no expert on US Marshals, but I knew they were law enforcement officials, and like all law enforcement officials and soldiers, they lived in a brotherhood. And a brotherhood carried with it a code of honor.
I was unknown to my father—a guy named Jack Reacher, an Army man. My mother had known me, however. She had been a Marine and a cop, so I was all too familiar with the brotherhoods and the codes of honor among them.
I was on the road with no particular place to go, looking for a man I might never find, but I figured one thing I could find was this woman and her daughter. I could find them for John Martin and warn them to get out.
Chapter 5
TWENTY YEARS WAS A LONG TIME. And that was what John Martin had said. Therefore, I assumed he was talking about Kara and her daughter. In which case, Kara would be over forty, probably, and her daughter would be older than me or my age at a minimum, and maybe well into adulthood.
I couldn’t be sure because I knew nothing about the case John Martin was talking about, and I knew nothing about the good guys and nothing about the bad guys. All I knew for sure was that something had forced him to drive all night down Route 66, alone and not in the best of health. My guess was that he had known about his heart condition but that he was obsessed with Kara’s protection for some unknown reason. Perhaps she was that one case that had haunted him even after he retired, or perhaps he had become personally involved with her and her daughter. Perhaps he felt a sense of responsibility for their well-being. Perhaps it was more than professional to him. In some way, it was personal.
I could only guess because at that moment there were only two certainties about John Martin. One was that he wasn’t going to be able to help anybody, not tonight, and not for a while. The second was that John Martin had no idea who to trust.
One of the primary functions of the US Marshals Service was to protect witnesses to major crimes. Witnesses whose lives were often in grave danger. The US Marshals Service was tasked with overseeing the witness relocation and protection programs.
From the circumstances of John Martin’s current predicament and last words to me, I could only assume he had been heading to Cedar Corner to warn a witness from a fifteen-year-old case that she and her daughter were in jeopardy. Somehow, Kara and her daughter had been made by the bad guys. And so John Martin had taken himself out of retirement, told no one of where he was going, and hit the road toward Kara’s last known residence.
I presumed that he told no one because it would’ve been ten times easier for a retired US marshal to pick up the phone and call the local field office and warn them of his fears. And the local office was probably in Albuquerque, which wasn’t that far up the highway. Certainly, it was a lot closer than he was, and the agents there were younger and better suited for this sort of thing. So why not let them handle it?
Easy .
He trusted no one.
Just as I, being an outsider, trusted no one.
The ambulance pulled into the town of Cedar Corner, which was when I questioned whether or not I should’ve thought of it as a town. It looked more like a nook than a corner. It was tiny. There was, surprisingly, one three-story building, which was the federal building the paramedic had spoken of. There was a gas station, a McDonald’s that was closing its doors and turning off its sign as we passed, about a dozen other buildings, a Walmart Super Store that barely qualified as super, and finally, off at the end of the main street, there was an all-night diner.
The ambulance pulled into the federal building parking lot. There was no overhang like most emergency rooms had. No clear markings except a pitiful blue and white sign with fading bulbs in it.
I waited until the ambulance stopped and the driver slid the gear into park and stepped out of the door. Then I reached back and undid the latch to the rear