A Reason to Kill Read online

  SCOTT BLADE

  a Black Lion publication©

  A REASON TO KILL

  a JACK WIDOW mystery

  Also by Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  Jack Widow Series

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  Foreign & Domestic

  Reckoning Road

  Nothing Left

  A Reason to Kill

  Without Measure (Spring 2017)

  Other Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  S. Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Copyright © 2016 Black Lion, LLC.

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website:

  scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow book series and A Reason to Kill are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either 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.

  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.

  This series is not officially associated or a part of any other book series that exists.

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

  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

  About the Author

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  Without Measure

  Dedication

  To the men and women who fight for us. Everywhere.

  CHAPTER 1

  JACK WIDOW HAD NO REASON TO KILL ANYBODY.

  Not now, and not recently. Not yet. Killing had been the last thing on his mind two days ago when he was back in a hotel room, tangled in bleached sheets and soft limbs, and naked with a beautiful woman in Las Vegas. Widow liked to live in the moment, and at that moment, he couldn’t think of a better place to live.

  He didn’t have a reason to kill anyone, not until after he’d left Las Vegas and crossed through Arizona, New Mexico, and deep into Texas. At least not at first. Not at the moment he first met Claire Hood—a nice old bird, as nice as old birds come, like the catalog version of a sweet grandmother, and nothing else. Not a mean bone in her body. Not a mean word from her lips. A church grandma who baked cookies for everyone on her block and then returned a few days later to recover the plasticware and ask if everyone had enjoyed the cookies, leaving no stomachs and no lives untouched. The kind of nice old lady who played bingo every Tuesday and Thursday night—or at least that’s what she told her family—when in reality she gambled on pinochle or bridge or poker with her old lady friends.

  Claire Hood belonged in a Kodak photo of a family picnic more than she did sitting on a hot, dry bus station bench close to the wasteland part of Texas on the lengthy stretch of interstate between El Paso and San Antonio. But she was seated on a bus station bench.

  She sat upright on the edge of her seat, back straight and chin up. Perfect posture. Her purse rested on her knees, a perfect little black hat sat on her head, and her hands rested, palm on top of palm, on her lap. Her shoes were leather and crinkle-free, old but not worn.

  Her eyes were brown, and she had tan, paper-like skin. She was a skinny thing. Skin and bones, only more bones than skin. Her gray hair curled and coiled and merged with whiter strands of hair, all of which punched out from under the brim of her hat.

  That had been Widow’s first and last impression of Claire Hood—because twenty-one minutes after he met her, she dropped dead.

  The causes were natural; that was obvious because she was ancient. No medical examiner in the world, no medical examiner Widow had ever worked with, would even examine past a quick look over the body. They’d all agree with one glance that she was old, and it had been her time. No question.

  Claire Hood had died right in front of Widow. Right at that generic and sandy bus station. Right at a place where she didn’t want to die. Right at the time she couldn’t afford to die. She still had something left to do. More than unfinished business. Much more. And the only person in the world who knew about it was Jack Widow.

  Claire Hood had been on a personal quest. A quest that Widow would take up because there was no one else and no one left.

  THE PRINCIPAL called John Glock and waited for him to answer the phone. A static ringtone, an echoing whir, and then a hard voice that sounded like no one else on Earth answered and said, “Yeah.”

  John Glock’s voice was unlike anyone else’s on Earth because eight years earlier, he had been stabbed in prison by a shiv made out of twenty-five pages of rolled paper, thick and ripped from a National Geographic magazine, fashioned and soaped into a weapon. It was a great murder weapon. After its use, it could be unrolled and flushed down a toilet.

  Three inmates in a Texas prison had tried to take him out. They had succeeded in killing his friend, another former SEAL. But they had underestimated the man they were trying to put in the dirt. He had jerked the shiv out of his neck and whipped around and gored the closest attacker, twice, in his own throat. He’d jabbed the same shiv into the kidney of the second one as the attacker turned to run. And he’d killed the third attacker
five weeks later after he got out of the infirmary. Now Glock spoke, but with a rough and hard voice because some words were harder to pronounce than others.

  Glock had a tattoo that paid tribute to his fallen friend. It was a tattoo of a frog’s skeleton holding a trident, an unspoken symbol used by SEALs to honor their fallen friends. Glock had been a member of the SEALs for only four years when he and his friend were honorably discharged under less than savory circumstances. They had served their tenure and decided to go into business for themselves. That’s when they had met the Principal, a wealthy man who shared their vision, which was a non-inclusive vision for America.

  Glock considered himself a patriot, and he considered the Principal to be a patriot—a wealthy man but a patriot just the same. They had a plan to keep America safe. They shared a vision of taking back their country.

  The Principal said, “It’s me. I need your help.”

  “What’s up?” asked Glock. He walked over to the small, thin-paned glass window in the trailer and pulled down the blinds with his fingers. He stared out over the giant lot of construction vehicles and cement trucks and Caterpillars and unmanned bulldozers and giant excavators that stood monstrous and silent like dinosaur bones in a museum. And the site he was on wasn’t the only one they owned or even the largest.

  “We’ve got a problem. Our business is in jeopardy.”

  “At what corner?”

  The Principal said, “All of it. But primarily the Texas border.”

  “What happened?”

  “James Hood.”

  Silence came over the phone. John Glock knew that name. And he hated the man it belonged to.

  John Glock said, “Want me to call the Jericho Men?”

  “No. We need professionals, not a bunch of militia idiots with guns,” the Principal said. He paused a beat and said, “But put them on alert. Just in case.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “You know what his being out means?”

  “He’s not dumb enough to have done anything.”

  The Principal said, “Think, John. Why else would he be out? The Feds know something. Or they’re sniffing around. Or they’re simply casting a net because they’re bored. Whichever it is, we don’t need them catching something with that net.”

  Glock said, “Don’t be so paranoid. Maybe he’s running. In which case, they won’t find him. Either way, we’ll handle it like we always do.”

  “We can’t take that chance, and you know it.”

  Glock said, “Relax. We won’t leave him out there. He’ll be put down.”

  “And anyway, we made him a promise. Remember? If he didn’t stay in for the full sentence, then we’d kill him and his family.”

  “I know,” Glock said.

  The Principal said, “We must keep our promise.”

  “We shoulda killed him way back then.”

  “I agree.”

  “You know where he’ll go?”

  “To see his wife and kid. And his mother, if she’s still alive,” Glock answered.

  The Principal didn’t say anything. Glock wasn’t sure he was onboard with threatening the lives of three innocent females just to prove a point to one guy that they’d kill anyway, but he wasn’t going to leave them alive. Not his style.

  “I’ve called three others to help,” the Principal said.

  Glock said nothing. He didn’t need help, but it wasn’t his money. The Principal was the one with the cash. If he wanted to hire three other professionals to track and kill one man, then Glock wasn’t going to argue, and if James Hood was out long before his release date, that meant he was let out. And being let out by the Feds meant he’d made a deal.

  “Meet with them and find the target. Kill him.”

  The Principal hung up the phone.

  Glock smiled. He was already in El Paso, Texas. If James Hood had just gotten out of prison, he’d have a head start, but that wouldn’t matter. Glock would start with meeting the kill team members, and then he’d track James Hood down.

  JEMMA COULDN’T remember the last time she had seen this guy who looked like her daddy. She wondered where he was taking her. She still had on her good first-school-day clothes. She still had her lunch packed neatly inside her special lunch pail. It was special because her mommy had given it to her. It was a mint-condition collector’s item, from when her mommy was a little girl. It was cold steel but colored with warm pinks, and it had little ponies on it. What did her mommy tell her it was called? My Little Pony. Or something like that. She wasn’t exactly sure about the title. She learned new things every day, and it was hard to remember them all.

  The lunch pail was named after toys her mommy used to play with when she was a little girl. Maybe when her mommy was Jemma’s age.

  Jemma wasn’t sure about what time it was exactly. She didn’t have a watch yet because she was still learning how to tell time. But she knew it must’ve been around noon because she yawned again. Her little legs waved back and forth over the front seat of the car. The guy who looked like her daddy was tall, but all grownups were tall to her. So there was nothing special about his height that she could see.

  He had let her sit on the front seat. That was something her mommy had never let her do. She was always supposed to ride in the backseat. She was big enough to ride in the front, she thought, so she was glad to be in the front now. She had felt she was old enough for more than two years now. She was about to have her birthday soon. She was going to turn seven. She was proud of her age, and her school had even moved her into the advanced class.

  She yawned again and studied the guy who looked like her daddy. She looked him up and down. And down and up.

  He was different than she remembered because her daddy didn’t have an arm tattoo. This guy had one—a big one. She’d never seen anything like it.

  She wanted to talk with him and ask where they were going. She wanted to ask where he had been for the last two years. She wanted to show him she wasn’t in a car seat anymore. But he looked so serious that she didn’t want to bother him.

  He had picked her up at her bus stop, where she’d been waiting early for the bus and her first day back at school. She was starting late because her mommy had been in the hospital. She had been sick, and she was still sick, but her grandmother decided it was time for Jemma to go back to school. She didn’t want the other kids to ask her why she’d been away for so long. Then she’d have to tell them about her mommy. She’d have to tell them her mommy had lost all of her hair. They would’ve picked on her for having a bald mom.

  Her mommy had said to her that losing her hair was good because it meant she was getting better. The medicine did it to her. It meant the medicine was working.

  Jemma wondered if her daddy picking her up had been a surprise. She wondered if they were going to meet her mommy somewhere, but she didn’t want to ask the guy who looked like her daddy. She didn’t want to say a word. She knew he was her daddy. She was almost positive. He acted like her daddy, only quieter. But that was okay because she was feeling tired.

  She craned her head and pushed up off of the seat with her knuckles and tried to look at the terrain out the window, but all she could see was West Texas wasteland. She wasn’t sure about the names of some places because a lot of them were too big for her to pronounce. But just then she saw a sign that read a funny word. She wasn’t sure how to say it, but she mouthed the letters anyway.

  She saw the word Ozona and wondered how it was supposed to be pronounced. She recognized the Oz like Oz from Wizard of Oz. This was a big word. She’d been one of the best spellers in her class, but she wasn’t sure if she could spell it.

  Jemma yawned again.

  The time must’ve been close to lunchtime because that was her regular nap time. Not at school, but at her grandma’s house. Usually, her grandma would fix her a big lunch, and then she’d get so sleepy that she’d take a nap.

  She looked at the guy who looked like her daddy one last time. He looked tired too.
He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. She was about to ask him if he wanted to take a nap with her, but before she could, her eyes got heavier, and she decided to just lay her head back against the seat. And then she was asleep.

  CHAPTER 2

  BEFORE HE’D MET Claire Hood four days ago, Jack Widow was in Las Vegas, a city he had always wanted to see and a city in which he had spent four days and three nights. It was a city he had never laid eyes on and still hadn’t. Not really. He hadn’t been to the world-famous Las Vegas Boulevard Strip, and he hadn’t seen the fountain show at the Bellagio, and he hadn’t ridden the roller coaster at New York, New York. He hadn’t gone up the replica of the Eiffel Tower at Caesars Paris. He hadn’t experienced the famous Fremont Street. He hadn’t seen the canals at the Venetian or gazed at the lights that shot off the black pyramid, known as the Luxor. He hadn’t bungee jumped off the Stratosphere, the tallest structure in Las Vegas. He hadn’t seen a magic show or a musical or one of those topless, burlesque shows, and not because he had a thing against naked ladies or because he was some sort of feminist who was against women dancing naked on stage and calling it art. In fact, he didn’t think of it one way or the other, except for the fact that he was certain he would enjoy such a production. Widow wasn’t a musical or a ballet-going type of guy, but he did like beautiful women, and in his opinion, the only thing better than a beautiful woman was a naked beautiful woman. He liked them as much as the next guy—and maybe more than others—and he certainly liked art in all forms. He wasn’t the artsy type, but that didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate it.

  Jack Widow had never known his father. All he knew of his old man was what his mother had told him. His father had been a big guy with apelike features, but handsome. Or so she had said. And he was a drifter too.

  Widow assumed he had inherited a lot of his father’s traits. Therefore, he assumed he liked women as much as his old man had. From what his mother had told him, the Widow men might be simian in appearance, but they weren’t barbarians. Just because he had been born with the attributes of a caveman didn’t mean he thought like a caveman.