Reckoning Road: A Get Jack Reacher Short Story Read Online Free Page A

consumption culture. So why not consume?
    But I wasn’t in Cedar Corner for the coffee. In fact, I’d never even heard of the town until John Martin had nearly run me over with his car.
    Next, I did what I did a million times a day. I put one foot in front of the other and marched up the strip to the diner that lay ahead.
    Chapter 6
    THE THING ABOUT GOING INTO A SITUATION where you’re looking for suspects who fit squarely into the bad guy column, those seeking to do grave harm to a witness that they haven’t seen in twenty years, is that when you’re in a small town diner just after the dinner rush is over, the first suspicious person in sight is you.
    When I walked into Ceanna’s Diner, two things stumped me. The first was that I was way off base on the name. And the second was that the room had only two full tables, two patrons sitting at a long, white counter, and a cook, a dishwasher, and two more waitresses.
    The first waitress wasn’t a waitress but a waiter—a young black guy probably younger than me. He had steel wire glasses and a look on his face like this was his first night working. There were patrons sitting in his section with angry looks on their faces like they had been waiting for their change or their checks or they hadn’t even gotten their food yet. But it seemed like they had already eaten because most people would’ve just gotten up out of their seats and walked out. Of course, this was a small town, so where else would they be going to? I guessed they could go to the coffee shop, which probably had a limited menu. Maybe it had some food on it, but most coffee shops I’d been in had only cold food. No grill. No selection of home-cooked meals. And families and patrons in small towns often liked to go out, but ironically, they also wanted home-cooked meals, just not at home.
    So I figured that the patrons had already eaten, and they were now waiting with decreasing patience for their bills. Which was good for me because that meant that they would get up and pay their checks and walk out soon enough. And that’d leave me with only two suspects. The guys at the counter.
    But I knew instantly that they were no good for two reasons. The first reason was that the waitress behind the counter had talked to both of them and called them by their first names and smiled at them like she probably had every night for her whole life, which hadn’t been that long. And that was the other reason why I knew these guys weren’t my suspects—because the waitress behind the counter wasn’t Kara. Not the Kara that John Martin had requested for me to help.
    She wasn’t Kara, his witness from twenty years ago, because she was too young. The girl behind the counter had that self-confidence like she’d worked there for years, but those years must’ve all been teenage ones because she wasn’t even twenty years old. No way.
    I walked toward the counter and looked around and the girl who wasn’t old enough to be Kara walked over to me with a smile on her face. She was an attractive woman. Nice smile. Blond hair that was shaved on one side, a style I’d seen before. And I kind of liked it. It was rebellious yet not overboard.
    She had a tattoo that took up the length of the bottom part of her forearm. It was writing. Some kind of cursive font that I couldn’t read because she moved her arms too much. Like maybe she couldn’t keep them still, which made sense because she was at work.
    Tattoos weren’t meant for others even though they were displayed to others, to external eyes. They were meant for the wearer, that’s what I thought. Like clothes. You go out. You shop around. And you pick clothes you like. And you wear them. Sometimes they could be to impress others. And sometimes they could be meant for certain occasions. But that was where tattoos differed. They were for all occasions—even ones they weren’t meant to be in. That was the point of tattoos. They weren’t for someone else, not the good ones.