48

Vegas in the morning looked flat and small and exposed under the hard desert sun. The light was pitiless. It showed up every fault and compromise. What by night had looked like inspired impressionism looked like silly fakery by day. The Strip itself could have been any worn-out four-lane in America. This time they walked it in a quadrant of four, two ahead, two behind, a smaller collective target, alert and always aware of who was ahead and who was behind them.

But there was nobody ahead and nobody behind. Traffic on the street was thin and the sidewalks were empty. Vegas in the morning was as close as it ever got to quiet.

The construction zone halfway down the Strip was quiet, too.

Deserted.

No activity.

“Is it Sunday today?” Reacher asked.

“No,” O’Donnell said.

“A holiday?”

“No.”

“So why aren’t they working?”

There were no cops there. No crime-scene tape. No big investigation. Just nothing. Reacher could see where he had bent the fence panel the night before. Beyond it, the dirt and the sand were muddied where Neagley had hosed them off. The old sidewalk had a huge dry stain on it. The old roadbed’s gutter had the last of a thin damp slick running to a drain. A mess, for sure, but no construction zone was ever tidy. Not perfect, but reasonable. There was nothing overt that could have attracted anyone’s attention.

“Weird,” Reacher said.

“Maybe they ran out of money,” O’Donnell said.

“Pity. That guy’s going to start to smell soon.”

They walked on. This time they knew exactly where they were going, and in the daylight they found a shortcut through the mess of curved streets. They came up on the bar with the fire pit from a different direction. It wasn’t open yet. They sat on a low wall and waited and squinted in the sun. It was very warm, almost hot.

“Two hundred eleven clear days a year in Vegas,” Dixon said.

“Summer high of a hundred and six degrees,” O’Donnell said.

“Winter low of thirty-six.”

“Four inches of rain a year.”

“One inch of snow, sometimes.”

“I still didn’t get to my guide book,” Neagley said.

By the time the clock in Reacher’s head hit twenty to twelve, people started showing up for work. They came down the street in loose knots, separated out into ones and twos, men and women moving slowly without visible enthusiasm. As they passed by, Reacher asked all the women if they were called Milena. They all said no.

Then the sidewalk went quiet again.

At nine minutes to twelve another bunch showed up. Reacher realized he was watching the bus timetable in action. Three women walked past. Young, tired, dressed down, with big white sneakers on their feet.

None of them was called Milena.

The clock in Reacher’s head ticked around. One minute to twelve. Neagley checked her watch.

“Worried yet?” she asked.

“No,” Reacher said, because beyond her shoulder he had seen a girl he knew had to be the one. She was fifty yards away, hurrying a little. She was short and slim and dark, dressed in faded low-rider blue jeans and a short white T-shirt. She had a winking jewel lodged in her navel. She was carrying a blue nylon backpack on one shoulder. She had long jet black hair that fell forward and framed a pretty face that looked about seventeen. But judging by the way she moved she was nearer to thirty. She looked tired and preoccupied.

She looked unhappy.

Reacher got up off the wall when she was ten feet away and said, “Milena?” She slowed with the kind of sudden wariness any woman should feel when randomly accosted in the street by a giant of a stranger. She glanced ahead at the bar’s door and then across at the opposite sidewalk as if assessing her options for a fast escape. She stumbled a little as if caught between the need to stop and the urge to run.

Reacher said, “We’re friends of Jorge’s.”

She looked at him, and then at the others, and then back at him. Some kind of slow realization dawned on her face, first puzzlement, then hope, then disbelief, and then acceptance, the same sequence Reacher imagined a poker player must experience when a fourth ace shows up in his hand.

Then there was some kind of muted satisfaction in her eyes, as if contrary to all expectations a comforting myth had proved to be true.

“You’re from the army,” she said. “He told me you’d come.”

“When?”

“All the time. He said if he ever had trouble, you’d show up sooner or later.”

“And here we are. Where can we talk?”

“Just let me tell them I’m going to be late today.” She smiled a little shyly and skirted around them all and headed inside the bar. Came out again two minutes later, moving faster, standing taller, with her shoulders straighter, like a weight had been taken off them. Like she was no longer alone. She looked young but capable. She had clear brown eyes and fine skin and the kind of thin sinewy hands a person gets after working hard for ten years.

“Let me guess,” she said. She turned to Neagley. “You must be Neagley.” Then she moved on to Dixon and said, “Which makes you Karla.” She turned to Reacher and O’Donnell and said, “Reacher and O’Donnell, right? The big one and the handsome one.” O’Donnell smiled at her and she turned back to Reacher and said, “They told me you were here last night looking for me.”

Reacher said, “We wanted to talk to you about Jorge.”

Milena took a breath and swallowed and said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Probably,” Reacher said. “We know for sure Manuel Orozco is.”

Milena said, “No.”

Reacher said, “I’m sorry.”

Dixon asked, “Where can we go to talk?”

“We should go to Jorge’s place,” Milena said. “His home. You should see it.”

“We heard it was wrecked.”

“I cleaned it up a little.”

“Is it far?”

“We can walk.”

They walked back down the Strip, all five of them, side by side. The construction zone was still deserted. No activity. But no commotion, either. No cops. Milena asked twice more whether Sanchez was dead, as if repeating the question might eventually yield the answer she wanted to hear. Both times Reacher answered, “Probably.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“His body hasn’t been found.”

“But Orozco’s has?”

“Yes. We saw it.”

“What about Calvin Franz and Tony Swan? Why aren’t they here?”

“Franz is dead. Swan too, probably.”

“For sure?”

“Franz for sure.”

“But not Swan?”

“Not for sure.”

“And not Jorge for sure?”

“Not for sure. But probably.”

“OK.” She walked on, refusing to surrender, refusing to give up hope. They passed the high-end hotels one by one, moving through sketched facsimiles of the world’s great cities all in the space of a few hundred yards. Then they saw apartment buildings. Milena led them through a left turn, and then a right, onto a parallel street. She stopped under the shade of an awning that led to the lobby of a building that might have been the best place in town four generations of improvements ago.

“This is it,” she said. “I have a key.”

She slipped her backpack off her shoulder and rooted through it and came out with a change purse. She unzipped it and took out a door key made of tarnished brass.

“How long did you know him?” Reacher asked.

She paused for a long moment, trapped into contemplating the use of the past tense, and trying to find a way of making it seem less than definitive.

“We met a few years ago,” she said.

She led them into the lobby. There was a doorman behind a desk. He greeted her with a degree of familiarity. She led them to the elevator. They went up to the tenth floor and turned right on a faded corridor. Stopped outside a door painted green.

She used her key.

Inside, the apartment wasn’t a breathtaking spread, but it wasn’t small, either. Two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen. Plain décor, mostly white, some bright colors, a little old-fashioned. Generous windows. Once the place must have had a fine view of the desert but now it looked straight at a newer development a block away.

It was a man’s place, simple, unadorned, undesigned.

It was a real mess.

It had been through the same kind of trauma as Calvin Franz’s office. The walls and the floor and the ceiling were solid concrete, so they hadn’t been damaged. But other than that, the treatment had been similar. All the furniture was ripped up and torn apart. Chairs, sofas, a desk, a table. Books and papers had been dumped everywhere. A TV set and stereo equipment had been smashed. CDs were littered everywhere. Rugs had been lifted and thrown aside. The kitchen had been almost demolished.

Milena’s cleaning up had been limited to piling some of the debris around the perimeter and stuffing some of the feathers back into a few of the cushions. She had stacked a few of the books and papers near the broken shelves they had come from.

Apart from that, there hadn’t been much she could do. A hopeless task.

Reacher found the kitchen trash, where Curtis Mauney had said the crumpled napkin had been found. The pail had been torn off its mounting under the sink and booted across the room. Some stuff seemed to have fallen out, and some hadn’t.

“This was more about anger than efficiency,” he said. “Destruction, almost for its own sake. Like they were just as much mad as worried.”

“I agree,” Neagley said.

Reacher opened a door and moved on to the master bedroom. The bed was wrecked. The mattress had been destroyed. In the closet, clothes were dumped everywhere. The rails had been torn down. The shelves had been smashed. Jorge Sanchez had been a neat person to start with, and his neatness had been reinforced by years of living with military restraints and standards. There was nothing left of him in his apartment. No shred, no echo.

Milena was moving around the space, listlessly, putting more stuff in tentative piles, stopping occasionally to leaf through a book or look at a picture. She used her thigh to butt the ruined sofa back to its proper position, even though no one would ever sit on it again.

Reacher asked her, “Have the cops been here?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Did they have any conclusions?”

“They think whoever came here dressed up as phony contractors. Cable, or phone.”

“OK.”

“But I think they bribed the doorman. That would be easier.”

Reacher nodded. Vegas, a city of scams. “Did the cops have an opinion as to why?”

“No,” she said.

He asked her, “When did you last see Jorge?”

“We had dinner,” she said. “Here. Chinese takeout.”

“When?”

“His last night in Vegas.”

“You were here then?”

“It was just the two of us.”

Reacher said, “He wrote something on a napkin.”

Milena nodded.

“Because someone called him?”

Milena nodded again.

Reacher asked, “Who called him?”

Milena said, “Calvin Franz.”