“You still got doubts?”
“I’m from the army. First we check, then we double-check.”
“O.K.,” she said. “If you want.” They turned around and walked down the alley and she took possession of Carmen’s lizard skin belt and her ring by signing a form that specified both items as material evidence. Then they went looking for a jeweler. They walked away from the cheap streets and found one ten minutes later in a row of upmarket boutiques. The window display was too crowded to be called elegant, but judging by the price tags the owner had a feel for quality. Or for blind optimism.
“So how do we do this?” Alice asked.
“Make out it’s an estate sale,” Reacher said. “Maybe it belonged to your grandmother.”
The guy in the store was old and stooped. He might have looked pretty sharp forty years ago. But he still acted sharp. Reacher saw a flash in his eyes. Cops? Then he saw him answer his own question in the negative. Alice didn’t look like a cop. Neither did Reacher, which was a mistaken impression he’d traded on for years. Then the guy went into an assessment of how smart these new customers might be. It was transparent, at least to Reacher. He was accustomed to watching people make furtive calculations. He saw him decide to proceed with caution. Alice produced the ring and told him she’d inherited it from family. Told him she was thinking of selling it, if the price was right.
The guy held it under a desk lamp and put a loupe in his eye.
“Color, clarity, cut and carat,” he said. “The four Cs. That’s what we look for.”
He turned the stone left and right. It flashed in the light. He picked up a slip of stiff card that had circular holes punched through it. They started small and got bigger. He fitted the stone in the holes until he found one that fit exactly.
“Two and a quarter carats,” he said. “Cut is real handsome. Color is good, maybe just on the yellow side of truly excellent. Clarity isn’t flawless, but it’s not very far off. This stone ain’t bad. Not bad at all. How much do you want for it?”
“Whatever it’s worth,” Alice said.
“I could give you twenty,” the guy said.
“Twenty what?”
“Thousand dollars,” the guy said.
“Twenty thousand dollars?”
The guy put up his hands, palms out, defensively.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Someone probably told you it’s worth more. And maybe it is, retail, some big fancy store, Dallas or somewhere. But this is Pecos, and you’re selling, not buying. And I have to make my profit.”
“I’ll think about it,” Alice said.
“Twenty-five?” the guy said.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars?”
The guy nodded. “That’s about as high as I can go, being fair to myself. I got to eat, after all.”
“Let me think about it,” Alice said.
“Well, don’t think too long,” the guy said. “The market might change. And I’m the only game in town. Piece like this, it’ll scare anybody else.”
They Stopped together on the sidewalk right outside the store. Alice was holding the ring like it was red hot. Then she opened her pocketbook and put it in a zippered compartment. Used her fingertips to push it all the way down.
“Guy like that says twenty-five, it’s got to be worth sixty,” Reacher said. “Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. My guess is he’s not the Better Business Bureaus poster boy.”
“A lot more than thirty dollars, anyway,” Alice said. “A fake? Cubic zirconium? She’s playing us for fools.”
He nodded, vaguely. He knew she meant playing you for a fool. He knew she was too polite to say it.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They walked west through the heat, back to the cheap part of town, beyond the courthouse, next to the railroad tracks. It was about a mile, and they spent thirty minutes on it. It was too hot to hurry. He didn’t speak the whole way. Just fought his usual interior battle about exactly when to give up on a lost cause.
He stopped her again at the door to the mission.