Reckoning Road: A Get Jack Reacher Short Story (2 page)

BOOK: Reckoning Road: A Get Jack Reacher Short Story
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“No. He’s out cold.”

“Is he breathing?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone else in the vehicle with him?”

“No.”

“Are you injured?”

“No.”

The voice paused a long beat.

I stayed quiet.

The voice came back and said, “Sir, can you identify yourself?”

I asked, “Why?”

The voice said nothing, and then a new voice came on the line. A male voice.

He said, “Sir, this is Lt. Daniel Moreno. I’m the night watch CO here in Encino. Which is about forty miles southwest of your position. That phone’s GPS shows us that you’re near Cedar Corner. My nearest ambulance is from there. They’ll be with you shortly. But the nearest sheriff’s deputy is coming from here, and he’s leaving now.”

I stayed quiet, still wondering why this guy’s phone was registered with Homeland Security. So I asked.

“Lieutenant, why’s this guy’s phone listed with Homeland Security?”

Moreno said, “The phone you’re using is registered with the United States Marshals Service.”

“Marshal?” I asked.

I reached down and searched the guy’s other jacket pockets and found his wallet, opened it. A US Marshals Service business card identified him as John Martin, retired.

Chapter 3

THE CEDAR CORNER PARAMEDICS ARRIVED
in about twenty minutes.

Which was better than I expected but not much. A small town with limited resources that was a good distance away from my location wouldn’t be the best imaginable savior in a rescue situation. However, a couple of paramedics on-call all night with nothing to do might be inclined to respond fast. They probably waited with a combination of coma-inducing boredom and eagerness for action—kind of like the military. So they got the call—and not just from anyone but from the night watch commander at the nearest sheriff’s office—and the subject of the call was more than just an automobile accident. It involved a retired US marshal and a tree and an unknown, middle-of-the-night passerby.

The paramedics jumped out of the square blue van with medical emblems displayed all over the sides and the back, and they leaped into action like power tools that had been neglected and were eager for jobs.

They went right to John Martin and lifted his head slightly and checked his pulse and started to talk to him. One looked at his watch while counting Martin’s heartbeat, and the other guy did something else. I wasn’t sure what.

I looked around. No sheriff’s cruisers coming at us. Not yet.

I said, “Where are the sheriff’s deputies? I was told they’d come out for this guy.”

One paramedic ignored me. The other didn’t look back but spoke over his shoulder. He said, “They told us you should wait here for them.”

I stayed quiet.

“They told us you should stay and wait,” he repeated.

I said, “Where are you takin’ him?”

The paramedic said, “First, we’ll take him to Cedar Corner and let the ER doctor look at him. If he says he’s fine, then we keep him there.”

“You’ve got an ER in Cedar Corner?”

“It’s small. Just one floor of a federal building. But as long as this guy doesn’t have major internal bleeding or extensive head injuries that’re critical, then we’ll keep him and care for him there.”

“Can I ride with you guys into town?”

The paramedics began lifting the guy onto a stretcher. The one said, “We don’t care what you do.”

The other finally spoke. He said, “The cop wanted him to stay behind.”

Then the same guy hushed his voice to a lower octave but not low enough to where I couldn’t hear him, and he said, “He could be dangerous. He could’ve attacked this guy.”

The first paramedic looked at me and shrugged. He said to me, “Help us put him in the back.”

I went to the ambulance and held the back doors open wide, preventing them from swinging. I didn’t need to move too far back because my arm span allowed me to hold both doors open through the whole procedure.

They lifted and rolled the guy and the stretcher onto the floorboards of the ambulance and wheeled him all the way forward. The first paramedic hopped in after Martin and tapped his foot on a mechanism at the base of the back wheels, and I heard a rusty
snick
which I guessed signaled that the wheels were locked in place, preventing the stretcher from rolling.

He said, “Hop in if you want to ride with us.”

I jumped in the back and sat across from the first paramedic, and the second one shut the doors behind us.

I heard the second one scramble around the outside of the ambulance and open the driver door and hop in. He fired up the engine and hit the gas, and we were on the blacktop, headed for some part of Route 66 called Cedar Corner.

Chapter 4

RETIRED UNITED STATES MARSHAL JOHN MARTIN
woke up and repeated his early concerns.

He looked at me with weak eyes and said, “You’ve got to get to her first.”

I said, “Who? Get to who? Who’s she?”

The first paramedic said, “He needs to be silent.” And he started to put an oxygen mask over Martin’s mouth, but Martin reached up with a shaky arm and grabbed the guy’s hand. He shook his head. The paramedic said, “Sir, it appears as if you’ve had a mild cardiac event.”

I looked up at the paramedic, realizing that must’ve been why Martin had been swerving all over the road. He’d probably been speeding to help whoever this girl was that he kept mentioning, and then he’d seen me on the road and was struck with a mild heart attack. It had caused him to drive recklessly, and he’d crashed into a tree.

In a way, it made me feel a little guilty, like what if it had all happened because he had unexpectedly seen me, a hulking stranger, standing in the road in the middle of the night? What if that had been the trigger for his heart attack?

I shrugged it off. Couldn’t help it now if that was the case.

He was both a lucky and an unlucky guy. Unlucky because of the heart attack. Lucky because the tree had been there to save his life. It had stopped the car and stopped him from ramming into another vehicle or hitting a ditch and flipping his car. Either way, he could’ve been dead, and in my book, any guy who survives a career in law enforcement, a heart attack, and a car accident to boot was a pretty lucky guy. No matter which way you cut it.

Martin said, “Wait. Wait.”

He breathed heavy like it was his first breath after being submerged deep underwater for months. He reached out toward me with his left hand like he wanted to grab me but couldn’t reach. He said, “You. I need your. Help.”

I moved down the bench past some medical equipment, some of which was foreign to me and some I had seen in movies or in my limited experiences in medical settings. I neared the side of his stretcher. He relaxed his hand.

The ambulance sirens were off because there was no traffic, not even a car on the highway, but the lights swirled through the air, ricocheting red beams through the front windshield and into the rear of the vehicle.

The red lights flashed across the paramedics face as he listened.

John Martin said, “Help her.”

I asked, “Who? Help who?”

He said, “Kara. Kara. She’s in danger. They know. They know.”

He paused and swallowed hard and then he said, “They know where she is. They’re coming tonight. Right now.”

I said, “Who is?”

“Them. The bad guys. Carter.”

I said, “Who is she?”

He said, “Kara. Kara’s witness. Protection.”

I said, “Where?”

John Martin said, “Twenty years. She’s been off the books for twenty years. I promised her she’d be safe. Her and her little girl.”

I said, “Martin, where are they?”

John Martin’s eyes faded in and out, his pupils dilated.

The paramedic said, “He needs to breathe now.”

I said, “Where’s Kara? Tell me!”

He looked at me once more and said, “Diner. Waitress. Please.”

Then he was gone—out cold—and from the look of him, he wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Not soon enough for Kara, the waitress.

The paramedic hovered over him and put two fingers on his neck. Then he forced a clear oxygen breather over Martin’s face and watched as Martin took slow breaths.

The paramedic said, “What the hell is he talkin’ about?”

I said, “His duty, I guess.”

I was no expert on US Marshals, but I knew they were law enforcement officials, and like all law enforcement officials and soldiers, they lived in a brotherhood. And a brotherhood carried with it a code of honor.

I was unknown to my father—a guy named Jack Reacher, an Army man. My mother had known me, however. She had been a Marine and a cop, so I was all too familiar with the brotherhoods and the codes of honor among them.

I was on the road with no particular place to go, looking for a man I might never find, but I figured one thing I could find was this woman and her daughter. I could find them for John Martin and warn them to get out.

Chapter 5

TWENTY YEARS WAS A LONG TIME.
And that was what John Martin had said. Therefore, I assumed he was talking about Kara and her daughter. In which case, Kara would be over forty, probably, and her daughter would be older than me or my age at a minimum, and maybe well into adulthood.

I couldn’t be sure because I knew nothing about the case John Martin was talking about, and I knew nothing about the good guys and nothing about the bad guys. All I knew for sure was that something had forced him to drive all night down Route 66, alone and not in the best of health. My guess was that he had known about his heart condition but that he was obsessed with Kara’s protection for some unknown reason. Perhaps she was that one case that had haunted him even after he retired, or perhaps he had become personally involved with her and her daughter. Perhaps he felt a sense of responsibility for their well-being. Perhaps it was more than professional to him. In some way, it was personal.

I could only guess because at that moment there were only two certainties about John Martin. One was that he wasn’t going to be able to help anybody, not tonight, and not for a while. The second was that John Martin had no idea who to trust.

One of the primary functions of the US Marshals Service was to protect witnesses to major crimes. Witnesses whose lives were often in grave danger. The US Marshals Service was tasked with overseeing the witness relocation and protection programs.

From the circumstances of John Martin’s current predicament and last words to me, I could only assume he had been heading to Cedar Corner to warn a witness from a fifteen-year-old case that she and her daughter were in jeopardy. Somehow, Kara and her daughter had been made by the bad guys. And so John Martin had taken himself out of retirement, told no one of where he was going, and hit the road toward Kara’s last known residence.

I presumed that he told no one because it would’ve been ten times easier for a retired US marshal to pick up the phone and call the local field office and warn them of his fears. And the local office was probably in Albuquerque, which wasn’t that far up the highway. Certainly, it was a lot closer than he was, and the agents there were younger and better suited for this sort of thing. So why not let them handle it?

Easy
.

He trusted no one.

Just as I, being an outsider, trusted no one.

The ambulance pulled into the town of Cedar Corner, which was when I questioned whether or not I should’ve thought of it as a town. It looked more like a nook than a corner. It was tiny. There was, surprisingly, one three-story building, which was the federal building the paramedic had spoken of. There was a gas station, a McDonald’s that was closing its doors and turning off its sign as we passed, about a dozen other buildings, a Walmart Super Store that barely qualified as super, and finally, off at the end of the main street, there was an all-night diner.

The ambulance pulled into the federal building parking lot. There was no overhang like most emergency rooms had. No clear markings except a pitiful blue and white sign with fading bulbs in it.

I waited until the ambulance stopped and the driver slid the gear into park and stepped out of the door. Then I reached back and undid the latch to the rear doors. I stepped out and helped the paramedic with the gurney and lifted it up and out of the van and rested it on its wheels on the pavement.

The paramedic who had spoken with me earlier said, “If you head east, you’ll reach the interstate. Step off of the road and follow alongside it. That should keep you out of sight, and the cops won’t see you. If that’s what you want.”

I said, “What if I want to talk to these sheriff’s deputies?”

The paramedic said, “You can wait here if you want. You’ll have to stay in the parking lot. But if I were you, I’d get going. Whatever they want with you will probably inconvenience you at the least, and at the worst—well, let’s just say the cops are pretty bored out here. So when they see a nobody from nowhere coming into their jurisdiction and getting involved with a US marshal who ends up in the emergency room, they’ll be inclined to detain you for the max allotted time.

BOOK: Reckoning Road: A Get Jack Reacher Short Story
7.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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