by Scott Blade
She said, “It’s hard to escape a place like this.”
I smiled and nodded. I knew something about feeling stuck in a small town in Mississippi. In fact that was all I ever knew. Suddenly, I felt grateful that I had realized it now rather than later on in life.
She said, “When I was abroad I met a nice guy. We got to know each other and he offered to fund a clinic and research facility for me. He paid for my schooling and so I’m under obligation to maintain this facility. I only have another year and then I will be free and clear.”
I asked, “What will you do then?”
She said, “I’ll move away. Maybe one of the coasts. I like Florida. I don’t know.”
“You sound unhappy.”
She smiled and shook her head. Her eyes blinked and opened. They were unforgettable, a kind of gray color. I had never seen that color before. In the sunlight, when I had met her, I hadn’t noticed.
She said, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful. I do have some moral objections.”
I asked, “With what?”
She said, “The research side.”
“Animals?” I asked.
She looked off in the distance for a second. Her eyes stared at one of the medical posters on the wall—a poster about pregnancy.
She said, “Right. Animal testing. Gotta pay for this clinic somehow.”
Chapter 33
I spent the better part of an hour with Sheldon and we talked like a pair of teenagers who had never kissed before, which technically, I was. At least the teenage part.
I was 18 and a half years old, but she never asked, so I hadn’t told her. Why should I?
She probably thought that I was in my 20s, which was okay by me.
It was now 1:15 a.m. I could’ve talked to Sheldon all night. She was an amazing woman. Truly something sensational. Why she was single, I had no idea.
The one thing that I wanted to do more than talk to her was to stare at her amazing beauty. The only thing that I wanted to do more was kiss her. Everywhere.
In that moment, she was the only thing that I cared about. Under different circumstances, I would’ve given up my mission and stayed in Black Rock with her.
Between finding a father that I had never known and staying with this beautiful woman, hands down she was the easy choice.
She asked, “You’re the reason that I had so much business yesterday? I was setting broken bones all morning.”
I smiled and said, “Sorry about that.”
She smiled back and then said, “Don’t worry about it. This town is full of backward people. They don’t like outsiders.
“Gemson isn’t any different. Women. Blacks. Hispanics. People here don’t care.”
I said, “I grew up in a place like this. Don’t judge the South by the people here. Where I’m from, my community has its racial scars too. But there are good people.”
She nodded and then changed the subject.
She asked, “Was your mother really the sheriff?”
I nodded.
She said, “My parents are dead.”
I stayed quiet.
She trailed off into her own thoughts, lost in some distant memory.
I asked, “What is it?”
“What is what?”
“You’re thinking about something. What is it?”
“Nothing. Just glad that I met you.”
I smiled.
Right then and there, three things happened.
First, Sheldon Eckhart leaned forward and kissed me with a pair of lips that were sweeter than any fruit. Her kiss was incredible. It swelled through me like a hurricane. My hair tingled, my skin perspired, and my heart beat fast.
I kissed her back and then I gently caressed the back of her head.
I kissed her and she matched me move for move.
Her lips were wet and her skin was smooth and soft.
She smelled good, like a wet rainforest. Her kiss was alive and wet like one too.
She mesmerized me. If Sheldon had stopped kissing me right then and said “stay with me,” I would’ve dropped my quest for Jack Reacher and stayed the rest of my life.
It would have meant the rest of my life secluded and yet surrounded by people that I didn’t belong with. And I would’ve been happy to do it. I would’ve done anything for her.
The second thing that happened at the same time that we were locked in a passionate kiss was that I remembered Matlind and I realized that I had gotten sidetracked.
And the third thing that happened ended our kiss. Sheriff Grady walked in, with a less than happy look on his face.
He stood inside the doorway with an accusatory look in his eyes like he had just caught me with his wife.
We were silent for a moment.
He interrupted the silence and asked, “So who is the dead Mexican in my jail cell?”
I said, “I have no idea. All I know is that he tried to kill me and that he is definitely a professional hit man.”
Chapter 34
Sheriff Grady stared at me with a kind of swollen look, like he had grown tired of me. I couldn’t say that I cared. One of his deputies walked up behind Grady and stopped about three yards away. He rested his hand on the butt of his holstered Glock.
These country boys still didn’t trust me. I couldn’t say that I blamed them.
I faced the sheriff. I needed to get back to Matlind. It had been most of a day and he wasn’t safe on his own. Not if this professional hit man was somehow related to his missing wife, which was the only thing that made sense to me. I had kicked a hornets’ nest and it had to be because of Faye Matlind’s disappearance. She was the one thing that connected me to a Mexican hit man. Had to be. And in that case, Chris Matlind was at the center of something. I doubted if Grady was going to take him seriously. It was best that I got back there.
I said, “I need to go back to the motel.”
Grady said, “You need to stay in my custody.”
“Am I still a prisoner?”
“You’re a witness. There are a lot of unanswered questions here.”
I said, “You don’t need me. And you can’t take me back to the jail, not after what happened.”
“So what do you suggest? That I let you go?”
“Take me back to my motel. At least there I can get some sleep before morning.”
Grady paused like he was searching his brain for the right answer. He knew that I was right. I couldn’t go back to the jail. It was a crime scene now and it wasn’t safe there, but right then it wasn’t safe anywhere.
Grady looked at his deputy, not Mike, but the other guy.
He said, “Lewis, take the boy back to the motel and stay outside in your car till I call you.”
Lewis came all the way into the room. He looked at me and made the come here gesture with his hand. I ignored him and looked back at Sheldon.
I held her hand in mine. She slid off the countertop and stared up at me with those gray eyes like storm clouds brewing—beautiful and dangerous.
She was tiny underneath my frame. The lights above hit my back and cast a shadow over her from my body. It consumed her like she stood in the wake of a tall tree.
I asked, “Will I see you later?”
She smiled and said, “I hope so.”
Chapter 34
Deputy Lewis and I drove back to the motel in his police cruiser.
I sat in the back.
We didn’t have to go far. Maybe ten minutes.
Lewis drove with the light bar off. There was no rush in getting me to the motel.
He hadn’t spoken until we came to a traffic light. It was one of those times when the light turned red for us and we were the only car on the road.
After we stopped at the light, Lewis reached up and adjusted his mirror. I saw his eyes in the reflection. The light shone red across the top of his face.
He said, “Ya saved my friend’s life, but ya’re the reason that he got shot in the first place. I reckon that I owe ya some j
ustice for that, but I can’t do nothing to ya. The sheriff said so, but that don’t mean that I can’t tell ya that I don’t like ya.”
He spoke without an accent, but still managed to slur his speech in a kind of backwoods sort of way just like Gemson. Maybe that was how he had gotten the job in the first place, like he came off as the smart one.
I asked, “Do a lot of backwoods justice here?”
He said, “When the situation requires it, we’d been known to take a bad guy out into the woods and teach him a lesson before we book him.”
“You abuse your prisoners?”
“We don’t hurt anyone who ain’t got it coming. And sometimes prisoners like to try to run. We gotta teach them a lesson.”
“So why are you telling me this?”
He asked, “Maybe ya want to pull over before we get to the motel? Maybe ya want to try to run?”
I said, “Sheriff told you to drive me to the motel. I’m not a prisoner. You’re escorting me like I’m a VIP. Kind of like a chauffeur.”
He scowled in the mirror and stared back at me and then said, “Ya may think that ya aren’t, but ya’ll end up back behind bars soon enough. I’d bet my badge on it.”
I stayed quiet.
He asked, “So ya wanna get it over with now? I’ll pull over and we can get out and settle this.”
I said, “You pull over and only one of us is getting back in the car. The other is going to need that medical chopper to come back for him.”
Lewis paused. He almost said something, but the light turned green and he continued on to the motel.
We stayed quiet the rest of the way.
The motel was dark and quiet. The parking lot was half full. The cars were silent and still. A family of raccoons rustled through a dumpster at the next parking lot over.
Lewis stopped the car in the parking lot to let me out.
He said, “Get out. I’ll be sitting in the car. Sheriff’s orders.”
I paused.
He said, “What? Do you need me to check your room for you? Are you scared?”
I ignored him. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Gemson’s cell phone. I tossed it on the back bench.
I didn’t bother to explain, just got out of the car and shut the door behind me. Not hard. I didn’t want to slam it. I wanted him to know that his remarks hadn’t affected me, which they hadn’t.
I went to room 14. I had left Matlind there the night before. I only hoped that he had stayed put and waited for me to return like I’d asked.
I knocked. No answer.
I knocked again—hard. No answer.
I reached down and grabbed the handle and twisted the knob and pushed the door open.
The room was dark. I flipped on the light. The room was empty. No sign that Matlind had ever slept there. The bed was remade as though it had never been slept in.
The only thing left in the room that didn’t belong was my phone charger. It was still plugged into the wall.
I left the room, left the door open, and checked next door. Maybe Matlind had returned to his own room to wait with his own stuff. Maybe he needed to shower and needed his own belongings.
The doorframe was still shattered and it would probably stay that way for weeks. Judging by the state that the motel had been in, I doubted that the owner got around to fixing things in a prompt manner.
A dim light shone through the cracks between the curtains and the splinters of the door.
I pushed the door open. It creaked and more splintered wood fell from the top of the frame.
The light that dimly lit the room was from the bathroom. And the reason why Matlind had not answered me was because he was dead.
His body lay flat across the bed. His arms were twisted out and away from him. His fingers on his left hand reached out to me like he wanted me to take his hand and follow him. A Beretta Px4 Storm weighted down the tip of his index finger.
It had a black, rubbery look to it. It lay on the bed like a snake, coiled and waiting for action. The smell of gunpowder lingered in the air.
At the top of the bed and partially on the wall were dried stains—part blood, part brain, and part skull fragments.
Matlind had blown his brains out.
He had woken up and found that I had abandoned him too. First his wife vanished and now me. He had set his hopes on me and I had let him down.
So he took his own life.
Chapter 35
As long as I could remember, I had guns and crime scenes in my life. Growing up the son of a small-town sheriff, guns and dead bodies went hand in hand like how riding a bike went hand in hand with a guy who grew up in a life with a non-sheriff parent.
I studied Matlind’s corpse and scanned the motel room carefully.
On the cold, hard tile at the foot of the bed was a shell casing. I knelt down and inspected it without picking it up.
I got down on my hands like I was going to do a pushup. The tile was dusty. I went all the way down, eye level with the brass so I could see the head stamp.
The bullet was a 9mm.
I pushed up and got back on my feet. I looked over the corpse.
I bet that if I ejected the magazine out of the Beretta Px4 it would have been loaded with 9mm parabellums. That was the most popular bullet in the U.S. It was used in over 60 percent of police firearms.
I inspected Matlind’s entry and exit wounds.
He had put the gun barrel in his mouth and the muzzle of the gun must’ve pushed all the way till he involuntarily began swallowing it because the exit wound had taken out the top part of his brainstem and the bottom of his brain.
I looked at his fingers on his left hand.
I couldn’t recall whether or not Matlind had been left-handed. Maybe. I saw gunshot residue on his left hand and clothes. It was all the way to his forearms.
He hadn’t killed himself. The suicide had been staged. I knew that for sure.
It seemed like his fingers weren’t broken, a typical sign of a faked suicide. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t forced to pull the trigger or that he hadn’t been coerced in some other way.
I saw no visible evidence that he hadn’t done it, but I knew because I had met a man who tried to get me to commit suicide. I was positive that he had murdered Matlind first. That was how he knew about me.
He had come here after I left and questioned Matlind and murdered him, probably convinced him that he’d kill Faye.
The dead Mexican who had tried to kill me was connected to Faye’s disappearance somehow. Had to be. No other logical explanation.
I stepped back to the door and opened it wide with my foot.
Lewis saw me and turned on his headlights and then his light bar. I wasn’t sure why, probably thought that it would irk me. His engine had still been running. He was parked in the lot facing my door.
The cones from his light bar lit up the room every time they rotated by.
This time I was the one who used my hand to gesture for him to come to me.
He got out of the car and approached.
Before he reached the door, he said, “What? You need me to tuck you in?”
I stepped out of the doorway to let him see the room and the dead body.
I said, “No. But you might need me to do your damn job for you.”
His jaw dropped open and he stared at the corpse.
He said, “Oh, God!”
I said, “You’d better call the sheriff over here.”
Chapter 36
We waited outside for Grady to arrive. Deputy Lewis hadn’t known what to do; that was obvious.
Under normal conditions, he should’ve locked down the crime scene as best he could. He should’ve locked me in the rear bench of his car, but he hadn’t done those things.
The only thing that he had done was to move his car closer to room 13 and light up his light bar so that it spun faster, no siren, only the blue and red lights. I’d guessed that the faster spin was to signify more immediate danger.
Lewis had said nothing to me since he saw Matlind’s body. Two dead bodies in one night must have been plenty for him.
I felt bad on the inside. I had seen plenty of corpses. That hadn’t bothered me, but I had been responsible for Matlind’s death. I could’ve stayed with him or brought him with me. The only reason that I had left him was to let him sleep, and now the guy would never wake again. Stupid on my part.
The guy’s wife was missing. Some rednecks tried to take him. I should’ve taken this more seriously.
I wasn’t quite seeing how a Mexican hit man and the rednecks were connected.
A drug-related arrangement?
The sheriff drove up in his Chevy Tahoe. The light bar rolled and flashed, out of unison with the lights from Lewis’s squad car. The Tahoe’s tires squawked as Grady pulled it into the parking lot.
Grady got out and walked over to us.
He gazed at me with a look on his face like what are you doing out of cuffs? But he said nothing about it.
He went past us and into the room. He looked over the crime scene, the body, the brass. He didn’t touch anything. He came back out of the room a couple minutes later.
He stepped out into the parking lot. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a half-empty pack of Newports. He opened the pack and slid a cigarette and a lighter out. He lit the cigarette.
He took two drags and then said, “Reacher, you’re bad luck.”
I nodded.
He said, “I never even heard of you until yesterday and now I have two dead bodies and a wounded deputy.
“One guy tried to kill you in prison and another shot himself in the head. Both strangers here.”
I stared down at him, his eyes covered by the brim of his hat. Even with the police lights flashing, darkness covered his face and the only facial features that I could see on him were whenever he took a drag from his cigarette. The brief light flashed across his face revealed the gray stubble of a man who had had a long day.