Foreign and Domestic

by Scott Blade

  “Hello,” the guy said.

  “Hi,” Cameron said, running one hand through his wet hair and combing a good amount of water out of it. He brushed more rain off of his face and blinked a couple of times and stared back at the guy behind the counter.

  The guy was young, of average height and average weight. Nothing memorable about him except he had a thick, black beard and black-rimmed glasses. He reminded Cameron of one of those geeky guys that worked in an Apple store or a Windows store. Still, Cameron figured that a coffee shop mashed together with a computer lab, which was essentially what an Internet cafe was, was an adequate fit for a nerdy guy who loved computers and coffee. Cameron couldn’t fault the guy for loving coffee. Nothing but understanding there.

  The guy said, “Can I help you, sir?”

  Cameron stayed quiet and let his eyes scan the room, more out of habit than curiosity. The room was lit up brightly. High ceilings with some kind of railing system that held the bright lamps running the length of the room. It looked like warehouse lighting or maybe the kind of lights inside an airport terminal or a high school gymnasium, not the kind that belonged in a cafe. He had no idea what they were called exactly. Homes and gardens and airplane hangars were not his kind of things.

  “Can I help you?” the guy repeated.

  Cameron smiled at him and said, “I guess I’ll take a cup of coffee.”

  The guy smiled and said, “You’ve gotta rent a computer.”

  “Rent a computer?”

  “Pay for Internet time.”

  Cameron nodded and said, “How much?”

  “It’s $6.50 for a half an hour or $10 for the hour.”

  Cameron paused and looked outside. The rain hammered down nonstop and didn’t look like it was going to let up anytime soon. He turned back to the guy behind the counter and said, “Better give me an hour.”

  “No problem.”

  The guy paused a beat like he was waiting for Cameron to say something, and then he said, “Got a credit card? I need to hold onto it. Like a bar tab.”

  Cameron smiled and said, “Of course.”

  He dug his hand into his pocket and pulled out his debit card. He handed it to the guy.

  “You can pick any computer you want. I’ll bring your coffee out to you.”

  “Okay.”

  Cameron turned and walked over to a computer in the back corner, sat down. His clothes were soaked. They bunched and squeaked as he walked, and then when he sat down, they made a swoosh sound like he had dumped himself down into a puddle of water.

  He sat and waited, didn’t touch the computer because he had no real interest in using it. He just wanted to dry off and get coffee.

  After a minute and fifteen seconds, the guy came around the counter, passing a bar designated for self-service. It had napkins and different types of sweeteners—sugar, brown sugar, Sweet ’n’ Low, and something called Sugar in the Raw. He had no idea what that last one was for.

  The guy set a plain white mug down in front of Cameron on a coaster that was already there.

  He said, “You can log on to the computer using this password.”

  And he handed Cameron a slip of paper with a login and password on it.

  Cameron stayed quiet and took the paper.

  The guy said, “Call me if you need anything. My name is Mark.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  Then Mark walked away.

  Cameron took a look at the coffee. It was black and looked hot, and that was all that mattered at this point. He took a slow sip and confirmed that it was definitely hot—too hot to drink straight away. He blew on it and watched the steam shift and sway under his breath, then he set the cup back down on the coaster and waited for it to cool down.

  Cameron looked around the room. His eye-level was much higher than the computers, so he saw most everything that there was to see—windows, doors, metal railings, a staircase that led up beyond the high ceiling. Nothing of interest until he heard a noise in the furthest corner of the room. It came from a nook that branched off into a more private location. He craned his head a little and saw something under the darkness of a broken light above.

  He smiled when he realized it was a couple of teenagers making out, and then he thought about how he’d never had that experience. Not really. He had never made out with a girl in public before. Of course, he had done plenty of other things. Things that would’ve probably made those teenagers blush. Things with Karen, for example. But this wasn’t the place to sit and think about that sort of thing. Still, he couldn’t help but smile.

  Cameron took another look at the coffee, having second thoughts about how hot it was, but still, he waited.

  Might be a few minutes, he thought.

  He decided to go online.

  When in Rome.

  Cameron looked at the slip of paper and tapped on the keyboard. A screen popped up and asked him to log in. He followed the instructions, which led him through a series of clicks and yes/no and agree/don’t agree obstacles before he was logged on. A small timer popped up at the bottom of the screen. It counted down sixty minutes. It was a big icon. It made him feel like he had sixty minutes left to live.

  Better check my email before it’s too late, he thought and smiled.

  One thing he had noticed being on the road and having no one to interact with for long periods of time was that his sense of humor had gotten strange. Being alone for a long time, a guy started to make jokes to himself and before he knew it, he found the most stupid things to be amusing. This was why Cameron was glad for the occasional, temporary friend. They kept him from going so crazy that he started talking to himself and answering himself back. He had met drifters like that on the road, and he had seen them at bus stops and on train platforms and in alleyways and along the shoulders of sun-beaten highways.

  Cameron stared at the screen for a moment and thought of where to go and what to look at before figuring he might as well check his email. He didn’t use it that much, not even when he had been a high school student, which had been the reason for creating it in the first place. His high school had required its students to have email addresses so that they could be constantly in touch with one another and their teachers and could receive school newsletters and updates.

  Cameron doubted there was much in the way of spam in his email since, from his understanding, spam came from giving out your email on a regular basis. Filling out a form here and there and leaving your email or signing up for something like an account where you’d be prompted to first divulge your email. That sort of thing. These were traps he never fell for.

  Cameron went to his email and logged on.

  He had been wrong about one thing. His in-box was jam-packed. He browsed through it and looked at the senders’ addresses. Many of them were old—a year at least. Some of the handles he recognized, and some he didn’t, but he imagined most of them were people from another time—a past life—and not something he was interested in rehashing. He knew that some email programs allowed the sender of a message to see if it had been opened by the receiving party, so he did nothing to them. Didn’t open them. Didn’t trash them. He simply left them in the in-box, unread.

  Cameron scrolled back to the top of the in-box because there had been a name repeated several times, and it had caught his attention. It was Chip Weston’s email.

  Weston had been his mom’s lawyer and the guy who had given him her instructions for her remains after her death. It was probably something important. So he clicked on the most recent message and waited as the mail program scanned the email. Then it opened, and Cameron read the short message: Call me as soon as you get this. I have information on Jack Reacher.

  No greetings. No goodbye. No signature. Just the fourteen words and two periods. Cameron figured that Weston had sent so many messages he had probably grown tired of saying hello and asking how are you. At this point, Weston was just sending a message with the essential words. Straight to the point. He probably figured it was
a nearly fruitless endeavor to email him because Jack Cameron was out on the road trying to get to know his father, and that meant he would be difficult, if not impossible, to find. Like father like son. It meant he’d be far away from emails and the Internet.

  But here Cameron was, a victim of time and chance. One thing leads to another. Cause and effect.

  Karen had asked him to leave. He’d caught a ride. The guy’s car had broken down. The rain had come in. And Cameron then stepped into the only café that had space for a customer, the only cafe that hadn’t asked him to leave because of his appearance—and it happened to be an Internet café. Now he sat at a computer he’d been forced to pay for, which had, in turn, convinced him not to waste his money and time there and to log on. And the high school he had gone to, not all that long ago, way back in Mississippi, had forced him to open an email account in the first place. And since he was forced to sit there and pay for Internet and use it, he might as well check the only email address he’d had from a lifetime ago. Well, maybe not a lifetime, but definitely a different lifetime ago.

  One thing led to another.

  Cameron put the mouse over the reply button and clicked it. He put his fingers to the keyboard and typed a short message: Will call today. He clicked the send button, and the computer made a swooshing noise like a reverse vacuum cleaner—and his email was off.

  Cameron wondered what information Weston had. He figured that, perhaps, he could scroll back through the older messages and find the answer, but what was the point in digging through older messages? They were technically things of the past, and Cameron didn’t like to sift through the past. What was the point in doing that? On the other hand, Jack Reacher was from a long-ago and unknown past—his past. Therefore, it was sometimes necessary to go backward in order to move forward.

  Chapter 13

  THE NEXT THING THAT CAMERON SET OUT TO DO after the rain stopped and he paid his tab at the Internet cafe was to find a pay phone. In the twenty-first century, this was not an easy task. Even in a major city like Seattle, pay phones weren’t that easy to come by, but Cameron asked around and ended up on what felt to him like a scavenger hunt, at least at first. Go here. Turn there. Look by that place. Search by this place. But in the end, he found a pay phone down by the fish market.

  As he stared at the pay phone, he felt something he couldn’t quite explain, a sense of déjà vu, like some sort of ghost stood over his shoulder. He felt like he’d been there before. He got that kind of feeling like he knew—not sensed, but knew—that he was meant to be at that pay phone.

  Strange, he thought.

  The pay phone was located across from a streetlight that had just turned red. He looked over at the idling cars and then examined an interesting coffee shop across the street. It had maroon paint and scarred wood. A chalkboard menu stood outside. Nothing was written on it because it was covered in rainwater, but Cameron imagined that it was a sign used to display the day’s specials for onlookers and passersby so they could decide to try the red cake or the mocha frappe with cherry drizzle or the pumpkin spice latte or whatever such nonsense they created to draw in today’s American coffee drinker.

  No one knew what the big deal about Seattle and coffee was, but Cameron imagined it had something to do with the bleeding-heart, poetic, artistic stigma the city carried, or maybe it was the fact that Starbucks had opened its first pilot store in Seattle. Either of these two options could’ve been a reason, or both, or neither. Whatever, Cameron didn’t care. What he liked about Seattle so far was that there was a coffee shop on every corner. What he didn’t like about Seattle was that, in his short stay, it had definitely lived up to the hype about rain. It rained a lot, but then again, Cameron had only been in the city for less than two hours.

  Cameron walked over to the pay phone and didn’t have to wait in line, which wasn’t a shock. If there had been even one person using the phone, Cameron would’ve been surprised. He recalled seeing old movies where people waited in line forever to use a pay phone, but those days were long gone. Even the days when people didn’t have cell phones were almost before he was born. This made seeing a pay phone for Cameron like seeing a relic from another time.

  A smile flickered across his face as he thought of his father using pay phones. Then he wondered if his father had used this pay phone. According to some study or article he had read, America had less than 500,000 pay phones left—and that was something he had read more than five years ago, probably dated information by now. Now the number was probably less than 450,000. Maybe even much less, but Cameron wasn’t sure about the exact number of pay phones, and he remembered numbers and facts pretty well when he paid attention.

  If his father had been in Seattle and had needed to use a pay phone for some reason, then perhaps he had also been directed to the fish market, and maybe he had used this particular pay phone.

  This thought made Cameron smile.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out five quarters and slipped them into the pay phone coin slot. He figured that Mississippi was a long distance number from Seattle and it would cost a dollar and a quarter, which was what it had cost in Mississippi to call long distance a long time ago, but he wasn’t sure if there was a difference nowadays or not. He hadn’t used a pay phone in a long time. However, taking inflation and deflation and time out of the equation, he believed $1.25 was the correct price because pay phones were no longer used for profit, not really. Cameron had no idea why the phone companies that controlled them kept them around.

  He heard the change slide into the phone and stop dead, and then he heard a dial tone from the receiver. He pulled up the number from his memory and dialed it. He hoped that Weston hadn’t moved offices or changed his phone number. He hit the last digit with his index finger and waited.

  Cameron looked across the street at the coffee shop again and then to the sky. By the looks of the clouds, it might start raining, or it might clear up—there was really no way of predicting it.

  The phone whirred and buzzed silently like it was trying to go through different towers or wires or however pay phones worked, Cameron wasn’t sure. Then it rang. A distant kind of ring. Then a click. Another ring. And a voice.

  Weston sounded a little husky, like he had fallen asleep and was answering the phone straight from a deep nap.

  “This is Chip Weston.”

  “It’s Cameron.”

  “Yes,” Weston cleared his throat and said, “Yeah. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  Cameron stayed quiet.

  “I got a call about you.”

  “A call?”

  “I haven’t been looking for your dad or anything. What I mean to say is that I didn’t go around searching for him after your mother passed.”

  Cameron asked, “Who called you?”

  He swallowed, and then he said, “The United States Secret Service.”

  Cameron looked around the street and wondered why Weston had announced it in that way.

  Probably.

  A truck pulled up along the side of a building in his view and waited. The passenger got out and walked into a storefront. The engine ran idle, and exhaust pooled out of the back pipe.

  Cameron arched a brow and asked, “What about exactly?”

  “They’re looking for Jack. They tracked your mom down—I guess because she’d been searching through so many case files across the country for so many years. For some reason, it makes a difference to them now.

  “I told ’em that she was dead, but that didn’t seem to matter to them. The agent said that she had tripped a flag in her relentless searches.”

  “So what? They’re only now asking about it?”

  “I’m not sure why. But anyway, I told them I represented her estate. And about you.”

  Cameron stayed quiet, processed the information.

  “The guy got suddenly very interested in who you are. He started asking questions about you. I mean he was very interested.”

  “What sorts of qu
estions?”

  “Your age and where you were born. What you thought of your father. What your relationship with him is like. Stuff like that.”

  Cameron said, “What else?”

  “The guy left a contact number. He wanted you to call him.”

  Weston paused a beat, and then he asked, “Do you want the number?”

  “Give it to me.”

  Weston asked, “Got a pen?”

  “I’m ready.”

  Weston told him the number. Cameron committed it to memory.

  “How’re you out there?”

  Cameron said, “I’m good.”

  “Any luck finding Jack?”

  “Not so far, but the longer I’m out here, the more I start to think that my mother may not’ve ever expected me to find him.”

  Obviously, Cameron couldn’t see Weston, but he imagined a confused look on the guy’s face like it said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Cameron didn’t wait for Weston to ask. He said, “I better get off the phone. It’s a pay phone.”

  Weston cleared his throat again quickly and asked, “Is there a way for me to contact you? The email thing isn’t efficient.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ll call you. Got to go.”

  And Cameron hung up the phone. Didn’t wait for an acknowledgment or anything else. He clicked the receiver back into its cradle and listened as his change rattled down into the stomach of the pay phone and was lost in the mechanism.

  He wasn’t interested in setting up some kind of long-term communication with Weston or anyone else from his old life or hometown because that was in the past, and Cameron wanted only to move forward, wanted only to get a lead on Jack Reacher and move on with his life.

  Nothing else.

  The delivery truck that had pulled up a little down the street had remained idle. No change. Cameron watched as the driver got out and walked to the back of the truck, opened it up, and went inside. He the exited with a dolly stacked with boxes. His partner came out of the store with a clipboard, and they hauled in the boxes.