A Reason to Kill (Jack Widow Book 3), page 1
A REASON TO KILL
A 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: B01M7O5JG6
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-05-4
Hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-35-1
(Original KDP ISBN-13: 978-1520850887)
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 A Reason to Kill 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.
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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
Without Measure: A Preview
Without Measure: A Blurb
Chapter 1
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 & Domestic
Patriot Lies
The Double Man
Nothing Left
The Protector
Kill Promise
1
Jack Widow had no reason to kill anybody.
Not now. Not recently. Not yet. Killing had been the last thing on his mind. He was traveling. Seeing. Experiencing. Touristing. Taking things in.
Making memories.
One memory, the one that wouldn’t leave him, was two days ago. Back in a hotel room, Widow had been tangled in bleached sheets with high thread counts and soft limbs, and bare and naked with a beautiful woman in Las Vegas.
The impression lasted. He had a smile on his face for the entire two days that followed.
The feeling he held on to was the opposite of retribution. The reverse of reprisal. The contradiction of payback. The disagreement of disagreement.
It was sunshine in the dark.
He was the farthest thing from wanting to kill.
In the sweltering Texas heat, that was all about to change.
He first met Claire Hood outdoors in a bus depot in West Texas.
She was a nice old bird, as nice as old birds come, like the catalog version of a sweet grandmother, and nothing else. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body—not a mean word from her lips.
She was like a churchly grandmother who baked cookies for everyone on her block and then returned after a couple of days to recover the plastic ware and ask if everyone had enjoyed the cookies. She left no stomachs and no lives untouched.
She was the kind of woman who played bingo every Tuesday and Thursday night, routine. At least that’s what she told her family. In reality, she was gambling. Playing pinochle, sometimes bridge, sometimes poker with her friends.
She belonged in a Kodak photo of a family picnic more than she did sitting on a hot, dry bus terminal bench close to the wasteland part of Texas on the long stretch of Interstate 10, somewhere between El Paso and San Antonio.
But that’s where she was. Right there. She sat on a bus station bench, filled with nothing but bravery and pride. The sensation beamed off her. She seemed a little haughty, a little superior to the rest of the ticket holders. Not too far. Not in an arrogant I’m-better-than-thou kind of way, but borderline.
She sat upright on the edge of her seat, back straight and chin up. Perfect posture. Her purse rested on her knees like a small dog. A perfectly pint-sized black hat rested on her head. Her gaunt hands were stacked, palm on top of palm, across her lap.
Her shoes were leathery and almost crinkle free, old but not worn to the point of retirement.
Her eyes were brown, and she had tan, paperlike skin. Lighter than her shoes, but not by much. She was a skinny thing: skin and bones, only more bones than skin. Her gray hair curled and coiled and merged with whiter strands of hair, all of which punched out from under the brim of her hat.
All the things Widow noticed about her had been his first and last impressions of her. Because twenty-one minutes after they met, after a long, revealing conversation, Claire Hood dropped dead.
2
The causes were natural.
That was obvious, because she was ancient. No medical examiner in the world, no medical examiner Widow had ever worked with, would even go beyond a quick look over the body.
Ten medical examiners out of ten would agree. Right there on the spot. They’d all agree with one glance. Claire Hood was ancient. It had been her time. A strange place, no doubt, but your time was your time.
No question.
Claire Hood had died right in front of Widow. Right at that generic, sandy bus depot. Right at a place where she didn’t want to die. Right at the time she couldn’t afford to die. She had something left to do. She had unfinished business.
And the only person in the world who knew about it was Widow.
The Principal called John Glock and waited for him to answer the phone. A static ringtone, an echoing whir, and then a hard voice that sounded like no one else on earth answered and said, “Yeah.”
Glock’s voice was unlike anyone else’s on earth because eight years earlier, he had been stabbed in prison by a shiv made out of twenty-five pages of rolled paper, thick and ripped from a National Geographic magazine, fashioned and shaped into a great murder weapon. After its use, it could be unrolled and flushed down a toilet.
Three inmates in a Texas prison had tried to take him out. They had killed his friend, another former SEAL. But they had underestimated the man they were trying to put in the dirt. He had jerked the shiv out of his neck and whipped around and gored the closest attacker, twice, in his own throat. He’d jabbed the same shiv into the kidney of the second one as the attacker turned to run. And he’d killed the third attacker five weeks later, after he got out of the infirmary. Now Glock spoke, but with a rough and hard voice because some words were harder to pronounce than others.
Glock had a tattoo that paid tribute to his fallen friend. It was a frog’s skeleton holding a trident, an unspoken symbol used by SEALs to honor their fallen friends. Glock had been a member of the SEALs for only four years, when he and his friend were honorably discharged under less than savory circumstances. They had served their tenure and gone into business for themselves. That’s when they had met the Principal, a wealthy man who shared their vision, which was a noninclusive vision for America.
Glock considered himself a patriot, and he considered the Principal to be a patriot. A wealthy man, but a patriot just the same. They had a plan to keep America safe. They shared a vision of taking back their country.
The Principal said, “It’s me. I need your help.”
“What’s up?” asked Glock. He walked over to the small, thin-paned glass window in the trailer and pulled down the blinds with his fingers. He stared out over an enormous lot of construction vehicles and cement trucks and Caterpillars and unmanned bulldozers and giant excavators that stood monstrous and silent like dinosaur bones in a museum. And the site he was on wasn’t the only one they owned, or even the largest.
“We’ve got a problem. Our business is in jeopardy.”
“At what corner?”
The Principal said, “All of it. But primarily the Texas border.”
“What happened?”
“James Hood.”
Silence came over the phone. John Glock knew that name. And he hated the man it belonged to.
John Glock said, “Want me to call the Jericho Men?”
“No. We need professionals, not a bunch of militia idiots with guns,” the Principal said. He paused a beat and said, “But put them on alert. Just in case.”
“What do you propose?”
“You know what his being out means?”
“He’s not dumb enough to have done anything.”
The Principal said, “Think, John. Why else would he be out? The Feds know something. Or they’re sniffing around. Or they’re simply casting a net because they’re bored. Whichever it is, we don’t need them catching something with that net.”
Glock said, “Don’t be so paranoid. Maybe he’s running. In which case, they won’t find him. Either way, we’ll handle it like we always do.”
“We can’t take that chance, and you know it.”
Glock said, “Relax. We won’t leave him out there. He’ll be put down.”
“And anyway, we made him a promise. Remember? If he didn’t stay in for the full sentence, then we’d kill him and his family.”
“I know,” Glock said.
The Principal said, “We must keep our promise.”
“We shoulda killed him way back then.”
“I agree.”
“You know where he’ll go?”
“To see his wife and kid. And his mother, if she’s still alive,” Glock answered.
The Principal said nothing. Glock wasn’t sure he was onboard with threatening the lives of three innocent females just to prove a point to one guy that they’d kill anyway, but he wouldn’t leave them alive. Not his style.
“I’ve called three others to help,” the Principal said.
Glock said nothing. He didn’t need help, but it wasn’t his money. The Principal was the one with the cash. If he wanted to hire three other professionals to track and kill one man, then Glock wouldn’t argue, and if James Hood was out long before his release date, that meant he was let out. And being let out by the Feds meant he’d made a deal.
“Meet with them and find the target. Kill him.” The Principal hung up the phone.
Glock smiled. He was already in El Paso, Texas. If James Hood had just gotten out of prison, he’d have a head start, but that wouldn’t matter. Glock would start with meeting the kill team members, and then he’d track James Hood down.
Jemma could not remember the last time she had seen the guy driving the car that she was in. But he looked like her daddy.
Jemma wondered where he was taking her. She still wore her good first-school-day clothes. She still had her lunch packed neatly inside a special lunch pail, special because her mommy gave it to her. It was a mint-condition collector’s item from when her mommy was a little girl. It was made from cold steel, but colored with warm pinks and sunny yellows, and friendly whites.
Little ponies danced on the surfaces.
What did her mommy tell her it was called? My Little Horsey? Or My Small Pony? Or something like that. She wasn’t exactly sure about the title. She learned new things every day, and it was hard to remember them all.
The lunch pail was named after toys her mommy used to play with when she was a little girl growing up in another country.
Maybe she had been Jemma’s age. Maybe that’s where Jemma got her love of horses from.
Jemma wasn’t sure about what time it was. Not exactly. She didn’t own a watch. Not yet. Because she was still learning how to tell time, but she knew it must’ve been around noon because she yawned again. Her legs dangled and waved back and forth over the edge of the front seat of the car.
The guy who looked like her daddy was tall, but all grown-ups were tall to her. There was nothing special about his height that she could see.
He had offered her Gummy Bears, which was her favorite. Not Gummy Worms. Worms were gross, she thought.
She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. Or take rides from them. But her daddy was no stranger. He convinced her it was okay.
He said, “It was cool with mommy.”
At first, she didn’t trust him, but he had known her mommy. He knew her name. He looked like her daddy, maybe. So he didn’t count as a stranger. Right?
It made sense to her. She had worked it all out.
The guy who looked like her daddy let her sit in the front seat. She loved that.
Her mommy never let her sit in the front seat of her car. And her grandma never let her ride in the front of her old town car.
Jemma had to always ride in the back seat. She hated the back seat. It was boring.
She was big enough to ride in the front. She thought so.
That’s why she was glad to be in the front row next to her own daddy.
She had felt she was old enough for over two years.
Jemma was about to have a birthday soon. She was going to turn seven, and she was very excited about the whole prospect.
She wondered if that’s why her daddy was picking her up? Maybe he was surprising her for her birthday?
Jemma yawned again and stretched out her arms and hands as far as they would extend. She made a big deal out of it. All kinds of sounds and moans and groans, like she had heard her grandma do a million times.
Old people made all kinds of sounds, she thought.
Jemma twisted in her seat and stared at the guy who looked like her daddy.
She looked him up and down, and down and up, and back down, and back up, again.
He was her daddy. She was pretty sure. But he differed from what she remembered. Her daddy didn’t have an arm tattoo. This guy had one—a big one. It was huge. She hadn't seen anything like it.
It was a dragon or snake or some kind of monster from Ancient Greece. She had learned about Greece in school. There was a book in the library she liked. It had plenty of pictures of monsters. There was one that looked like the one he had on his arm. It had three heads. Or ten heads. She couldn’t remember.
The monster in her book had magical powers. If you cut off one head, another grew back in its place. Or two more grew back—something like that.
The guy who looked like her daddy’s arm tattoo was a little different. She only saw one head.
The guy who looked like her daddy looked down at her. A quick, brief glance, only he held on to it for more than a second. He seemed to stare into her face, hard. Then he smiled.
Under the stubble and the hard tan, she was pretty sure it was her daddy.
Almost sure.
Jemma wanted to talk with him and ask where they were going. She wanted to ask where he had been for the last two years. She wanted to show him she wasn’t in a car seat anymore. But he looked so serious that she decided not to bother him with what her teacher called "small talk."
