Bad Luck and Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

up to the back of the hotel’s main lobby. Reacher followed. Watched her move. She floated, like she was weightless. She ghosted through a crowded dogleg corridor and came out in a reception area the size and shape of a baronial hall. There was a check-in desk, a bell desk, a concierge desk, all separate. There were pale velvet armchairs with beautifully dressed guests in them.
    Reacher said, “I look like a bum in here.”
    “Or like a billionaire. Nowadays you can’t tell.”
    She led him to the counter and checked him in. She had reserved his room under the name Thomas Shannon, who had been Stevie Ray Vaughan’s giant bass player back in the day, and one of Reacher’s favorites. He smiled. He liked to avoid paper trails, whenever possible. He always had. Pure reflex. He turned to Neagley and nodded his thanks and asked, “What are you calling yourself here?”
    “My real name,” she said. “I don’t do that stuff anymore. Too complicated now.”
    The clerk handed over a key card and Reacher put it in his shirt pocket. He turned away from the desk and faced the room. Stone, dim chandeliers, thick carpet, flowers in huge glass vases. Perfumed air.
    “Let’s make a start,” he said.
     
     
     
    They started in Neagley’s room, which was actually a two-room suite. The living room portion was tall and square and stately and had been done up in blues and golds. It could have been a room in Buckingham Palace. There was a desk in the window with two laptop computers on it. Next to the laptops was an empty cell phone cradle and next to that was an open spiral-bound notebook, new, letter-size, the kind of thing a high school student might buy in September. Last in line was a thin stack of printed papers. Forms. Five of them. Five names, five addresses, five telephone numbers. The old unit, less two dead and two already present.
    Reacher said, “Tell me about Stan Lowrey.”
    “Not much to tell. He quit the army, moved to Montana, got hit by a truck.”
    “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “What was he doing in Montana?”
    “Raising sheep. Churning butter.”
    “Alone?”
    “There was a girlfriend.”
    “She still there?”
    “Probably. They had a lot of acres.”
    “Why sheep? Why butter?”
    “No call for private eyes in Montana. And Montana was where the girlfriend was.”
    Reacher nodded. At first glance Stan Lowrey had not been an obvious candidate for a rural fantasy. He had been a big-boned black guy from some scruffy factory town in Western Pennsylvania, smart as a whip and hard as a railroad tie. Dark alleys and pool halls had seemed to be his natural habitat. But somewhere in his DNA there had been a clear link with the earth. Reacher wasn’t surprised he had become a farmer. He could picture him, in a raggedy old barn coat, knee-high in prairie grass, under a huge blue sky, cold but happy.
    “Why can’t we raise the others?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” Neagley said.
    “What was Franz working on?”
    “Nobody seems to have that information.”
    “Didn’t the new wife say anything?”
    “She isn’t new. They were married five years.”
    “She’s new to me,” Reacher said.
    “I couldn’t interrogate her, exactly. She was on the phone, telling me her husband was dead. And maybe she doesn’t know anyway.”
    “We’re going to have to go ask her. She’s the obvious starting point here.”
    “After we try the others again,” Neagley said.
     
     
     
    Reacher picked up the five sheets of printed paper and gave three to Neagley and kept two for himself. She used her cell phone and he used a room phone on a credenza. They started dialing. His numbers were for Dixon and O’Donnell. Karla and Dave, the East Coast residents, New York and D.C. Neither one of them answered. He got their business office machines instead, and heard their long-forgotten voices. He left the same message for both of them: “This is Jack Reacher with a ten-thirty from