We’ve been wrong from the start. We need to reverse the paradigm. Suppose Franz got a panic call from Orozco or Sanchez? That’s certainly someone he regards as special. That’s someone he’s obligated to somehow. Not a client, but he can’t say no. He’s got to pitch in and help, no matter what Angela or Charlie think.”

Silence in the room.

Reacher said, “Orozco contacted Homeland Security. That’s difficult to do. And it’s the only really proactive thing we’ve seen so far. It’s more than Franz seems to have done.”

O’Donnell said, “Mauney’s people think Orozco was dead before Franz. That might be significant.”

“Yes,” Dixon said. “If this was Franz’s deal, why would he farm out the heavy-duty inquiries to Orozco? I imagine Franz was better equipped to handle them himself. That kind of proves the dynamic was flowing the other way, doesn’t it?”

“It’s suggestive,” Reacher said. “But let’s not make the same mistake twice. It could have been Swan.”

“Swan wasn’t working.”

“Sanchez, then, not Orozco.”

“More likely both of them together.”

Neagley said, “Which would mean this was something based in Vegas, not here in LA. Could those numbers be something to do with casinos?”

“Possibly,” Dixon said. “They could be house win percentages taking a hit after someone worked out a system.”

“What kind of thing gets played nine or ten or twelve times a day?”

“Practically anything. There’s no real minimum or maximum.”

“Cards?”

“Almost certainly, if we’re talking about a system.”

O’Donnell nodded. “Six hundred and fifty unscheduled winning hands at an average of a hundred grand a time would get anyone’s attention.”

Dixon said, “They wouldn’t let a guy win six hundred and fifty times for four months solid.”

“So maybe it’s more than one guy. Maybe it’s a cartel.”

Neagley said, “We have to go to Vegas.”

Then Dixon’s room phone rang. She answered it. Her room, her phone. She listened for a second and handed the receiver to Reacher.

“Curtis Mauney,” she said. “For you.”

Reacher took the phone and said his name and Mauney said: “Andrew MacBride just got on a plane in Denver. He’s heading for Las Vegas. I’m telling you this purely as a courtesy. So stay exactly where you are. No independent action, remember?”

42

They decided to drive to Vegas, not fly. Faster to plan and easier to organize and no slower door to door. No way could they take the Hardballers on a plane, anyway. And they had to assume that firepower would be necessary sooner or later. So Reacher waited in the lobby while the others packed. Neagley came down first and checked them out. She didn’t even look at the bill. Just signed it. Then she dumped her bag near the door and waited with Reacher. O’Donnell came down next. Then Dixon, with her Hertz key in her hand.

They loaded their bags into the trunk and slid into their seats. Dixon and Neagley up front, Reacher and O’Donnell behind them. They headed east on Sunset and fought through the tangle of clogged freeways until they found the 15. It would run them north through the mountains and then north of east out of state and all the way to Vegas.

It would also run them close to where they knew a helicopter had hovered more than three weeks previously, at least twice, three thousand feet up, dead of night, its doors open. Reacher made up his mind not to look, but he did. After the road brought them out of the hills he found himself looking west toward the flat tan badlands. He saw O’Donnell doing the same thing. And Neagley. And Dixon. She took her eyes off the road for seconds at a time and stared to her left, her face creased against the setting sun and her lips clamped and turned down at the corners.

They stopped for dinner in Barstow, California, at a miserable roadside diner that had no virtues other than it was there and the road ahead was empty. The place was dirty, the service was slow, the food was bad. Reacher was no gourmet, but even he felt cheated. In the past he or Dixon or Neagley or certainly O’Donnell might have complained or heaved a chair through a window, but none of them did that night. They just suffered through three courses and drank weak coffee and got back on the road.

The man in the blue suit called it in from the Chateau Marmont’s parking lot: “They skipped out. They’re gone. All four of them.”

His boss asked, “Where to?”

“The clerk thinks Vegas. That’s what she heard.”

“Excellent. We’ll do it there. Better all around. Drive, don’t fly.”

The dark-haired forty-year-old calling himself Andrew MacBride stepped out of the jetway inside the Las Vegas airport and the first thing he saw was a bank of slot machines. Bulky black and silver and gold boxes, with winking neon fascias. Maybe twenty of them, back to back in lines of ten. Each machine had a vinyl stool in front of it. Each machine had a narrow gray ledge at the bottom with an ashtray on the left and a cup holder on the right. Perhaps twelve of the twenty stools were occupied. The men and women on them were staring forward at the screens with a peculiar kind of fatigued concentration.

Andrew MacBride decided to try his luck. He decided to designate the result as a harbinger of his future success. If he won, everything would be fine.

And if he lost?

He smiled. He knew that if he lost he would rationalize the result away. He wasn’t superstitious.

He sat on a stool and propped his briefcase against his ankle. He carried a change purse in his pocket. It made him faster through airport security, and therefore less noticeable. He took it out and poked around in it and took out all the quarters he had accumulated. There weren’t many. They made a short line on the ledge, between the ashtray and the cup holder.

He fed them to the machine, one by one. They made satisfying metallic sounds as they fell through the slot. A red LED showed five credits. There was a large touch pad to start the game. It was worn and greasy from a million fingers.

He pressed it, again and again.

The first four times, he lost.

The fifth time, he won.

A muted bell rang and a quiet
whoop-whoop
siren sounded and the machine rocked back and forth a little as a sturdy mechanism inside counted out a hundred quarters. They rattled down a chute and clattered into a pressed metal dish near his knee.

Barstow, California, to Las Vegas, Nevada, was going to be about two hundred miles. At night on the 15, with due deference to one state’s Highway Patrol and the other’s State Police, that was going to take a little over three hours. Dixon said she was happy to drive all the way. She lived in New York, and driving was a novelty for her. O’Donnell dozed in the back. Reacher stared out the window. Neagley said, “Damn, we forgot all about Diana Bond. She’s coming down from Edwards. She’s going to find us gone.”

“Doesn’t matter now,” Dixon said.

“I should call her,” Neagley said. But she couldn’t get a signal on her cell phone. They were way out in the Mojave, and coverage was patchy.

They arrived in Las Vegas at midnight, which Reacher figured was exactly when the place looked its absolute best. He had been there before. In daylight, Vegas looked absurd. Inexplicable, trivial, tawdry, revealed, exposed. But at night with the lights full on, it looked like a gorgeous fantasy. They approached from the bad end of the Strip and Reacher saw a plain cement bar with peeled paint and no windows and an unpunctuated four-word sign:
Cheap Beer Dirty Girls.
Opposite was a knot of dusty swaybacked motels and a single faded high-rise hotel. That kind of neighborhood was where he would have started hunting for rooms, but Dixon drove on without a word, toward the glittering palaces a half-mile ahead. She pulled in at one with an Italian name, and a swarm of valets and bellmen came straight at them and grabbed their bags and drove their car away. The lobby was full of tile and pools and fountains and loud with the chatter of slot machines. Neagley headed to the desk and paid for four rooms. Reacher watched over her shoulder.

“Expensive,” he said, reflexively.

“But a possible shortcut,” Neagley said back. “Maybe they knew Orozco and Sanchez here. Maybe they even gave them their security contract.”

Reacher nodded.
From the big green machine to this.
In which case,
this
had been a huge step up, at least in terms of potential salary. The whole place dripped money, literally. The pools and the fountains were symbolic. So much water in the middle of the desert spoke of breathtaking extravagance. The capital investment must have been gigantic. The cash flow must have been immense. It had been quite something if Sanchez and Orozco had been in the middle of it all, safeguarding this kind of massive enterprise. He realized he was intensely proud of his old buddies. But simultaneously puzzled by them. When he had quit the army he had been fully aware that what faced him was the beginning of the rest of his life, but he had seen ahead no further than one day at a time. He had made no plans and formed no visions.

The others had.

How?

Why?

Neagley handed out the key cards and they arranged to freshen up and meet again in ten minutes to start work. It was after midnight, but Vegas was a true twenty-four-hour town. Time had no relevance. There were famous clichés about the lack of windows and clocks in the casinos, and they were all true, as far as Reacher knew. Nothing was allowed to slow down the cash flow. Certainly nothing as mundane as a player’s bedtime. There was nothing better than a tired guy who kept on losing all night long.

Reacher’s room was on the seventeenth floor. It was a dark concrete cube tricked out to look like a centuries-old salon in Venice. Altogether it was fairly unconvincing. Reacher had been to Venice, too. He opened his folding toothbrush and stood it upright in a glass in the bathroom. That was the sum total of his unpacking. He splashed water on his face and ran a palm across his bristly head and went back downstairs to take a preliminary look around.

Even in such an upmarket joint, most of the first-floor real estate was devoted to slot machines. Patient, tireless, microprocessor-controlled, they skimmed a small but relentless percentage off the torrent of cash fed into them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bells were ringing and beepers were sounding. Plenty of people were winning, but slightly more were losing. There was very light security in the room. No real opportunity to steal or cheat either way around, given a slot’s mechanistic nature and the Nevada Gaming Board’s close scrutiny. Reacher made only two people as staff out of hundreds in the room. A man and a woman, dressed like everyone else, as bored as everyone else, but without the manic gleam of hope in their eyes.

He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on slots.

He moved onward, to huge rooms in back where roulette and poker and blackjack were being played. He looked up, and saw cameras. Looked left and right and ahead, and saw high rollers and security guards and hookers in increasing concentrations.

He stopped at a roulette table. The way he understood it, roulette was really no different than a slot. Assuming the wheel was honest. Customers supplied money, the wheel distributed it straight back to other customers, except for an in-built house percentage as relentless and reliable as a slot machine’s microprocessor.

He figured Sanchez and Orozco hadn’t spent much energy on roulette.

He moved on to the card tables, which was where he figured the real action was. Card games were the only casino components where human intelligence could be truly engaged. And where human intelligence was engaged, crime came soon after. But major crime would need more than a player’s input. A player with self-discipline and a great memory and a rudimentary grasp of statistics could beat the odds. But beating the odds wasn’t a crime. And beating the odds didn’t earn a guy sixty-five million dollars in four months. The margin just wasn’t there. Not unless the original stake was the size of a small country’s GDP. Sixty-five million dollars over four months would need a dealer’s involvement. But a dealer who lost so heavily would be fired within a week. Within a day or an hour, maybe. So a four-month winning streak would need some kind of a huge scam. Collusion. Conspiracy. Dozens of dealers, dozens of players. Maybe hundreds of each.