Bad Luck and Trouble Read Online Free PDF

track,” Neagley said. “I’m interested.”
    “Why can’t you raise them?”
    “I don’t know. I put calls out, but nobody’s answering.”
    “So is this an attack on all of us collectively?”
    “Can’t be,” Neagley said. “I’m at least as visible as Dixon or O’Donnell and nobody has come after me.”
    “Yet.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You called the others the same day you put the money in my bank?”
    Neagley nodded.
    “It’s only been three days,” Reacher said. “Maybe they’re all busy.”
    “So what do you want to do? Wait for them?”
    “I want to forget all about them. You and I can stand up for Franz. Just the two of us.”
    “It would be better to have the old unit back together. We were a good team. You were the best leader the army ever had.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “What?” Neagley said. “What are you thinking?”
    “I’m thinking that if I wanted to rewrite history I’d start a lot further back than that.”
    Neagley folded her hands together and rested them on the black binder. Slim fingers, brown skin, painted nails, tendons and sinew.
    “One question,” she said. “Suppose I had gotten ahold of the others. Suppose I hadn’t bothered to try that thing with your bank. Suppose you found out years from now that Franz had been murdered and the six of us had just gone ahead and fixed it without you. How would you feel then?”
    Reacher shrugged. Paused a beat.
    “Bad, I guess,” he said. “Cheated, maybe. Left out.”
    Neagley said nothing.
    Reacher said, “OK, we’ll try to find the others. But we won’t wait forever.”
     
     
     
    Neagley had a rental car in the lot. She paid the diner check and led Reacher outside. The car was a red Mustang convertible. They climbed in together and Neagley hit a button and dropped the top. She took a pair of sunglasses from the dash and put them on. Backed out of her slot and turned south off Sunset at the next light. Headed for Beverly Hills. Reacher sat quietly beside her and squinted in the afternoon sun.
     

     
    Inside a tan Ford Crown Victoria thirty yards west of the restaurant a man called Thomas Brant watched them go. He used his cell phone and called his boss, a man named Curtis Mauney. Mauney didn’t answer, so Brant left a voice mail.
    He said, “She just picked up the first one of them.”
     
     
     
    Parked five cars behind Brant’s Crown Victoria was a dark blue Chrysler sedan containing a man in a dark blue suit. He too watched the red Mustang disappear into the haze, and he too used a cell phone.
    He said, “She just picked up the first one of them. I don’t know which one it is. Big guy, looks like a bum.”
    Then he listened to his boss’s reply, and pictured him smoothing his necktie over the front of his shirt, one-handed, while he held the phone with the other.

 
     
    9
     
    Like its name suggested, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was on Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of Beverly Hills, directly opposite the mouth of Rodeo Drive. It was made up of two large limestone buildings, one behind the other, one old and ornate, the other new and plain. They were separated by a valet lane that ran parallel to the boulevard. Neagley nosed the Mustang into it and stopped close to a knot of black Town Cars and Reacher said, “I can’t afford to stay here.”
    “I already booked your room.”
    “Booked it or paid for it?”
    “It’s on my card.”
    “I won’t be able to pay you back.”
    “Get over it.”
    “This place has got to be hundreds a night.”
    “I’ll let it slide for now. Maybe we’ll take some spoils of war down the track.”
    “If the bad guys are rich.”
    “They are,” Neagley said. “They have to be. How else would they afford their own helicopter?”
    She left the key in and the motor running and opened the heavy red door and slid out. Reacher did the same thing on his side. A guy ran up and gave Neagley a valet stub. She took it and tracked around the hood of the car and took the steps