Gone Forever Read online

  GONE FOREVER

  A Cameron REACHER Novel

  Scott Blade

  Also by Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  Get Jack Reacher Series

  (Coming June 2015)

  Winter Territory

  S.Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Other Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  Copyright © 2015 Black Lion, LLC.

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website:

  scottblade.com

  Get Jack Reacher book series and Gone Forever are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Note that copyrighted characters are not used. Jack Reacher is the sole property of Lee Child. Permission has been obtained before the publication of this book series. Jack Reacher does not appear in this novel.

  Characters, places, or story arcs that seem loosely based on the creations of other authors are used under indicative permission based on the creator’s public permission, as well as express permission given by representatives of other authors. Note that copyrighted characters are not used.

  For more information on copyright and permissions visit scottblade.com.

  To see Reacher family crest and tree information: http://www.houseofnames.com/reacher-family-crest.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The publisher and/or author do not have any control over and do not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission from the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published by: Black Lion, LLC.

  Visit the author website:

  http://www.scottblade.com

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  About the Author

  Bonus: Winter Territory

  Dedication

  Jack Reacher saved my life. For that, I am indebted. This book is dedicated to Lee. Thank you.

  “I’m the last Reacher on earth, far as I know.”

  —Jack Reacher

  Chapter 1

  JACK REACHER IS DEAD.

  At least that’s what I thought up until a few days ago. That is the name of my father. Jack Reacher. No middle name. No need for one. I have none. Like father, like son.

  Up until a few days ago I had no idea where I was going or what I would do with my life because my life had never been my own. Not yet. Not really.

  After graduating high school, I had no plans for college and no plans for the military and no real plans of my own. I didn’t know it yet, but I had never felt freedom. I know now that my mother had never known freedom either. In fact, hardly anyone knows true freedom. Americans are supposed to be the freest people in the world. That was kind of our mantra: land of the free and home of the brave. But real freedom wasn’t something that most people could afford.

  There was only one guy that I could see was truly free. I didn’t know it yet, but the path of my life would be dictated by this guy I had never met—my father.

  My father was dead to me and that was fine because at least then I knew where he was. Maybe not specifically. I didn’t know if he was buried, cremated, or just out there somewhere. All I knew was that he was gone from my life.

  My whole life, I never knew who he was, never thought about him, and never asked about him. Why would I? I was born without knowing him and I was fine with that. Now that I know his name, I almost wish that I had never heard of him because the day that I heard his name was the day that my mother died, which set me on a course that would change my life forever.

  I was raised by a single parent, a tough woman, a small-town sheriff, and she had been more than enough.

  I grew up without a father and still had a good life, growing up in Mississippi, a town called Carter Crossing, the back of beyond, the stereotype of a small town. It was rural, but never dull, not under the surface. On the surface, things seemed quiet, but take a closer look and small towns have their secrets, like shadows stalking them.

  I never lived in a city, but I’d never been country or rural or redneck or however you want to describe someone from a rural area in the South. People from small towns don’t grow up to be that way, not always and not for the most part. Small-town life isn’t like the movies.

  Mine wasn’t.

  In a small town, there was plenty to do and plenty that needed doing. We had to do for ourselves. In Carter Crossing, I fired guns, hunted animals, and learned survival in some of the most rugged terrain available. The United States Army used to have an elite training base here for Army Rangers; the 75th used to send the best of the best here to train for a time. It was quite a big deal for us. This town was built up around the base, no other real economy to speak of.

  The closing of the base almost killed the town and it may yet be a slow death. Many Southern towns are in a sad state of disrepair: crumbling roads, closed stores, sunken economies, abandoned high schools, wastelands of empty plazas, graveyards for old trains, and like Carter Crossing, forgotten military bases. Parts of Mississippi are like the third world. It took leaving the state for me to see that, because like I
said, I never really knew any better until after that day.

  Growing up, my mother insisted that I have two educations. The first was a school education and the second was a life education, which was okay by me; I liked to learn things.

  I learned the sciences, math, philosophies, and I learned how to fire guns and how to clean them and store them and the many different kinds of guns. I learned how to fight, I learned how to kill, and I learned how to use restraint. I learned how to hunt and skin animals, but I never cared much for that sort of thing because the animals had never done anything to me so why should I go around killing them?

  My mother was a sheriff and an MP for the United States Marine Corps before that. It was important for her that I learned the family trade. My life was like boot camp; only my boot camp lasted for eighteen years and not three months like for most Marines.

  She trained me in both the military life and the cop life and I became good at both.

  I studied and participated in crime scene investigations, interpretations, evidence collecting, and forensics from the time I was a boy. I was so good at it that I solved many of the crimes in Carter Crossing even though I couldn’t take the credit for any of them. We couldn’t let the loved ones of homicide victims or the voters know that a minor was solving cases, which was fine by me. I didn’t care about credit or trophies or recognition or even acknowledgement. Solving crimes and setting things right was in my genes, ingrained in my DNA like human programming. I didn’t like things going wrong; it didn’t seem right to let bad people get away with bad things.

  I grew up to be big too—huge. It was a genetic thing like my mind; my physique had been inherited through my ancestry.

  At the age of six, I was tough. Got into my first fistfight at the age of five. Kids learned quickly not to mess with me. If they left me alone, then I left them alone. I wasn’t a bully. I hated bullies. Some of the other kids would pay me for protection from bullies. I made a good profit in elementary school protecting smaller kids from the bigger ones. They paid me part of their lunch money like a recovery fee. A fine enterprise for me. I didn’t have many friends. Not really. I was like Frankenstein—everyone was afraid of me and I was misunderstood.

  The school’s coaches loved me. All the way through school they tried to get me to play football. And I did. I played for one season until I broke another kid’s jaw, not on purpose. The coach instructed me to tackle him without holding anything back. All season he had been riding me, accusing me of not giving it my “full potential.” He said that I had feral eyes. I’ll never forget that. Feral. I’d never heard that word before to describe another human being. It’s a great word. Feral.

  It described that experience better than any other word because for a few seconds I lost control. I went into a rage. I ran straight at this kid. He stood cocked down low on the line, in the ready position, less than a second after the ball was snapped—less than half a second. No one was blocking him and my quarterback had been left wide open, baiting him, but instead of charging the quarterback like he had been trained to do, he simply stood there, frozen with his feet still firmly planted in the dried dirt. He had a clear shot. The quarterback was lined up in his mind’s reticle and he knew it, but something that he saw in his peripherals stopped him dead in his tracks. Something feral.

  He had seen me. The sight of my massive bulk running him down had frozen him solid. In his quivering eyes I could see the sheer terror that overcame him as he stared at this hulking goliath running him down like a freight train.

  I ran behind the quarterback from the opposite side of the line. I ran past the other players and ran right at the kid. Headed straight at him was 190 pounds of moving teenaged mass. I was a 15-year-old freshman and he was a 17-year-old senior, but he was right to be terrified of me. Like I said, I was a real-life Frankenstein.

  I was fast too. At that time in my life, I ran daily. Being a part of a football team had a lot of advantages. One of them was being forced to exercise. The coaches weren’t worried about me getting bigger or stronger; they only wanted me faster.

  The coaches focused my training on running and endurance. So I was fast. I was known for my speed. The kid had no time to retreat and he knew it. In that split second, he had time for only one thing—that was to fear for his life.

  For the first time in my life I performed an action that I’d never even thought of before. I achieved a feat that later on would save my life. Never had I been trained to do this move. It was pure genetics, some kind of ancient warrior gene that lay dormant in my bones until that second. I ran at the kid, full speed, with no intent of braking, no flinching, and no hesitation. At the last microsecond, I reared my head back, contracted my neck muscles and shoulder muscles, and then I catapulted. My head whipped forward in a violent slingshot motion like a cannonball and I felt the skull lunge forward and my helmet whipped and crashed into the kid’s face, straight through the open-faced part of his helmet, and shattered the bones in his nose and jaw. The truth is that if his helmet hadn’t had the hard plastic faceguard on the front, the adults might’ve been cleaning up that kid’s face with a sponge.

  I delivered a colossal head-butt.

  The force behind my blow had sent his helmet flying off his head, the facemask broken into pieces, and I had broken more than that. The kid’s nose splintered and cracked, his front teeth sprayed out of his mouth: two white incisors and three broken canines. His chinbone had pierced through his skin and his jaw snapped and split, everything broken.

  Parents and school officials rushed the field to the kid’s side as he lay crying and wailing like a dying animal. Paramedics had to rush the kid off in an ambulance.

  Two things happened after that: I never played again and he never looked right again. I never meant to seriously hurt anyone. I heard the kid had to wear a steel wire for six months. I learned a serious lesson about my own strength and I could never bring myself to play a full contact sport again.

  After that I spent most of my time after school helping my mom at work in a kind of penance for my destruction of the kid’s face. She was the sheriff and her jurisdiction was the entire county, a hard job. Sometimes things were slow and she spent her downtime with me. Other times the job demanded all of her focus.

  When I was older, she assigned me to shadow our only detective like a school project. I was to ask him questions and watch and learn and take mental notes, which I did.

  We were a small community, but with the sheriff’s department in charge of the whole county, the detectives who came through over the years stayed busy enough.

  I learned a lot about investigation from them.

  My mother was my only parent, but the deputies and the two ladies who worked in her office had become my family. My mom knew that she could leave me alone and that I would manage fine. I was always tough, tougher than other kids, tougher than most adults. She used to tell me that I was tougher than some Marines she had known.

  Ever since I was big enough to lift a gun, she had trained me to use them. She had been a Marine for 16 years, a previous life, long before I was born. She used to say, “I had a rich uncle. He paid for me to tour the world.” It was something that Marines said. It meant that Uncle Sam had paid her to travel. I was a little envious about that because I always wanted to travel.

  In the military, she had been a Marine cop; then she had returned home to serve our community as sheriff. My grandfather was the county sheriff before her. He served Carter Crossing for years until he died, also before I was born.

  When he was alive, everyone called him Chief. After he was gone, they all called her Chief. No one called her Sheriff Deveraux and I never heard anyone call her by her first or middle name, not once. The citizens of Carter County would never even bat an eye at the fact that technically she wasn’t a chief. Sheriff departments don’t have chiefs, just a sheriff and his deputies.

  Elizabeth Anne Deveraux was my mother’s name, but everyone called her “Chief.” I was no different.


  I said, “Chief.” I stared at her while she lay dying in an old warm bed. Not a hospital bed, but her own bed. A hospital bed would have meant that she had a fighting chance. It would have meant that she was undergoing treatment and that a staff of nurses and doctors and possibly x-ray technicians were working around the clock to keep her alive. It would have meant that she had an IV bag and heart rate monitor and machines plugged into her, monitoring her progress and possibly her recovery. However, there were no heart rate monitors and no machines watching over her, guarding her progress as she fought to stay alive, but there was an IV—a morphine drip that she barely used. It was there to make her passing more comfortable.

  My mom had always fought and won, but this time she had fought the good fight and now the cancer had won, not winning, already won. It was over and there was no fight left. I saw an understanding of this loss written across her face.

  In the next room, there was a hospice nurse waiting in case we needed anything or in case my mother had pain, but she didn’t complain. She never had. Not once, my whole life had I ever heard her complain. Even on her death bed, she smiled at me like she was staring at an angel, but I was the one looking at the angel.

  My mother was devastatingly beautiful—a fact that I had to cope with my whole life because I had gotten into my fair share of fights at school with the other kids who would make comments about her. They used to call her a MILF and a cougar—negative words in my opinion, at least about my mom. Then again, what son wouldn’t agree with that?

  In my early teen years only new kids made the mistake of commenting on my mom. Once I corrected them, they never made it again. My mom would discipline me for putting kids in the hospital whenever they made rude comments about her; it became a cycle. They’d make snide remarks, I’d correct them, and she’d punish me, and so on.

  When I reached my teen years I simply learned to accept their comments like it was the way of the world. Boys were going to make rude comments about her and there wasn’t a whole lot that I could do about it. So I got used to it.