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

If there had been even one person using the phone, Cameron would’ve been surprised. He recalled seeing old movies where people waited in line forever to use a pay phone, but those days were long gone. Even the days when people didn’t have cell phones were almost before he was born. This made seeing a pay phone for Cameron like seeing a relic from another time.
    A smile flickered across his face as he thought of his father using pay phones. Then he wondered if his father had used this pay phone. According to some study or article he had read, America had less than 500,000 pay phones left—and that was something he had read more than five years ago, probably dated information by now. Now the number was probably less than 450,000. Maybe even much less, but Cameron wasn’t sure about the exact number of pay phones, and he remembered numbers and facts pretty well when he paid attention.
    If his father had been in Seattle and had needed to use a pay phone for some reason, then perhaps he had also been directed to the fish market, and maybe he had used this particular pay phone.
    This thought made Cameron smile.
    He reached into his pocket and pulled out five quarters and slipped them into the pay phone coin slot. He figured that Mississippi was a long distance number from Seattle and it would cost a dollar and a quarter, which was what it had cost in Mississippi to call long distance a long time ago, but he wasn’t sure if there was a difference nowadays or not. He hadn’t used a pay phone in a long time. However, taking inflation and deflation and time out of the equation, he believed $1.25 was the correct price because pay phones were no longer used for profit, not really. Cameron had no idea why the phone companies that controlled them kept them around.
    He heard the change slide into the phone and stop dead, and then he heard a dial tone from the receiver. He pulled up the number from his memory and dialed it. He hoped that Weston hadn’t moved offices or changed his phone number. He hit the last digit with his index finger and waited.
    Cameron looked across the street at the coffee shop again and then to the sky. By the looks of the clouds, it might start raining, or it might clear up—there was really no way of predicting it.
    The phone whirred and buzzed silently like it was trying to go through different towers or wires or however pay phones worked, Cameron wasn’t sure. Then it rang. A distant kind of ring. Then a click. Another ring. And a voice.
    Weston sounded a little husky, like he had fallen asleep and was answering the phone straight from a deep nap.
    “This is Chip Weston.”
    “It’s Cameron.”
    “Yes,” Weston cleared his throat and said, “Yeah. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
    Cameron stayed quiet.
    “I got a call about you.”
    “A call?”
    “I haven’t been looking for your dad or anything. What I mean to say is that I didn’t go around searching for him after your mother passed.”
    Cameron asked, “Who called you?”
    He swallowed, and then he said, “The United States Secret Service.”
    Cameron looked around the street and wondered why Weston had announced it in that way.
    Probably.
    A truck pulled up along the side of a building in his view and waited. The passenger got out and walked into a storefront. The engine ran idle, and exhaust pooled out of the back pipe.
    Cameron arched a brow and asked, “What about exactly?”
    “They’re looking for Jack. They tracked your mom down—I guess because she’d been searching through so many case files across the country for so many years. For some reason, it makes a difference to them now.
    “I told ’em that she was dead, but that didn’t seem to matter to them. The agent said that she had tripped a flag in her relentless searches.”
    “So what? They’re only now asking about it?”
    “I’m not sure why. But anyway, I told them I represented her estate. And about you.”
    Cameron stayed quiet, processed the