THE JACK REACHER FILES: VELOCITY (with bonus thriller CROSSCUT)

by Jude Hardin

  Everything was hunky-dory until they couldn’t get the drug for one reason or another. Then they became very sick individuals. Their brains needed the drug like a sponge needs water. Their entire existence depended on it. They would do whatever it took to get it. They would kill for it if they had to.

  A drummer named Brett tried to borrow a thousand dollars from me one time. Colt .45 had just come off tour, and we’d gotten word that Dead Ringer, our third album, had gone platinum. I was flush with cash. I could have thrown Brett a grand with no problem. I never would have missed it. He said it was for rent and food, but I knew better. Brett was an addict. You could see it in his eyes, and you could see it on his arms. My thousand dollars wouldn’t have helped him. He would have needed another thousand in a few days.

  I said no. It wasn’t about the money. I just didn’t want to contribute to the cause when I knew the cause was an early grave.

  Twenty-four hours after I turned him down for the loan, Brett walked into a convenience store with a sawed-off shotgun and told the clerk to open the safe. The clerk said she didn’t know the combination, so Brett pulled the trigger and blew her face off. A friend in the sheriff’s department let me watch the security video.

  Last I heard, Brett was still on death row. Last I heard, it’s hard to score dope there, and they don’t let you have a drum set.

  I thought about going to the police and having Brother John arrested for drug possession, but I figured that wouldn’t work either. He had inserted a urinary catheter in me and a feeding tube and a PICC line. He was obviously a medical doctor, which meant he probably had a license to dispense narcotics. The drug he had turned me into a junkie with was probably not heroin off the street. It was probably a pharmaceutical analgesic called Dilaudid. I had taken it before in tablet form, but the intravenous version was much quicker and much more potent. It produced euphoric states similar to heroin, and it was every bit as addictive.

  I decided to go on up to the eighth floor and play along for a while until I could think of something that would put Brother John away for a long time. I put my shirt on and walked back out to the lobby. There was a petite woman in a business suit waiting at the elevator bank with a walkie-talkie.

  “Hi Mr. Maddox,” she said.

  “My friends call me Maddog. Or just Dog.”

  “Okay, Dog. Ready to go up?”

  “Absolutely.”

  We took the elevator to the eighth floor and she stayed with me until we reached the studio. Bob Watson was waiting at the entrance and he vouched for my identity. The petite woman said goodbye and marched back toward the elevators.

  “Forget your wallet this morning?” Bob said.

  “Yeah. Actually, I lost it. ID, credit cards, everything.”

  “That sucks.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  He gestured toward the main room. “Come on back and meet the guys.”

  “Okay.”

  Bob introduced me to Dan Powers, Jack Dixon, and Warren Boxx. The singer, bass player, and drummer.

  “We’re looking for a permanent guitar player,” Dan said. “Think you might be interested?”

  “Let’s see how it goes with this record,” I said.

  “Cool. Bob and I would like to get you in the big room with Jack and Warren today, see if we can add some live energy to some of these tracks.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a drum set and a bass rig already set up in the main room. I plugged into the Marshall and went through the songs with Jack and Warren. They were good musicians, and we made it through all ten songs with no problem. I was on autopilot most of the time, trying to think of a way out of this mess and a way to send Brother John and his brainwashed brethren to prison.

  There was a wall and a window separating the main room from the control room, and through the window we could see Bob and Dan and Roger working at the console. Throughout the session they issued instructions through our headsets, and when we finished the last song Bob gave us a thumbs-up and told us to break for lunch.

  We put our instruments away and walked to the control room. Roger sat at the mixing board and let us listen to the recording.

  “It’s sounding really good,” Bob said. “What I’d like to do this afternoon is—”

  The door opened and Brother John walked in carrying two large bags from a Mexican food place.

  “Anybody hungry?” he said.

  After lunch the guys in the band left the studio and Bob worked with me on the lead solos to three of the songs. By four o’clock I needed another shot. I asked if we could take a break, and then I asked Brother John if I could speak to him in private. He grabbed his doctor bag and led me through a set of mirrored sliding glass doors and into a storage area behind the control room. I slid the door shut and latched the deadbolt.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  I hesitated for a second. I wanted that shot. I wanted it more than almost anything.

  But while we were eating lunch, something clicked. Something I might have thought about sooner if half my brain cells hadn’t been saturated with the most powerful narcotic painkiller on the planet. When we met at the seafood place on Fat Tuesday, Donna Wahl told me the police had found some DNA at the Lambs’ residence that didn’t belong to any of the Lambs or her brother Derek. Allison Parker, the great niece who was trying to sell the Lambs’ house, said the DNA sample came from a bloody fingerprint on a piece of rubber. The police figured the murderer had worn a mask and that the mask had gotten torn in the scuffle. But if my hunch was correct, that wasn’t what happened.

  When I was first kidnapped and taken to the compound, I started referring to Brother John as Stoneface. I called him that because his face lacked expression. He never smiled, never frowned, just looked pretty much the same all the time.

  I didn’t think much about it. Some people are just like that. But while we were eating lunch in the control room, I noticed that something wasn’t quite right. The food he’d brought was hot and spicy and the room was kind of warm, and everyone else’s nose had an oily sheen while Brother John’s was bone dry. That’s when I put two and two together.

  The guy had a plastic face. Or at least part of it was plastic.

  I saw a man on television one time who had lost his nose and upper palate to cancer. He had a prosthesis he could snap on and off. I figured Brother John had something similar, and I surmised that part of it might have gotten torn during the struggle at the Lambs’ house. If that was the case, then the police already had all the evidence they would need to convict him of the murders.

  “What’s your name?” Brother John repeated.

  I clocked him in the jaw with an uppercut. His knees buckled and he fell to the floor.

  I stood over him with clenched fists.

  “Nicholas Colt,” I said. “My name’s Nicholas Colt.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I expected Brother John to get up and fight, or maybe even pull a weapon on me. He could have had a gun in his pocket for all I knew. My punch didn’t knock him out, so I expected a fight. But he didn’t get up. He stayed on the floor.

  He worked the hinge of his jaw back and forth with his hand, and then he looked up at me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re too late. The prophesy will be fulfilled.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I should stomp your skull in right now,” I said. “But I’m going to do the right thing. I’m going to hand you over to the police and hope you rot in prison.”

  “Haven’t you done enough to me already?”

  “I punched you in the jaw. Not a big deal.”

  “Not that. What you did to me at Chain of Light.”

  “So it is you,” I said.

  “You probably think this is a disguise, but it’s not. Three years ago at the Chain of Light Ranch, you tied me up in the back of a van and tortured me until I gave you the information you wanted
. Then you knocked me unconscious with the butt of a pistol and left me in the woods. That was around midnight. By the time I woke up the next morning, my left eye and most of my face had been eaten by fire ants. Can you imagine the pain I went through? Can you even imagine?”

  “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you then, and you’re lucky I don’t kill you now. Give me your phone.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out his cell phone, and tossed it to me. I called the police and identified myself and said I was holding a murder suspect. I gave my location, and the dispatcher promised help would be there shortly. She told me to stay on the line until the officers arrived, but I had another call to make. I disconnected and punched in Juliet’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Nicholas! We were so worried. I thought—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine. It’s over, Jules. Everything’s going to be all right now. It’s safe for you and Brittney to come home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Los Angeles. Long story.”

  “We’ll catch a flight out as soon as we can,” she said. “We have storm warnings here, so it might be a couple of days. I can’t believe this. We’ll have a layover at LAX, so maybe you can meet us there.”

  “I need to go to Tennessee,” I said. “But I’ll be in Florida by the time you guys get home.”

  “Oh, Nicholas, I’m so excited. Every day I prayed that you were okay.”

  “Well, I am. Is Brittney nearby?”

  She said that Brittney was out swimming in the ocean. Naturally Juliet wanted to know about everything that had happened to me. I told her I would fill her in later. I told her I loved her and that I would see her soon.

  Ten minutes later, someone banged on the door. I unlatched the deadbolt, and two uniformed offers stepped into the room. One of them was named Peterson, the other Garcia.

  “What’s this all about?” Garcia said.

  “It’s about murder,” I said. “The piece of shit on the floor here killed at least two people, probably more. He kidnapped me and drugged me and brainwashed me, and he did the same to an officer named Derek Wahl in Tennessee.”

  I told them everything, from the beginning, and I showed them the tattoo on my arm and the PICC line. I told them the evidence to convict Brother John was at the state police post in Mont Falcon.

  When I finished talking, Brother John said, “I want to speak to my lawyer.”

  “You’re not denying the accusations?” Peterson said.

  “I want to speak to my lawyer.”

  Peterson said I would need to come to the station and give my statement to one of the homicide detectives, and I said I didn’t have a problem with that.

  Garcia cuffed Brother John and read him his rights, and they marched him out of the studio and toward the elevators. I was holding up the rear.

  Bob Watson watched incredulously as we walked by.

  There was another pair of officers waiting outside. They put Brother John in one car and me in another, and we all ended up at a police substation a few blocks away. I had been waiting for almost two hours in an interrogation room when a guy wearing a white shirt and a striped necktie walked in and identified himself as detective Gregory Sloan. He talked to me for a while with a tape recorder running and gave me some papers to fill out. I told him about Brother John’s drivers back at the hotel and he said he would have them brought in for questioning. I asked him if he could help me get a duplicate driver’s license and some money from my Florida bank account.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Just so you know, John Martin, the man you knew as Brother John, is going to be extradited to Tennessee immediately. His lawyer insisted on it, and we really have no reason to keep him here.”

  “He’s a murderer,” I said.

  “He’s an alleged murderer in Tennessee. That’s where the crimes took place, and that’s where the trial will be. He hasn’t broken any laws in California. None that we know of. He’ll be on a flight to Nashville with an armed escort early tomorrow morning.”

  Garcia and Peterson gave me a ride to the hotel. I took a shower and put on a fresh set of clothes, walked out to the road and hitched a ride to the nearest hospital. I went through a set of doors under the big EMERGENCY sign and stopped at the admitting desk.

  The clerk looked up at me.

  “I need to see a doctor,” I said.

  “Could you tell me the nature of your problem this evening?”

  “I’m having chest pain.”

  She didn’t bat an eye.

  “Can I see your insurance card?” she said.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Picture ID?”

  “Nope.”

  She sighed exasperatedly and asked me for my date of birth and my social security number, and then she gave me a long medical history form to fill out. Rule #110 in Nicholas Colt’s Philosophy of Life: Never have a heart attack without your wallet on you.

  I filled out the form and waited for a while. A young lady wearing pink scrubs called my name and led me to a room with several beds partitioned by green drapes. She handed me a gown and told me to take my shirt off and lie on the bed. She took my blood pressure and temperature and asked me about the nature of my pain and how long I’d been having it. She gave me an aspirin and taped a nitroglycerine patch on my chest. She said the doctor would be in to see me shortly, and then another young lady wearing blue scrubs wheeled a machine in and put a bunch of wires on my chest. It was an EKG, she said, to let them know what was going on with my heart.

  By the time the doctor came in, I was ready to strangle someone. She listened to my chest with her stethoscope and examined the PICC line site.

  “Where is your pain?” she said.

  I pointed toward my sternum.

  “Here,” I said.

  “And is it a sharp pain, a heaviness, a pressure—”

  “More of a pressure,” I said.

  “And how long has this been going on?”

  “A couple of days. It’s hurting really bad right now.”

  “On a scale of zero to ten?”

  “Ten,” I said.

  “Why do you have the PICC line?”

  “I had an infection. They sent me home with IV antibiotics.”

  Being married to a nurse has its advantages. I was giving the doctor all the right answers.

  “You’re EKG looks fine,” she said. “I’m going to order some blood work and a stress test. We’ll need to admit you for twenty-four hour observation.”

  “Can I have something for the pain?”

  “Are you allergic to any medications?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “I’ll have the nurse bring you something.”

  She walked away. A little while later the young lady in pink scrubs came back with two syringes in her hand.

  “This is morphine,” she said.

  She uncapped the port on my PICC line and administered the medication. It wasn’t as good as the stuff Brother John had been giving me, but it took the edge off. She left and I wadded some tape on the end of a tongue depressor and stuck the contraption into the sharps container and fished out the syringes she had discarded. I untied the gown and put my shirt back on and nonchalantly walked out of the ER and out to the street where I proceeded to vomit in the gutter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  It took a while to sort everything out, but Detective Sloan had pulled some strings for me and three days later an envelope containing my driver’s license and debit card was delivered to the hotel. I’d been charging meals to the room, and I had managed to talk a maid into letting me into the adjoining suite where I found half a dozen vials of Dilaudid in a drawer. The Dilaudid had kept me going, but it was gone and I didn’t want to go to a hospital again where they would probably give me morphine again and I would probably puke my guts up again.

  I checked my balance at the ATM machine in the lobby. Th
ere was almost a thousand dollars in the account. I withdrew four hundred in cash, went back to my room and packed a change of clothes and some toiletries into a carry-on bag. I took a taxi to Wal-Mart and bought a pre-paid cell phone and a sandwich at Subway. I called some people and texted some others while I ate so they would have the new number. From there I took another taxi to the airport and bought a ticket for the red-eye to Nashville. It was a five hour flight and I slept most of the way. I rented a car and got a motel room and tried to sleep some more but the bugs were all over me inside and out and I couldn’t stand it. I drove to the bus station and hung out in the men’s room for a while and sure enough a guy with a backpack eventually walked in and recognized a potential customer when he saw one. He held out his palm and gently unfolded the corners of a foil packet.

  “How much?” I said.

  “Twenty.”

  “Give me five of them.”

  He unzipped his backpack and loaded five of the packets into a plastic bag. I handed him the money and he handed me the dope.

  “Know where I can get a piece?” I said.

  “You mean a gun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you looking for?”

  “Something I can put in my pocket.”

  He reached into the backpack and pulled out a small semiautomatic pistol with fake wooden grips.

  “How much you want for it?” I said.

  “Hundred bucks.”

  “I’ll give you fifty.”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “You got some shells to go with it?”

  He pulled out a small box of .25 caliber cartridges. I gave him the seventy-five. On the way back to the motel I stopped at a dollar store and bought some candles and a lighter and a cheap set of silverware. I knew you could get in trouble carrying a spoon around, that it could be considered drug paraphernalia, but I wasn’t about to cut a soda can in half like the street hypes do. I sat at the desk in the motel room and bent one of the spoons from the silverware set and lit one of the candles and unwrapped one of the foil packets. It was black tar heroin from Mexico. It looked exactly like the stuff you put on a roof. I scraped some off with the spoon, added some water to it and cooked it over the candle. I drew it into one of the syringes I had stolen and injected it into my PICC line. I fell asleep in the chair and woke up a couple of hours later with a line of drool on my chin.