by Scott Blade
So why not? she thought.
Even though he was older, it didn’t bother her. She didn’t know exactly how much older, though. If she had to guess, she’d say he was over thirty.
She waited with her MacBook and waited and waited. She drank three coffees and thought about eating a meal, but instead she settled for two different blueberry muffins, the second an hour after the first.
Jai Jai never showed, and the sun was going down. Raggie would have to head home soon before Uncle Lucas got suspicious. He was like that—overprotective was an understatement. Of course, it was a side effect of his profession because he used to work with her dad and was a retired Secret Service agent. So it was in his nature to be overly protective. And Raggie knew he loved her. He was her godfather after all.
Raggie paid her check for the three coffees and the blueberry muffins and then gathered her belongings and headed out the door.
Chapter 9
JAI JAI SLATER WAS DEAD.
The guy sitting in a white panel van in the parking lot of a café in east DC had put a bullet in the YouTuber about eight hours earlier. Jai Jai had cried and even wet his pants, but he hadn’t fought back. How could he? He’d been tied up and gagged for nearly two weeks. The only time the guy with the gun and the black suit, tie, and Secret Service earpiece had let him free was so that Jai Jai could go to the bathroom. And even in those instances, he’d never let him out of his sight.
Jekyll’s main job had been law enforcement. Because of his training and his involvement with Secret Service agents, he knew a thing or two about abduction, too. He knew how to watch a prisoner and make sure he consumed just enough food and water so he wouldn’t die but wouldn’t make his body stronger, either.
Jekyll knew that the best way to keep a protectee cooperative was to keep him fed, distracted, and feeling protected. It gave a feeling of security and safety. To break the spirits of a captive meant doing the opposite. Take away food. Take away communication. Take away dignity. Take away hope. And then you had full control over them.
Jai Jai had been an easy captive. But Raggie would be even easier because she’d trust Jekyll from the start. He’d have no problem getting her into the van and no problem getting her to eat sleeping pills crushed up and sprinkled onto the Beacon Fizz Pop from South Africa she used to love. He did worry that she might refuse it while she was in the van because maybe she was full from the café. That’s why he had contingencies for these two obstacles. In case she didn’t want the pop, he’d use chloroform on her, which was riskier because she would struggle. Raggie was only a teenager, and she trusted him, but she wasn’t stupid. Certainly, she’d seen enough movies to know what chloroform does and why a man would be shoving a rag soaked in it over her mouth and nose.
Jekyll watched as Raggie exited the café and pulled her hoodie over her head.
He waited until she walked out past the line of sight of the security camera above the door. He never went into view of the café or its windows. He didn’t want to be caught by that camera or the traffic camera mounted to the street light on the main turn out of the parking lot. He fired up the engine. The van’s motor kicked into action and whirred. He already had the nose facing forward, so he tapped the gas and turned the wheel.
The van drifted off toward Raggie. She walked away from it and toward the street. The bus stop was her destination.
Jai Jai’s body was under a tarp in the back of the van. Jekyll peeked back and took one last look at it to make sure none of it was visible. He pulled the van up alongside Raggie.
He rolled down his window and asked, “You lost?”
Raggie turned and stared at the van. At first, she was ready to run, but then she looked up at Jekyll’s familiar face and smiled.
Raggie said, “What’re you doing here?”
He said, “Was in the neighborhood.”
Raggie said, “Wait! Did my mom send you?”
Jekyll smiled and said, “She’s worried about you.”
“Great! So she knows I lied to her? She knows I’m not with my friends?”
“She’s not stupid. Everyone knows you don’t have any friends.”
Raggie stopped walking and smiled. She looked down at the concrete and her Converse shoes. Then she looked back up and said, “I guess I’m in trouble?”
“She doesn’t know you lied to her. She doesn’t know anything. I’m only supposed to look out for you. You know how protective they are. She doesn’t know anything about why you’re really here. Promise.”
Raggie tilted her head as if something bothered her, but she didn’t say anything. She just walked around the nose of the van and reached up to the handle. She clicked it open, and the door squeaked as it turned out. She reached one arm up and grabbed the lip of the door and hauled herself up and into the seat. She reached across herself and jerked the door closed.
Jekyll tapped on the gas, and the van drove off. They turned out of the parking lot and off onto the street. Things looked like they’d go according to plan, but then Raggie said something that was smart on her part, but dumb if she only knew who Jekyll really was.
She said, “How’d you know why I was here?”
Jekyll said, “Your Internet.”
Raggie said, “What?”
“Look. I got you one of those blow pops from South Africa.”
Raggie ignored him and said, “What do you mean? The thing about my Internet? Why’re you watching my Internet? How?”
“Your mom. She asked me to,” Jekyll said.
“Why?”
“Come on. Take the candy. It was hard to get.”
Raggie said, “I don’t want it. Answer me. Why my Internet?”
Jekyll smiled and said nothing. Instead, he jerked the wheel, and the tires whipped up off of the blacktop, and the van pulled into the empty parking lot of a Dollar Store or a Dollar Tree or a Family Dollar. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t look at the sign long enough to read the brand. He pulled around the building and juddered the van to a stop and flipped gear into park.
Raggie said, “What’re we doing?”
The guy in the Secret Service-looking outfit leaned forward and popped open the glove box with one hand. He did this as a distracting tactic, but Raggie never realized it until it was too late. While Raggie watched him do this, he swept his other hand around her head and locked on with a rag dipped in chloroform. Quickly, in a violent upward arc, he grabbed her face with his other hand. He pressed the rag tightly over her face.
Raggie whipped her one arm up but couldn’t get a grip on his hands because of her angle. Instead, she kicked and squirmed, but he had a powerful grip on her. She fought and fought as long as she could. She thought back to the day in the water with the Raggie shark. She saw the same blackness. She felt the same powerful jaws. She closed her eyes a few seconds, and for those few seconds, she saw the shark’s dorsal fin, poignant and dejected in the distance. The difference this time was that she didn’t escape. She succumbed to the danger.
Jekyll held her down for a few more seconds, but not too long. He didn’t want to kill her. He looked around the van and scanned his surroundings. He glanced out the front windshield, the passenger window, and then the driver’s side window. No one was around except for some guy walking a black lab, but he was far away. Neither he nor the animal made any sign of turning around and seeing what Jekyll was up to.
A few more moments passed, and the dog walker and the black lab turned a corner.
Jekyll relaxed and removed the rag from Raggie’s face. He got out of the van and went around to the passenger side and opened the door. He reached in and picked up Raggie’s limp body with ease, carrying her like a new bride to the back of the van. He held her in one arm, which was hard because she was basically dead weight, and reached out from under her to popped open the van’s back door.
He laid her down next to Jai Jai’s body, over the tarp.
Jekyll took one last look at her and closed the doors. He went back to the driver’s
side and pulled the keys out of the ignition. He returned to the back and locked the doors with the keys. Going back to the driver’s side, he took one last scan of the area and saw nothing. No cameras. No witnesses. No sign of life of any kind.
He dumped himself back onto the seat and closed the squeaky door. He started the engine and drove off as if everything was normal—a normal guy driving a normal van through a quiet, forgotten area of a normal town.
Chapter 10
IN THE AIRPORT, CAMERON SAT ON ONE of the modern, chrome countertop stools, gazing out over a small crowd of travelers. Men w3ith suits and ties, talking on their cell phones, walked the metal and glass corridors. Women strolled, pulling their luggage on wheels, staring at their boarding passes, looking around and searching for their gates. Families hustled through. Some looked lost. Others didn’t. All busy people.
One woman carried a small dog that kept yapping—not barking, but yapping. The dog had a pink bow in its cropped blond hair. Some kind of Yorkie maybe. Cameron had heard that service animals were allowed on planes, but he wasn’t sure what kind of service animal this one was. Why did this woman need a service dog? She was obviously not deaf because she kept telling the thing to stop barking, and she wasn’t blind because she stared right at it when she talked to it, her eyes moving like someone with 20/20 vision.
He was in Terminal 1-Lindbergh, which was in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He waited out a layover from Seattle to Washington, DC.
The coffee bar had a fancy, black granite countertop. Everything else had a chrome finish. It was a setup he had never seen before in a place where you get coffee, but then again, over the last three hours and fifteen minutes, he had seen a lot that he hadn’t seen before. The fact that there were a lot of new sights and sounds wasn’t surprising because airports were new to Cameron.
He had just flown on a passenger plane for the first time. It wasn’t the first flight he’d ever been on, just the first he had ever flown that wasn’t at gunpoint like back in Black Rock, Mississippi. That had been a short flight. Much shorter than the one he had just taken and not a flight that he cared to repeat or recall.
Cameron looked at a new iPad device that was fastened and locked to a rail-thin, chrome arm. It had a screen that read “Order here” at the top and “Let us keep up with your flight” at the bottom. He ignored the flight screen and examined the menu.
Pictures of different food items scrolled across the top half of the screen. Cameron tapped the glass and then swiped to the left and then to the left again. He pulled up a menu that read “Beverages.” He immediately went to the “Hot” section and scoured for coffee or plain coffee or coffee black or coffee without cream or without sugar. He found no such offering. Instead, he saw descriptions like “cappuccino,” “Americano,” and “frappe.” Cameron was familiar with all of those terms as terms, but even though he was of the Starbucks’ generation, he had no clue what they meant when applied to coffee.
Cameron was nineteen years old, but he had grown up fast in the last year. This had been a year he would’ve never predicted. Not in a million years. Not under any circumstances. Unlike most nineteen-year-olds, at least the ones that Cameron had known, he had been humbled because of his experiences. Whereas most nineteen-year-olds were self-absorbed or thought they knew it all or were invincible, Cameron was learning quickly that he wasn’t as invincible as he’d thought. More importantly, he was becoming aware of his own mortality and need for humility. When he’d first set out on the road to find Jack Reacher, he had thought his size to be a great advantage, but now he wasn’t so sure. Bullets could stop anyone. No doubt about that. And being a big guy made him a big target.
He had also thought his intelligence was a great advantage, but this past year had tested him to the point that he realized that he may be smarter than some people, but that didn’t mean he knew everything. In fact, he was quickly learning that he was not as smart as he had thought. There was a huge difference between knowing everything and being smart enough to realize that you’ll never know everything.
He felt grateful for the knowledge of this fact because arrogance had almost gotten him killed—and worse, it had put other people in jeopardy, people that Cameron had cared about. Being arrogant could’ve easily gotten Amita or Mike Jacobs or Chief Red Cloud or Faye Matlind or many others killed. He didn’t even like to think about the people who had died. Thinking about them made him second guess himself. What if he had acted differently? Made a different choice. Maybe they’d still be alive. Maybe Matlind or Hank would still be alive if Cameron had been a little wiser and not so overconfident.
He wondered what Jack would’ve said. Or what he would’ve done.
The price of youth was inexperience, and Cameron had plenty of inexperience and a lot to learn about the world. He knew that his wins so far were partly due to genetics and partly due to his mother’s training, but perhaps they were also because of luck—maybe more luck than genetics and training. The reality about luck, though, is that it always runs out.
His father had taught him, whether he’d been present or not. And he had a lot more to learn from Jack. Every day Cameron spent on the road searching for him, he learned something new.
Cameron’s thoughts returned to the present. He searched again through the iPad menu screen, but he couldn’t find plain black coffee anywhere. So he pressed the button that said “Call Attendant.”
A moment later, a young black woman came over to him. She had a pleasant and genuinely friendly look about her. Her hair was a thick, curly heap that rose a few inches above her head. She had a bright smile and two different colored eyes that were obviously contacts. This had been new to Cameron when he was back in Mississippi, but not now. Since then, he had seen plenty of fashion choices and a plethora of accessories that people wore, so this contacts thing didn’t seem unusual to him. Not anymore.
He had flown out of Seattle after spending only a night there. In that one night, he’d seen plenty of weird things. One guy he’d seen in the airport had a Mohawk, dyed pink with blue streaks, and he’d had the most horrible piercings through his cheeks. Cameron believed they were called cheek windows. By far, that had been the weirdest thing he had seen in his life as far as fashion statements went.
The coffee attendant’s contacts were timid compared to the guy with the cheek windows.
The attendant asked, “Yes, sir. What can I get ya?”
Cameron smiled and said, “Coffee. No sugar. No milk. Please.”
The girl smiled back and said, “I’m sorry. We don’t carry regular coffee. Want an espresso?”
“A coffee bar that doesn’t have plain coffee?”
“I’m sorry. But that’s what we got.”
“The world has changed. When a coffee bar doesn’t have coffee.”
The girl stared back at him in confusion but stayed quiet.
Cameron shook his head as if to say, “Never mind,” but instead he said, “How about an Americano? That’s pretty close to a regular coffee. Right?”
He said that like he knew exactly what an Americano was, but the truth was that even though he had spent one night in Seattle, the coffee hub of the world, before leaving on an 11:35 am flight, he actually had no idea what the hell an Americano was. But he had seen them before, and he believed it was the closest thing to a regular coffee he was going to get from a fancy, chromed coffee bar in the middle of an airport he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be in.
The attendant left and returned shortly with a little wheat-colored cup on a little wheat-colored saucer. She placed it down in front of Cameron and asked, “Sweetener?”
“No sugar.”
She said, “Not sugar. Sweetener.”
“What the hell is the difference?”
“Sweetener isn’t bad for you.”
He said, “Isn’t that stuff supposed to cause cancer or something?”
“Don’t believe all that.”
He shook his head and said, “Black
.”
She nodded.
He asked, “How much?”
He pulled cash money out of his front pants pocket.
She waved it off and said, “You pay on the iPad.”
Cameron stayed quiet.
“With your credit card. We don’t do cash.”
Cameron said, “Okay.”
Then she said, “Or you can use your PayPal.”
Cameron smiled. He knew what PayPal was, but he didn’t have a PayPal account. It made him smile because he suddenly imagined Jack Reacher sitting there instead of him. More than likely, Jack wouldn’t have known what the hell PayPal was. He’d probably stare back at the waitress like she was an alien from another planet. To him, she might as well have said, “We only take intergalactic noodles.”
Cameron put the money back into his pocket and pulled out his debit card. The debit card was attached to a checking account with money that his mother had left for him. It was his inheritance. When she died, she’d left her house in Carter Crossing to him and a bank account with her life savings. The lawyer, a guy named Chip Weston, had sold the house and put the profits and savings into a checking account in Cameron’s name. It wasn’t much, but it was a lot for an eighteen-year-old. He had made it last a lot longer than most teenagers would have. He still had plenty of the money left. Plenty for a nineteen-year-old at least.
Chapter 11
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AGO, CAMERON HAD BEEN in Seattle, wanting desperately to go to a coffee shop and sit down for a spell—not because of his addiction to coffee but because of the rain.
He had been walking the entire morning and was coming into the city. No one had stopped for him. Seattle was known for many things other than its coffee obsession—music, Kurt Cobain, Microsoft, the Space Needle, and the rain.