Winter Territory_A Get Jack Reacher Novel

by Scott Blade

  She stopped ten feet past the guys and said, “Stay here. Don’t move.”

  Reacher stayed quiet, but complied. He felt her let go of the cuffs. He thought, I could run. I could make it off into those trees. Maybe she’d get one good shot off, but she wouldn’t hit him unless she was a crack shot. No way. The light was near death and Reacher was fast, not as fast as he used to be, but he still had speed and natural athleticism on his side. He knew that he could’ve been low down and behind the bunch of trees only 30 yards away from him, but he didn’t run. He had done nothing wrong. She was the one who was in the wrong.

  Then he heard Officer Red Cloud speak to the guy with the crooked collar and the broken nose. She said, “That nose is bad. You should tape it up and head back to Tower Junction. Go to the emergency room there.”

  Then she paused a beat and said, “I’d call you an ambulance, but we don’t have one here. As you know. Your friend doesn’t look so good. I’d take him to a doctor when you get to Tower Junction. Like I told you. We don’t know a Jacobs here. Tell your bosses that and don’t come back. We have rights here, gentlemen.”

  The guy with the broken nose muttered something back to her. Reacher couldn’t make it out. And if he had broken the law by helping her out, then he was about to break it again by not obeying her because he turned and faced them. He didn’t want to have his back to two guys that he had just laid out. He knew that they had been armed. Why she wasn’t doing anything about that, he had no idea.

  As it turned out there was no need for Reacher to worry because one guy was still unconscious and the other guy was cupping his nose. He wasn’t going to be able to do anything because it took both of his hands just to keep his nose from bleeding out. Can a man die from a nosebleed? Reacher wasn’t sure, but he knew that if anyone would, then it’d be this guy. The snow around him was painted crimson red from his blood loss so far.

  First time for everything, Reacher thought.

  The cop turned to Reacher and walked back to him. The fear had left her face and was replaced with that police confidence that Reacher expected from cops.

  She approached him and said, “Face the other way and walk.”

  Reacher complied.

  They stayed quiet for the next minute as they walked south and then she pulled him to turn east and toward a second road that connected to the other side of the row of buildings. It was a road that Reacher hadn’t walked on, but he recalled it from the map that he had memorized. The road snaked north and then zigged west and eventually it connected to another branch of the tree of roads that ran into the mountains.

  They walked some more and then they looped around a corner and Reacher saw their destination. It was a parked police cruiser in an empty lot to the southeast. The only way that Reacher could follow the entrance into the lot was by following the tire tracks from the cruiser that led back out.

  The cop must’ve just parked there since the time that Reacher had arrived on the reservation because it hadn’t snowed since he’d been there and her car didn’t have a flake of snow anywhere on it.

  They reached the car and Officer Red Cloud said, “Stop.”

  Then she said, “Lean down face first on the car.”

  She used her small hand and pushed Reacher gently forward against the passenger door of the car and she moved left and opened the door. Then she stepped back and said, “Get in.”

  Reacher ducked down and got into the rear of the car. She was supposed to push his head down so that he wouldn’t hit it getting into the car, a pretty standard universal cop move, like Cop 101, but she hadn’t done this and Reacher knew why. It was because she couldn’t even reach his head.

  Officer Red Cloud was about 5’10”, which was tall for a woman. At least most of the women that Reacher had ever met were shorter than she was, but this was still far shorter than Reacher. Eight inches shorter.

  Reacher sat back on his hands in the backseat and got as comfortable as he could. Then he stared forward in a kind of trance. He wasn’t really angry or annoyed anymore, but the experience had moved far beyond being funny at this point. Now it was real. He was going to the station and he was probably going to spend the night behind bars.

  Reacher had a natural sense to find the good in any situation. And even though he looked menacing on the outside, on the inside he was smiling because he realized that at least now he’d have a room for the night and he didn’t have to pay for it. A free room was always a welcoming factor for him. Then he smiled on the outside because he found something that was funny about the whole thing. This was the second night in a row that he had had a free room for the night and both had been because of beautiful women: Farrah from Utah and now Officer Red Cloud from Red Rain Reservation.

  Ironic, he thought and then he thought about that old Tom Hanks movie: Forrest Gump. “Life is like a box of chocolates.” Except in Reacher’s case, life on the road was like a box of chocolates because you never knew what you were going to get.

  Officer Red Cloud opened the driver’s door and plopped down into the seat. She put her seatbelt on, which reminded Reacher of his mom, who had been a cop.

  She put the keys into the ignition, fired up the engine, and revved it up and let it get warm. Cold air blasted through the vents and she let the car run for a while so that the heater would have a chance to warm up the air.

  Reacher leaned forward and asked, “Are you going to tell me why I’m being detained?”

  She looked in the rearview mirror. Reacher could see her forehead. In order to see his eyes she had to reach up and adjust the mirror because all she could see was the bottom of his chin.

  She said, “Interfering with police work. Obstruction of justice. Assault on an officer of the law. Take your pick, sir!”

  “Assault on an officer?!”

  She said, “Yes.”

  “What officer? You were the one getting assaulted. I helped you.”

  She turned back in her seat and faced him. Anger seeped into her face and her smooth forehead suddenly crinkled violently. She said, “Sir, I’m not the officer that you assaulted. Those guys are.”

  Suddenly and violently and involuntarily, Reacher swallowed hard.

  The two guys poking and prodding and accosting her like that in public hadn’t been criminals; they were cops too. That’s why she hadn’t drawn her service weapon.

  She must’ve seen the realization in his eyes because she started nodding and then she said, “Yeah. That’s right. You assaulted two federal agents and now you’re going to jail.”

  Then she said nothing else and turned around in her seat. She popped the gear into reverse and hit the gas and accelerated backward. Then she shuffled the lever to drive and hit the accelerator and the tires peeled out in the snow, spraying a trail of white haze behind the car.

  Seconds later they were driving over the rugged snow-covered roads back to the police station and for the first time in months Reacher was worried.

  Chapter 8

  For the second time in his life; Cameron Reacher was going to spend the night in jail. Somehow he felt that this was Jack Reacher’s fault. If he had never learned that Jack was his father then there was a good chance that he’d still have been a regular upstanding, taxpaying citizen back in nowhere Mississippi. Then again, he thought that if it wasn’t for learning about Jack Reacher then he would still be a regular upstanding, taxpaying citizen in nowhere Mississippi. On that point he felt grateful. After all there is a whole great big world out there and he would’ve never experienced any of it if it wasn’t for the events of his life.

  Officer Red Cloud pulled into the parking lot of the police station, which was at the back of the community center, where Reacher had memorized the map of the reservation earlier.

  The daylight had died away completely, but the northern territory of Wyoming wasn’t really pitch black at night, not like other places because the sky was lit up from billions of bright stars and solar satellites. This night had that kind of skyline, only t
o the south and to the east, because to the north and to the west were the looming clouds carrying what the old guy Floyd had said was probably a blizzard. That was confirmed by the guy on the weather forecast that Reacher had heard back in Floyd’s Explorer.

  Reacher sat back on his hands in the police cruiser and waited for Officer Red Cloud to park the car, slide the gear into park, kill the engine, and step out. She shut her door and walked around to Reacher’s door and popped it open. Then immediately like some sort of primitive reaction of self-preservation, she jumped back on her heels and rested one hand on the hilt of her Glock.

  She said, “Get out.”

  Reacher leaned forward and scooted over and stepped out of the car with his head bent down on the way up. He barely cleared the doorframe trying to get out.

  Reacher stretched as best as he could. From his toes to his upper torso, he felt ten times better being out of the cramped space in the backseat.

  He purposefully stretched his fingers out behind him and Officer Red Cloud heard the knuckles crack in a menacing sound. It was Reacher’s way of showing his agitation at being arrested for being a Good Samaritan.

  He said, “Where to?”

  She said, “Forward.”

  And she pointed straight ahead to a faded orange door with a security camera above it. The door looked more like the backdoor to a warehouse or a shed or a hardware store than it did a police station. The station itself had no sign on the door, on the building, or anywhere posted on the parking lot out front. Reacher guessed that it didn’t need a clear sign marking it because everyone who mattered probably already knew its location and everyone who didn’t know where it was located probably didn’t matter. Not to the police or the citizens of Red Rain Reservation because so far Reacher didn’t figure that even the police respected outsiders.

  Reacher walked toward the door until Officer Red Cloud tugged on his handcuffs again and halted him like he was a prize stallion on reigns and he stopped and growled in a low, deep and primitive caveman grunt that he hadn’t meant to make, but it came out anyway. She must’ve been startled by it because she paused a beat, showing her hesitation and again showing that she was scared of him. Then Officer Red Cloud made a fatal mistake; she released her grip on his cuffs and she walked past him, past his reach. Even though he was restrained and couldn’t have reached out with his hands and snatched her right up, he could’ve easily lunged forward and head-butted her. He could’ve killed her with it. Reacher knew that.

  The head-butt had become a secret weapon in his arsenal. He wasn’t really sure how he knew how to perform it, but there it was like some kind of instinct as if it had been handed down to him from his genetic line from his father and from his father’s father and so on. In the story of Perseus and Zeus, Zeus handed his son, Perseus, the Chrysaor or the sword of gold, which Perseus used to defeat the Gorgons in his battles. Reacher’s head-butt was like that.

  Officer Red Cloud walked past Reacher over to the orange door and pulled out her keys. She slid the right key into a deadbolt and unlocked the door. Reacher thought that was a very outdated security measure, but was not surprised.

  She turned back to him and said, “Inside. Follow the line on the floor.”

  Reacher entered the station and saw no reception area. Probably because they had entered from the back, which made sense. Most stations had an entrance for arrests and bookings separate from the one for the public. That was not his experience in Mississippi, but Wyoming was a different state and a different set of customs.

  Officer Red Cloud followed behind Reacher as he walked and followed the line on the ground, which led him down the corridor and under bright florescent lights with cracked, old covers. They turned a corner and Reacher saw on one side of a large room that there were three sets of holding cells facing the bullpen, which was made up of only four cubicles with four chairs and four desks and four lamps and four computers.

  The station itself was clean and tidy and plain and efficient. Nothing was out of place or impractical. Everything had a purpose and everything had a place.

  The floor was a stone white tile with kinked, copious black borders. The ceiling was twelve feet or so with the same cracked florescent lights as the hallway. The cells were very clean, the cleanest that Reacher had ever seen in a basic jail. There were clean toilets, clean beds, clean floors, clean walls, and polished black bars with fallow locks that looked straight off the shelf from some chain store.

  Officer Red Cloud said, “Walk over to the first cell and step inside.”

  Reacher finally broke through his tension and asked, “Are you really going to go through with this? I was trying to help you.”

  “You attacked two federal agents and you broke one of their noses! Not to mention that the guy you knocked out might have a concussion or worse! What did you expect would happen?”

  “Those guys were shoving and poking at you! I’m sorry that they were federal agents or whatever. It looked from where I was standing that you needed assistance. It looked like you let two guys get the drop on you. How was I supposed to know that they were cops?

  “Besides, cops or not, those guys were harassing you and harassing or assaulting a police officer is a crime no matter if it is done by a civilian or by another cop. I know what I’m talking about. My parents were cops. I grew up around cops. Police work is in my blood.”

  Officer Red Cloud said, “If you know about cops then you’ll recognize the inside of a jail cell. Now get in!”

  Reacher shrugged and stepped inside the open cell.

  Officer Red Cloud left the cuffs on him and slammed the door to the cell shut. It was one of those old time cells that opened up and swung outward. Not an automatic one that slid into the wall and was programmed to a timer or controlled by a security booth or from some panel behind the desks.

  The locks engaged on impact and made a clicking sound that Reacher hadn’t heard from the cells that he had seen in the past because they had all been the automatic kind, but he was familiar with the sound because he had heard it as a sound effect in movies and cop shows and even video games that he’d played in his teenage years.

  Officer Red Cloud said, “Now step backward and slide your hands through the cell so that I can unlock you.”

  Reacher complied with her instructions. However, she didn’t unlock him, not yet. Instead she asked, “Do you have any weapons in your pockets?”

  “No.”

  Reacher thought that it had been strange that she’d skipped on patting him down. Now he knew why. It was because she hadn’t wanted to touch him or get too close to him.

  She said, “Stand there and wait. I’m going to pat you down.”

  Reacher waited with his back leaning up against the cold bars that chilled him even through his layers of clothes.

  Officer Red Cloud kept her fingers loose and gently and thoroughly and swiftly she patted him down in his pockets, his waistband, and his legs, especially near his shoes. Then she stood back up and said, “You’re good. Now I’m going to unlock you.”

  She took out her keys again and unlocked him and then she slid the cuffs off his wrists.

  Reacher cracked his fingers and loosened them up and then rubbed his wrists like people always seemed to do, but in his case he actually needed to because his wrists were the size of two-by-fours and handcuffs are notoriously uncomfortable on the wrists. Then he turned around slowly. It was the first time that she had really gotten a look at his face.

  Officer Red Cloud didn’t smile or let it on, but there was a slight movement in her face almost like a wave of something. A look. A look that Reacher had seen before. Reacher was no Romeo or lady’s man. In fact he was mostly socially awkward. He had always been on the fringe, like a tree in the desert. He simply hadn’t fit in to what was normal and he preferred it that way. One of the reasons why he felt so compelled to follow in his father’s footsteps was to go out there and be himself. That was where he fit in—out there.

  And even thou
gh Reacher had never been a lady’s man, he had had some good luck with women in the past, recent past. He was growing into a confidence in his own skin. It was a lot easier when he let go of all the conditioning that small town public schools had placed on him. In the real world when you are a stranger everywhere you go you are always the new kid and the new kid doesn’t quite fit in anywhere. Not bad. Not good. Just set apart from everyone else. And he liked being apart from everyone else. This social position came with advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages was that the stranger who just came into town was something mysterious and women liked mystery. And Cameron Reacher wasn’t a bad-looking young guy. He had good breeding and was an all-around good guy. His father was a drifter who wandered out there somewhere, helping the helpless, and his mother had been a beautiful woman dedicated to her community. She had raised him to be a gentleman and to do the right thing and in the end she wanted him to find his father. The more that he searched for Jack Reacher, the more he found himself eager to find him because he was getting more and more satisfied with finding his place in the world. And his place was no place. Like the stranger, he fit in nowhere because his station in life wasn’t to settle down. It was to move and to apply his talents helping people who couldn’t help themselves. He felt good about his good deeds so far, but Reacher was far from a saint. He was pretty sure that sainthood required pure thoughts and at that moment Officer Red Cloud was filling his head with impure thoughts and he had noticed the glimmer that went across her face just then.

  She was attracted to him whether she’d admit it or not. The human is an animal deep down. And in the animal world men and women can instantly be attracted to each other without explanation, without words, and without admittance. That was the attraction that he felt for her and he assumed that was what she felt for him because minus that primitive attraction, she wasn’t on his good side; after all, she had arrested him for helping her out.

  Reacher said, “Officer Red Cloud, aren’t you going to book me? Fingerprints? Charge me? Miranda? You know, all of that cop stuff.”