Gone Forever Page 9

My mom’s notes went on to piece together many of the cases that he had been involved in after he mustered out of the army. Some were bizarre, some had missing pieces, and some were filed away ass backward by the cops. My mother had done her due diligence, which was like her, and she had put together stories that read like crime novels, but the more I read them, the more they made sense.

  One case involved a master counterfeiter, where my uncle was killed, shot in the back of the head. Another where my father had been kidnapped alongside an FBI agent. There were case files involving a murder and corruption in Texas, murders in New York City involving a POW named Hobie, a missing mercenary group from New York led by some guy named Edward Lane, a sniper who shot and killed five people, the largest forgotten stash of military narcotics in American history in South Dakota, and there was even a file involving a dirty bomb that exploded in a recycling plant in Colorado.

  Jack Reacher’s life was more than a crime series. He had done what I felt the need to do. I wanted to travel, see the world, and let the road guide me. If, along the way, I came across something that didn’t felt right, then it was up to me to make it right.

  I spent all morning and most of the afternoon reading through them, but the realization that I wound up on happened right at the beginning, right in the front of Jack Reacher’s life story.

  I knew what he had done, what he was doing. He was free. He had grown up and served a life in the U.S. Army. He had served for someone else. He had always been told where to go and what to do. It wasn’t until he was 36 years old that his life changed forever.

  In 1996, he had met my mother. He had been assigned the last case of his military career, a case that sent him undercover, and that’s where they had met. From reading his history, I understood that for the first time in his life, he thought for himself. He had defended a country that he had never seen. He had watched guys die for a country that he had never known. He had killed for a freedom that wasn’t his and then he had met my mother and life as he had known it was gone forever.

  So far, I had only lived for one day the way that he had lived for the last 18 years and already I knew what took him a lifetime in the service to learn. I knew that service to the military wasn’t for me. It had worked for lots of people and I’d always respect them, but it wasn’t the life for me. I didn’t need to wear a uniform to have honor. I respected those who did, like my father, but it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want the status quo. I knew that I didn’t need the degrees, the medals, the orders to tell me to do the right thing. I didn’t need anyone ordering me to kill for them blindly without knowing that I was serving justice. I had grown up serving justice. It was in my genes.

  My father had spent the last 18 years seeing the country that he loved and helping others who crossed his path. His calling was now my calling.

  My dad had helped the powerless, the little guy. Why shouldn’t I? If I came across the kinds of injustices that he came across, I don’t think that I would have done anything different.

  I read on.

  The most detailed of the cases that she had written about was the one where she had met him back in 1996. That was the one that I read over and over again. It was also the only case that she had firsthand knowledge about. She hadn’t speculated. She had straight up told me that Jack Reacher had solved the murders of some young women from my town and she didn’t know how many foreign women in a place called Kosovo.

  Jack Reacher had found the culprits and knew that they were going to get away with their crimes. She even said that they had already gotten away with them, so my father did the only thing that he knew how. He “righted” the situation. He murdered the culprits after they had freely confessed to the murders and the cover up.

  He killed two men right on the train tracks. He broke their necks in their car and left them parked on the tracks, the same tracks that I had grown up knowing. The same tracks that I had scattered my mother’s ashes over.

  I wondered if that was why the tracks were decommissioned. I wondered if it was because of the accidental killing of two men who had remained parked on them when the midnight train plowed through and steamrolled them into the ground.

  My mom had seen the whole thing, all of it, and she had heard everything. The two men were guilty as sin and my father had killed them for it.

  My mom had written:

  If Reacher hadn’t killed those two men, I can only imagine how many more girls would be dead. I can only imagine how many lives he saved and how many families he spared the fate of losing their daughters.

  My mom had taught me to never take the law into my own hands, but she had seen my father do it. Now in her notes I read her comments about it. She simply explained the events and made one solitary statement of opinion on the matter. She wrote five simple words and then she said nothing more about the whole affair. She wrote:

  Reacher did the right thing.

  Chapter 8

  It was the middle of the afternoon before I realized it. I hadn’t moved from the café. The same chair. Same table outside. I had read the story of my father, a stranger, and yet he was me.

  I switched off my cell phone and put it in my pocket. The battery on it was dying.

  I tossed a couple of bucks on the table since I had taken it up all day and then I stepped onto the sidewalk and headed east.

  I had seen a motel on the east side of town about a block from the lake. I figured that it was a good idea to stay an extra night, see more of the town. Why not? Besides I wasn’t in a hurry. Since I wasn’t exactly sure where Jack Reacher was, it didn’t really matter if I took my time or not. I had no real destination and no real time limit.

  I walked past the store where I had bought the phone charger, passed some parked cars, and crossed the street. To the left-hand side of the street there was a series of townhouses with privacy fences and black iron bars on the windows and patriotic signs posted in the yards.

  I walked on until I came to the end of a faded entrance to a parking lot of a Super 8 motel.

  I walked into the lot and up to the office door and pulled it open. A bell dinged above my head. It was attached to the door, an ancient, but time-tested warning system.

  A tall, older man with one crutch came limping out of a side room. He saw me and nodded. He wore a yellow trucker’s cap and an old gray polo shirt.

  He limped over to the counter and went behind it and asked, “Can I help you?”

  I said, “Can I get a room for the night?”

  He looked down at a clipboard and studied it like it was a patient’s chart, then he said, “I have a single room all the way at the end. Number 14.”

  I said, “Works for me.”

  He nodded, turned, and grabbed a key off the wall.

  He turned back around and said, “$27.50.”

  I pulled out a wad of money and pulled off a 20 and a 10 and handed them to him.

  He just stared at me for a moment and then he said, “Hope that you don’t expect me to walk you all the way down there? I got a bum leg.”

  I shook my head.

  He handed me the key and asked, “Anything else?”

  I asked, “Change?”

  He said, “I ain’t got no change.”

  He pointed to a sign on the wall that read:

  Exact change only

  I grinned and nodded and turned to step out onto the sidewalk, but he cleared his throat and interrupted me.

  I turned back to look at him. He had the guest registry turned toward me. He tapped his old frail finger on the paper and said, “Sign in. State law. Gotta sign in.”

  I returned to the counter and took a blue ballpoint pen from his hand and stared down at the paper. I paused for a moment and thought back to a lesson that my mother had taught me. One time we had taken a trip to New Orleans to watch the Saints play the Cowboys. We had stayed off Bourbon Street in some rundown old hotel with fake balconies and shutters. The whole place was painted pink and it had faded to an almost orange tint.

&
nbsp; My mother had signed the registry Alenka v říši divů. Later she explained to me that this was Croatian for Alice in Wonderland. My mother had spent 16 years traveling the world as a Marine cop. She was full of surprises.

  She had taught me to never use my real name when checking into a motel. I guess she meant as long as they didn’t ask for my ID.

  I shrugged and began writing the first alias that I could think of.

  I signed the register: Jeremy Shockey. Shockey had played for the New Orleans Saints during the Super Bowl in 2010. They won that year. I figured that the old man might’ve recognized the name, but I doubted that it’d make any difference, that he’d call me out on it.

  I put the pen down and never handed it back to the guy. I smiled and walked out of the office and down the sidewalk to room number 14.

  It was the last room. There was no upstairs. No neighbors above. There was only the neighbor in room 13.

  As I crossed in front of room 13, I saw that the door was ajar just a hair, maybe an inch. I saw an eyeball peering out at me from the darkness in the room.

  The shades were drawn and the lights were off. The sun filled the terrain with its final light. Room 13 stayed as dark as possible. Whoever occupied that room didn’t want anyone to know that he or she was there.

  The second that I stepped one foot in front of it, the door slammed, the deadbolt locked into place, and the chain rattled as it was swiped across the top of the door.

  Maybe the occupant was an old woman or some timid person. I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t a dream neighbor in a seedy motel like this one.

  I was a scary guy, but my clothes were pretty normal. I was wearing an ordinary green t-shirt with an abstract design on it and baggy blue jeans. Typical teenager clothes, but I looked like an ape.

  I had been surprised at the generosity of the people that I met in the last two days, especially Hank and the girl who had picked me up yesterday. The rides that I had gotten were people who seemed genuinely nice and friendly.

  I slid the key into my door and turned it. The door opened and a thick dust seeped out. The air was stale. It didn’t smell bad, just unused, like an attic.

  I entered the room and shut the door behind me. The lights flickered on. The room was in decent shape. Bed was made, carpet was relatively clean and spot free and the furniture was old, but worn.

  I slipped the key into my pocket and decided to take a nap. It was early, around sundown, but I was tired.

  I pulled the cell phone charger out of the little bag that had the electronics store’s name on it. I plugged it into an outlet near the nightstand and I plugged the other end into my phone. I left it on the nightstand to charge. I double checked to make sure that the phone was still in airplane mode and set it down.

  I figured that people were still calling it, searching for me, but I had no interest in talking to any of them. I had spent my entire life in a rural town in Mississippi, but as far as I was concerned, now I was done with that life.

  I had loved my mother, but she was gone. The last thing that she would have wanted for me was to stay stuck in this state any longer than I had to be.

  I remembered that she had turned 18 and the first thing that she had done was join the Marine Corps. She left and then she had returned only because my grandfather had gotten ill. Coming back home, she took over his responsibilities and that had forced her to stay.

  Mississippi was like that. It was the poorest state in the Union—last in education, last in healthcare, and having the lowest median income per person out of all 50 states. It was dead last, but Mississippi also had the lowest cost of living of any state and it was generally an easy place to live. Traffic was never really heavy, not like major urban areas. Living here was simple. If you wanted to go somewhere you could hop in your car and go. Light traffic, no tolls, free parking, short lines, few people; there were a lot of perks to living in such a simple and unpopulated state. Still I was ready to leave. I felt lucky that I had just started my life and there was a huge country out there. I wanted to see all of it.

  Chapter 9

  I sat at Roy’s Red Dinner once again, inside corner booth with my back to the wall—an old instinct which meant that I had a cone of only about 90 degrees to watch over. It was much easier to protect myself if I only had to worry about a quarter of the surroundings. The rest was already protected by the wall.

  It was about ten past eight in the evening. There were no sun rays or shadows to predict the time. I knew this because there was a giant clock on the back wall above the counter. It had little cartoon hens drawn above or beside or beneath each of the quarter-hour bars. There was a large red rooster just underneath the 12 o’clock position.

  Probably years ago, Roy or his wife or his descendants had seen the clock in a garage sale and thought that it would fit the little diner. Since everything was red, it did.

  A young, Hispanic girl about 21 years old approached my table. She was the evening waitress, I guessed. She looked fairly new. It was something about the way that she walked, as if she was confused about what her section was, and she was a lot more energetic than her counterparts like she hadn’t been corrupted by years of complacency. She wore a fresh smile on her face.

  Her nametag read: “Maria.”

  It looked new and gleamed in the light. It was colored silver with bold black lettering. It reflected my face behind the letters in an obscure way like looking onto the surface of a spoon.

  She stopped in front of my table with her notepad at the ready. She was tiny too, probably 5’2” tall. Even though I was seated, she had to look up at me.

  She said, “Hi, cutie. Are you ready to order?”

  Normally, I’d respond quickly to another person when she spoke to me. Either I’d answer as directly as possible in short sentences or I’d say nothing. In which case, silence was my response.

  In this instance I was taken by surprise. This girl said that I was cute. I hadn’t expected that and she had meant it. I could tell. I knew how to look for lies in someone’s face, another cop trick that my mom had taught me. This girl wasn’t lying, so I smiled and said, “I will have the cheeseburger plate. No fries. Just the burger. And a glass of the organic milk.”

  She looked up from her notepad and said, “We don’t have organic, only whole.”

  “They gave me organic earlier.”

  She smirked and leaned forward and smiled. She rested her elbows on the tabletop and said in a low voice, “I’ve only been here for a week, but that’s long enough to know that these old bitches around here lie about everything.”

  I nodded and smiled.

  She stood back upright and asked, “Whole milk, sir?”

  I shook my head and said, “No milk.”

  She asked, “Water? Coffee?”

  “Water is fine.”

  She nodded, smiled, and walked away. She returned with water and a coffee.

  She placed both down on my table and pulled a clean spoon out of a plastic covering and slid it into the coffee.

  She said, pointing a finger toward the inside of my table, “Sugar is there. Do you need cream?”

  I said, “I didn’t want coffee. Just water.”

  “You didn’t say no to the coffee. You only said yes to the water. For you, the coffee is free.”

  She turned to walk away, stopped, looked back over her shoulder, and winked at me.

  I couldn’t remember the last time a girl flirted so hard with me. I shrugged and took out my cell phone.

  I switched off the airplane mode and the phone started to vibrate and light up with missed calls, voicemails, and text messages. Many of the callers I knew and many I had no clue who they were.

  I logged onto an email account that I had created for school. In actuality, I never really used modern technologies that much. I knew how. I understood the ins and outs of mobile devices, the Internet, and social media as much as everyone else from my generation. There was just something ingrained in me that preferred the natura
l, old ways. I liked to speak to a person face to face, not by text message and I never cared to share my every single thought or feeling on a social media site. Never saw the point. Feelings and thoughts are meant to be private and they are pretty much meaningless. Thoughts are only thoughts, not actions, not words. They are merely impulses and electronic signals firing in the brain. They don’t reflect anything about you. Only your actions speak about you.

  Whenever someone, a classmate or friend, ever asked me if I had Facebook, Twitter, or one of those networks, I’d say, “Reachers don’t tweet!”

  One of the things that I did actually like about modern connectivity and social media was how fast we got our news. Sports scores were fed instantly to the Internet. I could go online and read news coverage from around the world instantly. I loved that. I had always been curious about the outside world.

  While I waited for my food, I checked the news in sports. Germany was doing well in soccer. It was rumored that the Cleveland Cavaliers might get back their star player, who had left the team to play for Miami for the last decade. It hadn’t happened, but was merely the words of journalist speculation. Then there wasn’t anything else of interest.

  After sports I turned to news headlines. I browsed the articles until I found something interesting. There were articles about the president’s low job approval ratings, the bad economy, and something about the civil unrest in the Gaza strip, basically nothing new, and then there was an article about a raid by the DEA and the Mexican Federales on a major compound on the coast of Mexico. Then I saw an article on the rising stock prices of bottled water, and finally there was an article about the CEO of Starbucks promoting an idea to pay for college tuition for its employees.

  The DEA thing looked the most interesting, so I clicked on the link beneath the article and the webpage loaded. The story talked about a man named Oskar Tega. Apparently, seven days ago the DEA and the Mexican Federales had enough evidence to finally arrest the criminal mastermind named Oskar Tega. They had connected Tega to a string of secret operations all the way from Mexico to the south of Florida.