by Scott Blade
I asked, “Do you know Jack?”
She didn’t answer, just repeated my name, “Cameron?”
She let the flashlight beam rest on my features and stepped even closer than before, keeping the gun loose enough in her hand so that she could quickly flick it upward and shoot me. If she needed to.
She said, “You look just like him. This guy that I know.”
Then she paused a beat and said, “Used to know.”
I said, “My name is Jack Cameron. Jack Reacher is my father’s name.”
She nodded in complete recognition like she had known me my whole life and said, “Amazing. You look just like him. Different hair color. Younger, much younger. But…wow. Uncanny resemblance. Where is he? Did he settle down? That just didn’t seem like something he was capable of doing. Ever.”
I said, “To tell you the truth. I was hoping that you knew the answer to that. I’ve never met the man.”
I glanced down at where her nameplate was, left top of the breast pocket on her black uniform shirt. It glimmered faintly from the starlight. It rested right above a small star-shaped badge that was engraved with symbols and a badge number. The symbol was probably the crest for the local city and not the county because the side of her car read “police” and not “sheriff.” She was a part of a police force and not a sheriff’s office, which meant that she was on the force for a township or city and not for a county because sheriffs policed the counties of America and police worked the municipalities. At least the ones who could afford a police force.
I squinted at her nametag, but I couldn’t read it. The light from her flashlight was too bright in my eyes.
I said, “Can you lower the flashlight?”
She paused a beat and breathed in, heavily, like it was an act that was a complete betrayal to years of cop training.
She said, “Sorry.”
She dropped her hand down by her side and the flashlight beam fell down off my face, but she held it in her hand so that it stayed on my torso.
I glanced back down at her nameplate again. It read: Vaughn. And nothing else. No first name. No first or middle initial. No indication of married or single. It simply read her last name.
She was possibly less than five-foot-six, possibly less than one hundred twenty pounds, probably less than forty-five years in age. She had short, blonde hair. When I say short, I mean short, a couple inches long and not a fraction more. It blew like short grass in the open breeze.
She had no wedding ring, but had a look about her that said she was married or once married. It was that kind of mature “I’ve seen a thing or two” look that married people often had registered in their faces. I had seen it before and I guessed that I would see it again.
She said, “I’ve no idea where Jack Reacher is.”
I shrugged. In our predicament, that really didn’t matter much.
She asked, “You’re his son?”
She had asked it, but it was really more of a statement since she already knew the answer.
I shrugged in a way that said “yep” and stayed quiet.
Vaughn said, “You’re totally his son. No question. He used to do that same thing.”
I asked, “What thing?”
She said, “Shrug and stand there. Not like a moron or anything. He just never really spoke unless there was something to say. He had that quiet man thing going on. Although, I guess he wasn’t really quiet either because he did talk a lot. Just never any unnecessary words. He didn’t ramble. I liked him. He was a good man. He did a lot of good for my town.”
She paused a beat. The air was crisp and continued to be a little windy and carried with it a sense that it was only going to blow harder as the night progressed. It blew between us. Smells of the hilly terrain entered my nose—desert smells like far-off brush and rocky hills that were not quite mountains and were barely hills and an airy dryness that wafted from every direction. I could even smell something that I could only describe as the remnants of a dead campfire, but there was no fire.
Coyotes howled far away somewhere at the moonless sky. At first, it was only from the north, but soon we could hear them from the south and then the east. They sounded quite distant, but still the howls stirred the proper emotions in us. The kinds of emotions that they were supposed to stir up in people. My alertness rose and I imagined that so did Vaughn’s, but neither of us acknowledged it. I didn’t because it didn’t scare me. Hardly anything ever did. Vaughn didn’t acknowledge it either because she was used to it or she was a fearless woman or both. Nothing about her would’ve surprised me because she carried herself as a woman who had been through it all and seen it all and had come out of it standing tall—a hardened woman.
I thought about Jack and I knew instantly that they had shared time together. I knew instantly that they had been more than friends.
And then she said, “He did a lot for me.”
I asked, “He did a lot for your town. Are you from Hope?”
She said, “That’s right. Just to the east of here.”
I asked, “And the ghost town that I passed through back that way?”
I peeked back over my shoulder to the west, pointed with my chin. On my way into the boundaries of Hope I had passed through the remnants of a ghost town. There had been hollowed out buildings, houses torn, eroded away by time, and completely forgotten roads. It had looked like the town that time had forgot. I remember seeing an old two-story police station with an old police car parked out front, the tires removed and gone. Someone had probably stripped the engine out for parts. Although, I couldn’t have imagined why because the car itself was nineteen seventies, easy. The sound of coyotes in the distance seemed to quiet down like the end of a nightly chorus.
She said, “It’s a town called Despair. Well, what’s left of it. Your father had something to do with that.”
I nodded. I had already suspected that he had. I recalled in my memory the digital files that my mother had collected on Jack, which evoked a recollection of a case about an explosion in Colorado. I scanned through the data in my head. There had been an explosion from a dirty bomb that was set off in a recycling refinery. The explosion had erupted and blown metal shrapnel and debris across the town. Despair was later abandoned due to the loss of the only sustainable source of income, as well as highly dangerous levels of a chemical known as trichloroethylene or TCE. It is a halocarbon commonly used as an industrial solvent and is very dangerous when it affects the local drinking water of any town. Despair had been affected and Hope had been well on its way, according to the data that my mother had collected.
My mother had suspected that Jack had done what he always did, which was to say that he foiled a dark plot and dispatched some unsavory characters and then disappeared without a trace.
Officer Vaughn said, “Your father’s quite the guy. He was a one-man justice department.”
A slight smile wafted across her face and her features lit up. She was a good-looking woman. No doubt about that. A little older than me. Maybe a lot older. But she was still young—younger than some and older than others.
I said, “Do you mind un-cuffing me?”
Her smile faded as she deliberated my request.
Then she said, “Of course.”
Which I couldn’t really believe at first. I thought maybe she was joking, but then she holstered her gun and spun me around and unlocked my cuffs. Just like that.
Jack must’ve made quite the impression, I thought.
I turned back around and rubbed my wrists, really out of habit, not pain. Habit because I was getting more and more use to being in handcuffs. I had been arrested so many times as of late; it was becoming a regular ritual. These days it seemed like whenever I walked into a new town, immediately the local law enforcement arrested me and locked me up in jail. Although, this was the first time that I had been let go right after I had been placed in cuffs. Maybe my luck was changing. Maybe not.
Vaughn said, “Reacher, it’s nice to meet you. I
’m Vaughn.”
I said, “Call me Cameron. No one calls me Reacher. Not my name. It’s Jack’s.”
She nodded, must’ve realized that I already said Cameron, and said, “You sound like your old man. Does he know about you?”
I said, “No. He has no clue. I’m trying to find him.”
She asked, “Is that why you’re here?”
I nodded and said, “Sorta.”
She said, “So, you’re wandering around aimlessly, hoping to bump into him?”
I said, “That’s part of it. There’s no way to find Jack. Not really. Not with my resources. It’d take a government agency to locate that man.
“In a way, I’m getting to know him the best that I know how. Doing what he does.”
She asked, “Why not join the army then? That’s what he did.”
I shrugged and said, “That’s something to think about.”
She looked past me and back at the dead cops.
She asked, “What the hell happened to them?”
I looked at the two dead cops, the unmarked police car, and the holes left by the bullets that had shredded through the entire car and then I said, “They got shot an amateur.”
She looked at me with a half frown and shook her head.
She ignored that I said amateur and she said, “You’re just like him.”
I said, “Thanks. I guess.”
She said, “It’s not necessarily a compliment.”
I stayed quiet.
She said, “I’d better call this in. I think it best if you take off. Better not even be involved. How am I supposed to explain that I found you here and didn’t arrest you? Two dead cops and a drifter lurking around them. You know. It doesn’t look good.”
I looked at her in surprise and then I asked, “You’re going to let me go?”
She said, “I can’t explain why you aren’t under arrest, now can I? What am I going to say? I knew your father seven years ago and ten minutes ago I’d never heard of you. Never met you, but now I find you over two dead cops and I let you go?”
I shrugged again and said, “Guess you’re right.”
She said, “I’m going to call this in. You go ahead and head toward Hope. If you see another police cruiser headed this way, duck off the road and let it pass.”
I nodded and said, “Sure that you don’t need any help here?”
She asked, “Why? Were you a military cop too?”
I said, “Not exactly. Not like my parents, but my mother was a sheriff and I know the cop things to do in a case like this.”
She smiled and said, “I’m sure that you do, but you’d better let me handle this.”
I shrugged and she said, “Meet me in the diner in town in the morning. We’ll talk about your father.”
I said, “Okay.”
I didn’t ask the name of the diner because she had said the diner. That usually meant it was the locally owned one. It was the one that everyone went to. Not the corporate chain disguising itself as a hometown diner, but the greasy spoon that inhabited every small town. A dying anomaly these days.
I turned and walked east, down the abandoned road, onto the old, faded road, and toward Hope.
Chapter 4
I WALKED the center of the road for a while, thinking, like average people did on their daily commutes. I found the open road to be a place of great reflection, as did everyone else. Husbands and wives drove long stretches of roads to and from work on a daily basis and found themselves thinking. Truck drivers crisscrossed the American interstate system in stages of half alertness and half daydreaming. The open road was the modern place for meditation. What else is there to do but think? Or not. Whatever the case may be. Some days, I walked for hours without a single memorable thought or care or worry, while other days were different. Other days I had something on my mind, like tonight. Tonight there was no quiet, reflective meditation. My mind thought about the crime scene. Two dead state police officers. The lovely Officer Vaughn. The amateur shooter. The bullet holes riddled through the dead cops and the ones that missed and passed through the seats, the headrests, and into the backseat, possible crashing into the trunk.
The other part of my brain waited for the oncoming headlights and the flashing light bar of one or two or three of Hope’s finest to back up Officer Vaughn. I expected the sirens to flood the night and the empty road with their blue lights. No way was she going to stay alone back there, but so far no other police car had come by. Not a sign of blue flashing lights. Not a noise or sound of a car engine or tires barreling toward me from the distance.
The only sounds that I heard were the howling of an ever-changing wind across the treeless plains and the rolling hills. I heard the night breeze as it picked up dust and particles and swept the land. I heard the howl of a far-off coyote and nothing else after it died down to a low echo like it was the animal’s dying breath.
And then I started to worry. Why was there no backup coming to help Officer Vaughn investigate and secure the area? Where the hell were they? Why did she let me go so easily? What the hell kind of spell did my father put on her?
I stopped on the street and stared at dim lights in the distance. Not car lights. Not police cruisers speeding to the crime scene to back up their fellow officer. Not any of those things. Just town lights. It must’ve been the town of Hope. The town was still wide awake and active. I saw lights from various businesses all throughout the small town, scattered across the horizon like a far-off aircraft carrier, floating on the ocean. The lights guided my way and beckoned to me to head toward them. The beautiful Vaughn had asked me to wait for her in a diner. She had known my father. We could sit and have a conversation and she might be able to answer many of my questions. However, right now I was concerned about the quiet, noiseless night that lay behind me, where I had left her. Why was it so silent? Perhaps the shooter had returned. Perhaps he had been hiding out on the plains. Perhaps he had lain low out there in the darkness and he watched and listened to our conversation. Maybe he knew that his perfect chance to kill another cop was coming. Maybe he waited and watched me leave. Maybe he was setting up an ambush for as many cops as he could. Perhaps I was wrong about him. Perhaps he wasn’t an amateur after all.
I turned and gazed back the way that I had come. I had left Vaughn thirty-one minutes and five seconds ago. A lot can happen in thirty-one minutes and five seconds—a lot.
I started the walk back to her at a good steady pace. I didn’t run. I didn’t want to get there and find that she needed help and then I was out of breath. So I walked.
Chapter 5
THE TWO-LANE road was mostly straight, but not completely. I walked and crossed over a point where the old blacktop became bumpier, worn-out pavement like I had traversed a border between two townships, one with a good budget for roads and one without the same budget.
I walked, moving my legs out as far as I could, making huge strides, not elegant, but efficient. I covered ground faster this way.
Up ahead, I had expected to find Vaughn in some sort of trouble. Maybe the bad guy had returned and imposed on her a final tax for her discovery. But when I arrived, she was alone.
She stood over the dead cops, staring at the state police cruiser. She moved this way and that, tilting right, bending left, until she stopped and gazed at the bullet holes in the front windshield. She was investigating without backup, without a detective. It was unusual for a patrolwoman to be conducting an investigation of a crime scene. And then I looked at her car and knew why.
Her black-and-white patrol car didn’t read: “City of Hope: Police.” It read: “City of Hope: Chief of Police.”
Her title wasn’t Officer Vaughn; she was the chief of the Hope Police Department.
Why the hell was she not calling for backup? I thought.
It didn’t make sense. Time for me to ask her.
My mother and father had been military cops and my mom was a sheriff of a small county in Mississippi. She taught me all about the law and crim
e scene analysis and weapons and combat. One important lesson that she taught me was to never sneak up behind an officer of the law, especially one who was armed. Chief Vaughn and my mother had a lot in common: both called chiefs, both tough, and both beautiful. They both knew Jack Reacher in intimate ways, I supposed, another thing that they had in common. Just how much in common did they have regarding my father? I had no definite answer, but I bet it was pretty damn much.
I came up behind Chief Vaughn’s police cruiser and said, “Vaughn. I’m back.”
She did a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn while in a crouch and drew her Glock, fast as if it had been rehearsed countless times. She had it pointed and ready before she made the full turn. A slow slipstream of dust and sand drifted up behind her and whirled in the other direction like a little cyclone. I watched it circle and twist and die into the night behind her.
I froze. I honestly wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t shoot first. The look in her eyes said that she was already preprogrammed to fire as in a shoot first, ask questions later type of situation, which no one would question. Two dead cops out in the middle of nowhere at night was enough of a reason for any startled cop to shoot any stranger that snuck up from behind like I had with her, even though it had not been my intention. No jury, judge, courtroom, or police officer would’ve even questioned the logic in her shooting me where I stood.
The fear of getting shot by my father’s old friend lasted for only a second, but it was there and I wouldn’t be forgetting it any time soon.
I said, “It’s me. Cameron.”
She said, “Why’re you here? Again?”
I said, “I was worried about you. You said that you’d call for backup and I walked and saw no one. No flashing lights or speeding reinforcements. I worried that maybe the bad guy had returned.
“Maybe he’d done to you what he did to them.”
She said, “So, what? You come back to rescue me? You think that this guy could get the drop on me?”
I said, “I can be wrong. Wrong as the next guy. I’m only human.”