B01M7O5JG6 EBOK Read online

  “Sorry to ask. I was just curious.”

  “Are you for it?”

  “No way. I never even thought about something like that until yesterday. I met some guy who supported it. He was amazed that I never even heard of it.”

  Leon looked at him with a face that seemed to ask, “How dumb are you?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “You didn’t know about the wall?”

  “No.”

  “What have you been living under, a rock or something?”

  “No rock. Just don’t watch much TV.”

  “You don’t have to watch TV to know about the wall. One of the presidential guys has been talking about it for fifteen months.”

  Widow shrugged.

  “You do know about the election, right?”

  He shrugged again.

  “How the hell do you not know about the election?”

  “I know about it.”

  Leon leaned forward in her seat over the console and asked, “Widow, did you just learn about the election after this guy asked you about the wall?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh my god! You do live under a rock.”

  “Not under a rock. I just don’t pay attention to stuff like that.”

  Leon returned back to her upright position in the driver seat. Widow could see the muscles in her arms twitching and her breasts shudder just slightly underneath her body armor.

  Leon said, “You are a strange man.”

  He said, “I know.”

  “I was thinking about giving you my number too.”

  “I’d like that. I’d call you for sure.”

  “I just don’t know how it’d work. You don’t live anywhere. Do you even have a phone?”

  “I’d get one to call you.”

  Leon thought for a moment, and Jake stirred but didn’t make any noise. He just watched her demeanor like every decision he ever made required her say-so.

  Leon said, “Good night, Widow. I hope you find the person you’re looking for.”

  He nodded and said, “You be safe out there.” And he stood back and shut the door, not slamming it, but pushing it closed like he was thirteen years old again and trying to sneak out of his mother’s house.

  Widow stepped away from the Tahoe and over to the curb to the expensive restaurant and watched as Agent Leon and Jake pulled away and drove down the street. He watched until the Tahoe was lost to sight. And then he headed to the diner.

  A WHITE DODGE CHARGER pulled into the parking lot of the expensive restaurant, and the two people inside watched as Widow walked to the small diner across the street.

  CHAPTER 8

  JACK WIDOW sat at a table that was free nearest the back wall. Behind him was a group of Texas teenagers—one girl and three boys. They sat and drank coffee and tea and laughed and horsed around. He tuned them out and gave his attention to his coffee and meal.

  He ordered eggs and chicken, which seemed barbaric if one gave it too much thought, like eating a mother and her children. But he liked chicken and needed the protein because he really was starving. He ate everything naked, no ketchup or additives, and slid the plate to the side and gazed around the diner.

  He saw a priest sitting in one corner. The guy wore a brown coat over his priest’s attire. He had the white collar and black shirt and everything. The weather was hot outside, but he still wore that coat. In his defense, it was cold inside the diner. The family who owned it had the air conditioner running on full blast. Even Widow had to roll his sleeves down because it was like the Arctic in there.

  Over near the front door was an attractive woman who sat alone. She had been there as long as Widow had, came in right after he did. She had spent most of the time sifting through a day-old newspaper and the second half of the last hour playing on her phone. Widow knew the paper was old, but not because he could see the date on it. He was way too far away for that. His eyes weren’t that good. He knew it was a day old because he had seen the same issue of the Washington Post back on the newsstand in the gas station in Vegas.

  The cover was some face of a politician. He guessed one of the presidential candidates because it wasn’t the current president. Leon had asked if he lived under a rock, which he didn’t, but perhaps he wasn’t as up to date on current events as he should have been. Still, he knew the face of the current US president. The guy had been president for eight years.

  Widow looked over to his right and saw an off-duty waitress. She was young and Mexican, just like the rest of the family. She had her waitress uniform on, but it was underneath a coat that was far too big for her, and she had a pack of cigarettes laid out in front of her, but she wasn’t smoking. The place was nonsmoking, which was probably a city ordinance. Plenty of cities in America had started to do that. They had made it illegal to smoke in restaurants. Widow figured if it was showing up in Texas, then it had gotten everywhere.

  He didn’t think one way or the other about it. He didn’t agree with the government butting in about a person’s right to smoke, but he didn’t mind not having that smoky smell when he was eating food. Some social issues left him at an impasse as to what side he was on.

  The thing that interested him about the off-duty waitress was that she was playing around on a tablet. He figured she must have Wi-Fi on it, and she must have the code.

  He called over to his waitress, who looked like she was the other one’s older sister. She came over and started to take his empty plate.

  He said, “Is that your sister?”

  “Cousin,” the waitress said.

  “Can you ask her a question for me?”

  The waitress paused and gave him an accusatory look. She said, “She’s underage, sir.”

  “What? No, no, I’m not like that.”

  The waitress said, “Oh. Sorry.”

  “I want you to ask her if I can borrow her tablet.”

  The waitress looked back at her cousin and then at Widow. She said, “What for?”

  “Tell her I just want to look something up. Tell her I’ll only be a moment.”

  “What’s in it for her?”

  Negotiation. A good sign. Strangers are particularly funny with handing out their property to someone they don’t know. Especially if that property is an expensive device and they keep their own private information on it. It also doesn’t help if the stranger looks like Widow.

  He said, “Tell her I’ll tip her for it. I’ll tip you both. I only want five minutes.”

  “You’ll tip us both?”

  “You got it.”

  “How much?”

  Widow thought for a moment, and then he said, “Five bucks. Each.”

  “Five? Each?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’ll ask her,” she said, and she left with the empty dishes. She went into the kitchen to drop the plates off at the dishwasher’s station, and Widow wondered if that was run by another member of the family. He wondered how they determined who got picked for that job. Maybe there was a younger brother who had to do it as a rite of passage, or maybe there was an uncle no one liked. Or maybe they simply hired out for that particular job.

  The waitress walked back into the dining room and passed by the teenagers, who were trying to flag her down. It looked as if they were finished and needed to pay their respective checks. The waitress weaved in and out of the tables and over to her cousin. She leaned down and whispered to her, and they looked over at Widow. He waved back at them.

  A moment later, both waitresses walked over to him, and the cousin plopped herself down across from him in the seat.

  “You want to use my tablet?”

  “I do. It’s important.”

  “For ten bucks? Five each?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. But I stay here with you.”

  “No problem. I only need a few minutes with it.”

  She nodded and handed it over to him, and the on-duty waitress returned to her job.

  “You got internet, right?” />
  “Of course.”

  Widow handed it back to her and said, “Why don’t you do it? You know how to use that thing better than I do.”

  He was lying because he’d had extensive training and had to use all sorts of devices like a tablet in the Navy. But he figured that to her, he was just an old guy, and he’d been out of the military life for some years now.

  She took the tablet back and asked, “What are we looking up?”

  “I need to find someone.”

  She said, “Oh, like a criminal? Or a missing person?”

  He nodded.

  “Are you a cop?”

  He thought back to Leon’s impression of him. He said, “Ex-cop. I’m a bounty hunter. Just trying to return a bail jumper back to court.”

  She nodded and accepted that claim. She said, “Okay. We can just google the name and see what pops up.”

  “Sounds good. Google James Hood.”

  She looked down at the touch screen and slid her finger across it, and then she typed on a keyboard on the screen.

  Widow waited and sipped the last drop of his coffee.

  She said, “If he’s from Texas, then here he is.”

  She turned the device around and showed it to Widow. He leaned forward and saw the face of James Hood staring back at him.

  THEY WERE looking at Hood’s Facebook profile, which was old. It had had no activity for more than two years.

  “What do you want to look at?”

  “Check out his photos. I need to see if he has a little girl.”

  “Is he a bad guy or something? He looks like a nice guy to me.”

  “I don’t know if he’s bad. We recover a lot of people who are good.”

  She ignored him, turned the tablet back to herself, and jumped ahead and started to sift through his profile photos. She said, “Well, he doesn’t have a lot of photos. Only three. And he’s married, I think.”

  She flipped the tablet again like it was on a swivel, and she showed him full-screen photos. The first was Hood alone, the third was the exact same photo the grandmother had had. It was Lucy and Jemma, together. The way it should be.

  Widow had to get her back.

  He said, “That’s the right guy. Thank you.”

  “That’s it? You don’t need to see anymore?”

  “No. I just wanted to see his face.”

  “You don’t have a photo of him?”

  Widow shrugged and said, “I forgot it.”

  “Do you want me to send it to you? I can send it to your phone?”

  “No thanks. I don’t have a phone.”

  She said, “Oh, I guess that’s why you needed to see my tablet.” But she said it with a kind of snarky tone like she was really thinking that Widow was ancient.

  He had had his sleeves pulled all the way down, but on his left hand, past the wrist but not quite to the knuckles, his sleeve tattoos were exposed.

  She studied them like she had never seen them before on a man. And her snarkiness disappeared. She said, “Cool tattoos.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you have more?”

  He nodded.

  She remained quiet for a long moment, and then she asked, “Can I see them?”

  Widow reached into his front pocket, felt past his passport, and jerked some folded cash money out of his pocket. He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her. He said, “Split that with your cousin.”

  She took it and said, “Thanks.”

  He calculated in his head and from memory the total amount he owed for the chicken breast, the scrambled eggs, and the two cups of coffee he drank, and he guessed what the state tax was. He rounded up to ten percent, which seemed high to him, but it might’ve been true. After all, Texas was one of the richer states. He put the money down on the table and added a tip to it.

  He said, “Thank you for your help. Tell your family this is a great diner.”

  He got up from the table and walked out.

  The young waitress remained seated and shrugged. She guessed he didn’t want to talk about his tattoos.

  WIDOW WALKED to the Sheraton Hotel to try and book a room for the night. Judging by Hood’s photos and many other assumptions about fathers that are more reliable truths than assumptions, he figured Jemma was in no immediate danger. At this point, he suspected the chances were high that this was a situation of a father who’d gotten out of prison and stolen his own daughter so they could start a new life together someplace else.

  Widow wasn’t certain, and he knew that, but he also had no evidence that Hood intended to cause harm to his daughter. From the look of things, the guy had done his time and gotten out of prison. His wife was dying. Maybe he was concerned about his daughter’s wellbeing, and maybe he knew his mother would never allow him to see her. Widow couldn’t be sure about any of it.

  Then again, why didn’t Hood try to make contact and simply ask? Claire had made it seem like her son was just a guy who made a lot of mistakes but wasn’t evil. Still, Widow didn’t know why he would risk abducting his daughter and leaving so fast. The guy was probably on parole, which meant he was under restrictions to check in with his parole officers and so on. Of course, the limitation might’ve been for him to stay in the state of Texas, which was a big place.

  Maybe Hood had planned to call his mother when he reached Romanth and tell her everything was fine and beg her forgiveness. The whole situation could’ve been a simple fix. However, Claire seemed adamant about trying to rescue Jemma. In fact, she had died trying to get her back. Therefore, Widow had to rethink his earlier assumption because it made no sense. There must’ve been something dangerous about Hood having the girl because Claire felt it necessary to go after them on her own. She didn’t tell the cops, which Widow understood, but she also didn’t bring anyone with her. She came alone.

  Widow turned a corner onto a four-lane road that was the next block over from the Sheraton. The road was empty of moving cars. He could see in both directions for a good six blocks and several stoplights, and there was no traffic.

  Just then, a pair of headlights pulled out from a street up ahead and turned toward him, slow. The lights pulled up close to him. And stopped.

  Widow’s natural survival instincts set in because a pair of headlights stopping out in front of you on a dead street at night was almost always bad, or at least suspicious.

  The car stopped twenty feet in front of him, and both of the front doors jacked open. Two people jumped out. The passenger was a big guy in a suit and tie, about his size. The driver was harder to see. The lights behind her shone around her silhouette, and that was how he determined it was a woman. She was small in size but curvy enough to be unmistakably female.

  The woman said, “Freeze!”

  Widow couldn’t see them in great detail because the headlights were on bright and blinding him, but he knew by their approach and stance, and, of course, the word freeze, that they were holding guns and pointing them straight at him.

  CHAPTER 9

  WIDOW LEARNED two important lessons years ago. First, never run from the police. Always obey them. Especially if they have a gun pointed at you. The second lesson was never to trust people who pointed guns at you.

  He lifted his hands straight up into the air and said, “Guys, I’m frozen.”

  The woman said, “Good. Stay there.”

  The man approached at a steady speed but a little hesitantly, like he was approaching a tiger that had escaped from the zoo.

  “Who are you guys?”

  “FBI,” said the woman.

  “Badges?” Widow asked.

  “We got the guns here!” the man said.

  The woman said, “First we need to restrain you and check for weapons.”

  “No one is restraining me. No way,” Widow said. He didn’t shout it or reply with severe rebellion in his voice. He simply stated it as fact, which it was. He had been arrested many times. He knew the procedure. He knew the players in this space. He understood what was
real. These two had an air of deception about them. Which didn’t mean they weren’t law enforcement, but FBI? No way.

  “We’re giving the orders here!” the man said.

  “We’ll show you badges after,” the woman said.

  Widow stayed quiet. He waited.

  The guy stepped closer. He moved into the glare of the headlights and stood about four feet from Widow. He shouted, “Turn around!”

  Now Widow had more evidence that they weren’t FBI. The guy had a Colt Anaconda, which was a big Dirty Harry gun but not the same model. Old Clint used the Smith and Wesson Model 29, but both used big .44 Magnum cartridges. As far as power, they weren’t much different. Only gun nuts would argue the differences. Both of them would take a man’s head off, and Widow knew it. This wasn’t a common weapon in law enforcement, and by not common, Widow figured not at all was more accurate. The Colt Anaconda was a beast. It fired bullets that didn’t just blow a hole through something—they removed that something. They made that something not something.

  In fact, Widow couldn’t imagine any department anywhere allowing any guy to carry it. Widow knew for a fact it wasn’t standard issue by the FBI. It was possible to use one’s own firearm, with approval, but Widow was fairly certain the FBI wasn’t one of the agencies that had this policy. Of course, he could’ve been wrong, but he doubted it.

  Widow started to pivot like he was going to comply with the demand. He had been an undercover cop of sorts, and he knew how to deceive the enemy. He had learned all of the methods and had even invented some. He slumped his shoulders in an “I surrender” pose and started to turn.

  Looking visibly relaxed, he pivoted on his right foot, toes out, and then he swung out, hard. He jacked to the left, out of the line of fire, in one quick movement. The guy didn’t fire, which told Widow he wasn’t a cop and wanted him alive. A cop or FBI or whoever would have fired in self-defense.

  Widow used the landing on his left foot and his momentum to fire a quick disarm move that he’d learned in the SEALs.

  The guy was right-handed and pointed the Colt Anaconda with both hands. His right-hand index finger was in the trigger housing. His left hand gripped lower. Which makes for a harder disarm. Which is one reason why professionals hold their gun with both hands. But there were still options available, and Widow knew them all. He expected the guy knew some as well.