Nothing Left (Jack Widow Book 16), page 1
NOTHING LEFT
A JACK WIDOW THRILLER
SCOTT BLADE
Copyright © 2021.
Scott Blade.
A Black Lion Media Publication.
All Rights Reserved.
Available in eBook, paperback, and hardback.
Kindle ASIN: B08PCCDBKC
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-39-9
Hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-38-2
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 Nothing Left 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
The Protector
The Protector: 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
Two cops. Both dead. Murdered by twenty-six bullets, between them. Twenty-six shots fired. Twenty-six shell casings ejected. Twenty-six bullet holes suggest they were killed with extreme prejudice. Without remorse. Without hesitation. Without fear of consequence. But also, without experience. Without planning. Without expertise. Because the whole scene was overdone. Overreach. Overstated. Overkill.
The shooter wanted to kill them, resurrect them, and kill them again.
The corpses were slumped over the front seats of an unmarked white Ford police cruiser, like deflated tires. Blood dripped off the driver’s side door panel. It dripped slowly off the steering wheel, like a loose bathroom faucet. The blood soaked everything. Broken glass littered the interior and the ground around the vehicle. Fluids leaked from the car’s undercarriage and pooled in the dirt. Dust clouds lingered in the air like a car just sped off, and I missed it.
Someone shot both cops in their heads, shoulders, necks, and chests—straight through the driver’s side windshield. Large sections of the windshield remained intact. But other sections were broken and gapped and scattered about where glass used to be. Jagged edges of broken glass on the ground reflected the moonlight, the clouds, and the stars.
Bullet holes riddled the remaining glass, the hood, the metal, the dash, the seats, and the rear bench. There were probably spent bullets in the trunk. The headlamps were shattered. Small plastic pieces were scattered across the ground under the grille. Countless veiny cracks splintered across the windshield, fracturing off in thousands of directions, like an infestation of spiderwebs. The windshield slowly cracked in places. I heard it under the wind. It sounded like someone tiptoeing over broken glass.
I stood in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, about sixty yards off an old road in the distance behind me. It was a forgotten two-lane highway, just a line on a map with no real interest to anybody but the people who passed through, like an abandoned tunnel or an ancient bridge. It wasn’t used all that often anymore because newer interstates and roads emerged and took away the need for it.
Besides the locals—which there weren’t many of—this road was mostly used as the scenic route. Some travelers are into that sort of thing. No one stopped to see what was in the middle of it. They just passed through it as fast as they could and went onward to their final destinations.
I was in the middle of New Mexico, on the Great Plains. Low hills rolled in all directions. Huge mountains loomed in the distance. Billowing Indiangrass stretched out for miles. To the west, a herd of huge, shadowy objects moved like slow-rolling boulders. It was a herd of grazing buffalo. The highway and the police cruiser were the only signs of human existence for a few miles, with one exception.
Hovering over me, and all around me, were huge wind turbines. They spread out for a hundred thousand acres. They towered over everything at around five hundred feet high. The long blades whooshed and spun, like enormous helicopter rotors. They looked pretty new. My guess was less than five years old. Some were only months old, maybe. They were all well-maintained. I must’ve been surrounded by a giant wind farm. Some kind of multimillion dollar project to cheapen power for the state, as well as help the environment.
I was headed to Roswell, hunting for aliens—the little green men, not the migrants. It was a simple curiosity, one of those things where the stars aligned.
This morning, I stopped at the Four Corners Monument, a quadripoint where four states merge at a crossing with four perfect right angles. You can stand in two states at once, one foot in each. You can step from one state to the next and twice more, a total of four states. Crossing the borders of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico in a single second. I saw younger people trying to time each other to see who could traverse the four states the fastest. It was like a kids’ game. It was one I’d seen before. Only, that game is drawn on a street with chalk. There are squares and each player hops on one foot to the next square. The young people seem to enjoy it. I think it’s called Hopscotch.
I’d never been to the Four Corners before. That’s where I met a young couple who were on their way back to wherever they came from. They drove an old Bronco covered in alien and UFO bumper stickers. One sticker was of a UFO beaming a man up. It read: Get in Loser.
There was a mural painted all over the Bronco. It was like a collage of alien stuff. There were little green men, UFOs, and drawings of space. The couple smelled of marijuana. I was looking for a ride, which they offered me, but they were headed north, and I was headed southeast. Although, I could’ve changed my direction. I was headed down toward Texas for no particular reason. Like the wind hitting sails on a boat, I could change course. No problem.
We got to talking, and they told me all about how much fun they had doing an alien tourist thing down in Roswell, New Mexico. I asked if they had tried Area 51, in Nevada. There’s a small town there, not even sure if it’s a town, more like a settlement. The whole thing is built around the allure of Area 51. There’s an alien diner, alien museum, and a mysterious black mailbox where visitors can leave mail for the aliens. It’s not marked on any map. It’s a big black mailbox stuck on the side of the road. It’s easy to miss. They told me they had been to Las Vegas many times and visited all that stuff before. But this was their first time in Roswell.
I’m not a believer in aliens or past visits. But I also can’t rule it out either. This couple got me curious, but the thing that pushed me to decide to stop here was what happened this
It was at a gas station close to the state border that I got a ride from the woman who abandoned me several miles back down the highway. I passed through an abandoned town, with empty rundown buildings and one major intersection with a half of a stoplight dangling from a cable.
And that’s how I ended up here.
Roswell, New Mexico was more than twenty miles southwest, but less than fifty, from where I ended up. The driver who abandoned me had overshot Roswell. So I had to backtrack, which was what I was doing now. I hitched a ride with the mission of discovering aliens. Instead, I found two dead cops.
Two hours ago, the driver who picked me up had dropped me off without explanation. Right at that moment, she was blasting Sheryl Crow on the stereo. Ironic.
The driver’s decision had been a last-minute sort of thing, like she just changed her mind about me, suddenly. It was bad luck for me, because we were outside the realm of civilization, and it was after nightfall. In hindsight, she ditched me. Maybe she suddenly didn’t like the look of me. Or maybe it was something I said, or didn’t say. Either way, it’s fine. That’s part of the road, part of the rules of nomadic life. You take your chances, like Sheryl Crow said: Every day is a winding road.
You got that right, Sheryl.
So I walked a while and ended up here—lost. I saw the unmarked police cruiser’s faded red brake lights in the distance. I stepped off the main road to check it out. I thought maybe there was someone here who could help me out. Maybe someone who could give me a ride to a service station. I expected to discover some campers, or a couple of teenagers out here drinking and thinking they wouldn’t be bothered. Instead, I stumbled upon two dead cops. But they wouldn’t help me. They wouldn’t help anyone. Ever again.
The wind blew around me, turning the massive turbine blades. They droned with each rotation. The grass whooshed and rustled. Darkness surrounded me. Nighttime prairie sounds thrummed across the landscape. It was quiet, but not silent. Crickets chirped all around me. Coyotes, or wolves, howled far off in the distance. A rattlesnake rattled somewhere between the howls and where I stood, somewhere off in the tall grass. Nightbirds fluttered their wings overhead. Their flight path was below the massive blades. I couldn’t see them. Judging by the sounds, they were probably birds. But they could’ve been bats. I prayed they were owls.
Above, the moon was full. Heavy clouds streamed across the sky quickly, like time was fast-forwarding. There was still plenty of moonlight to see, clouds or no clouds. I could see the scene pretty well, even without a flashlight. The nearest city lights were faint on the horizon, but the darkness was soft enough and the moonlight bright enough to make the visibility pretty good.
I concentrated on the dead cops and examined the murder scene. Bullet holes honeycombed the cruiser’s hood. Thin plumes of smoke wafted out of the bullet holes, like parts of the engine were smoking. Hopefully, the thing wouldn’t catch fire. I double checked the engine was off. And it was.
The front tires were flat from bullet punctures. Water from the radiator leaked out under the car and soaked into the soil.
Gunsmoke lingered in the air. I smelled blood on the wind. The whole thing smelled like it went down not that long ago. Tire tracks were smeared back down the track. The killer peeled out before speeding away. He left behind all kinds of tire tracks, and probably, rubber from the tires for the forensic guys. There were clear skid marks all across the highway, which would be easier seen in daylight.
The cruiser’s headlamps were off, but the brake lights were lit up, tinging the hills behind the cruiser in a low red hue, like faded blood. The cruiser was in park, but the driver died with his foot on the brake pedal, and it stayed there after he was dead. Thus, the lingering brake lights.
I was the only living person around in the nighttime gloom. I looked around in all directions, and saw no one else. No signs of other humans. No traces of anyone else, except for the aggressive tire tracks the killer left behind, the looming city lights of the nearby town, and, of course, the giant rotating wind turbines.
I leaned over the open driver’s side window, careful not to touch the corpse. A coffee napkin from my pocket made a great tool to cover my fingerprints. With the napkin covering my hand, I reached into the window, grabbed a knob, and twisted it for the headlamps. They flickered on. Dust hazed through the beams. I leaned back out of the car and walked around to the cruiser’s nose, out several yards to the killer’s vehicle’s tire tracks.
I knelt and studied the tire tracks in the dirt. I was no expert on tires, but I knew the FBI could identify everything about the vehicle easily from these. I stood up and turned back to the police cruiser. I saw the dead cops as dark figures, staring back at me. They looked more like heaps of bones than humans.
I stayed where I was and scanned the ground between the killer’s vehicle and the police cruiser. Instantly, I realized I had missed the shell casings on the ground. But I saw them now. Luckily, I hadn’t stepped on them. Out in front of the cruiser’s headlamps, there were numerous shell casings. They littered the ground. I counted them up, as I had the bullet holes. I accounted for twenty-six, matching the number of bullet holes.
I crept closer to them, squatted, and looked, staying careful not to step on them. The killer’s footprints were right there with them, several feet away from me. His gun had spat out the bullet casings in the same direction, indicating one firearm used.
I inched closer again and looked at them. The bullet casings were all the same—all nine-millimeter. I recounted them and stared at each to be sure of the number and caliber. I got twenty-six again. Near the shooter’s footprints, I found one empty magazine. It was too dark to count the notches, which marked how many bullets each magazine held. The killer was sloppy to leave the magazine behind. Criminals forget to pick up their casings all the time, but a magazine? That was dumb.
The same gun fired them. There was one shooter. I dared not get any closer. I didn’t want my footprints mixing in with the shooter’s. So I stood up and retreated to the cruiser.
I got close to the dead cops, but touched nothing. Like my fingerprints, I didn’t want my DNA on any part of the crime scene. I didn’t want anyone to mistake me for having any part of it. I studied the dead cops from an observer’s distance. Their wounds appeared to be scattered kill shots. They weren’t random, but they weren’t professional either. It was just sloppy work. Plain and simple. The shooter knew how to fire a gun. Probably because they watched it on a bad prime time cop show. But they weren’t a trained professional. My guess was they had fired a weapon before, but had zero training. This was no assassination for pay. No professional hit. It was just a run-of-the-mill criminal homicide, except the victims were cops.
There are a few things that really piss me off. One is injustices, like when bad guys get away with bad things. The second is cop killers. The same goes for anyone who kills our military service members. Cop killers, and enemy combatants who kill service members, struck a vengeful nerve with me.
