Free Foreign and Domestic: A Get Reacher Novel by Scott Blade

he would be difficult, if not impossible, to find. Like father like son. It meant he’d be far away from emails and the Internet.
    But here Cameron was, a victim of time and chance. One thing leads to another. Cause and effect.
    Karen had asked him to leave. He’d caught a ride. The guy’s car had broken down. The rain had come in. And Cameron then stepped into the only café that had space for a customer, the only cafe that hadn’t asked him to leave because of his appearance—and it happened to be an Internet café. Now he sat at a computer he’d been forced to pay for, which had, in turn, convinced him not to waste his money and time there and to log on. And the high school he had gone to, not all that long ago, way back in Mississippi, had forced him to open an email account in the first place. And since he was forced to sit there and pay for Internet and use it, he might as well check the only email address he’d had from a lifetime ago. Well, maybe not a lifetime, but definitely a different lifetime ago.
    One thing led to another.
    Cameron put the mouse over the reply button and clicked it. He put his fingers to the keyboard and typed a short message: Will call today. He clicked the send button, and the computer made a swooshing noise like a reverse vacuum cleaner—and his email was off.
    Cameron wondered what information Weston had. He figured that, perhaps, he could scroll back through the older messages and find the answer, but what was the point in digging through older messages? They were technically things of the past, and Cameron didn’t like to sift through the past. What was the point in doing that? On the other hand, Jack Reacher was from a long-ago and unknown past—his past. Therefore, it was sometimes necessary to go backward in order to move forward.
    Chapter 13
    THE NEXT THING THAT CAMERON SET OUT TO DO after the rain stopped and he paid his tab at the Internet cafe was to find a pay phone. In the twenty-first century, this was not an easy task. Even in a major city like Seattle, pay phones weren’t that easy to come by, but Cameron asked around and ended up on what felt to him like a scavenger hunt, at least at first. Go here. Turn there. Look by that place. Search by this place. But in the end, he found a pay phone down by the fish market.
    As he stared at the pay phone, he felt something he couldn’t quite explain, a sense of déjà vu , like some sort of ghost stood over his shoulder. He felt like he’d been there before. He got that kind of feeling like he knew—not sensed, but knew —that he was meant to be at that pay phone.
    Strange , he thought.
    The pay phone was located across from a streetlight that had just turned red. He looked over at the idling cars and then examined an interesting coffee shop across the street. It had maroon paint and scarred wood. A chalkboard menu stood outside. Nothing was written on it because it was covered in rainwater, but Cameron imagined that it was a sign used to display the day’s specials for onlookers and passersby so they could decide to try the red cake or the mocha frappe with cherry drizzle or the pumpkin spice latte or whatever such nonsense they created to draw in today’s American coffee drinker.
    No one knew what the big deal about Seattle and coffee was, but Cameron imagined it had something to do with the bleeding-heart, poetic, artistic stigma the city carried, or maybe it was the fact that Starbucks had opened its first pilot store in Seattle. Either of these two options could’ve been a reason, or both, or neither. Whatever, Cameron didn’t care. What he liked about Seattle so far was that there was a coffee shop on every corner. What he didn’t like about Seattle was that, in his short stay, it had definitely lived up to the hype about rain. It rained a lot, but then again, Cameron had only been in the city for less than two hours.
    Cameron walked over to the pay phone and didn’t have to wait in line, which wasn’t a shock.