by Dan Ames
A USA TODAY BESTSELLING BOOK
Book One in The JACK REACHER Cases
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The Right Man For Revenge
Set in the Reacher universe by permission of Lee Child
Dan Ames
The JACK REACHER Cases (The Right Man For Revenge) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Copyright © 2017 by Dan Ames
All rights reserved.
Published by Slogan Books, Inc., New York, NY.
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Contents
The Right Man For Revenge
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
About the Author
Also by Dan Ames
The Right Man For Revenge
The Jack Reacher Cases
* * *
Set in the REACHER universe.
By permission of Lee Child.
* * *
By
* * *
Dan Ames
“The more laws, the less justice.”
-Cicero
Chapter One
The big man didn’t hear the sound of the rifle being fired. He didn’t have a sense that a bullet was hurtling toward him at thousands of feet per second. For him, it was a day like any other.
On the road, moving from one town to the next.
A vague destination in mind, maybe a cup of coffee and breakfast in a local diner, the soundtrack provided by the locals discussing politics or the high school sports team’s victory or loss with the appropriate level of enthusiasm.
As the bullet bore down on him, the big man’s mind reverted to the road ahead of him.
How different it was than the typical highway he was used to traversing. Instead of long, straight patches of sunbaked asphalt, this was a mountain road in the Pacific Northwest, well saturated with frequent rain. Towering evergreens flanked both sides of the road and prevented the sun from heating and drying the pavement.
The big man was running calculations in his mind, a comparison between distance traveled when elevation was a factor. It wasn’t as easy as walking a long, flat stretch, but the big man was in excellent shape.
He shrugged his massive shoulders. He was at least 6’5” with a deep chest and narrow waist. Lean. Tough. He had on blue jeans. A shirt with a toothbrush in the pocket. Both looked like they were brand-new. His shoes were English.
His last thought was a statistical analysis of what the view ahead would look like when he topped the rise and the road curved back down toward a valley, most likely.
When the bullet hit the back of his head, it blew it apart with a velocity that drove his upper body forward.
The sound of the shot startled a trio of ravens who flocked to the sky.
The man folded at the waist and toppled forward. He landed on the side of the road amid hard-packed gravel and a few hardy weeds.
While his immense body was intact, most of his head was gone. Blood gushed from the stem of his neck, pooled, and ran down the slope of the embankment.
No human being heard the sound of the rifle, except for the shooter, who looked down from above at what was left of the target. Satisfied, the killer stood, retrieved the shell casing, and placed the rifle back in its case.
While the lonely road saw little traffic, eventually someone would see the body. The shooter planned to be well down the road before that happened.
Down on the embankment, the last of the big man’s blood had finished spilling from his body.
Nothing moved and nothing happened until the next morning, when a car carrying a pair of hikers driving toward the trailhead slowed at the sight of a small group of turkey vultures gathered around the remains of a human being.
The hikers called the authorities and when the police arrived, they summoned a crime scene team and notified dispatch that initial observations pointed toward a homicide.
First responders instantly surmised the likelihood of a gunshot to the back of the victim’s head, resulting in chunks of the man’s unrecognizable face decorating the ground a few feet from the body.
At least, the pieces that hadn’t been snatched up by the hungry birds.
The crime scene technicians were fast but thorough, and one of them soon managed to extract the contents of the dead man’s pocket, which consisted of two items.
A toothbrush.
And an ATM card.
A slight rain had begun to fall, and it began to wash away some of the blood splatter covering the dirt and gravel.
The crime tech used a flashlight to read the name on the ATM card.
JACK REACHER.
Chapter Two
The first time he felt the joy of killing, Archibald Sica was just eight years old. He was working on his uncle’s farm an hour southeast of Guadalajara.
There was a well, with several long pieces of wood placed into the vertical shaft. The bottoms of the wood planks were buried in water. The tops of the planks were at the mouth of the well, which itself was raised and fashioned into a square out of cement. It was like a viewing area into the depth of the well.
It wasn’t a deep well, just ten feet or so. The planks were twelve feet long, enabling a person to stand at the top of the well and use the plank to stir the bottom, or help retrieve something if it fell into the well.
And at the bottom of the well there was only a few feet of water. It was mostly used to collect rainwater.
And lizards.
In that part of the country, there were plenty of lizards. And they liked to sunbathe about halfway up the wood planks. When they got too hot, they would slide off, dip into the water, and then climb back out.
Sica’s uncle enjoyed the lizards, and had insisted the planks be left in the well to allow the lizards easy travel up and down the well.
At eight years old, Sica was just a boy, and had a young boy’s stamina for work. Which meant he took frequent breaks when he could manage to sneak away.
As he was doing now.
The boy was hot, sweaty and tired. They were in the midst of harvesting crops and his job was to tie bundles of marijuana and load them onto the back of a pickup truck. He couldn’t stop sneezing and his eyes were bleary.
Plus, his arms were itchy.
He was hungry.
And a little bit angry at having to do so much work.
So when he leaned over the edge of the well, his forearms on the cement ledge, he studied the lizards. Some were bigger than others. Mostly green. A couple of them were a dark, mottled brown. There were slightly different tails. Some were long and straight, others were more upright, with a bit of a curl.
They stared ahead, surviving the heat just like everyone else.
Sica grabbed one of the planks and twisted it, then laughed as the lizards fell off into the water.
He was about to do the same to the others when he had an idea. He lifted the wood plank, which was very heavy for a boy his size, and raised the end from the water. He moved it over until its edge was directly above one of the fatter lizards with a curved tail.
And then Sica drove the plank downward.
The edge of the plank severed the lizard neatly in half. Blood squirted out onto the wood plank and the two halves of the lizard fell into the water.
Sica laughed.
Suddenly, he wasn’t tired anymore.
He felt energized.
Happy.
He eyed the other lizards, nearly a half dozen on one of the other planks. He shuffled sideways, maintaining his grip on the plank. He raised it again and chopped downward six times, killing all of the lizards one after the other. They were either too tired, too lazy or too stupid to get out of the way. The boy marveled at how they could be so oblivious to their neighbors being slaughtered.
Where was their survival instinct?
Sica laughed again.
He repeated the action until every lizard in the well was chopped or smashed to death. The water had turned red, and chunks of lizard flesh floated to the surface.
The smell attracted flies who began to arrive at the top of the well.
Suddenly, the thrill of killing subsided for the boy and he realized what he had done. He dropped the plank and ran back to the field.
Later, word reached his uncle that the boy had murdered all of his pet lizards and Sica received a vicious beating.
But later, he thought it was worth it. The power. The pure joy of killing. Many years later he realized that scene at the well was a pivotal moment in his life. It helped him realize who he really was.
Now, some twenty-five years later, as he stared across the room at the terrified young man, Sica thought again of the primal joy he’d experienced at the well.
He glanced over at the center of the basement room and the deep square hole cut in the middle of the floor. It, too, was about ten feet deep. But it was much wider to accommodate Sica’s exotic pets.
Like his uncle, the young boy had developed a fondness for reptiles.
Specifically, alligators.
Now, he nodded his head and two of his lieutenants carried the boy by his arms to the edge of the opening. He cried and tried to scream, but the duct tape across his mouth held steady. His feet churned in the air. His body thrashed but he wasn’t strong enough to break the grips of the much bigger men.
The boy was a thief.
And now, he would be an example.
Two other men brought the young woman to the edge of the opening. Her hands were bound, and her feet were hobbled together with two sets of handcuffs.
She tried to look away, but one of the men grabbed her by the jaw and twisted her face until she had to watch the boy in front of her.
Sica raised his hand and dragged an invisible blade across his own throat.
One of his men cut the throat of the boy and threw his body into the opening.
There was a splash, and then moments later, thrashing.
Sica listened, as did the other young men assembled for the viewing. They were part of the thief’s crew.
The young woman vomited onto the floor and the men returned her to her seat against the concrete wall.
Tears streamed down her face and her chest heaved.
Sica wanted everyone in the room to learn from the display.
His hope was that the young woman would understand just how much trouble she was in.
And he wanted his crew to understand they had a choice.
They could be loyal.
Or they could be food.
Chapter Three
Former FBI Agent Lauren Pauling held the gun steady.
She aimed for the heart.
But just for fun, she tilted the muzzle up and fired five rounds straight through the head. Without hesitation. And with deadly accuracy.
“Come on, Lauren,” the voice next to her said.
Pauling took off her ear protection gear and thumbed the button to bring the paper target back to her.
It was a great grouping.
Five rounds neatly stitched into the forehead of the gun range’s paper target bad guy.
Part of the requirement to hold a private investigator’s license in New York was to stay up to date with firearms training and requirements. Pauling loved to shoot. She spent frequent afternoons at the same indoor gun range just up the street from her apartment, and today, she’d invited a friend of hers, also a former agent, to the range.
Her friend’s name was Haley Roberts and she now worked Internal Affairs for the NYPD.
“Head shots are for long distance,” Haley said. “What were you trying to do, go all Hollywood on me?”
“I know,” Pauling answered. “Sometimes, head shots are good therapy, though.”
She ejected her spent shells and put the gun back into her case, which she slipped into her purse.
Roberts did the same and the two friends left the range.
They stepped out onto the busy street, where the sound of gunfire wouldn’t be met with the same kind of casual indifference found at the gun range. At least, Pauling hoped not.
“Wine at my place?” Pauling asked.
“Nah, can’t tonight,” Roberts said. “Big meeting tomorrow with the chief about that thing.”
Roberts was a tall black woman with an overbite and an athlete’s body. Being a female and working Internal Affairs meant her popularity on the job was never very high.
But she was tough and strong. More importantly, she believed in what she was doing. Pauling admired her.
‘That thing’ was a department-wide bribe scandal that Roberts had managed to nip in the bud before it got out. Now, Pauling’s friend was in charge of damage control and containment.
It was a big job and her friend was under a lot of pressure.
“Okay. Text me if you need any help,” Pauling said as they parted.
It was a cool, late summer evening in New York and Pauling enjoyed the walk back to her apartment. The first touches of cold weather were just beginning to appear, and she made a mental note to take a look at her cold-weather wardrobe.
She made it back to her co-op near West 4th. The building was a renovated factory so her walls and ceiling were made of brick, at least two-feet thick. She opened her door and stepped inside. The apartment was light, bright and inviting. Even the smell, a vague sense of lavender, welcomed visitors.
Pauling set her keys on the kitchen counter and stowed her gear in her bedroom closet before washing her hands and returning to the kitchen for a glass of wine.
She had leftover grilled salmon in the fridge but she wasn’t terribly hungry. The living room was cozy with muted rugs, soft textures and dark woods. Pauling sank into a brown leather chair and debated about turning on the television, or filling the space with some soft jazz and just relaxing.
She ended up doing neither because her cell phone rang.
She fished it from her front pocket and looked at the number.
It wasn’t one she recognized.
“Hello?” she said.
The voice on the other end was scratchy and gender-neutral.
It spoke in an even, measured cadence.
“Jack Reacher is dead.”
Chapter Four
The shooter climbed high
er along the face of the mountain. It was cold and a steady wind tore at the killer’s pale face. Loose stones tumbled down the side of the hill and a hawk flew far overhead, hunting a field mouse.
With an easy confidence, the shooter made good time. Every step seemed to have a little extra bounce to it.
The shot had been a good one.
It occurred to the killer that not many people could have pulled it off. This thought process didn’t stem from arrogance. Or a conceited ego.
It came from professionalism.
A cold knowledge that, like a machine, the mechanics behind another killing had meshed with robotic precision. Perfectly calibrated to factor in the wind. The drop in elevation. It hadn’t been easy.
Back in the day, the shooter would have had a spotter who’d worked out a lot of the calculations.
Those days were long gone, though.
The sniper worked alone. And it was better that way. It was never good to depend on people, that’s how mistakes were made. And in this business, the shooter knew, your first mistake was often your last.
The mountain leveled off and opened up into a deep meadow, filled with huge slabs of rock, long grass and a creek that ran through its middle. There were bear here, the shooter knew, and they tended not to like company.
