by Scott Blade
The police still felt it was good to leave an officer at the hospital. All of this wasn’t due solely to the false fire alarm. It was mostly because after a mysterious man had arrived in a Navy chopper, the staff discovered an unidentified dead orderly on the seventh floor.
The waiting room on the seventh floor was completely empty, as were the staff area and the rooms. This wasn’t because of the dead body or the crime scene tape. It was because of the fire sprinklers spraying out water for an hour. Machines were ruined, carpets were stained, beds were drenched, and the doctors were concerned about germs. So the patients were moved to the third floor and dispersed into shared rooms with other patients.
Jemma Hood was fast asleep on a hospital bed next to her mother. Machines and a heart monitor beeped and whirred and provided white noise for her to sleep deeply. She had slept and dreamed better than she had in weeks, maybe months.
A familiar voice broke her sleep. She heard a voice say, “Pip. Little Pip. Wake up.”
Jemma squinted and turned and opened her eyes.
She saw her mother looking back at her with a big smile on her face.
Lucy Hood said, “Hey, Pip. Are you going to sleep all day?”
The first thought Jemma had was that she was still dreaming, until her mother kissed her on the forehead.
Jemma said, “Mommy?”
“Yeah, dear. It’s me. Who else would I be?”
Jemma jumped up and hugged her mother tight.
“What’s wrong, dear? You act like I’ve been in a coma,” Lucy joked.
A WEEK LATER, Lucy Hood was still in bed, but she had been moved to a standard shared room. She had a nice younger girl in her room, a preteen. Jemma liked her. Lucy had decided to keep Jemma out of school, and the two were inseparable and might remain so for a long time to come.
Lucy’s cancer had become manageable. Doctors said it was a good sign that she came out of her coma. Although, she still had cancer, the growth had subsided, and for the first time in months, they felt optimistic about her chances to live longer.
In the last few days, she’d had visitors from the FBI, the US Marshals, and the local police. She had been asked the same questions over and over. They were about her husband. But she had been in a coma for months. No way did she have the answers they wanted.
Of course, she had cooperated out of fear of someone asking about her citizenship. When she couldn’t help the FBI, she had expected to hear from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She just knew they would be the last ones to visit her. She knew they would come and take her and Jemma away. But they weren’t the last to visit her.
She had gotten a strange visit from the Naval Crime Investigations Unit, and only one agent came. The agent had explained he was a new agent on a routine interview.
The questions weren’t major or anything. Most of them were to Jemma. The agent asked if she remembered the man who had helped her, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lot of information.
The agent left a bag with Jemma and Lucy. He had said it was from his boss, and he didn’t know what was in it.
Lucy was astonished to find that the bag was full of cash, and that wasn’t all. It also had birth certificates and social security cards for both her and Jemma. And both were from the United States Government, proving they were US-born citizens.
AUSTIN, TEXAS was more than just than just the capital of the Lone Star State. It was Donna Leon’s home. But she wasn’t at home. She sat in a Starbucks, doing more than avoiding the pouring rain. She turned in her seat and stared out the window at a long line of people hiding and hunching together under their umbrellas and rain slickers. The line was so long that she couldn’t even see the end of it.
Jack Widow stood at the counter, ordering two coffees. Unlike a few days earlier in Las Vegas, this time he knew that the second one would make it to the intended woman.
The guy in front of him ordered, paid, and moved on to the pickup counter. Widow stepped forward, and the barista looked outside at the long line. She said, “Boy, would you look at that line? It wasn’t like that last time.”
Widow looked confused and asked, “Yeah, what’s up with that line? Where are they all going?”
She looked at him like he’d been under a rock. She asked, “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Today’s Tuesday.”
“Tuesday?”
The barista said, “You know, it’s November?”
Widow looked at her with a blank face.
She said, “It’s the election. For president.”
“Ah.”
“Aren’t you going to vote?”
Widow said, “Nah. Never did much good in my opinion.”
Barista said, “This is the most important election we’ve ever had.”
“They always say that. Every election is the most important one ever.”
“Yeah, but this one will determine if we put up that huge border wall.”
Widow nodded. He didn’t ask what the barista thought of the wall. He said, “I doubt we’ll see that happen either way.”
“You don’t think so?”
“America isn’t about walls. Free to all.”
The barista nodded.
Widow paid and went to wait for his coffees. He looked back at Donna Leon and smiled. She smiled at him.
His coffee came, her coffee came, and he took them and returned to Leon’s table. He had thought she was something special in uniform, but he was wrong. Because in her casual clothes, she was far more spectacular—jaw-dropping.
“Here’s your coffee,” he said and sat across from her.
“Thanks.”
“They get the money?” he asked.
“They got it.”
“Did you get the IDs?”
She nodded and said, “I’ve got better news than that, even.”
“What’s that?”
“Lucy Hood woke up. They think she’ll be fine.”
Widow smiled a long smile, all teeth. He hadn’t smiled that way in a long time. He said, “That’s great.”
Leon was quiet for a moment, and then she asked, “What’s next for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where will you go?”
Widow stayed quiet.
She asked, “Or will you stay?”
Silence.
She said, “Maybe you’ll find a reason to stay.”
Widow said, “Maybe.”
About the Author
Scott Blade has written five bestselling books, two of which reached the top 100 on Amazon.
He isn't a traditional bestselling author. Although, he's been nominated for numerous awards and accolades in fiction, collecting trophies isn't he's style.
The dealio about Scott Blade is that he is a real life drifter, who writes books, and hitchhikes or uses public transport from place to place. What started as a experiment inspired by Jack Reacher, wanderlust, and others things, became a real-life habit. And now he writes a bestselling book series based on a drifter hero, Jack Widow.
Scott takes characters, places, and plot elements from the towns, seashores, lonely roads, and busy cities across the globe. He travels the planet, sometimes with his deaf Siberian Husky, carrying a MacBook and the bare essentials, going from place to place, and solving mysteries. Not real mysteries, only the ones in his head.
Growing up in a place like Mississippi, Scott always had the itch to explore the world beyond the pine trees and dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Currently, Scott travels North America and is working on his next Jack Widow book.
If you liked this book, then please leave a review, go to his website, and sign up to receive previews, communications, and receive free content, which sometimes includes exclusive Jack Widow or Cameron stories.
Check out other books in the Jack Widow series. www.scottblade.com, facebook.com/iamscottblade, twitter.com/iamscottblade or email at [email protected].
G
ONE FOREVER
A JACK WIDOW NOVEL
BONUS
SHERIFF DEVERAUX WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD in a town that I had tried to forget—Killian Crossing, a small town in nowhere Mississippi. Up until eighteen hours ago, I hadn’t thought of this place since I was seventeen, which was the age that I ran away from home. I had never had a second thought about it. I wasn’t the type of guy who looked back. I looked forward because I had thought that everything that mattered was ahead and not behind me.
I was wrong. Because sometimes the past does still matter.
It was the early morning hours. The sun wasn’t even peeking around the earth’s corner yet.
I stood over Deveraux, who was bound up, tight in hospital sheets and blankets like she was being held prisoner by the hospital bed. She either lay dying or recovering. I wasn’t sure. I’m not a doctor, but she looked bad.
A 9mm bullet shot to the front of her head should’ve killed her instantly, but it didn’t. The shooter must’ve thought she was dead, because he left her lying in a ditch on an abandoned road to nowhere, near her police cruiser. I closed my eyes and imagined the cold blue lights still flashing in the heavy rain and washing over her body.
The shooter had shot her and driven away without leaving behind a single clue.
A gunshot to the head doesn’t always cause death. It’s all about relativity and physics; that and the size of the bullet. Most handguns are low velocity, but low velocity doesn’t mean less damage. A high velocity round fired into the head, might leave a victim with less damage due to its steady speed. This appeared to be the case for Sheriff Deveraux.
A high velocity round, higher than from most handguns, had burst through the front of her head, right side, tore through flesh and cracked her skull and was still lodged in there, somewhere.
Damage from a bullet to a human skull is caused in two ways. First, the bullet causes damage on impact, a direct blow will draw first blood. The track of a bullet destroys everything that it comes into contact with, creating a permanent cavity. But if the bullet yaws or twists or turns or spirals while on its course, it can trigger the energy transfer to increase and the cavity left behind is much, much greater—absolutely devastating. It can leave a crater like a meteor slamming into the earth.
The second way a bullet causes damage is the initial shockwave. The body’s tissue that surrounds the bullet’s path gets caught up in a fleeting vacuum that usually is exponentially larger than the bullet. The bullet’s flesh crater gets stretched and distorted and then restructures itself several times, like a blob, until the tissue cavity returns to its original position, or at least tries too.
I had seen a lot of gunshot wounds in my career and a lot of them were headshot wounds. And I had seen a lot of dead people. I had seen people shot and stabbed and blown up all over the world. Some of them I had shot myself. Nothing new to me.
Some of the people that I had seen shot, survived and some didn’t, but the ones who didn’t are the ones that I didn’t intend to kill.
Sometimes gunshot wounds that don’t appear to be as bad as others, are fatal, while others that bleed like a runaway firehose are not. Gunshot wounds are like commercial real estate, everything is location. Location. Location.
I’d seen straight on headshots pass through a guy’s head and come out the back and the guy lived. I’d even seen a bullet bounce off a Chief Petty Officer’s skull once. All he got from being shot in the head was a fractured skull and a major headache and a new found respect among the rest of us. Professional NFL football players had experienced worse. Nothing surprised me anymore.
Bullets could fire straight and true and enter and exit. While others could penetrate a man’s skull and then ping pong around inside his body, tearing and ripping through every piece of tissue, muscle, and organ that it came into contact with like a pinball machine, lighting up every DING and BING along its path.
Headshots are much more difficult to predict. The skull is like a sealed time capsule where the brain is cradled and protected, nothing was ever getting in until the capsule opened and the only way to open one was to crack open it’s wall of thick bone. Inside the capsule, there’s hardly room to move around in. There’s little space inside the human skull for anything other than the brain. If a bullet ping pongs around in there, the damage is almost always catastrophic.
But if the bullet hits the skull dead on and fires right through, sometimes the victim will survive, live through the process, and even recover to go on to live a normal life. Not a common result, but it did happen.
Sheriff Deveraux wasn’t that lucky, not yet, but she was a fighter.
No one knew that I was there. I had walked in past relaxed hospital security, past video surveillance cameras that were obviously not being monitored by anyone. I had to recon the halls in order to find her room. And now I stood over her in her hospital room in the early morning hours.
I had walked right past a deputy sheriff who was evidently supposed to be guarding her while she recovered. Instead of doing his job, when I arrived the guy had been fast asleep on a sofa in the hallway right across from her room. The staff must’ve pulled it out of the waiting room and set it directly outside her room for the deputy to sit on. They should’ve given him an uncomfortable chair instead. And then I wouldn’t have been standing over her while she was so vulnerable.
I could’ve killed her and gotten away with it, easy as anything.
The deputy slept sitting straight up, a cold cup of coffee rested on the end table next to him.
One of those old TVs, shaped like a huge box that couldn’t fit underneath a Christmas tree, was attached to a steel fixture at the top of the wall inside the waiting room across from him. It was at an angle. He looked like he had started sitting there, wide awake, and watching TV because he was angled in the corner of the sofa so that the TV was in his line of sight.
The local early, early morning news aired on the screen. No sound. But I could see that they hadn’t gotten the story about Sheriff Deveraux being shot, not yet. The local news was based out of the next county because Killian Crossing was really nothing more than acres and acres of forests and woods and a small, dying town. The only things here worth noting was the decommissioned train tracks and the long abandoned Army base.
I walked over closer to the Deveraux’s bedside and gazed down at her.
Life-preserving hospital machines pulsated and hissed and whirred nearby, a steady symphony of mechanical sounds. The room was smaller than some prison cells, but larger than the bunk space on a Naval Seawolf class submarine. I would know because I’d seen them both.
Deveraux breathed in and breathed out. She was dressed in a green hospital gown. IV tubes ran into the veins in her arm and stringed up to an IV drip.
She didn’t move or make any sign that she was aware of my presence or anything else for that matter. The only sign of life that she gave off was her breathing. Her head rested on a pile of white pillows. Her eyes were calmly closed, no twitching or racing like she was dreaming, which was not a good sign.
Other than the hospital machines and the IV drip and the wide, hospital-white bandages that wrapped tight around her head, she was exactly as I remembered her, a little older and a little greyer, but that was the only differences.
She still had thick hair that could fill a bucket. Her skin was dead pale, but it always had been white.
I reached down and took her right hand in mine. My hands were like baseball gloves and they dwarfed hers.
She liked to be called ‘Chief’, I remembered that. She liked it even though there was no such thing as a chief sheriff. It was just sheriff.
I whispered to her. I said, “Chief.”
My voice cracked like I hadn’t used it in months, which I basically hadn’t.
I don’t know if she heard me or not. Then I said, “It’s me. I’m here.”
She made no sound only the whirs and blips of the hospital machines responded to me like they answered for her.
I paused again and stared at her face, a face that I hadn’t seen in sixteen years, but I hadn’t forgotten.
“I bet you wonder where the hell I’ve been? Well, you’d be proud and pissed off at me all at the same time. Cause I joined the Navy, got into trouble, but that ended up getting me a job.”
I rubbed my thumb around the palm of her hand, hoping that she’d feel it, hoping that she’d wake up.
“I’m sorry it wasn’t the Marines. I know you’d want me to follow in your footsteps, become a Marine like you did, but I did become a cop like you. Sort of.
“I got booted out of the Navy. But then the NCIS recruited me. They said the same shit that people used to say my whole life. You know. I owed it to myself to use my gifts. Put my temper to good use. Blah blah.
“I finally listened. They sent me off to college and NCIS training and then right back into the Navy. A civilian technically, but I got all kinds of undercover work. Guess because I was expendable.
“After my first year, I had to train to become a Navy SEAL. Can you imagine that? Me, a nobody turned college graduate to Frogman? A boy from Mississippi.”
I paused a long, long beat, waiting for her to open her eyes, to say something, but she didn’t.
I said, “I wonder if you’d even recognize me. I wonder if you’d even know me.”
The machines continued to whir and beep and one made a nearly silent whistle, but there was one other sound from behind me at the door—the sound of slow scuffing shoes on tile.
A deep, southern Mississippi voice said, “Freeze! Now, ya hold it right d’ere!”
I stayed quiet. I didn’t recognize the voice, but I knew the accent.
The voice said, “Turn ‘round! No fast moves!”
I turned back towards the door and saw the deputy who had been asleep on the sofa. He stared at me from behind the barrel of his department issued Glock.