Gone Forever Read online

  He reached the cup out to me and said, “Coffee? I made a fresh pot.”

  I shook my head and said, “No thanks. I don’t drink coffee.”

  He shrugged and motioned for me to follow him.

  There was no secretary in his lobby, but there was a desk for one. I wasn’t sure if he had an assistant or not. Maybe there wasn’t enough business in town for him to have a staff. Maybe fewer lawyers would’ve helped.

  I’d seen television shows with law offices as part of the sets. Law and cop shows were popular in the South. The offices in those shows were always fancy with dark oak paneling and leather chairs. The office doors were usually large and thick and beautifully polished.

  Chip’s office couldn’t have been farther from this image. It was a rinky-dink, two-room office with wallpaper that looked like green pea soup. His doors looked like planks of wood scavenged together from ship wreckage.

  His desk was an old, rusted steel thing with one drawer and two empty slots where there had once been other drawers. He had three chairs in the room, two on my side of his desk and one on his.

  His chair was the nicest of the three and it was still a piece of junk. It had a faded brown pillow cushion on the back part. The stuffing poured out of two gaping holes like it was trying to escape.

  He gestured at the guest chairs and said, “Have a seat.”

  I sat. He followed suit and sat across from me.

  He placed his coffee cup down on top of some legal papers and looked up at me.

  “How are you holding up?”

  The concern in his voice seemed sincere. Something unique about small town folks was that they were genuine in their concerns. Of course I couldn’t compare that to people from cities because I’d never really been anywhere, not yet.

  I looked at Chip and then I said, “I’m okay. She went peacefully. Not much fuss.”

  He nodded like he had expected that, but I guessed that everyone who knew my mother would’ve expected her to not make a federal case out of death. Then he leaned back in his chair and opened his one steel drawer. The springs hissed and whined as they stretched back with the drawer. After it was opened, he reached into it and pulled out a thin, stapled document.

  He released the drawer and it slowly retracted itself to the closed position.

  A spring-loaded desk drawer? Never heard of that.

  He flipped through the pages and began to read to himself. Then after a few moments, he looked up at me and said, “This is your mom’s last will and testament. I know this seems like bad timing on my part, but in it she expresses two basic issues and one is time-sensitive. First you are to inherit her house, the money in her savings account, and all of her possessions.

  “The second part is how she wants her remains disposed of.”

  I cocked my head and moved my focus to him instead of the backside of the papers.

  He kept his eyes on her will and read the second part.

  “This is her own words,” he said and cleared his throat. Then he read, “I don’t wish to be buried. I’ve arranged it with the Ford-Elder people that they’re to bury an empty coffin at my funeral. My funeral is for the townspeople. It’s for them to grieve and move on.”

  He took a moment and swallowed. Then he continued, “The funeral home is going to have me cremated and my ashes given to you. I want you to take them and scatter them across the old train tracks. This is very important. I can’t explain to you why except to tell you that by now I should’ve told you about your father. You, he, and your grandfather are the only men that I’ve ever loved.

  “That train, the one that used to barrel through our town every night at midnight when you were a kid, it meant something to your father and me. I want you to scatter my remains across the decommissioned tracks. In a way I’ve been decommissioned and that’s where I want to be.

  “I love you. And I loved your father since before you were born. Scatter my ashes and let me go. Mr. Weston has been instructed to sell the house and give you the money. So don’t worry about selling it.

  “Let me go. I want you to pick up where I left off and get Jack Reacher. Find him. I want you to know him. There’s only one way that you can do that. Follow in his footsteps. There’s a huge world out there. Go see it. Follow your own nature. It will lead you to him.”

  Weston stopped reading and looked up at me.

  He said, “That’s it.”

  I nodded.

  He paused like he was waiting for me to say more.

  Then he said, “You don’t have to do any of this. I have to abide by her wishes because that’s the law, but you don’t. The house will have to go on the market. There’s nothing I can do about that. She left the profits from the sale to you, but she left no room to deviate from her wishes.”

  He was silent for a moment and then he said, “Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  He said, “Well, I have her ashes here. Are you okay with scattering her?”

  I felt so much emotion inside that I didn’t know how to act. So I simply nodded again.

  He pushed forward the last page of the document to me and handed me a fountain pen.

  “Sign the bottom. It’s acknowledging that I’ve given you clarification on her will and testament and that you agree to carry out her wishes.”

  I stayed quiet and leaned forward, grabbed the pen, and signed the document in solid blue ink.

  He reached back and picked up a square-shaped box that I hadn’t noticed before from the top of a filing cabinet.

  He said, “Her ashes.”

  In the box, there was a plastic bag with my mother’s remains. She’d been three feet from me ever since I sat down and I hadn’t even noticed.

  I realized that there was nothing left for me in Carter Crossing. Ever since the moment that my mother’s hand went limp in mine, the only thing that I’d thought of was the open road.

  I shook Weston’s hand and exited the building carrying my mother’s ashes.

  I turned east and headed toward the railroad tracks.

  It was 9:48 a.m. and the town was up and full of life. I walked the downtown streets and turned and zigzagged so that I could avoid as many people as possible. I didn’t want to stop for anyone because then I’d have to stop for everyone.

  I walked past the diner and the local hotel and bars. Went beyond the banks, a gas station, a public park, and the grocery. I kept my head down, avoiding everyone’s gaze.

  Occasionally people would wave at me or call me over to them. I ignored them and continued on.

  I walked for twenty minutes and stopped at an intersection with a traffic light. A steady stream of cars passed. I’m not sure if anyone recognized me. No one honked or stopped. In a small town everyone knows everyone. It was common practice to honk and wave.

  I kept my head low as best I could and tried not to make eye contact with anyone, but there was no way for me to stay unseen. Everyone knew me and I stood out. I was the easiest person to find. I could be spotted in a crowd in less than the blink of an eye.

  That’s what you get when you are a Reacher. The most I had weighed was the year before I had gotten up to 250 pounds. That was because that summer my mother had me doing all kinds of grunt work for the city. Real push-and-pull stuff. I mowed public lawns, trimmed hedges, planted trees, and uprooted dead ones. I did most of the city’s landscaping around the public buildings including around the high school and its football and baseball fields.

  I was consuming five heavy meals a day just to keep up with my hunger from all of that work in the sun. I ate a lot of fast food and tons of protein and drank gallons of water.

  Besides being such a gigantic guy, I also had thick, long black hair like my mother. She liked my hair long and let me grow it. She said it made me look Native American like one of those old, painted warriors. At such a young age, my skin was already sun-beaten and rough. I tanned easily; at the moment I was olive complexioned because I hadn’t been out in the sun that much since before t
he winter.

  My mother had gotten sick eight months ago and I had been coming straight home after school to take care of her.

  The cars and pedestrians continued to go by. I ignored them.

  I pulled the box with my mother’s ashes close to my chest like a football. I crossed the intersection and headed on toward the train tracks.

  I crossed between a two-story building and an abandoned post office and then came out onto a small open field. There it was. The railroad crossing ran straight through the center of town, north to south. It split the town in half. Literally, there had always been the right side and wrong side of the tracks. What that really had meant was there was the white side and the black side, as most of our black population lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Not something that I was ever particularly proud of, but it had been that way long before I was born.

  Grass and weeds had grown thick over the rail bed. The trains had stopped running when I was a kid, long ago. There was no evidence left of them except the old, rusted tracks.

  I surveyed the nearest street that crossed over. It ran west to east. On one side of the tracks the old train warning sign still stood upright. The broken bottom half of a warning sign stood on the opposite side for oncoming traffic. The top half of it had vanished long ago. Probably taken out into the woods and used for target practice by local kids.

  I stomped through the overgrown grass in the clearing and made my way to the tracks.

  The middle, connecting planks were mostly still intact, but a few of them were split here and there. Nearly 15 years of neglect had seen to that.

  The rocks in between the lines were still an off-white color. Not much would erode them anyway. Rocks never really changed.

  I walked along the tracks for a while. I stopped at the crossing road and turned my head and looked both ways. There were no cars in sight.

  I looked to the east. That had always been considered the bad side of town. It was mainly small project housing and some abandoned factories.

  An old sign on the side of the street caught my eye. It used to be blue and reflective, but now it was mostly peeled away and the letters were faded. I could still read it because I already knew what it had said.

  It read:

  Kelh m rmy Base

  4 Mil s Ah ad

  Kelham Army Base was the old base that this town had been built up on half a century ago. My mother never spoke too much about it and I never asked. It seemed to be a hard subject for her. It was like she avoided the topic on purpose.

  The sun was just past the ten o’clock position in the sky. The May weather was cool for this time of year, almost down to 60 degrees. It felt more like early spring than the preface to summer.

  The summer would be hot and humid and probably rainy.

  I took a deep breath and held out the box. I opened it and pulled out the bag containing my mother’s ashes.

  It was heavy for such a small bag. I tossed the box on the ground and watched it roll a couple of times off the road. I wasn’t worried about littering. No sheriff’s deputy would’ve said anything about it, not to me, and not on this side of town.

  Next I pulled my house keys out of my pocket and used the sharp jagged edge to tear the bag open. I started at the top and sawed a hole down to the middle.

  I returned the keys to my pocket and stood still for a moment.

  I gauged which way the wind was blowing. I didn’t want to throw open the bag and scatter her ashes into the wind and have my dead mother’s ashes blow back on me.

  After I acquired the right direction, I twisted back, ripped open the hole big and wide and then I whipped the bag around like a fisherman casting a net. One powerful swing and the ashes released into the wind. They were carried off fast. My mother had been here and then she was gone.

  It was only a matter of seconds until she was spread out perfectly over the tracks.

  I watched her until she was lost to sight.

  I stood there, breathing, taking in the scenery. This was the town that I had grown up in. It was my home—the only place that I had ever known.

  I pulled out my house keys again and stared at them. Then I reared back and threw them as hard as I could. They flipped and spun through the air, off into a northwest direction. I lost sight of them in the heavy grass.

  I’d never carried a wallet. I didn’t like the bulky feeling in my pocket. I had my bankcard and my driver’s license in my back pocket. I liked traveling light and I had no credit cards to worry about, not at my age.

  I pulled out my mother’s cell phone and switched it on.

  It had a full charge and a strong signal. It read the name of the service provider at the top corner. The phone’s wallpaper was a picture of us together. I was young and she was young. We laughed and smiled and were full of life. It was the way that I wanted to remember her.

  I looked in the phone’s photo album. There were mostly photos of me, of her, of us hunting, and then there was one photo of a man in an army uniform. It was an old photo, possibly a screenshot from the Internet. It was a roster photo from an early ‘80s or late ‘70s class from West Point Military Academy or someplace similar, a graduate picture or something. He was a newly minted officer.

  In the background to his right-hand side was an American flag, draped on a pole like a coat rack. It was a smaller indoor flag. The stars and stripes curved over the folds. The man in the picture towered over the flagpole by several inches. It was obvious that the flag was meant to be photographed with normal-sized men and this guy was anything but normal-sized. He was huge like me. The photographer must have had to back the camera up all the way against the opposite wall just to fit the new graduate in the frame.

  His features were rugged, even with his clean-shaven face. He had a chiseled jaw and an arched brow like concrete and he had blue eyes and fair hair. He was a little older than me now, maybe three years. He could have been twenty-one or twenty-two.

  The other thing that I immediately noticed about him was that he looked exactly like me. Except for his hair, we could have been brothers or cousins or he could have been...my father.

  A wave came over me. For the first time since my mom’s small hand had gone limp in mine, I felt something like a feeling of direction, of purpose. It swept over me, steering me like a compass, pointing me the right way. This was my father.

  This was Jack Reacher.

  Chapter 3

  I walked on the side of the road back toward downtown. I passed by the diner, the sheriff’s station, and the outlet stores. I passed by people I had known all of my life. I passed them without a second glance, or a second thought, because they were in the past now. I walked like a man possessed, which reminded me of Kung Fu again—the wandering stranger. I continued west and walked the old, dusty main street out of town. Cars passed me by. Some drivers recognized me and slowed, but no one stopped to ask how I was. They took one look at my face, at my demeanor, and left me alone. I walked 47 minutes straight, no break, no rush, just a steady pace. I was surrounded by low-hanging trees in a thick green and brown forest on both sides of the track. The ditches along the sides of the road were dry along the beds and covered in layers of grass along the tops. Gravel was sunk into the bottoms of the ditches, probably washed in from the road by the rains—Mississippi had rainy summers.

  I had spent my whole life living in one place except for a brief stint in Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. Of course I had only just learned that from my mother the night before and I was too young to remember living there.

  I was 18 years old, a citizen of an America that I had barely seen, and I had sights to see and places to visit. There was an entire frontier out there filled with mountains and rivers. There were huge cities and there were deserts. There was countryside and there were parks. There was forest and there were hotels and music. There were historical places and there were plenty of roads and tracks and paths. There were graves and there were places where legends had been born. I was a citizen of a remote part
of a nation that had so much more to offer.

  I stayed straight on the only road that led out of this place. One way in and one way out. I placed one foot in front of the other and stuck out my thumb, headed somewhere that I didn’t know.

  I headed west.

  It wasn’t long before I heard vehicles approaching from behind me. I craned my head and looked over my shoulder. Two pickup trucks drove up behind me, carrying small clouds of dust behind them.

  The first one was a brand-new crew cab, a white Silverado. It pulled a small trailer.

  The second truck was an old, beat-up thing, probably a Ford. It was the ugliest truck that I had ever seen. Some of the body was slapped together from other dead trucks. The thing looked like it had just driven out of a junkyard.

  The guy in it had his left arm hanging out of the window. His fingertips to the middle of his bicep was made up of rugged sun-beaten skin until it crossed directly over to a pale tan line and disappeared up his sleeve. He pulled up alongside me and leaned over in the seat. The passenger window was down. He looked at me and asked, “You need a lift, son?”

  I had to bend down just to see into the cab and this was not a small truck.

  The guy wore gray slacks, a plaid shirt with a pack of cigarettes in his front pocket, and a genuinely concerned look on his face. He was middle aged. Looked like he had had a hard life, but managed to keep a good outlook.

  The guy wore gray slacks, a plaid shirt with a pack of cigarettes in his front pocket, and a genuinely concerned look on his face. He was middle aged. Looked like he had had a hard life, but managed to keep a good outlook. He smiled at me and showed some crooked teeth and some empty slots where there had once been teeth.

  His right arm was draped across the top of the steering wheel at the twelve o’clock position like he had been driving with the bottom of his forearm instead of his hands.

  I said, “I’m headed out of Carter County.”

  He asked, “Where to?”

  I said, “West. I suppose.”