Nothing Left: A Jack Cameron Thriller Read online

  NOTHING LEFT

  A Jack Cameron Thriller

  Scott Blade

  Also by Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  Jack Cameron Series

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  Foreign & Domestic

  Reckoning Road

  Nothing Left

  A Reason to Kill (Summer 2016)

  Once Quiet (Summer 2016)

  S. Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Other Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  Copyright © 2016 Black Lion, LLC.

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website:

  scottblade.com

  Get Reacher/Jack Cameron book series and Nothing Left and Reckoning Road 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.

  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

  About the Author

  Dedication

  To my fans who write me.

  You are too many to list, but too important not to mention.

  With thanks, Scott Blade.

  “Plans go to hell as soon as the first shot is fired. Protect and serve. Never off duty.”

  —Jack Reacher, 61 Hours.

  Chapter 1

  TWO DEAD COPS were slumped over the front bench and to the right side of a white Ford unmarked police cruiser like toppled dominos. Both cops were shot in their heads, shoulders, necks, and chest straight through the driver’s side of the front windshield and I was the only person around in the gloom.

  Their wounds were the kind of scattered kill shots that looked not random, but more like overkill.

  I knew this was a police car because there was an array of antennas sticking up along the trunk lid. Plus, both dead bodies had that cop look about them. They wore street clothes, but were definitely off-duty cops. No doubt about it.

  I’ve spent the last couple of years walking from one state to the next, never stopping for long, and never getting too used to staying in one place. I started drifting in order to find my father—a guy named Jack Reacher. I have gone off course more than once. Like my father, I have discovered that I’m an addict, not a drug or alcohol addict. I’m addicted to two things: coffee and wandering. My addictions have no cure that I’m aware of, not that I’d want to change them.

  Day by day, I learn more and more about the father that I never met because day by day I become more and more like him. It started before I was born. It started before he was born with some sort of genetic evolution that endowed us with traits that some people might call advantages. I don’t know. Sometimes they feel like curses.

  Like right now.

  Because the next thing that happened was that another police cruiser, one that looked as though it had once been a state-of-the-art machine, blazed and bounced as it sped toward me from out of the darkness. The sirens howled, the tires screeched, and the brakes squealed as the thing came skidding to a stop ten feet from me. The rear of the car skidded clear across the lanes of an abandoned two-lane road.

  The sirens quelled, but the blue lights flashed, lighting up the low, hilly desert land around me like light blue lighthouses. The night sky brightened and the beams from the light faded into lazy clouds. Dust rose up, slow and somber from the tire skid.

  I stayed where I was. I didn’t raise my hands. Why should I? I didn’t kill the cops. I had only just found them.

  The police cruiser’s driver’s side door burst open and a female cop jumped out and pulled a department-issued Glock on me. She steadied her arms over the top of her car door. They were firm and she stood strong—textbook stance. She aimed dead center of my chest. She had been well-trained. She pulled up, presumably to a distress call from the two dead cops, or not, and she had seen me—a giant hitchhiker with black, gas station clothes, that I had only just purchased not long ago, and a look that can only be called “horror movie slasher.” The kind of movie where the killer never dies and keeps coming back after being shot with shotgun rounds, 9mm parabellums, or whatever else that the local cops could throw at him. So I couldn’t blame her for thinking that I was responsible for her dead colleagues. But the truth was that seventy-one seconds ago, I was fifty-five yards away, walking along the highway in far-reaching darkness. Forty-three minutes before that, I was to the west near a junction when the driver that I had been riding with let me out and the reason, the best that I could guess, was because she had regretted picking me up in the first place.

  She had been a nice enough lady. On the road, you don’t question a driver who is willing to pick you up, but I hadn’t felt like conversing and apparently, she had. I let her talk for over an hour, but when I hadn’t said
that much, or responded, or even nodded, I suppose that she had had enough of me.

  She pulled her Lincoln Navigator over to the shoulder of a more modern highway than this one and dropped me off. I stood on the shoulder of that road and stared at the road ahead, watching her taillights fading until they were lost to sight. There were two routes: left and right. She had gone right and I had gone left. Whenever I could never decide on which direction to travel, I simply decided to go left. No reason to deliberate about it all day, just pick left. Left was first by our American standards. Ever since grade school, we are taught to read from left to right. We are taught to write from left to right. My always going left policy just seemed natural. When you don’t know the road ahead, left is as good as right.

  Fifty-fifty. Only in this case, left turned out to be the wrong direction.

  Twenty-four hours before that I was in a place called Moscow—the one in Kansas, not Russia. I had heard about the name while passing through the state and I became curious about the town and about why the name Moscow? Honestly, I had no idea and still I don’t and I guess that I never will. The people there were friendly enough, but no one gave me a straight answer to this question. The town had only had three hundred people living in it—very small.

  The policewoman said, “Hands up!”

  My mother had been a small-town sheriff from Mississippi and an ex-Marine before that and she had taught me: you obey the law and respect women. Naturally, I raised my hands high above my head and kept my fingers limp and still. As my arms went up, she watched and followed with her eyes like a flag rising in front of uniformed men and women, a long route. Her eyes flicked back down to where my face was, but I doubted that she could see much detail on me because I stood in the darkness with no street lights or natural light, no moonlight to illuminate any of my features, except every few seconds when a hint of blue light blipped across my face from the police light bar.

  She said, “Keep them up!”

  She had a calm, yet firm voice, a seasoned cop voice, a style of voice that I knew well. Not her actual sound, but the type of voice that she used and the type of attitude that came with it.

  She said, “Turn around! Face the other direction!”

  I turned around, slow and calm. My head pivoted back to look over my shoulder as I turned so that I could maintain eye contact with her, not that she could tell.

  She said, “Don’t move!”

  I turned my head back toward my front and faced the direction of the silent state cop car with the two dead cops inside. I looked at their bodies, close. I saw that the bullets were clearly not fired by a professional because their heads and chest weren’t the only things that were hit. There were bullet holes all over the place—the front hood, the backseat, the rear windshield, and even in the headrests. The shooting had been an act of passion and nothing else.

  The policewoman walked up behind me, slow and steady with her shoes scuffling in the dirt. I sensed that she had stopped behind me, outside of my reach, which was a smart move on her part. She had sized me up like a veteran law enforcement officer would and she had made the right call to stay clear of my long arms.

  She said, “Very slowly, place your hands behind your back.”

  I did as she asked. Knowing what she was going to do, I jetted my thumbs out and within one and a half seconds, she had locked one of my wrists in a handcuff and then the other. I heard the clicks from the handcuff and felt the cold metal as it coiled over my skin. I glanced back at her from over my shoulder, not fast and not slow, just a steady glance with a friendly look on my face. I had been arrested many times before and I had been arrested by a woman officer before. In my experience, all officers are hopped up on adrenaline and training that told them to be aggressive and to make their voices sound full of steadfastness and resilience. They were trained to sound like they meant business. When an officer tells you to freeze, what he is really saying is “freeze or I’ll shoot you.” And ninety-nine percent of the time they will shoot you. Of course, most officers are good people with families and most joined the police force for more than a job. They joined to make a difference and to protect their community, but in any job field there are always bad apples. Perhaps, in a job where you could legally carry and discharge a firearm, the statistics were higher that there would be more bad apples than in other jobs.

  I didn’t know this woman. So far, she seemed experienced, level-headed and competent, but I could have never been one hundred percent sure that she wasn’t really a bad apple. So I gave her no provocation to shoot me.

  I kept my voice friendly, but more toward the side of neutrality than complete friendliness and I said, “You’re making a mistake. I didn’t do this. I just found them.”

  She said, “Right. Now turn around. Slow.”

  I turned around, dawdling, and gazed down at her. She squinted her eyes, but not in a way that said she couldn’t see me. It was more like she couldn’t believe her eyes, like she recognized me. She took one hand off of the Glock, covered her mouth, and just held the gun one-handed, pointing at my center mass. Then she reached down and grabbed a small flashlight out of her police belt, quickly, like she had rehearsed it many, many times.

  She lifted it up and clicked the light on in one fluid motion. The beam was bright, white like a surgeon’s light. The beam spotlighted straight at my chest and then moved up to my face. It was powerful and suddenly blinded me.

  The police officer stepped forward, closer to me than she should have, and lowered the Glock down to her side. She looked at me in a strange way—strange for this situation. Strange for any situation where a stranger is pointing a Glock at you one second and the next she’s greeting you with the eyes of an old friend. She looked at me like she had seen a ghost, someone from years ago that she had thought was dead by now, but I had never met her in my life. Not once.

  She said, “Reacher? Jack Reacher?”

  Chapter 2

  BACK IN MOSCOW, the one in Kansas, not Russia, I had been standing near a payphone at a huge truck stop, the kind with showers and complimentary coffee, which was the whole reason that I had spent a little too much time there—the free coffee. But as soon as I had gone in and picked up a cup and went outside with it and sat on a bench near the rear of the truck stop, I had regretted taking the coffee because it was awful, really something of an abomination to coffee. That’s when I guessed the reason was because this particular truck stop recycled their filters, the cheap, thin white kind.

  Sometimes, I felt like getting older meant that I was getting a little dumber because I took another swig from the cup and it was still the worst coffee that I had ever had. I chucked the full cup into a wastebasket that was small and locked inside a steel cage that protected it like the place had some kind of problem with people stealing their trashcans. It was then that I started to realize that the cage and the coffee were conclusive evidence that the owners or the manager of this particular truck stop were cheap.

  I sat on the bench for another hour, just thinking, which was something that I did a lot. Being on the road, moving from place to place, always being the stranger in a strange land, meant that I had perfected the art of meditation because that was what I was doing almost all the time.

  I hadn’t realized it, but I had been sitting so still that the outside light above where I was seated had gone dark, like it was a motion sensor light, which also went along with my theory about how cheap the owners were. Outside motion sensor lights were a great invention for homes to save on power and power bills, but not just for homes. They also worked just as well for businesses and small towns and big cities. I had seen these kinds of lights used in parking lots, subdivisions, farms, and less busy roads and even highways.

  I decided that I would remain still and see how long I could maintain my stillness like when I was a teenager and my mother took me toward Meridian, Mississippi to the shooting range. Once a month, we would get in her police cruiser and drive five hours and thirty-seven minutes do
wn there on a Saturday.

  I remember one Saturday in particular, she wanted me to take aim down the sights of a rifle and line the faraway target in the reticle, but she didn’t want me to fire. She said to just keep it in my sights as long as I could. She had already been teaching me how to breathe and to lower my heart rate. She told me that I had better not move until she returned. She took a bottle of water that was full and removed the cap. She set the bottle on my upper back, right between my shoulder blades. It took her a minute or so to line it up so that it would stay there.

  She said, “I’ve drawn a line around the water level on this bottle. If you spill even a drop, I’ll know. Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t fire the gun. Just stay still. Keep the target in your sights. Understand?”

  I said, “But where are you going?”

  She said, “I’m hungry.”

  I said, “I know. We haven’t eaten breakfast. I’m hungry too.”

  She said, “So there you go. I think that I saw a Mexican restaurant back a couple of miles. I’ll go there and grab some chicken burritos.”

  We were from a small town called Carter Crossing and the one thing we didn’t have was a Mexican restaurant. No one served Mexican food anywhere and I loved Mexican food.

  I said, “Come on, Mom? I’m starving too. I love Mexican!”

  She said, “Don’t move. Control your breathing. Stay on target. I’ll be back.”

  She got up and left me.

  We had arrived at ten o’clock in the morning and I had stayed there until they closed at five-thirty. She came back with a bag of to-go Mexican food in one hand and a smile on her face, but not because she was proud or happy.

  When she walked into the gun range, she saw that I was seated with my back to the wall and an empty bottle in my hand.

  I said, “I didn’t make it.”

  She said, “You spilled the whole bottle?”