Страница 43 из 80
46
Reacher helped Dixon up. Neagley got up on her own. O’Do
“Step away, Dave,” Reacher called. “Let him bleed out. No point ruining a pair of shoes.”
“Who is he?” Dixon asked.
“We may never know,” Neagley said. “His face is a real mess.”
She was right. O’Do
Nothing in any of them.
No wallet, no ID, no nothing.
Just car keys and a remote clicker, on a plain steel ring.
The guy was pale and turning blue. Reacher put a finger on the pulse in his neck and felt an irregular thready beat. The blood coming out of his thigh was turning foamy. There was major air in his vascular system. Blood out, air in. Simple physics. Nature abhors a vacuum.
“He’s on the way out,” Reacher said.
“Good shooting, Dave,” Dixon said.
“Left-handed, too,” O’Do
“You’re right-handed.”
“I was falling on my right arm.”
“Outstanding,” Reacher said.
“What did you hear?”
“The slide. It’s an evolution thing. Like a predator stepping on a twig.”
“So there’s an advantage in being closer to the cavemen than the rest of us.”
“You bet there is.”
“But who does that? Attacks without a round in the chamber?”
Reacher stepped away and looked down for a full-length view.
“I think I recognize him,” he said.
“How could you?” Dixon asked. “His own mother wouldn’t know him.”
“The suit,” Reacher said. “I think I saw it before.”
“Here?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. I can’t remember.”
“Think hard.”
O’Do
“Me either,” Neagley said.
“Nor me,” Dixon said. “But whatever, it’s a good sign, isn’t it? Nobody tried to shoot us in LA. We must be getting close.”
Reacher tossed the guy’s gun and car keys to Neagley and broke down a section of the construction site’s fence. He hauled the guy through the gap as fast as he could, to minimize the blood smear. The guy was still leaking a little. Reacher dragged him across rough ground past tall piles of gravel until he found a wide trench built up with plywood formwork. The trench was about eight feet deep. The bottom was lined with gravel. The formwork was there to mold concrete for a foundation. Reacher rolled the guy into the trench. He fell eight feet and crunched on the stones and settled heavily, half on his side.
“Find shovels,” Reacher said. “We need to cover him with more gravel.”
Dixon said, “Is he dead yet?”
“Who cares?”
O’Do
“You volunteering?” Reacher said.
“I’ve got a good suit on. And I did all the hard work so far.”
So Reacher shrugged and vaulted down into the pit. Kicked the guy onto his back and stamped him flat and got him partway embedded in the gravel that was already there. Then he hauled himself back out and O’Do
He breathed out.
“OK,” he said. “Now we take the rest of the night off.”
They dusted themselves down and formed up and resumed their walk down the Strip, slowly, four abreast, ready to relax. But Wright was waiting for them in the hotel lobby. The house security manager. For a Vegas guy, he didn’t have a great poker face. It was clear that he was uptight about something.
47
Wright hurried over to them when they came in and led them away to the same quiet corner of the lobby that they had used before.
“Azhari Mahmoud isn’t in any Las Vegas hotel,” he said. “That’s definitive. Also negative on Andrew MacBride and Anthony Matthews.”
Reacher nodded.
“Thanks for checking,” he said.
Wright said, “And I made a few panic calls to my opposite numbers. Better that than lying awake all night, worrying. And you know what I found? You guys are completely full of shit. No way is this town down sixty-five million dollars in the last four months. It just isn’t happening.”
“Can you be sure?”
Wright nodded. “We all ran emergency cash-flow audits. And there’s nothing going on. The usual bits and pieces, that’s all. Nothing else. I’m going to send you my Prozac bill. I practically overdosed tonight.”
They found a bar off the lobby and bought one another beers and sat in a line in front of four idle slots. Reacher’s was simulating a big jackpot win, over and over again, like a tempting advertisement. Four reels were clicking to a stop on four cherries and lights were flashing and strobing and chasing themselves all over the front. Four reels, eight symbols on each. Astronomical odds, even without the microprocessor’s covert intervention. Reacher tried to calculate the to
Dixon said, “Wright already figured it would have to be industrial-scale scamming. He came right out and said so. Dealers, pit bosses, security guys, cameras, tapes, cashiers. It’s not much more of a leap to imagine that apparent cash flow could be massaged. They could have installed a phony program that makes everything look kosher for as long as they need it to. It’s exactly what I would do.”
Reacher asked, “When would they find out?”
“When they do their books at the end of their financial year. By that point the money is either there or it’s not.”
“How would Sanchez and Orozco find out ahead of that?”
“Maybe they tapped in lower down the food chain and extrapolated backward.”
“Who would need to be involved?”
“Key people.”
“Like Wright himself?”
“Possibly,” Dixon said.
O’Do
“We need to find Sanchez’s friend,” Neagley said. “Before someone else does.”