Bad Luck and Trouble Read Free Page A

touched. He didn’t really know why. But anything except brief accidental contact with her would earn a guy a broken arm. Maybe two broken arms.
    So what was her problem?
    The past, he guessed, which meant the army.
    A list of names? Maybe chickens were coming home to roost. The army seemed like a long time ago to Reacher. A different era, a different world. Different rules. Maybe someone was applying today’s standards to yesterday’s situations, and complaining about something. Maybe a long-delayed internal inquiry had started up. Reacher’s special investigations unit had cut a lot of corners and busted a lot of heads. Someone, maybe Neagley herself, had come up with a catchphrase: You do not mess with the special investigators. It had been repeated endlessly, as a promise, and a warning. Deadpan, and deadly serious.
    Now maybe someone was messing with the special investigators. Maybe subpoenas and indictments were flying around. But in that case why would Neagley compromise him? He was as close to untraceable as a human being in America could get. Wouldn’t she just play dumb and leave him be?
    He shook his head and gave it up and got on the plane.

    He used the flight time figuring out where in LA she would hole up. Back in the day it had been part of his job to find people, and he had been pretty good at it. Success depended on empathy. Think like them, feel like them. See what they see. Put yourself in their shoes. Be them.
    Easier with AWOL soldiers, of course. Their aimlessness gave their decisions a special kind of purity. And they were heading away from something, not toward something. Often they would adopt a kind of unconscious geographic symbolism. If their route into a city was from the east, they would hole up on the west. They would want to put mass between themselves and their pursuers. Reacher would spend an hour with a map and a bus schedule and the Yellow Pages and often he would predict the exact block he would find them on. The exact motel.
    Tougher with Neagley, because she was heading for something. Her private business, and he didn’t know where or what it was. So, first principles. What did he know about her? What would be the determining factor? Well, she was cheap. Not because she was poor or a miser, but because she didn’t see the point in spending a buck on something she didn’t need. And she didn’t need much. She didn’t need turn-down service or a mint on the pillow. She didn’t need room service or tomorrow’s weather forecast. She didn’t need fluffy robes and complementary slippers heat-sealed in cellophane. All she needed was a bed and a door that locked. And crowds, and shadows, and the kind of anonymous low-rent transient neighborhoods where bartenders and desk clerks had short memories.
    So, scratch downtown. Not Beverly Hills, either.
    So where? Where in the vastness of LA would she be comfortable?
    There were twenty-one thousand miles of surface streets to choose from.
    Reacher asked himself, Where would I go?
    Hollywood, he answered. A little ways south and east of the good stuff. The wrong stretch of Sunset.
    That’s where I would go, he thought.
    And that’s where she’ll be.

    The plane landed at LAX a little late, well after lunch. There had been no meal service on board and Reacher was hungry. Samantha the Portland prosecutor had served him coffee and a bran muffin for breakfast, but that seemed like a long time ago.
    He didn’t stop to eat. Just headed out to the taxi line and got a Korean guy in a yellow Toyota minivan who wanted to talk about boxing. Reacher knew nothing about boxing and cared less. The sport’s obvious artificiality turned him off. Padded gloves and above-the-belt rules had no place in his world. And he didn’t like talking. So he just sat quietly in the back and let the guy ramble on. He watched the hot brown afternoon light through the window. Palm trees, movie billboards, light gray traffic lanes striped with endless twin tracks of