by Dan Ames
The Jack Reacher Cases (A Man Beyond the Law)
Dan Ames
A USA TODAY BESTSELLING BOOK
Book One in The JACK REACHER Cases
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Copyright © 2018 by Dan Ames
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
The Jack Reacher Cases
Prologue
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
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The Jack Reacher Cases
(A MAN BEYOND THE LAW)
* * *
BY
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DAN AMES
Prologue
Southern Turkey
* * *
The bar was nearly filled to capacity, but even among the densely packed crowd, Jessica Halbert stood out. She was dark-haired with dazzling blue-green eyes and a smile that could melt even the harshest cynic’s heart.
It had always been that way. Ever since her beauty blossomed as a young girl, the world had smiled at Jessica Halbert and she had always smiled back. She had one of the utterly honest, positive outlooks on life; a belief that the world was inherently good. And why wouldn’t she feel that way? Life, and people, had always been kind to her.
Now she nursed her beer and waited. The establishment was a favorite of the soldiers who were stationed at the nearby army base, less than three miles away. Halbert was one of those soldiers.
On any given night, there were easily a dozen or so Americans drinking hard, trying to make the most of their limited free time, on some level dreading the return to the drudgers that often characterized life in the army. Oftentimes, the tavern was the last stop on the way back from the nearest city for “last call” before heading back to the base.
Tonight Jessica Halbert wasn’t returning from time off, she was meeting someone. A person she’d met during their last operation. Things had gotten somewhat interesting between them, and he’d asked to meet her. It was a request she felt she couldn’t refuse.
Because she believed in doing the right thing.
That’s how the world worked, in her mind.
She was growing impatient, however. A woman who looked like she did attracted a lot of attention in a place like this, and although there were a few familiar faces in the crowd, they were few and far between. The army base was huge and had a fairly high turnover rate of new soldiers rotating in and others rotating out. It meant there was always a fresh supply of complete strangers.
Despite having a full glass of beer, she was repeatedly offered drinks by guys who did double takes after their first look at her. As if she was a mirage in the desert. She politely declined but always did it in a way that made them feel as if she’d been glad they offered.
Jessica Halbert had a way of making people feel happy, even if they didn’t get what they wanted. It was as if they didn’t win the prize but were pleased to have simply been nominated.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she saw that it wasn’t a number she recognized. She quickly read the text message and felt a surge of relief. It was her friend and he was waiting outside.
Jessica paid for the beer she hadn’t consumed, and worked her way through the crowd, a few guys not making much of an effort to give her space so they could rub up against her.
Outside, she smiled when she saw the vehicle and climbed inside.
It would be nearly two full weeks before a group of men hunting deer in the deep forest nearly fifty miles from the tavern found the mutilated body of Jessica Halbert.
Gone was the vivacious and warm woman who brought joy to those in her orbit.
In her place was a grotesque corpse that had been beaten, raped, and slashed to pieces in what appeared to be a horrifically violent, frenzied killing.
The local authorities initially handled the case, which turned out to be problematic. They weren’t homicide investigators and the crime scene was severely compromised before the army was able to negotiate control of the case.
The first step was to analyze the text message sent to her phone, but it was traced to a disposable burner phone that had gone inactive shortly after the estimated time of death.
Eventually, the case was given to an army special investigator who had an excellent clearance record for difficult cases. He was a big guy, with a physical presence that could unnerve reluctant witnesses or motivate people with secrets to start spilling the beans. He had a love of black coffee and cold logic.
But despite his best efforts and months of intense investigation, the case of Jessica Halbert’s murder, much like her body in the army’s morgue, went ice cold.
Chapter One
Army Medical Center, Virginia
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The patient’s life hung in the balance, but against nearly all of the doctors’ and surgeons’ predictions, he continued to survive. They all agreed it was a medical marvel. With multiple fractures, internal bleeding and the near-fatal onset of severe shock, it was astounding the man had survived.
Information on the patient was scant. Previous injuries showed more than one bullet wound, a stab wound, and other signs of a life spent in harm’s way.
It wasn’t the patient’s injuries that garnered the medical staff’s first remarks.
No, initial attention was paid to the man’s size and physicality.
Being a military hospital, the patient population naturally skewed male. It also exhibited a higher-than-normal percentage of extremely fit individuals. Although fighting men came in all shapes and sizes, the doctors and nurses were used to seeing patients above average in terms of height, width and muscularity.
This patient stood out even among the regulars. He was easily six feet five inches tall, but his arms were longer than normal and his chest and shoulders were nothing short of massive. His pectoral muscles were the size of dinner plates. And his hands were enormous.
The hospital was known to have only two beds that were bigger than normal, and the attending physician had immediately ordered one of them for the new patient.
Even then his large feet hung off the end of the bed, and his shoulders veered over the edge of both sides of the mattress.
A new doctor appeared in the
room, with a nurse who’d been one of the attending staff when the patient had originally been admitted.
“What’s his story?” the doctor said. His name was Reilly and he carried the air of a man in a hurry who didn’t have time to make small talk. “Besides his overactive pituitary gland? Jeez, this guy’s enormous.”
“Yeah, we had to break out the big bed for him,” the nurse said. Her name was Helen and she’d been at the hospital for over five years, which made her an old pro. She had light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, revealing a flower tattoo on the back of her neck.
“All we know is that it was some kind of car accident,” she said. “Maybe a roadside bomb, we don’t know. But it was touch and go there for a long time. No one thought he would make it this far. The guy’s got incredible stamina and was in incredible physical condition. It’s the main reason he pulled through.”
Dr. Reilly looked through the chart, which was only a page and a half. He checked the back of the clipboard as if something was missing.
“This is it?” he asked.
Helen shrugged her shoulders. In a place like this, all kinds of things happened with regards to information and security. A lot of the soldiers who ended up at the hospital were fresh from overseas and security clearances were always an issue.
“I’ve put in a request for more information, but this is all we have so far,” Helen said. “It’s unusual, but not unheard of. It all depends on his classification.”
The doctor went to the bedside of the patient and checked his pulse, and then used his stethoscope to listen to the man’s breathing.
“His next round of meds will be in a few hours,” the nurse said. “If you want to speak with him, you’ll be the first. He hasn’t said a word since he’s been here. We don’t even know if he can. But he may come around an hour or so before then. He’s on enough painkillers now to tranquilize a horse.”
“There are horses smaller than this guy,” the doctor pointed out.
“Yeah, and he’s been ridden hard. Those injuries took some time and lots of pain to acquire. He’s a real mystery man.”
Reilly nodded and hung the clipboard at the end of the patient’s bed.
“It’ll be interesting to see if and how this mystery ends,” Reilly said. “Let’s do our best to make sure it has a happy ending.”
He left and Helen went to the patient’s bedside and pulled the sheet back up over his chest. The doctor had lowered it to listen to his breathing.
She looked down and smiled at him. He was handsome in a rough-hewn kind of way. Like a rustic log cabin with solid beams that was warm in the winter, but didn’t have any fancy touches.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Helen said. “Try not to miss me.”
The patient’s eyes remained closed.
The nurse walked out of the room and when she passed the clipboard, it gently rocked from its hanging position.
At the top of the chart was an empty blank for the patient’s name. Next to it, scrawled in pen by hand, was a single name.
In bold.
Reacher.
Chapter Two
The shock hit Pauling full force.
The setting sun cast a crimson light into the room. Lauren Pauling, a handsome woman well north of forty years old, brushed back her light blonde hair, now shimmering gold in the last traces of the day. She caught sight of her reflection in the windows that looked out upon Manhattan, and knew her best features, her green eyes and whiskey-tinged voice, weren’t represented in the image.
Now she looked away from the view and back down at the papers in her hand.
She had prepared herself, even taken the proposal home with her rather than reading it at the office. Even though the private investigative firm was her own and she had ample privacy in her own office, some things she liked to keep separate, and it would have almost seemed treacherous to study the proposal within the walls of the firm she was contemplating selling.
The numbers were staggering.
They were much, much higher than she’d expected.
She was glad she hadn’t done it at the office as some of her staff might have noted her shock and wondered what was wrong.
When Pauling had left the FBI after a distinguished career, she’d immediately begun working as a civilian contractor, a private investigator in most cases. Part of the reason she had left the Bureau, ironically, was because she was simply tired of the bureaucracy.
Chasing down bad guys was what drove her, it was the thrill of the hunt.
So moving immediately into working as an investigator in the private sector had been a no-brainer. Eventually, she gained the knowledge and business expertise to open her own firm. She had started small, but her company had grown steadily over the years.
The first offers from rivals who wanted to buy her firm as opposed to competing against it, didn’t begin until their clients started departing for Pauling’s firm. Their solution was if they couldn’t beat her, they’d buy her.
Now a corporate firm that had lost the most business to her and not coincidentally had been her most ardent pursuer, just upped the ante.
Big time.
Pauling took a deep breath and pushed away from the table. She needed to breathe. Her condo was in the middle of what she considered the greatest city in the world, on 4th and Barrow, and featured large windows that looked out over a small park and a section of 5th Avenue.
She’d put in a full day, including a private workout with her trainer over the lunch hour, and now she was tired and flattered.
Should she feel flattered? Proud that someone put that high of a value on something she’d created from nothing?
Damn right I should, she thought.
It was a lot to think about, in every sense of the phrase.
The money was incredible. It was of the I’ll-never-have-to-work-again kind. She could travel. Buy a home in Italy. Or France. Or both.
And then what?
As nice as the money was, it couldn’t fill her days.
Besides, she didn’t want to stop working.
Oh, it would be nice to be free of the administrative and management duties required as a business owner. They were endless.
But give up work?
Pauling knew she didn’t want that.
Catching thieves and murderers was in her blood. Her DNA. It’s what she did.
The firm who made the offer to buy her out also said she could cherry pick cases to work on, but she knew how that would go. It would be working for someone else. Needing approval. Checking with the higher-ups.
A bureaucracy.
No thank you.
Been there, done that.
Pauling turned from the window, crossed the room back to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of white wine. She turned the offer sheet over so she didn’t have to think about it anymore.
At times like this, she often thought of Jack Reacher.
Pauling went into the living room and curled up on the couch. She wondered if she would ever hear from Reacher again.
Little did she know, the answer would be arriving in tomorrow’s mail.
Chapter Three
The hospital worker pushed the combination bed/gurney along the hallway, looking every bit the part. His white shirt and pants both bore the official logo of the hospital, and the gurney was clearly medical grade, complete with collapsible sides, and a multitude of levers and knobs for a kaleidoscope of adjustment options.
He wheeled the bed into the patient’s room, shut the door and performed the intricate maneuver of rolling the giant man off the bed onto the gurney, using a technique employed by nurses of pulling the sheet in a rolling motion.
Some of the patient’s tubes popped from their counterparts and the orderly quickly disconnected a monitor that began to beep.
The patient remained unconscious as he was wheeled through the hallway of the hospital, down to the large elevator and onto the ground floor. The orderly said nothing to the patie
nt. Instead, he hummed a tune that may or may not have been We Gotta Get out of This Place, by the Animals.
The patient was whisked through the automatic doors next to the emergency room and into the cool outside air. It was sunny and clear, but he wasn’t able to sense the change in his surroundings. He didn’t hear any of the voices around him, nor was he able to see the vehicle he was loaded into.
If he had seen it, the big man would have recognized that something wasn’t right. The white van did have the logo of a hospital, but it was only on one side of the vehicle and there were no accessories typical of a medical transport. No bars of red and blue lights that could flash in an emergency. No medical equipment in the back. No aerial antennas for additional communication capabilities.
The rear doors of the van were opened and the collapsible gurney slid onto the floor of the van. It took a tremendous heave from the hospital worker, but he was able to lift the end of the gurney, despite the weight of the big man.
Once the patient was secure, the rear doors of the van were slammed shut and the vehicle drove away from the hospital. No security guards would remember seeing the patient leave the hospital and there were no surveillance cameras filming the area.
