Gone Forever (Jack Widow Book 1), page 29
The helicopter was a remarkable machine with deadly and accurate machine guns attached. It was equipped with special side turret-style machine guns based on the Vulcan-style gun and could fire M50 ammunition at fifteen hundred rounds per minute. The ammunition housed five hundred rounds and could be reloaded in fifteen minutes.
The man knew this information not because of his military training, but because of his tradecraft. Although now he questioned the statistics and details in his mind because he knew one thing for certain—he was starving, and the lack of sustenance in his body was causing him to lose focus and reasoning. He tried desperately to concentrate on the details of the stealth helicopter. And it helped. But he was still starving.
He was in one of the richest states in the country, and at that moment, he was a rich man. He was richer than he had been five or six or seven days ago because of the value of the contents of the security briefcase in his possession.
Next to the man was a Beretta nine millimeter, a service weapon given to him just before his secret mission. It rested on top of a closed shoebox next to him in close grabbing distance. The safety was on, but that could change quickly. The shoebox was stacked on top of a large appliance box that held old items from a childhood long past.
The room the man was in was dark and dank and not well insulated. Spiders indigenous to the region crawled in the far corner of the ceiling. They crawled in the shadows of a swinging bulb that hung down on a long cord and swayed back and forth in a curved arc from west to north. A wind that chilled the room blew the bulb from side to side. The man could hear a faint whistle that sounded with the gusts of wind from the outside terrain.
The man was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. He craned his neck to look out of a snow-covered, shuttered window above his head. He had to press his body up against the wall and use his arms to hoist himself up just to see. Billions of stars shimmered across the stretch of sky. The ground was covered in snow, but the night sky was clear and dark blue and picturesque, like the wallpaper on a desktop computer. Perhaps on a computer back in Langley, Virginia, which was where he had lived for the last year of his life.
The man leaned forward some more and looked straight down at the front of the house. He couldn’t see the front door from his position, but he was over two stories up, and he could see more than a hundred yards down the steep land in front of him. Behind him were dense trees and then the edge of a rugged mountain. He wasn’t much worried about men coming for him from that direction. He figured these guys would just come straight up the long, wide driveway if they could find it. The snow had covered it over, leaving no signs of where it used to be. More than likely, his enemies would come in by snowmobile, and he would hear their engines in the dead silence around him. The noise would echo and bounce off the far-off trees or the sides of the mountains. No way could anyone surprise him on a snowmobile. The only alternative means of transportation would’ve been horses. The snow on the ground wasn’t deep enough to prevent them from riding on horseback up the track.
Either way, it wouldn’t matter. He was ready. His main problem wasn’t how they would come for him, but when.
The owner of the house didn’t know he was there. He was hiding out. He prayed he wouldn’t be discovered. The last thing he wanted to do was involve innocent people.
Just then, he heard a noise, a creaking on the staircase below him. He stretched back up and craned his head to look out the window. He couldn’t see the front door because of the huge porch, a fact he had forgotten. Then he remembered he had just looked down only moments ago.
The man heard more noises from below him. He heard footsteps growing louder and louder. A moment later, someone was on the floor beneath him, and then he heard a chair moving across the floor and light footsteps as if someone had climbed the chair and reached up for the rope to the attic door. He heard the creaks of his frozen bones as he twisted to look at the trapdoor and then the squeaking of springs from the door itself as someone pulled it down. The sound was deafening in the house's silence.
He grabbed his Beretta and quickly pointed it in the direction of the attic door as it was pulled downward. Light flashed in through the crack and up onto the ceiling above him. Soon it filled half of the attic. He wanted to slide over to hide behind some of the larger boxes, but he couldn’t really move his legs. He had lost feeling in them some time ago but couldn’t remember when. He had forgotten they were paralyzed.
The trapdoor went down all the way, and the folding staircase attached plopped down below. The man heard the creak of the wooden ladder as someone climbed it. A head stuck up into the attic, and a body followed. The tiny figure in front of him scanned across the attic and the boxes until their eyes connected.
The man lowered his Beretta when he saw a small boy, approximately six years of age. The boy glowered at him peculiarly. Most likely a combination of fright because of the gun and then recognition.
The man had been in and out of sleep for days and had spent so much energy in guarding himself, holding the Beretta up, that before he knew it, his eyes closed under the heavy weight of his eyelids.
CHAPTER 2
Jack Widow was doing what he loved best—wandering without a care in the world. This was what he thought was true freedom. A lifetime of doing as he was told had turned him into a man who no longer listened to anyone. He did as he wanted and went where he pleased.
Widow had spent the last several months doing more and seeing more of his home country than he had ever done or seen in his entire life. He had traveled from Mississippi, a place that seemed so far away and long ago in his memory, through seven states, across hundreds of highways, around thousands of cloverleaves, and over the southern part of the Rocky Mountains. He’d traveled all the way west until he couldn’t go any farther unless he started swimming or chartered a boat or stole a submarine or bought a plane ticket. And even then, he was out of states except for Hawaii and Alaska, depending on whether you considered them to be west.
Over the last year, he had discovered three addictions. The first was the open road. There was nothing like the freedom of the American frontier. The second was coffee. Coffee was a drug he couldn’t explain. Perhaps it was from being a Navy cop. Perhaps not. Or maybe it was just a drug that did what drugs do and did it well—it created an addiction. Whatever the case was, he didn’t care. And the third was that he was constantly picking up old paperback books and reading them along his travels.
He had slept only about five hours the night before because he had met a girl named Farrah in Salt Lake City. The only person he had known with that name was the actress Farrah Fawcett, but when he’d asked the girl about it, she had denied being named after her. She told him she had been asked that question for her entire life but claimed never to have even seen a Farrah Fawcett film. As the girl was only nineteen years old, that was probably true. Farrah had been dead for years and hadn’t really done any acting in decades. The only thing Widow knew her from was Charlie’s Angels, a horrible show in his opinion, from before he was born.
Farrah—the nineteen-year-old and not the actress—had been a lot of fun for Widow. She was a part-time waitress and student, not at the University of Utah but at a community college. She was taking night classes to be a nurse, a trade that Widow admired. He admired anyone who was in the profession of helping others. The military, criminal justice, firefighting, the medical field, and even the clergy were all trades he respected.
Farrah was the complete opposite of Farrah Fawcett, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t gorgeous. She was absolutely gorgeous, far more so than the 1970s actress. At least that was Widow’s conclusion. Farrah was six feet tall. She was dark-skinned with long, straight black hair and even longer legs. She was toned, but not in the way of someone who was into fitness. It was more of a youthful way, the way you are when you have good genes.
Widow had met Farrah while she was working at a local bar. She had thought it was odd that he was reading a book in a bar, and they struck up a conversation. He had asked her to have a drink after her shift ended, which they did. His time on the road had been lonely. Not that the isolation didn’t appeal to him as well. He liked to be alone. And there was something romantic and resolute about wandering. He found peace. Widow accepted the aloneness, but finding the occasional friend was something he looked forward to.
After they had a beer together—some local craft brew—Farrah had invited Widow back to her place for another beer, which turned the one beer into an all-night thing, which was okay by him.
In the morning, Widow put his clothes on and said goodbye to Farrah as she slept. He wasn’t sure if she had heard him or not, and it hadn’t mattered. He was ready to be on his way.
He left her asleep in her bed in her ground-level apartment and locked the door behind him. He left without a phone number or without leaving her one in return. No email. No forwarding address. There was no point. He had no phone. No email. No address.
Jack Widow had been born in Mississippi to a single mom. She was an ex-Marine, which meant she was still a Marine. She was also the sheriff of the town in which Widow had grown up in until six months ago when she had been murdered while investigating a series of disappearances of beautiful women.
Widow had left his assignment as an undercover Navy cop to investigate her death, returning to the small town he’d grown up in. No one remembered him because he had left home when he was eighteen and joined the Navy. He’d spent sixteen years away from home and never called or wrote or spoke to his mother. His last two memories of her were the day she died and sixteen years before, when they had fought one of those life-changing fights. She’d admitted to lying to him his entire life about his father.
Widow had grown up thinking that his father had been a military war hero, a soldier who had died defending his country. But when he turned eighteen, she told him the truth. His father had been a drifter, just some guy. Widow had wanted to escape small-town life for his entire childhood, and that fight with his mother led him to run away with the Navy. Originally, he had planned to call her, but one month turned into two and then into six. Six months turned into a year, which turned into many years.
American families.
By the time sixteen years had passed, it took a tragedy for him to return home. When he returned to his old town, the people there had thought of him as a drifter. So he continued on to the town in which his mother had died and kept his drifter persona intact.
Widow knew about undercover work—that’s what he did for NCIS. He stayed undercover to find out who shot his mother, and that led him down a dark path. At the end of which, he came face-to-face with a conspiracy he’d much rather forget.
After his mother died, the NCIS told him he had to come back. That was his only choice, but Jack Widow decided it was time to make his own choices. He put one foot in front of the other and never looked back.
What started as a quest to find the person responsible for shooting his sheriff mother had turned into a full-blown obsession, which turned into a way of life.
Along the way, Widow realized that the first part of his life had been to follow in his mother’s footsteps. She was a Marine and a cop, and he had become a Navy SEAL and a cop. Now in the second half of his life, he was a drifter, like the father he had never known. Now he was literally following in his father’s footsteps.
No possessions had been Widow’s thing. It was because, in the Navy, Widow had carried gear everywhere he went. He had been trained to carry tremendous weight. After he joined the NCIS and went undercover with a secret unit, he had carried more than physical things with him. Living a double life had taken a toll on him. Now he carried nothing.
Widow didn’t want possessions. Possessions meant commitment and things to carry and store. In Widow’s mind, things to carry meant baggage, and baggage could hold you down and hold you back.
The things Widow carried now were his passport, his debit card, and a wad of cash, which was four hundred fifty-eight dollars at that moment. He tried to carry cash-money on him. He never knew when he would need quick access to it. In addition, using cash provided a lot more anonymity than using his debit card. And he liked anonymity.
The only other item he carried was a foldable toothbrush, which looked like a blue barber-style shaving blade. Instead of a blade that snicked out of the handle, there was a toothbrush. The bristles and plastic head folded down into the handle and flipped out like a switchblade. He carried the toothbrush but replaced it fairly often. Toothbrushes could be bought at any drugstore.
On the morning after Widow left Farrah for Salt Lake City, he ventured out to visit the unique attractions around the city, including the Temple Square gardens, thirty-five acres of land downtown that headquartered the Mormon Church. The gardens were world famous and had two hundred and fifty flower beds and seven hundred different plants from all across the planet. The gardens were replanted and redesigned every year, and it took hundreds of volunteers to finish them. But Widow couldn’t get in to see them because the garden was only open in the summer, and tours were by appointment only.
So he spent the afternoon on a ritual he completed either daily or weekly, depending on where he was and how dirty he had gotten. He went to a cheap-looking old barbershop and said hello to an old guy with a jarhead haircut and photographs of himself with other guys, doing guy things, that were pinned all over a bulletin board near the entrance. The old guy said hello back and asked if Widow needed a cut. Widow nodded and told him he would like a buzz cut.
On the road, Widow had discovered the benefits of keeping his hair short, and he had quickly shed the long-haired look. Of course, in the winter months, it would make sense to let it grow long, but Widow was still getting used to the drifter lifestyle. For the last six months, he had been getting his head buzzed short and hadn’t yet thought about the winter. He had figured he’d spend it in California, but he had gotten there earlier than he’d thought he would. Part of this new nomadic life was going with the flow, and the flow had turned him around at the Pacific Ocean.
After the jarhead barber had cut his hair short, Widow got out of the chair, paid the man, and thanked him. Then he left the barbershop and walked down the street along a cracked cement sidewalk to a side of town that was less than pristine. Potholes riddled the street, and old cars were parked along the street. Leaning telephone poles besieged the area like reminders of a forgotten time.
Widow walked on until he found what he was looking for, an old consignment store called America’s Clothing Store. Not a catchy name for a consignment store, but Widow wasn’t looking for trendy. He was looking for cheap.
Another thing he’d discovered was buying cheap clothes was better than owning one pair and rewashing them all the time. Laundromats aren’t cheap. Detergent isn’t cheap. Buying new clothes, wearing them, and tossing them in a Salvation Army bin after was like being a part of a subscription service. In his mind, it was like Netflix for clothes. He’d buy new ones, wear them, recycle them, and someone else would use them.
He walked into the store and nodded at a cute girl behind the counter. She was folding clothes and nodded and smiled back at him. He guessed she was barely an adult. She looked like a mixture of Asian and white. The girl wore a multicolored striped top with mostly gray in it and black chinos. She was petite, probably five foot one. Her hair was shorter than shoulder length, dyed pink, and shaved on one side. To Widow, she looked like a modern punk rocker, a style that seemed to return.
Traveling from state to state, city to city, Widow had come across young people of all types. In the urban areas, he’d noticed similar hairstyles, especially among girls. Although he was from a southern state, a conservative state, Widow couldn’t complain about the new look. In fact, on her, it looked damn good.
He began wandering around the store. They didn’t have a big and tall section—he had found that most places didn’t. The big and tall sections of America hadn’t vanished—there were plenty of them out there—but most of the stores that catered to bigger people had become specialty stores. Expensive specialty stores. So Widow had often settled for XXL or XXXL if he could find it in tops. Fitting his waist hadn’t been a problem because he had a thin waist for a guy his size—thirty-four inches, but he was six four with long legs and needed pants that were long enough. Usually, he’d buy a size thirty-six and let them ride on his hips.
Widow headed to the pants section and searched around. He looked at jeans first and found a pair of Levi carpenter jeans, size thirty-five. The legs were long. He grabbed them and walked over to look at the tops. He sifted through the selections and pulled out a long-sleeved white shirt. Then he turned and started toward a wall of shoes on display, but before he got there, he saw a nice gray fleece vest from the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked it over. He was thinking about heading northeast and realized he had no winter gear, and it was now the beginning of November.
He grabbed the fleece and looked at the tag. It was only an XXL, but it was a sleeveless vest, so he didn’t need to worry about it having long sleeves that reached only to his forearms. Widow had abnormally long arms—long arms and long legs. His mother was tiny, so he assumed he had inherited them from his unknown father.
Widow grabbed his clothes and went over to the fitting room, which was in the back of the store. He dipped into a little hallway and came face-to-face with a young black girl who was barely out of high school. Like the girl from the front, she also had a punk rocker look about her. No pink hair, but she had three nose piercings and those huge pieces in her earlobes that looked like rims for a truck. They were black and rubbery looking. They opened her ears up to a size big enough to slide his pinkie through, which was more like the size of a gun barrel.
