Winter Territory_A Get Jack Reacher Novel

by Scott Blade

  He said, “Do you need any help bringing in the supplies?”

  Floyd looked back up and over the roof at him. He studied Reacher up and down like he was taking in his size for the first time, even though he had seen him walking on the side of the road.

  Then he thought for a moment.

  The cold gusts of breath exhaled from his big nostrils and his beard stiffened in the breeze.

  He said, “Sure, that’d be fantastic. You mind lifting some of those heavy sacks of coffee beans for me and bringing them inside? They’re heavy, but I’m sure you can manage. The Indians here love coffee.”

  Reacher stayed quiet, but thought about coffee, which was one of the preprogrammed addictions in his genes.

  Floyd said, “If you want to bring those in for me, we’ll call it even for the ride.”

  Reacher shrugged and nodded. A few big sacks filled with coffee beans a few yards for miles and miles of a free ride? Sounded like a great deal to him. So he went around to the back of the Explorer and grabbed the handle and opened the door. He stood back as the door rose up automatically. A whiff of the warm air from inside the cabin engulfed his face and then he stopped and stared. Floyd hadn’t been lying when he had said that the sacks were big and that they loved coffee here. There were five huge sacks of coffee beans. They were the size of Reacher’s torso.

  He shrugged at the sacks as if he were speaking to them and then he reached down and picked up two of the industrial-sized sacks. Along the sides in a diagonal direction the label of the company, Grinded Coffee Bean Co, was printed on the bags.

  Grinded Coffee Bean Co was some sort of bean that he had never heard of. The bags were closed and probably sealed, but even so the aroma of fresh coffee spilled out and filled his nose and rejuvenated him like a contact high. If Reacher was honest with himself, he really wasn’t certain that the aroma of the beans had really seeped out of the bags or not because just knowing that the coffee beans were that close to him may have incited his brain to send out the same signal to him as when he did smell coffee. After all, the bags were probably sealed and therefore airtight because in Reacher’s experience most coffee bean bags were sealed and airtight for freshness.

  The first bag lumped up in his hands like a beanbag. He lifted two of the big bags up and out of the back of the Explorer and tossed them over his shoulders. They were heavy. He wondered how the old guy had carried them normally on his own. He must’ve done one bag at a time or maybe there was a dolly inside the store. Reacher thought that it would’ve been a good idea to carry a dolly in the Explorer, if there was room, and if not, then perhaps he could’ve had one attached to the bottom of the carriage.

  Floyd said, “Walk on in with them. You can leave them up against the wall. And again I sure do appreciate the help.”

  Reacher stayed quiet and followed the instructions and walked across the snow-covered ground and stepped up a couple of wooden steps that creaked under his weight.

  The general store on the outside blended in with the other buildings that it was attached to like they were originally all a part of one big structure. The name of the store was Red Rain’s General Goods. It was written on the wall just outside the front entrance in an old faded font.

  Reacher prepared to lay one of the bags down by the door for a second so that he could pull the door open and enter, but right before he initiated this plan, the door swung open and a giant Native American stepped out onto the porch. He wore a clean and starched brown apron and black cargo pants with a thick white sweater.

  The guy was a Native, no doubt about it because he looked just like a stereotypical Indian from an old Western movie like one of those Sergio Leone films. If it weren’t for his clothes, Reacher would’ve assumed that he was acting in one. The guy had long black hair like a Native American warrior and a headband that pulled it back out of his face. The only things that the guy was missing were feathers and a bow.

  Reacher smiled at the guy and waited as he stepped aside and held open the door, then Reacher walked past the guy and into the store. He turned at the inside and put down the bags and then he turned and looked around the store, scanning it. The inside was just as plain as the outside, only slightly more modern. Everything was arranged in neat places which made perfect common sense: newsstand off to one corner, milk in the coolers in the back, knickknacks on shelves near the front of the store set up as impulse buys.

  The store was average in size and average looking. No signs hanging around that displayed what aisles had what items. No candy machines. No soda machines or snack machines. No carts at the front. Instead there was a stack of green handheld baskets with no markings on them.

  Reacher turned around and walked through the door and back out into the cold air. He stepped past the big guy in the apron and walked back toward the Explorer. He saw Floyd stepping out from the back of the Explorer carrying one bag of the coffee beans and a few other smaller items in his free hand. He wasn’t carrying the bag on his shoulder like Reacher had done. He had more dragged the bag and half carried it instead.

  When he saw Reacher coming toward him he picked up the pace and the bag like he didn’t want Reacher to think that he was weak, which was a technique that a lot of guys had done in the past. Reacher ignored it like he had done many times before.

  He walked to the back of the Explorer and ducked inside and grabbed the last two bags and then he carried them just as he had the first two. He walked back past the big guy in the apron who didn’t smile, but instead he stared Reacher up and then down. Reacher walked into the store and set the two bags next to the first two that he had brought in and looked over the shelves and saw Floyd walking to the back of the store.

  Reacher called out to him and said, “I’m going to head out now. Thanks again for the ride.”

  Floyd said, “Thanks so much for the help. I appreciate it. And good luck to you, son. I hope that you find your dad.”

  Reacher stayed quiet and walked out of the store. He passed the big guy one last time and did the hat-tipping gesture that he had seen in old cowboy movies even though he had no hat on and then he carried on. He walked back to the station or community center or whatever it was back down the road a bit. He figured that since that had been the nicest building so far, and also the first, then it must be where tourists were greeted when they first walked onto the reservation. Therefore they might have a map of the reservation. Normally, he didn’t use maps, but since he had never heard of Red Rain Reservation before, he figured that it would be helpful to take a glance at a map. Especially when he looked up at the sky and saw no sun even though it was still daytime and this worried Reacher because the weather report had mentioned a blizzard. Judging by the clouds on the horizon and across the sky, there was something harsh coming this way. Reacher figured that knowing the layout of the land was a good idea. He wasn’t above sleeping outside, under the stars, but tonight there would be no stars, just hard snow and white squalls of wind.

  He followed the smoke from the chimney that he had seen earlier and it led him back toward the community center. The building was much nicer than the complex of the general store and whatever else the other buildings connected had been and it was far nicer than the shantytown of mobile homes across the road.

  Reacher walked back over some hills and across the snowy ground. Back at the community center he stepped onto a blanket of hard snow and then realized that it was concrete underneath. The snow had camouflaged the parking lot.

  He walked through the empty lot and over to the community center. When he got closer, he saw that there was a metal sign on the wall that read:

  Red Rain Tribal Police

  Around Side

  Near the front entrance to the community center, Reacher peered around the side of the building and saw that there was another parking lot with one squad car in it, an Old Crown Victoria covered in snow with Red Rain Reservation Police faded across the doors. The tires were buried in snow. Next to the one car, he saw tire tracks in th
e snow that led out of the lot and over to a small one-lane track and then they led off toward the mountains to the north.

  Reacher tried the doors to the community center; they were locked, but there was an office door that was separate. Reacher opened it and walked in. A blast of heat from the heating vents inside the office caressed his face.

  A woman sat behind the desk. She wore a purple turtleneck sweater with a design on it that looked like a drawing of a large moon with green grass growing out of it. It was one of the ugliest things that Reacher had ever seen someone wear, but he made no acknowledgement of it so as not to offend her because for all he knew it represented something special to her.

  The woman also had a cheery smile on her face when she saw him as if she hadn’t seen another person all day. The office was quiet except for an instrumental melody that played on a radio set to a low volume. The radio was an old gray thing with one big speaker and a handle on the top. The antenna was extended outward at the one o’clock position and the tip was broken off, leaving a vicious-looking point at the end.

  She had long black hair and leathery tan skin, yet she retained a beautiful glow about her that anyone could see was the positive vibe that she gave off.

  She stayed seated and stared up at Reacher’s hulking bulk standing in the tiny office space over her. Even though she was smiling warmly, Reacher could tell that she hadn’t expected a hulk to come walking into her space. Now that he was standing there he realized that she had only smiled out of habit because a quick burst of fear seemed to sweep through her eyes and across her face. It was quick and she returned to her cheery smile fast, but Reacher had seen it because he had learned long ago to recognize when people were terrified of him. In fact, he had come to expect it as if it was as natural as breathing, which in a way it was, because four things that were very natural to almost every creature on earth were: breathing, breeding, feeding, and self-preservation. And whenever people met Cameron Reacher for the first time, the small, prehistoric parts way in the backs of the brain kicked into gear and signaled to every appendage in their bodies to be cautious. This is a fierce predator that can hurt you, their brains would say. But the civilized part of this woman’s brain overrode her natural warning instinct and told her that this guy wasn’t here to hurt her. He was only here looking for help.

  Reacher smiled back at her and said, “I need some help.”

  She said, “You came to the right place. Welcome to Red Rain Native American Reservation. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for a map of the reservation. I’m a tourist.”

  The woman’s smile fell a little bit and then she said, “On the wall behind you. There’s also a small one if you need to take one.”

  Reacher raised his hand and said, “Not necessary. I’ll glance over the big one and then be on my way and out of your hair.”

  Reacher turned and walked to the map on the wall and looked over it. He traced the roads with his eyes and followed the main one from the entrance through the populated part of the reservation, which was the shantytown, and then he studied the other roads that branched off into multiple directions like tree branches. The routes set into his mind like an internal GPS. He looked over the reservation and saw that mostly it was rugged mountainous terrain to the west and north and that most of the population was settled in the south, where he was.

  The reservation depended on tourism and outsiders for almost the entire revenue is what Floyd had told him, but looking over the map, Reacher hadn’t seen much that was geared toward tourism. Sightseeing here would mostly be gazing at nature. There were no historical battles fought on the land or memorials or Native American museums that were clearly marked. Most of the so-called tourists must’ve been people who had already seen Yellowstone Park and wanted to include some Native American history in their adventures, but they were most certainly disappointed in Red Rain Reservation. Reacher figured that like the tourists who wandered onto the reservation seeking some real sights, for him this would also turn into a short expedition.

  He turned back to the woman behind the desk. Hoping that she might have a better insight than Floyd, he asked, “Is there anywhere to stay the night in town?”

  She smiled at him and said, “Unfortunately the nearest town is Tower Junction to the southeast. They will have a couple of motels there, but we don’t have any here in town. You might be able to rent a room for the night at the general store from Henry Little. He runs the store. He is a quiet and a hard-looking man, but he is nice enough, although not by sight. He will probably rent to you if you wait late enough to ask.”

  Reacher stayed quiet.

  The woman asked, “Are you driving?”

  Reacher said, “No car.”

  She said, “If you can, I’d be on the last bus into Tower Junction. If you miss it, head over to the general store and purchase something from Henry, then ask him about a room. Tell him that you missed the bus. He is a very big man like you. You can’t miss him.”

  Reacher nodded. She must be talking about the huge Native guy that he had seen at the store already. Henry Little was a funny name for a giant, he thought. Should’ve been Henry the Huge.

  “Thank you for your help,” Reacher said. He turned, didn’t wait for a response from her. He just left.

  Chapter 5

  Walking alone was something that Cameron Reacher had done for more than six months. He was used to it. There was no conflict in his head. No internal struggles. Moving on was easy when you kept yourself free and clear of attachments, which came easily to him since the only person that he’d ever been attached to was gone. His mother had been a sheriff for a small town in Mississippi and a decorated Marine cop before that and she had trained him in every imaginable form of combat, weapons, and investigation that she had known. Like most parents, she wanted Cameron to have it better than she had, but she also expected more of him than most kids and so she made him work hard at everything that he did. She never thought twice about being overly hard on him because he was a Reacher and a Deveraux and he could take it.

  Reacher had spent the last two hours walking the reservation. He’d pulled up the map in his head and had followed it along the main road and ventured a couple of times off the beaten path and mostly discovered exactly what he had already predicted. That was that most of the sights to see on the reservation weren’t manmade. He had seen thick forests, incredible mountains in the distance with tremendous peaks, old Western-style houses and structures, and even some wild animals, and all of it was covered in snow. Reacher had been awed by the natural beauty of the land and disappointed in the low care given to most of the buildings. In general it seemed that the community was poor.

  Reacher didn’t want to speculate, but he imagined that it was something related to government, taxes, no economic viability, or all of the above. The one thing that he had learned so far was that the reservation had some tourism flowing into it, but the locals didn’t seem too keen on tourists and so they had never built any monuments or tourist attractions.

  Looking through the general store in Reacher’s mind, he perfectly recalled the layout and there were some items targeted at tourists. Most of which were the knickknacks that lined the walls near the entrance. Reacher guessed that Henry Little was the only game in town so to speak. Business didn’t appear to be booming at the general store, but then again the weather now wasn’t the perfect climate for tourists. Maybe the tourism in the reservation picked up in the summer months. It was too bad that the Natives didn’t open a ski resort or a casino near one of the mountains that were on their property because the skiing must’ve been incredible and Reacher had heard that many Native American reservations had embraced casinos on their properties. And these casinos had proved to be very, very profitable for the entire community.

  The Red Rain residents hadn’t seemed too open to growing their economic status by opening up their land to such endeavors. Perhaps they were too proud or perhaps they viewed such a thing as selling
out. Reacher wasn’t sure, mainly because so far no one had spoken to him. Since he had been walking, he hadn’t even seen another soul. Not a car passed on the roads. Not a citizen had come out of his home.

  Reacher looked up to the sky and devised that the time was near what his mind had calculated. Reacher had learned from his mother how to tell time down to the minute by the shadows on the ground, which was a useful trick, but he never seemed to need such a trick because Reacher’s brain was wired like a computer. He could tell time without even thinking about it. This was a gift that he hadn’t yet perfected. The one thing that his mind could do without ever faltering was it acted as a stopwatch. He could calculate the exact amount of time that an action took from start to finish. That was why he related his mind more to a stopwatch than to an actual clock.

  The time was 4:51 p.m.

  Reacher looked to the western horizon and watched the seductive colors of the sky as the sun began the process of setting over the mountains.

  Remembering that Floyd had warned him about being stuck on the reservation for the night, he decided to return back to the main part, near the stucco buildings and the community center and the general store. He imagined that the shuttle that left and headed back to Tower Junction was probably going to be doing its final runs for the night. Floyd had said that the last one was at 8 p.m., but judging by the weather on the horizon, he thought that it was best to head back sooner. He had seen all that there was to see in Red Rain. At least that was what he thought.

  Chapter 6

  Reacher walked back to the central hub of the reservation in 16 minutes flat. He hadn’t explored all of the reservation. It was too big to explore completely in two hours, but he had seen enough and was ready to move on. So far there had been nothing special about Red Rain Reservation except for the majestic scenery, which he could’ve seen just by staying in Yellowstone National Park. The only other thing that he had seen so far was that the inhabitants of the reservation were less than friendly; frankly they were less than interesting to him.