by Scott Blade
Day-by-day I learn more and more about the father that I never met because day-by-day I become more and more like him. It started before I was born. It started before he was born with some sort of genetic evolution that endowed us with traits that some people might call advantages. I don’t know. Sometimes they feel like curses.
Like right now.
Because the next thing that happened was that another police cruiser, one that looked as though it had once been a state-of-the-art machine, blazed and bounced as it sped toward me from out of the darkness. The sirens howled, the tires screeched, and the brakes squealed as the thing came skidding to a stop ten feet from me. The rear of the car skidded clear across the lanes of an abandoned two-lane highway.
The sirens halted, but the blue and red lights flashed, lighting up the low hilly land around me. The night sky brightened and the beams from the light faded into lazy clouds.
I stayed where I was. I didn’t raise my hands. Why should I? I hadn’t killed the cops. I had only just found them.
The driver side door burst open, a female cop jumped out, and pulled a department-issued Glock on me. She steadied her arms over the top of her car door. They were firm. She aimed dead center of my chest. She had been well-trained. She pulled up, presumably to a distress call from the two dead cops, or not, and she had seen me—a giant hitchhiker with dirty black clothes and a look that can only be called “horror movie slasher”. The kind of movie where the killer never dies and keeps coming back after being shot with shotgun slugs, 9mm Parabellums, or whatever else they throw at him. So I couldn’t blame her for thinking that I was responsible for her dead colleagues. But the truth was that 51 seconds ago I was 155 yards away, walking along the highway in complete darkness. Forty-three minutes before that I was to the west near a junction when the driver that I had been riding with let me out and the reason, the best that I could guess, was because she had regretted picking me up in the first place. She’d been a nice enough lady. On the road you don’t question a driver that is willing to pick you up, but I hadn’t felt like conversing. Apparently, she had. So I let her talk for over an hour, but when I hadn’t said that much, or responded, or even nodded; I suppose that she had had enough of me.
She pulled her Lincoln Navigator over to the shoulder of a more modern highway and dropped me off. I stood on the shoulder of that road and stared at the road ahead. There were two routes: left and right. She had gone right. And I had gone left. Whenever I could never decide on which direction to travel, I simply decided to go left. No reason to deliberate about it all day, just pick left. I really don’t know how I came up with that policy. It just seemed natural. When you don’t know the road ahead, left is as good as right.
Fifty/fifty.
Twenty-four hours before that I was in a place called Moscow. The one in Kansas, not Russia. I had heard about the name while passing through the state and I became curious about the town. Why the name Moscow? Honestly, I had no idea and still didn’t. The people there were friendly enough, but no one gave me a straight answer to this question. The town had only had 300 people living in it. Very small.
The policewoman said, “Hands up!”
As my mother had taught me: you obey the law and respect women. So I raised my hands. She watched and followed my arms as they went up with her eyes, a long route. Her eyes flicked back down at where my face was, but I doubted that she could see much detail on me because I stood in the darkness, except every few seconds when a hint of blue light blipped across my face from the police light bar.
She said, “Keep them up!”
A calm, yet firm voice. A seasoned cop voice. A voice that I knew well. Not the woman’s actual sound, but the type of voice. The type of attitude that came with it.
She said, “Turn around!”
I turned around.
She said, “Don’t move!”
I faced the direction of the silent state cop car with the two dead cops inside. I looked at their bodies. I saw that the bullets were clearly not fired by a professional because their heads and chest weren’t the only thing that was hit. There were bullets all over the place—the front hood, the backseat, and the rear windshield. The shooting had been an act of passion and nothing else.
The policewoman walked up behind me, slow and steady. I sensed that she had stopped behind me outside of my reach.
Then she said, “Very slowly, place your hands behind your back.”
I did as she said, within one and a half seconds she had locked one of my wrists in a handcuff and then the other. I heard and felt the clicks from the handcuff as the cold metal rounded over my skin. I glanced back at her from over my shoulder.
I said, “I didn’t do this. I just found them only a few moments ago.”
She said, “Right. Now turn around.”
I turned around and gazed down at her. She squinted her eyes, but not in a way that said she couldn’t see me. It was more like she couldn’t believe her eyes. So she took one hand off of the Glock, covered her mouth, and just held the gun one-handed, pointing at my center mass. Then she reached down and grabbed a small flashlight out of her police belt.
She lifted it up and clicked the light on. The beam was bright, white, and shot straight at my chest and then moved up to my face. I fell blind behind its powerful, little beam.
The police officer stepped forward and lowered the Glock to her side. She looked at me in a strange way—strange for this situation. Strange for any situation where a stranger is pointing a Glock at you. She looked at me like she recognized me, but I had never met her in my life.
She asked, “Reacher? Jack Reacher?”
