Reckoning Road Read online

  Chapter 3

  THE CEDAR CORNER PARAMEDICS ARRIVED in about twenty minutes.

  Which was better than I expected but not much. A small town with limited resources that was a good distance away from my location wouldn’t be the best imaginable savior in a rescue situation. However, a couple of paramedics on-call all night with nothing to do might be inclined to respond fast. They probably waited with a combination of coma-inducing boredom and eagerness for action—kind of like the military. So they got the call—and not just from anyone but from the night watch commander at the nearest sheriff’s office—and the subject of the call was more than just an automobile accident. It involved a retired US marshal and a tree and an unknown, middle-of-the-night passerby.

  The paramedics jumped out of the square blue van with medical emblems displayed all over the sides and the back, and they leaped into action like power tools that had been neglected and were eager for jobs.

  They went right to John Martin and lifted his head slightly and checked his pulse and started to talk to him. One looked at his watch while counting Martin’s heartbeat, and the other guy did something else. I wasn’t sure what.

  I looked around. No sheriff’s cruisers coming at us. Not yet.

  I said, “Where are the sheriff’s deputies? I was told they’d come out for this guy.”

  One paramedic ignored me. The other didn’t look back but spoke over his shoulder. He said, “They told us you should wait here for them.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “They told us you should stay and wait,” he repeated.

  I said, “Where are you takin’ him?”

  The paramedic said, “First, we’ll take him to Cedar Corner and let the ER doctor look at him. If he says he’s fine, then we keep him there.”

  “You’ve got an ER in Cedar Corner?”

  “It’s small. Just one floor of a federal building. But as long as this guy doesn’t have major internal bleeding or extensive head injuries that’re critical, then we’ll keep him and care for him there.”

  “Can I ride with you guys into town?”

  The paramedics began lifting the guy onto a stretcher. The one said, “We don’t care what you do.”

  The other finally spoke. He said, “The cop wanted him to stay behind.”

  Then the same guy hushed his voice to a lower octave but not low enough to where I couldn’t hear him, and he said, “He could be dangerous. He could’ve attacked this guy.”

  The first paramedic looked at me and shrugged. He said to me, “Help us put him in the back.”

  I went to the ambulance and held the back doors open wide, preventing them from swinging. I didn’t need to move too far back because my arm span allowed me to hold both doors open through the whole procedure.

  They lifted and rolled the guy and the stretcher onto the floorboards of the ambulance and wheeled him all the way forward. The first paramedic hopped in after Martin and tapped his foot on a mechanism at the base of the back wheels, and I heard a rusty snick which I guessed signaled that the wheels were locked in place, preventing the stretcher from rolling.

  He said, “Hop in if you want to ride with us.”

  I jumped in the back and sat across from the first paramedic, and the second one shut the doors behind us.

  I heard the second one scramble around the outside of the ambulance and open the driver door and hop in. He fired up the engine and hit the gas, and we were on the blacktop, headed for some part of Route 66 called Cedar Corner.

  Chapter 4

  RETIRED UNITED STATES MARSHAL JOHN MARTIN woke up and repeated his early concerns.

  He looked at me with weak eyes and said, “You’ve got to get to her first.”

  I said, “Who? Get to who? Who’s she?”

  The first paramedic said, “He needs to be silent.” And he started to put an oxygen mask over Martin’s mouth, but Martin reached up with a shaky arm and grabbed the guy’s hand. He shook his head. The paramedic said, “Sir, it appears as if you’ve had a mild cardiac event.”

  I looked up at the paramedic, realizing that must’ve been why Martin had been swerving all over the road. He’d probably been speeding to help whoever this girl was that he kept mentioning, and then he’d seen me on the road and was struck with a mild heart attack. It had caused him to drive recklessly, and he’d crashed into a tree.

  In a way, it made me feel a little guilty, like what if it had all happened because he had unexpectedly seen me, a hulking stranger, standing in the road in the middle of the night? What if that had been the trigger for his heart attack?

  I shrugged it off. Couldn’t help it now if that was the case.

  He was both a lucky and an unlucky guy. Unlucky because of the heart attack. Lucky because the tree had been there to save his life. It had stopped the car and stopped him from ramming into another vehicle or hitting a ditch and flipping his car. Either way, he could’ve been dead, and in my book, any guy who survives a career in law enforcement, a heart attack, and a car accident to boot was a pretty lucky guy. No matter which way you cut it.

  Martin said, “Wait. Wait.”

  He breathed heavy like it was his first breath after being submerged deep underwater for months. He reached out toward me with his left hand like he wanted to grab me but couldn’t reach. He said, “You. I need your. Help.”

  I moved down the bench past some medical equipment, some of which was foreign to me and some I had seen in movies or in my limited experiences in medical settings. I neared the side of his stretcher. He relaxed his hand.

  The ambulance sirens were off because there was no traffic, not even a car on the highway, but the lights swirled through the air, ricocheting red beams through the front windshield and into the rear of the vehicle.

  The red lights flashed across the paramedics face as he listened.

  John Martin said, “Help her.”

  I asked, “Who? Help who?”

  He said, “Kara. Kara. She’s in danger. They know. They know.”

  He paused and swallowed hard and then he said, “They know where she is. They’re coming tonight. Right now.”

  I said, “Who is?”

  “Them. The bad guys. Carter.”

  I said, “Who is she?”

  He said, “Kara. Kara’s witness. Protection.”

  I said, “Where?”

  John Martin said, “Twenty years. She’s been off the books for twenty years. I promised her she’d be safe. Her and her little girl.”

  I said, “Martin, where are they?”

  John Martin’s eyes faded in and out, his pupils dilated.

  The paramedic said, “He needs to breathe now.”

  I said, “Where’s Kara? Tell me!”

  He looked at me once more and said, “Diner. Waitress. Please.”

  Then he was gone—out cold—and from the look of him, he wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Not soon enough for Kara, the waitress.

  The paramedic hovered over him and put two fingers on his neck. Then he forced a clear oxygen breather over Martin’s face and watched as Martin took slow breaths.

  The paramedic said, “What the hell is he talkin’ about?”

  I said, “His duty, I guess.”

  I was no expert on US Marshals, but I knew they were law enforcement officials, and like all law enforcement officials and soldiers, they lived in a brotherhood. And a brotherhood carried with it a code of honor.

  I was unknown to my father—a guy named Jack Reacher, an Army man. My mother had known me, however. She had been a Marine and a cop, so I was all too familiar with the brotherhoods and the codes of honor among them.

  I was on the road with no particular place to go, looking for a man I might never find, but I figured one thing I could find was this woman and her daughter. I could find them for John Martin and warn them to get out.

  Chapter 5

  TWENTY YEARS WAS A LONG TIME. And that was what John Martin had said. Therefore, I assumed he was talking about Kara and her daughter
. In which case, Kara would be over forty, probably, and her daughter would be older than me or my age at a minimum, and maybe well into adulthood.

  I couldn’t be sure because I knew nothing about the case John Martin was talking about, and I knew nothing about the good guys and nothing about the bad guys. All I knew for sure was that something had forced him to drive all night down Route 66, alone and not in the best of health. My guess was that he had known about his heart condition but that he was obsessed with Kara’s protection for some unknown reason. Perhaps she was that one case that had haunted him even after he retired, or perhaps he had become personally involved with her and her daughter. Perhaps he felt a sense of responsibility for their well-being. Perhaps it was more than professional to him. In some way, it was personal.

  I could only guess because at that moment there were only two certainties about John Martin. One was that he wasn’t going to be able to help anybody, not tonight, and not for a while. The second was that John Martin had no idea who to trust.

  One of the primary functions of the US Marshals Service was to protect witnesses to major crimes. Witnesses whose lives were often in grave danger. The US Marshals Service was tasked with overseeing the witness relocation and protection programs.

  From the circumstances of John Martin’s current predicament and last words to me, I could only assume he had been heading to Cedar Corner to warn a witness from a fifteen-year-old case that she and her daughter were in jeopardy. Somehow, Kara and her daughter had been made by the bad guys. And so John Martin had taken himself out of retirement, told no one of where he was going, and hit the road toward Kara’s last known residence.

  I presumed that he told no one because it would’ve been ten times easier for a retired US marshal to pick up the phone and call the local field office and warn them of his fears. And the local office was probably in Albuquerque, which wasn’t that far up the highway. Certainly, it was a lot closer than he was, and the agents there were younger and better suited for this sort of thing. So why not let them handle it?

  Easy.

  He trusted no one.

  Just as I, being an outsider, trusted no one.

  The ambulance pulled into the town of Cedar Corner, which was when I questioned whether or not I should’ve thought of it as a town. It looked more like a nook than a corner. It was tiny. There was, surprisingly, one three-story building, which was the federal building the paramedic had spoken of. There was a gas station, a McDonald’s that was closing its doors and turning off its sign as we passed, about a dozen other buildings, a Walmart Super Store that barely qualified as super, and finally, off at the end of the main street, there was an all-night diner.

  The ambulance pulled into the federal building parking lot. There was no overhang like most emergency rooms had. No clear markings except a pitiful blue and white sign with fading bulbs in it.

  I waited until the ambulance stopped and the driver slid the gear into park and stepped out of the door. Then I reached back and undid the latch to the rear doors. I stepped out and helped the paramedic with the gurney and lifted it up and out of the van and rested it on its wheels on the pavement.

  The paramedic who had spoken with me earlier said, “If you head east, you’ll reach the interstate. Step off of the road and follow alongside it. That should keep you out of sight, and the cops won’t see you. If that’s what you want.”

  I said, “What if I want to talk to these sheriff’s deputies?”

  The paramedic said, “You can wait here if you want. You’ll have to stay in the parking lot. But if I were you, I’d get going. Whatever they want with you will probably inconvenience you at the least, and at the worst—well, let’s just say the cops are pretty bored out here. So when they see a nobody from nowhere coming into their jurisdiction and getting involved with a US marshal who ends up in the emergency room, they’ll be inclined to detain you for the max allotted time.

  “Look, I’m not a cop. I’m only doing my job. You should get going while the going is worth getting. Forget about this place.”

  The paramedic turned his attention back to John Martin and his partner, and they headed toward the emergency room’s uninteresting entrance and rolled Martin in.

  I stood in the night air and watched them leave. It was late August, and the fall hadn’t yet come on, but the summer was wafting away, and it showed. The temperature was still warm, but it was mellowed by a nice coolness. With the exception of the car accident and the impending danger, it was one of the nicest nights in my recent memory.

  I looked toward the main strip of Cedar Corner and traced the closed daytime businesses with my eyes as they led into the places with later hours of operation. The first building I saw was a bank, then a Protestant church, then a pharmacy, then a dry goods store that looked like it was cut straight out of an Old West movie set, and then there began stores that catered to a more nightly crowd. I saw a coffee shop, a bar, and a fast food place I’d never heard of, which was across from the McDonald’s.

  Corporate America competing with small businesses, right here in the perfect example of a small town with small business. The McDonald’s parking lot had some cars in it, and the fast food place that I’d never heard of didn’t.

  The straight street winded slightly to the left, and I saw a motel with a blinking red sign and across from the motel’s parking lot was a diner. Must’ve been the one that Martin had mentioned because it was the only thing that really classified as a diner. There was a dwindling car count in the parking lot, and a short staircase led up to the front door. Windows stretched from one corner to the other and then wrapped completely around the building.

  I couldn’t read the sign from where I was, but I was sure it was some locally owned thing. And like most of the places I’d been to in America, it probably had a name like Lloyd’s Diner or Clint’s Greasy Spoon.

  I headed toward the diner’s lights without even thinking twice about the coffee shop. Which was unusual because I loved coffee. Diners had coffee, like coffee shops, but one thing I’d discovered was that coffee shops often had more expensive blends I’d never heard of. Even though they were priced high, I liked to try them. I was a man who craved new adventures and liked trying new things. I had found that the coffee shops that were small chains or even single units seemed to have a knack for importing some of the best coffee beans in the world. Coffee beans that had been roasted, experimented with, and tested until the perfect blends were discovered. And if other people in other countries had discovered coffee, and then centuries later the farmers of those far off places had tested it and experimented until they discovered the best flavors and qualities, then who was I to reject their efforts? The least I could do was try. Besides, I was a consumer living in a consumption culture. So why not consume?

  But I wasn’t in Cedar Corner for the coffee. In fact, I’d never even heard of the town until John Martin had nearly run me over with his car.

  Next, I did what I did a million times a day. I put one foot in front of the other and marched up the strip to the diner that lay ahead.

  Chapter 6

  THE THING ABOUT GOING INTO A SITUATION where you’re looking for suspects who fit squarely into the bad guy column, those seeking to do grave harm to a witness that they haven’t seen in twenty years, is that when you’re in a small town diner just after the dinner rush is over, the first suspicious person in sight is you.

  When I walked into Ceanna’s Diner, two things stumped me. The first was that I was way off base on the name. And the second was that the room had only two full tables, two patrons sitting at a long, white counter, and a cook, a dishwasher, and two more waitresses.

  The first waitress wasn’t a waitress but a waiter—a young black guy probably younger than me. He had steel wire glasses and a look on his face like this was his first night working. There were patrons sitting in his section with angry looks on their faces like they had been waiting for their change or their checks or they hadn’t even gotten their food yet.
But it seemed like they had already eaten because most people would’ve just gotten up out of their seats and walked out. Of course, this was a small town, so where else would they be going to? I guessed they could go to the coffee shop, which probably had a limited menu. Maybe it had some food on it, but most coffee shops I’d been in had only cold food. No grill. No selection of home-cooked meals. And families and patrons in small towns often liked to go out, but ironically, they also wanted home-cooked meals, just not at home.

  So I figured that the patrons had already eaten, and they were now waiting with decreasing patience for their bills. Which was good for me because that meant that they would get up and pay their checks and walk out soon enough. And that’d leave me with only two suspects. The guys at the counter.

  But I knew instantly that they were no good for two reasons. The first reason was that the waitress behind the counter had talked to both of them and called them by their first names and smiled at them like she probably had every night for her whole life, which hadn’t been that long. And that was the other reason why I knew these guys weren’t my suspects—because the waitress behind the counter wasn’t Kara. Not the Kara that John Martin had requested for me to help.

  She wasn’t Kara, his witness from twenty years ago, because she was too young. The girl behind the counter had that self-confidence like she’d worked there for years, but those years must’ve all been teenage ones because she wasn’t even twenty years old. No way.

  I walked toward the counter and looked around and the girl who wasn’t old enough to be Kara walked over to me with a smile on her face. She was an attractive woman. Nice smile. Blond hair that was shaved on one side, a style I’d seen before. And I kind of liked it. It was rebellious yet not overboard.

  She had a tattoo that took up the length of the bottom part of her forearm. It was writing. Some kind of cursive font that I couldn’t read because she moved her arms too much. Like maybe she couldn’t keep them still, which made sense because she was at work.