Gone Forever (Jack Widow Book 1), page 1
GONE FOREVER
THE FIRST JACK WIDOW THRILLER
SCOTT BLADE
Copyright © 2016. Scott Blade.
A Black Lion Media Publication.
All Rights Reserved.
Available in eBook, paperback, and hardback.
Kindle ASIN: B01N51YELD
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-01-6
Hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-32-0
(Original KDP ISBN-13: 978-1539941408)
Visit the author's website: ScottBlade.com.
This book is copyrighted and registered with the US Copyright Office under the original ISBN. All new and alternate editions are protected under this copyright.
The Jack Widow book series and Gone Forever are works of fiction produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This series is not associated with/or represents any part of any other book or series.
For more information on copyright and permissions, visit ScottBlade.com.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Published by Black Lion Media.
CONTENTS
Also by Scott Blade
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
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Winter Territory: A Preview
Winter Territory: A Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
A Word from Scott
The Scott Blade Book Club
The Nomadvelist
ALSO BY SCOTT BLADE
The Jack Widow Series
Gone Forever
Winter Territory
A Reason to Kill
Without Measure
Once Quiet
Name Not Given
The Midnight Caller
Fire Watch
The Last Rainmaker
The Devil’s Stop
Black Daylight
The Standoff
Foreign and Domestic
Patriot Lies
The Double Man
Nothing Left
The Protector
Kill Promise
1
Sheriff Deveraux was shot in the head in a town that I had tried to forget—Killian Crossing, a small town in nowhere, Mississippi. Until eighteen hours ago, I hadn't thought of this place since I was seventeen, which was the age when I ran away from home. I had never had a second thought about it. I wasn't the type of guy who looked back. I looked forward because I had thought that everything that mattered was ahead and not behind me.
I was wrong. Because eventually, the past always catches up.
It was the early morning hours. The sun wasn't even peeking around the corner yet.
I stood over Deveraux, who was bound up tight in hospital sheets and blankets like she was being held prisoner by the hospital bed. She either lay dying or recovering. I wasn't sure. I'm not a doctor, but she looked bad.
A nine-millimeter bullet shot to the front of her head should've killed her instantly, but it didn't. The shooter must've thought she was dead because he left her lying in a ditch on an abandoned road to nowhere in front of her police cruiser. I closed my eyes and imagined the cold blue lights still flashing in the heavy rain and washing over her body.
The shooter had shot her and driven away without leaving behind a single clue.
A gunshot to the head doesn't always cause death. It's all about relativity and physics—that and the size of the bullet. Most handguns are low velocity, but low velocity doesn't mean less damage. A high-velocity round fired into the head might leave a victim with less damage because of its steady speed. This appeared to be the case for Sheriff Deveraux.
A high-velocity round, higher than from most handguns, had burst through the front of her head, right side, torn through flesh, cracked her skull, and stayed lodged in there somewhere.
A bullet damages a human skull in two ways. First, the bullet causes damage on impact; a direct blow will draw first blood. The track of a bullet destroys everything that it meets, creating a permanent cavity. But if the bullet yaws or twists or turns or spirals while on its course, it can trigger the energy transfer to increase, and the cavity left behind is much, much greater—absolutely devastating. It can leave a crater—like a meteor slamming into the earth.
The second way a bullet causes damage is the initial shock wave, then the body's tissue surrounding the bullet's path gets caught up in a fleeting vacuum that usually is exponentially larger than the bullet. The bullet's flesh crater gets stretched and distorted and then restructures itself several times, like a blob, until the tissue cavity returns to its original position, or at least tries to.
I had seen a lot of gunshot wounds in my career, and a lot of them were headshot wounds. And I had seen a lot of dead people. I had seen people shot and stabbed and blown up all over the world. Some of them I had shot myself—nothing new to me.
Some people that I had seen shot survived, and some didn't.
Sometimes gunshot wounds that don't appear to be as bad as others are fatal, while others that bleed like a runaway firehose are not. Gunshot wounds are like commercial real estate. Everything is location, location, location.
I'd seen straight-on headshots pass through a guy's head and come out the back, and the guy lived. I'd even seen a bullet bounce off a chief petty officer's skull once. All he got from being shot in the head was a fractured skull, a major headache, and a newfound respect among the rest of us. Professional NFL football players had experienced worse. Nothing surprised me anymore.
Some bullets fired straight and true and enter and exit. Others could penetrate a man's skull and then ping pong around inside his body, tearing and ripping through every piece of tissue, muscle, and organ that it encountered, like a pinball machine, lighting up every ding and bing along its path.
Headshots are much more difficult to predict. The skull is like a sealed capsule. It cradles and protects the brain. Nothing is ever getting in until the capsule opens, and the only way to open one is to crack open its wall of thick bone. Inside the capsule, there's hardly room to move around. There's little space inside the human skull for anything other than the brain. If a bullet ping-pongs around in there, the damage is almost always catastrophic.
But if the bullet hits the skull dead-on and fires right through, sometimes the victim will survive, live through the process, and even recover to live a normal life. Not a common result, but it happened.
Sheriff Deveraux wasn't that lucky, not yet, but she was a fighter.
No one knew I was there. I had walked in past relaxed hospital security, past video surveillance cameras that were obviously not being monitored by anyone. I had to recon the halls in order to find her room. And now I stood over her in her hospital room in the early morning hours.
I wal
I could've killed her and gotten away with it, easy as anything.
The deputy slept, sitting straight up. A cold cup of coffee rested on the end table next to him.
One of those old TVs, shaped like a massive box that couldn't fit underneath a Christmas tree, hung from a steel fixture at the top of the wall inside the waiting room across from him. It was at an angle. At some point the deputy must’ve sat there, wide awake, watching TV, because he was angled in the sofa's corner so that the TV was in his line of sight.
The local early, early morning news aired on the screen. No sound. But I could see that they hadn't gotten the story about Sheriff Deveraux being shot, not yet. The local news was based out of the next county because Killian Crossing was nothing more than acres and acres of forests and woods and a small, dying town. The only things here worth noting were the decommissioned train tracks and the long-abandoned army base.
I walked over closer to Deveraux's bedside and gazed down at her.
Life-preserving hospital machines pulsated and hissed and whirred nearby, a steady symphony of mechanical sounds. The room was smaller than some prison cells but larger than the bunk space on a naval Seawolf-class submarine. I would know because I'd seen them both.
Deveraux breathed in and breathed out. She wore a green hospital gown. IV tubes ran into the veins in her arm and strung up to an IV drip.
She didn't move or make any sign that she was aware of my presence, or anything else, for that matter. The only sign of life that she gave off was her breathing. Her head rested on a pile of white pillows. Her eyes were calmly closed, no twitching or racing like she was dreaming, which was not a good sign.
Other than the hospital machines and the IV drip and the wide, hospital-white bandages that wrapped tight around her head, she was exactly as I remembered her, a little older and a little grayer. But those were the only differences.
She still had thick hair that could fill a bucket. Her skin was deadly pale, but it always had been white.
I reached down and took her right hand in mine. My hands were like baseball gloves, and they dwarfed hers.
She liked to be called "Chief." I remembered that. She liked it, even though there was no such thing as a chief sheriff. It was just sheriff.
I whispered to her. I said, "Chief."
My voice cracked like I hadn't used it in months, which I basically hadn't.
I don't know if she heard me or not. Then I said, "It's me. I'm here."
She made no sound. Only the whirs and blips of the hospital machines responded to me, like they answered for her.
"It's been a long time since I left." I paused a long, penitent beat, and then I said, "I made a lot of mistakes. I shouldn't have been silent for so many years."
I paused again and stared at her face, a face that I hadn't seen in sixteen years, but I hadn't forgotten.
"I bet you wonder where the hell I've been. Well, you'd be proud and pissed off at me all at the same time. 'Cause I joined the Navy and got into trouble, but that ended up getting me a job."
I rubbed my thumb around the palm of her hand, hoping that she'd feel it, hoping that she'd wake up.
"I'm sorry it wasn't the Marines. I know you wanted me to follow in your footsteps, become a Marine like you did, but I became a cop like you. Sort of.
"I got booted out of the Navy. But then the NCIS recruited me. They said the same shit that people used to say my whole life. You know. I owed it to myself to use my gifts. Put my temper to good use—blah blah.
"I finally listened. They sent me off to college and NCIS training and then right back into the Navy. A civilian, technically, but I got all kinds of undercover work. Guess because I was expendable.
"After my first year, I had to train to become a Navy SEAL. Can you imagine that? Me, a nobody, turned college graduate to frogman? A boy from Mississippi."
I paused a long, long beat, waiting for her to open her eyes, to say something, but she didn't.
I said, "I wonder if you'd even recognize me. I wonder if you'd even know me."
The machines continued to whir and beep, and one made a nearly silent whistle, but there was one other sound from behind me at the door—the sound of slow scuffing shoes on tile.
A deep, southern Mississippi voice said, "Freeze! Now, ya hold it right dere!"
I stayed quiet. I didn't recognize the voice, but I knew the accent.
The voice said, "Turn 'round! No fast moves!"
I turned back toward the door and saw the deputy who had been asleep on the sofa. He stared at me from behind the barrel of his department-issued Glock.
The early morning hours of the hospital room must've shrouded me in just enough shadows to cover my face, because when I turned around completely, the sheriff's deputy jumped back a little like he had seen a monster. I wasn't a pleasant-looking man, not in the wrong light, and darkness was the wrong light.
I'd been told that in the darkness, I looked like something out of a nightmare. I'd been told that if I walked into a casting call for an actor to play the killer who comes out of the swamp and never dies, then they'd hire me on the spot. That's one thing that made me perfect for the SEALs. The best weapon that a SEAL has in the field is his mind. But being scary looking wasn't a bad thing either, because fear and intimidation were just as valuable as bullets and bombs. Being able to terrify enemies in the dark has benefited me all over the world. But I wasn't trying to scare this small-town deputy, so I said, "Relax."
The deputy said, "Hands up! Keep 'em where I can see 'em!"
He was in his early thirties, maybe not the best specimen for a cop, but I didn't know the guy. It was just a first impression, like an occupational habit. He visibly trembled.
He had what looked like a Glock 41, which was a standard law enforcement sidearm.
I was stationed at Coronado Naval Special Warfare in California—technically. But only technically, because I was undercover, and my assignment had been to pose as a former SEAL.
My CO had me dishonorably discharged, with a made-up criminal record, the whole nine yards. I spent a year growing out my hair and beard just so I'd look the part. Like a Navy SEAL has-been. All part of an operation that I spent a year preparing for. Of course, I wasn't there now. The investigation was all wrapped up anyway, but I got the news right at the end of it that someone shot Deveraux. So I left.
Before that operation, whenever I wasn't investigating a crime, they often stationed me in various places to maintain my cover. The SEALs are a relatively small military outfit, like a family. We had known each other or heard of each other, or we all knew a guy who knew the other guy. It wasn't very productive to put me into hot spots as an undercover operative and then pull me out when the job was done, because eventually, the other SEALs would figure out that I wasn't one of them.
I always had to go all the way. Sometimes I had to go all the way to the edge, close enough to see over it.
I had to go where the SEALs went and train when they trained.
