The Protector (Jack Widow Book 17), page 1
THE PROTECTOR
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: B08PFTSTZM
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-40-5
Hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-41-2
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 The Protector 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.
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Published by Black Lion Media.
CONTENTS
Books 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
The Kill Promise
A Word from Scott
Get Scott Blade Book Club Exclusives
The Nomadvelist
BOOKS 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
The Kill Promise
1
Out of breath, I sprinted for almost a half-mile, straight out, chasing after a car that barely swerved to miss me. Driving fast, more than sixty-five miles an hour. The car nearly slammed into me. The force would’ve flung me into the night air, legs flailing about. It would’ve been a hard landing. At best, I would’ve ended up in the hospital with two broken legs from crashing into God-knows-what. At worst, the paramedics would’ve pronounced me dead at the scene. My head could’ve bounced off a desert rock and busted wide open, spilling out the contents like a split coconut.
Before the car nearly killed me, I walked on the highway shoulder, thumb out, in the middle of a beautiful autumn night. An endless blanket of stars canvased the sky. Hulking rock formations and mountains lingered in the distance. A breeze blew off the Arizona desert, chilly but not unpleasant. I welcomed the slight chill in the air. It was a nice change of pace from the blistering heat that swept across North America this last summer.
I tried to get a ride for hours without luck. Honestly, I didn’t expect a car to stop for me. Not out here. Even if I hadn’t been on this dark, quiet highway, the odds of getting a ride were against me. No one picks up hitchhikers anymore, not at night, not out here, and especially not ones who look like me. On a good day, I wasn’t the ideal candidate to offer a lift. I was unkempt on this night, as I was lately. It might be a phase I was going through where I just didn’t care how I looked. A two-week beard covered my face and the hair on my head was full and a little bushy. I looked like a caveman who was just thawed out of ice after a hundred-thousand-year nap. The wind blew my hair around like it was at war with it. Strands danced and billowed across my forehead, blotting over my eyes, slightly impairing my vision. But the strands didn’t stay still long enough to impair it enough for me to brush it out of my face.
I looked like the sketch artist rendering of the nightmare drifter who’d been killing drivers up and down some dark superhighway and dumping their bodies across state lines. If the FBI was involved in a manhunt for someone like that, they’d arrest me on sight, throw me in a cell, and close the case. No questions asked. And that’s only if they didn’t shoot me first.
Even if I hadn’t looked menacing, hitchhiking was still a dying enterprise. I was surprised I got as many rides as I had this far into the twenty-first century.
I heard of the good ole days of hitching for rides from two old timers who hung out together on an interstate cloverleaf back at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
They educated me on the ways of the hitchhiker, like older guys did to younger guys. They had that attitude that anyone younger than them knew absolutely nothing about anything and they knew absolutely everything about everything. I don’t consider myself young. Not anymore. I think that happens as we age. There comes a point where you think your youth is gone, until you meet someone decades older, and they think you’re a newborn baby. These two saw me like that. Apparently, they considered a former Navy SEAL and undercover NCIS agent hovering around forty to be young and inexperienced. They acted like it was a miracle that I could tie my shoes.
Some people thought that way. Others didn’t. Apparently, they did.
To these two guys, I was a greenhorn, a rookie, a new blood—someone who needed schooling. I’ve met a lot of interesting people ever since I started wandering around with no clear destination, but these two deserved to be on the most memorable people list.
They were two old guys, one white and one black. Between the two of them, they didn’t have a full mouth of teeth. Their faces were dirty, almost soot-covered like two ancient, old west California gold prospectors on their last dime and last shred of reality. They were dressed like California gold prospectors too, only they weren’t reclusive. They were friendly, as friendly as any other two old guys would be to a stranger.
They saw me and immediately invited me over to them. Pleasantries were exchanged and conversations took place as the sun descended in the sky, at which point, I said goodbye and hit the road again on my own. They offered to walk with me. I didn’t want to be rude, but I felt I had a better chance of scoring a ride with some daylight left—and without the toothless, crazy prospectors on my tail.
Rides, for me, were scarce enough, but nighttime was ten times scarcer. Getting a ride for me at night was like praying for rain in a years-long drought.
Most people didn’t pick up hitchhikers. At least that’s true in my case. Then again, maybe they just didn’t pick me up.
I’m what kids call a big dude—six foot four inches in height and two hundred and twenty-five pounds of muscle and bone. I was blessed with half-unknown, but good genetics. My mother was a small-town sheriff. She was tough, the toughest person I ever knew. But she was a tiny thing, meaning I must’ve gotten my ape-man genetics from my father. He was a drifter, like me, but I never knew him. And I rarely give him a second’s thought.
I’ve got massive arms, the size of caveman clubs, the kind used to crush the skulls of Wooly Mammoth and prehistoric big cats. My biceps are as big as cannonballs fired on the battlefield at Yorktown. And my hands are big, like bear paws, but with long fingers. Both of my arms are covered with sleeve tattoos. Some of which serve meanings for me. Some don’t.
People avoided me based on my appearance, which was okay by me ninety-nine percent of the time. I liked not being bothered. If people kept to themselves, I kept to myself. There’s always an exception to any rule. That exception for me was when I needed a ride.
But that’s how it went sometimes. Often people avoided me when I needed them, and were evasive when I didn’t.
Usually, I’m surprised w
I knew as the sun went down the odds of someone engaging in this trade with me diminished to nearly zero. In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, on a quiet Arizona highway, I was the last thing someone wanted to see. That goes for any quiet nighttime highway in America. Hardly anyone stops for me under these conditions. Obviously, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes people stop for me. It’s a matter of numbers. On any day, hundreds or thousands of cars will pass me by without a second glance. But in those numbers, there’s bound to be one person who’ll stop.
Statistics.
So, when I saw car headlights barreling straight at me on a quiet Arizona highway in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, I thought maybe it was going to stop and offer me a ride. I thought it was the exception to the rule. It was the one in a thousand. But I should’ve known better. My judgement was slightly impaired because I wanted a ride so badly. I wanted to sit in the front passenger seat of a car and get off my feet.
My legs ached and my feet throbbed from standing and walking for a couple of days straight. I haven’t stayed for more than a night in a single location in several days. I just felt like moving with no interest in staying anywhere. My shoulders stung from sleeping on the ground under a tree. Many miles back, and the night before, I was tired, and the only motel I found was at full occupancy. Desperate, I laid up under a tree off the highway, down a hill out of sight, and slept there. Why not? When I was a SEAL, my team and I slept in worse conditions, outdoors, in rocky terrain, and with enemy combatants hunting us all night. We slept in the cold, in the pouring rain, all while keeping one eye open in case the enemy stumbled upon our camp. Crashing under a tree in Arizona wasn’t the end of the world.
But I overestimated how tired I was and overslept the next morning and woke up with my shoulder hurting from laying on it. A large tree root had pressed against it all night. My body cramped up. It was bad for the first part of the morning. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was still sore.
Moments before I leapt out of the way from being plowed at sixty-five miles an hour by the car, I saw inside the vehicle. It was just a glance, but it was like slow motion, the way time slows when you’re being shot at. I couldn’t see the driver. I thought I saw two occupants. They looked to be scrambling for the wheel. There was no one in the backseat.
It looked like there were two people in the vehicle's front, fighting over control of the car, maybe? Perhaps the driver was fighting with a passenger, like a carjacking or something. Perhaps it was a friendly conversation turned bad. Conceivably, they fought because the passenger was an unwilling participant on their journey. Maybe it was a kidnapping gone wrong? Or perhaps the driver was victim to a bad hitchhiker, someone with malicious intent. Whatever the reason, I didn’t like almost being hit by a car. Maybe I should’ve let it go. But I wasn’t the kind of guy who let things like that go. Not after it almost hit me. Not after I had walked for hours. Not after I slept on the hard ground the night before.
I saw the car’s headlights coming at me. I stayed on the shoulder, watching it, thinking it was coming at me, thinking it was going to slow and stop as it neared me. But it didn’t. I leapt out of the way, diving off the shoulder and rolling away in the dirt. The car barreled past me and weaved from lane to lane. It dipped down over a hill, into a valley, and then back up another hill. It ramped up into the air at the apex. The tires came up off the ground and the car landed on the pavement. Sparks flew, and the suspension hissed, but the car kept going. It weaved from shoulder to shoulder, across the highway, until the taillights faded away into the blackness and the car was lost to sight.
I didn’t think the car would make it far. Not in the reckless state of driving that it was in. My fear was it would crash into a tree. And that’s exactly what it did.
2
The car’s make and model was a violet Ford Fusion.
The vehicle’s year I didn’t know. It looked less than ten years old, but older than five. Whether it was an LS or XL, I didn’t know, or even if it came in LS or XL. What I knew was that it crashed into a tree about fifty yards off the side of a forgotten section of Route 66. The engine coughed and spurted and choked like it was about to die. The headlights were still on. They were bright halogen bulbs. They lit up the dark road ahead, beyond the tree. No headlights approached from the opposite direction. Nothing approached from behind me. We were alone for miles. Minus the starlight and the occasional streetlight, the road was dark. The night was black. But I was used to the dark.
In the last four hours, I had walked in the dark. The last sign of civilization I had seen was a couple of hours ago. I had seen lights off the highway from a small town. I was in a rural part of Arizona, somewhere west of Flagstaff but east of California. The Grand Canyon was probably within a hundred miles of me. If it was daylight, I’d probably go visit it. I liked to do things like that on a whim. Too many people didn’t stop to enjoy things.
Today, too many people walk around with their eyes half on their phone screens and half on the road ahead. I had seen it in cities. I had seen the same in the small towns and the same in the medium-sized towns. The same on trains. The same at day. And the same at night.
I had seen people driving the same way. Maybe a little less occupied with their phones, but that had only been because the ones who were more occupied with their phones had lost their driving privileges. Probably. Or worse. They had lost their lives or limbs.
Either way, most people lived their lives the same way that they drove their cars or walked the city streets or small towns or medium towns—half distracted.
Most people were too busy to live. In too much of a rush to look and see what was around them. Often they’re too busy looking to see. Maybe I was getting lame, but I liked to stop and smell the roses. Whereas other people simply walked right over the roses, not even noticing them.
Maybe not everyone would agree with me. Not necessarily. But that’s the kind of thoughts that you get on the road, when you’re alone.
I was never one for meditation. However, walking from place to place without complications is like surfing. The sun beats down. The wind gusts. The trees wave. The desert sand blows. The mountain terrain hovered on the horizon. It all had a way of cleaning the mind, of making everything clear, of resetting the brain.
Speaking of sand, the wind blew sand and sediment off the desert and batted my face. I swept it off my cheeks and approached the rear of the crashed car. The engine idled and exhaust pooled behind it and rose into the brake lights, creating a dark red smoke.
The night sky was clear and starry. No moon that I could see. Probably dark somewhere hiding among the stars.
I walked to the car’s rear bumper, staying in the rearview mirror so that I could be seen by the driver. I didn’t want to frighten her. I figured the driver was a woman just because of the type of car. No kind of statistics told me that. It was just a guess. The car was more in the feminine category than the masculine. Although that meant nothing.
