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

more to learn from Jack. Every day Cameron spent on the road searching for him, he learned something new.
    Cameron’s thoughts returned to the present. He searched again through the iPad menu screen, but he couldn’t find plain black coffee anywhere. So he pressed the button that said “Call Attendant.”
    A moment later, a young black woman came over to him. She had a pleasant and genuinely friendly look about her. Her hair was a thick, curly heap that rose a few inches above her head. She had a bright smile and two different colored eyes that were obviously contacts. This had been new to Cameron when he was back in Mississippi, but not now. Since then, he had seen plenty of fashion choices and a plethora of accessories that people wore, so this contacts thing didn’t seem unusual to him. Not anymore.
    He had flown out of Seattle after spending only a night there. In that one night, he’d seen plenty of weird things. One guy he’d seen in the airport had a Mohawk, dyed pink with blue streaks, and he’d had the most horrible piercings through his cheeks. Cameron believed they were called cheek windows . By far, that had been the weirdest thing he had seen in his life as far as fashion statements went.
    The coffee attendant’s contacts were timid compared to the guy with the cheek windows .
    The attendant asked, “Yes, sir. What can I get ya?”
    Cameron smiled and said, “Coffee. No sugar. No milk. Please.”
    The girl smiled back and said, “I’m sorry. We don’t carry regular coffee. Want an espresso?”
    “A coffee bar that doesn’t have plain coffee?”
    “I’m sorry. But that’s what we got.”
    “The world has changed. When a coffee bar doesn’t have coffee.”
    The girl stared back at him in confusion but stayed quiet.
    Cameron shook his head as if to say, “Never mind,” but instead he said, “How about an Americano? That’s pretty close to a regular coffee. Right?”
    He said that like he knew exactly what an Americano was, but the truth was that even though he had spent one night in Seattle, the coffee hub of the world, before leaving on an 11:35 am flight, he actually had no idea what the hell an Americano was. But he had seen them before, and he believed it was the closest thing to a regular coffee he was going to get from a fancy, chromed coffee bar in the middle of an airport he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be in.
    The attendant left and returned shortly with a little wheat-colored cup on a little wheat-colored saucer. She placed it down in front of Cameron and asked, “Sweetener?”
    “No sugar.”
    She said, “Not sugar. Sweetener.”
    “What the hell is the difference?”
    “Sweetener isn’t bad for you.”
    He said, “Isn’t that stuff supposed to cause cancer or something?”
    “Don’t believe all that.”
    He shook his head and said, “Black.”
    She nodded.
    He asked, “How much?”
    He pulled cash money out of his front pants pocket.
    She waved it off and said, “You pay on the iPad.”
    Cameron stayed quiet.
    “With your credit card. We don’t do cash.”
    Cameron said, “Okay.”
    Then she said, “Or you can use your PayPal.”
    Cameron smiled. He knew what PayPal was, but he didn’t have a PayPal account. It made him smile because he suddenly imagined Jack Reacher sitting there instead of him. More than likely, Jack wouldn’t have known what the hell PayPal was. He’d probably stare back at the waitress like she was an alien from another planet. To him, she might as well have said, “We only take intergalactic noodles.”
    Cameron put the money back into his pocket and pulled out his debit card. The debit card was attached to a checking account with money that his mother had left for him. It was his inheritance. When she died, she’d left her house in Carter Crossing to him and a bank account with her life savings. The lawyer, a guy named Chip Weston, had sold the house and put the profits and savings into a checking account in Cameron’s name. It