by Scott Blade
Some people called him Cameron, but no one had called him Cameron in months. When asked what his name was he simply said, “Reacher.” No point in giving away his first name. He didn’t even see much point in giving away his last name, but there wasn’t much point in lying either. Except when he had to fill out forms like motel registries.
Cameron Reacher had been born in Mississippi to a beautiful, single mom. She was an ex-Marine, which meant that she was still a Marine. She was also the sheriff of the town that Cameron had grown up in until six months ago when she died from cancer. On her deathbed, she confessed why she had always called him Reacher instead of Cameron. It hadn’t been because of her military background. It had been because she was in love with his father and Reacher had been his name. First name Jack. No middle initial.
Cameron had grown up thinking that his father was dead, but the truth was that Jack Reacher had no idea that he even existed. The day that his mother died, Reacher scattered her ashes on a set of old train tracks like she had instructed. Then he turned and walked right out of town. He hitchhiked straight across Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas and went all the way to California. He was on a quest to find Jack Reacher and to get to know who his father was. But how do you find a man who can’t be found? How do you get to know a man who is always somewhere? Who is always anonymous?
Cameron Reacher gets to know his father by literally following in his footsteps.
For a while he had carried around his Mississippi state driver’s license, but he ditched that back in Arizona in a truck stop trashcan. He could always get a new one from his lawyer back home. He wasn’t sure of the process required to get one, but he was certain that his family attorney had his birth certificate and could acquire a new driver’s license if he needed one, but what would he have needed one for? Reacher didn’t drive anymore. He had no car and didn’t plan on owning a car. No possessions had been his father’s thing and now it was his thing. Partially because it was his way of getting to know his father, by following in his footsteps. And partially it was because Reacher didn’t want any possessions. Possessions meant commitment and stuff and things to carry and store. None of these ideologies appealed to Reacher.
The only thing that Reacher carried now was his debit card that gave him access to his savings account, and a wad of cash, which was $458.35 at that moment. He had learned that it was better to carry a good amount of cash on him. He never knew when he would need quick access to cash. Plus using cash created a lot more anonymity for him over using his debit card for everything. He always tried to keep around $500 in his pocket.
The only other item that he carried with him was a foldable toothbrush which looked like a blue barber-style shaving blade. Instead of a blade that snicked out of the handle, there was a toothbrush. The bristles and plastic head folded down into the handle and flipped out like a switchblade.
In the morning after Reacher left Farrah for Salt Lake City, he ventured to visit the different attractions around the city including Temple Square Gardens, which is 35 acres of land downtown that headquarters the Mormon Church. The gardens are world famous and have 250 flower beds and 700 different types of plants from all across the planet. The gardens are replanted and redesigned every year. It takes hundreds of volunteers to finish it, but Reacher couldn’t get in to see it because the garden was just open in the summer and tours were by appointment only.
So Reacher spent the afternoon running a daily or weekly ritual that depended on where he was and how dirty he had gotten. He went to a cheap-looking old barbershop and said hello to an old guy with a jarhead haircut and photographs of himself with other guys, doing guy things, that were pinned all over a bulletin board near the entrance. The old guy said hello back and asked if Reacher needed a cut. Reacher nodded and told him that he would like a buzz.
On the road, Reacher had discovered the benefits of keeping his hair short and he had shed the long-haired look. Of course in the winter months it made sense to let it grow long, but Reacher was still getting used to the drifter life. For the last six months he had been getting his head buzzed short and had not thought about the winter yet. He’d figured that he’d spend it in California, but he had gotten there earlier than he’d imagined. Part of the new nomadic life was going with the flow and the flow had turned him around at the Pacific Ocean.
After the jarhead barber cut his hair short, Reacher got out of the chair, paid the man, and thanked him. Then he left the barbershop and walked down the street along a cracked cement sidewalk into a side of town that was less than pristine. Potholes and old cars parked along the street and leaning telephone poles besieged the area like the spoils of a forgotten time.
Reacher walked on until he found what he was looking for, an old consignment store called America’s Clothing Store. Which wasn’t a catchy name for a consignment store, but Reacher wasn’t looking for trendy. He was looking for cheap. He walked into the store and nodded at a cute girl behind the counter. She was folding clothes and nodded and smiled back at him.
She looked to be barely an adult and was possibly Asian and white mixed. She wore a multicolored striped top with mostly gray in it and black chinos. She was petite, probably 5’1” tall. Her hair was less than shoulder length, dyed pink, and shaved along one side. She had a look like what Reacher thought of as a modern punk rocker, a style that was returning.
Traveling from state to state, city to city, Reacher had come across young people of all types. In the urban areas, he’d noticed similar hairstyles, especially among girls. Although he was from a southern state, a conservative state, Reacher couldn’t complain about the new look. In fact, on her it looked damn good.
He began looking around the store. They didn’t have a big and tall section; he had found most places didn’t. The big and tall sections of America hadn’t vanished. There were plenty of them out there, but most stores that catered to bigger people had become specialty stores—expensive specialty stores. So Reacher had often settled for XXL or XXXL if he could find it in tops. Fitting his waist hadn’t been a problem because he had a thin waist for a guy his size—34 inches, but he was 6’6” tall. He needed pants that were long enough. Usually he’d buy size 36 and let them ride on his hips.
Reacher headed to the pants section and searched around. He looked at jeans first and found a pair of Levi carpenter jeans, size 35. The legs were long. He grabbed them and walked over to tops. He sifted through the selections and pulled out a long-sleeved white shirt. Then he turned and started toward a wall of shoes on display, but before he got there he saw a nice gray fleece vest from the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked it over. He was thinking about heading northeast since he had already traveled from the south when he came out west. He realized that he had no winter gear and it was the beginning of November.
Temperatures in Mississippi in around November were generally nice days and cold nights. So he grabbed the fleece and looked at the tag. It was an XXL, but was a sleeveless vest so he didn’t need to worry about having long sleeves that only went down to his forearms.
If the one picture of his father from his days at West Point and his own abnormally long arms were any indicator of his physical heritage. He had an enormous arm span. From one fingertip to the other, he could bear hug a bear. Hell, he could bear hug two bears.
Reacher grabbed his clothes and went over to the fitting room, which was in the very back of the store. He dipped into a little hallway and came face-to-face with a young black girl who was barely out of high school. Like the girl from the front, she also had a punk rocker look about her. No pink hair, but she had three nose piercings and those huge pieces in her earlobes that looked like rims for a truck. They were black and rubber looking. They opened her ears up to a size big enough to slide his pinkie through. And Reacher’s pinkie wasn’t the size of a pinkie. It was more like the size of a gun barrel.
She said, “How are you, sir? Want to try those on?”
Reacher said, “Yes.”
“How many items do you have?”
“I have three, but I want to grab a pair of shoes and socks too. Can I leave these with you?
She said, “Here, I’ll take them and set you up in a fitting room.”
She reached out with tiny coffee-colored hands and took his three items. She had to use both arms to carry them and then she was swallowed up like a newborn wrapped in tons of sheets.
Reacher turned and walked out to the shoes. He paced back and forth looking, for he had only one goal on his brain and that was to locate the size 16, which was his shoe size. This was one of the hardest things about being a giant, locating a comfortable shoe.
He had walked one way up the aisle and then back again when he realized that the bigger sizes were all the way at the top of the wall, well above the eye line of a normal guy, but Cameron Reacher wasn’t a normal guy and he had gained weight on the road. Two factors contributed to this. The first was that he was aging and a natural consequence of aging is that one gets heavier, but this wasn’t the main reason for his weight gain. The real reason had nothing to do with his diet or his age. It was because he walked most of the day. Reacher had covered about 2,000 square miles of the western United States in the last six months and that was why he had gained weight.
Reacher looked at the small selection of shoes that were in size 16. His choices were pretty slim. There wasn’t much there, not much at all. Not in the way of comfortable shoes. He had found that mostly it was better to look at the work shoes and boots. There usually seemed to be a larger selection of them and in pretty decent shape.
He picked up a pair of plain black boots that were comparable to Timberlands, but without the name brand. The boots were worn, but still in good shape. So he took them and returned to the fitting room and gathered his clothes and followed the young clerk to a room. She handed him a white and yellow tag that said 4 in big block font. It indicated how many items that he was taking into the dressing room.
He went into the booth and closed the door and tried the clothes on. Everything fit pretty well, including the long-sleeved white shirt. He rolled the sleeves down over his forearms and looked in the mirror. He looked okay.
He ripped the tags off all of the items and pulled the size stickers off and walked out wearing them.
The girl looked him up and down and smiled. She said, “Nice. Everything looks good.”
“Thanks. I’ll take them. I’m just going to wear them out.”
The girl said, “That’s fine. Where are your old clothes?”
“Right,” he said. Then he turned and went back into the room and picked up his old clothes and shoes and the tag that she had given him and he came back out.
He handed her the tag and she said, “If you take them to the front then Shelly will ring you up. Have a nice day.”
Reacher smiled and stayed quiet.
He went to the register and paid for his new clothes and walked out of the store. He stopped just outside the front door and turned to a Goodwill bin that looked like a giant blue city garbage can with a slot to throw old clothes in.
He bunched up his old clothes and tossed them in. No reason to waste them.
Then he turned and looked at the shadows on the ground. The time matched what he guessed it to be, which was about 2:45 in the afternoon.
Reacher had been raised by a Marine mother and one of the skills that she had taught him was how to tell time by the sun’s shadows. He had found that this skill wasn’t completely necessary since he had always been good at guessing the time fairly accurately, but his real talent was in measuring time, not telling it. Reacher’s brain was like a human stopwatch. He could measure the length of things down to the microsecond, even farther, probably. This ability had always served him well. And Reacher liked numbers anyway. Numbers don’t lie.
Chapter 3
The number on the side of the building was 113 Main Street and the building was a little country diner called Terry’s Diner. Nothing special about it. Plain diner. Plain booths. Plain long countertop.
The address was 113, but the guy sitting in the booth by the window had wondered why it was 113. The number made no sense because there were not 112 other addresses on the street. There weren’t even 12 other ones. Main Street in Tower Junction, Wyoming was really more like the only street. The other streets snaked off of Main Street like little streams feeding off one slightly larger river.
The guy dressed far too nice to be a local. He wore cowboy boots, cowboy hat, and a black suit. His clothes looked expensive because they were expensive. They were probably bought in Texas or New Mexico. That was what Aubree thought.
Aubree was the youngest waitress who worked at the diner. She had just turned 18 two weeks ago. Today was her first shift on the floor by herself, but the whole waitress thing wasn’t that hard. You greet people. Take their orders. Write them down on a ticket for the cook. He makes the orders and stabs the ticket on a spindle when it’s ready. Then you bring it out to the guest. Not a big deal. And the menu was pretty plain. It was an all-American diet: cheeseburgers, soups, salads, etc. No seafood. No pastas. But there was chicken on the menu and even that was a chicken sandwich. No fried foods except for French fries and even they weren’t really fried. They were microwaved, but Aubree was taught that there was no reason to tell the guest about the fries.
She had greeted the guy sitting by the window, but all he had wanted was coffee and nothing else. The guy wore nice clothes, but that wasn’t the thing that really stuck out to Aubree. The thing that really struck her was that he would’ve been very good-looking for an older guy except that he had a vicious deep-set scar that ran jagged across his face like someone had come at him with a chainsaw and skimmed the outside of his face. His left eye was completely grayed out like a blind man’s and the left part of his nose and left nostril were missing. The only thing that was left was a black hole shaped like a tiny pyramid.
The guy’s right eye was an amazing ice blue color like the middle of the ocean. He had silver and gray hair slicked back creating the perfect style. He also had a beard that was peppered with black and gray hair.
The guy was probably in his late forties, not an old guy, not like a grandfather, but close to her dad’s age.
Most of what Aubree could see about the guy was the good side of his face and there was nothing wrong with that. But when she brought him his coffee he turned his features directly to her and she swallowed hard when she saw the hole on the one half of his nose. The rest of the scar had faded into his hairline perfectly at the top of his head and it barely scraped across his upper lip. It left a slight cleft that wasn’t bad, not at all. One time in high school, Aubree had to “volunteer” at a homeless shelter with other students who were a part of the local church. At this function she had seen a guy with the upper part of his lip and teeth completely missing. The guy had tried to grow a mustache over it, but it was still visible.
Aubree remembered being told by her teacher to stop staring, but she couldn’t help it. She watched the guy eat. She remembered that it had sickened her to her stomach. She felt bad about that later. After all, the guy wore a denim vest with military and veteran patches all over it. He had served in Vietnam or some war that happened long before she had been born.
The guy in the booth at the window accepted the coffee from her and never touched it.
He never looked back at her again. He just sat and stared out the window like he was waiting for something or someone.
The guy had a serious way about him like he was ex-military or somehow he was important.
Other than the cowboy hat, which rested on the table in front of him, and the boots, the guy really didn’t fit in. Besides Tower Junction being a small town and the fact that Aubree knew almost everyone in it, the guy stood out. And that wasn’t because of the scar. It was more than that, but Aubree couldn’t explain it.
Whatever the guy was waiting on, there was no doubt that there was something on his mind. Something that was important.
She wondered if he was waiting on a miracle.
Chapter 4
The sky was a light blue. Huge lenticular clouds hovered over the horizon like giants. There was no weather, not yet, but Reacher knew that it was on the way. Still he had been walking on Highway 20, heading in a northeastern direction for 30 minutes when he was finally picked up by an old guy with a thick beard and a completely bald head and a dried-out look like he had just stepped out of aggressive chemotherapy, driving a newer model red Ford Explorer. The guy had picked him up and although Reacher hadn’t anticipated heading farther north, not into what looked like blizzard weather, he couldn’t complain.
He had left Utah and hiked east and then north into Twin Falls. This was when he had been grateful for the fleece because the weather had gotten colder—much colder. On the outskirts of Twin Falls, he had seen a digital bank sign that read the time and the temperature in a bright green color. The temperature had read 46 degrees, which wasn’t that cold, but the night was approaching. And Reacher knew that it would get colder.
The old guy hadn’t been much of a talker, but he had seemed nice enough. And talking wasn’t something that Reacher was interested in. He liked the quiet, but most people who had picked him up expected conversation. Perhaps that was why a lot of them had stopped in the first place.
The red Explorer had big, white magnetic signs stuck to the doors that read: Dale’s Supply Runs. The guy driving wasn’t Dale. His name was Floyd and he had told Reacher that he drove across the state line into Wyoming once a month in order to trade with the Lakota Indians on the Red Rain Reservation. Reacher hadn’t corrected him and said Lakota Native Americans. What would have been the point? He didn’t want to insult the guy who was giving him a ride and driving him around 100 miles.
Floyd finally broke the silence and said, “So why are you headed into Yellowstone?”
