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

wasn’t much, but it was a lot for an eighteen-year-old. He had made it last a lot longer than most teenagers would have. He still had plenty of the money left. Plenty for a nineteen-year-old at least.
    Chapter 11
    TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AGO, CAMERON HAD BEEN in Seattle, wanting desperately to go to a coffee shop and sit down for a spell—not because of his addiction to coffee but because of the rain.
    He had been walking the entire morning and was coming into the city. No one had stopped for him. Seattle was known for many things other than its coffee obsession—music, Kurt Cobain, Microsoft, the Space Needle, and the rain.
    It rained and rained on him while he crossed over Mercer Island along the I-90 expressway. As he crossed over the bridge, the rain pelted him to the point that he entertained the idea it held a grudge against him. It was so hard that at one point he actually feared he might get swept over the railing and into the waters of Lake Washington. And even then he might not get as wet as he had been while walking in the rain.
    Cameron didn’t like to swim. In fact, he hated it. He had never been much of a swimmer. He could do it, but he was a far cry from winning any gold medals. The last time he had gone swimming was in a lake way back in Mississippi. It wasn’t something he’d wanted to do, and it certainly hadn’t been for fun. He had jumped from a plane and landed in Jarvis Lake. He still remembered the water current sucking him and pulling him under. The terrifying feeling of the water filling his mouth and throat. The cold water rushing through his lungs. This wasn’t an experience Cameron wished to reenact. No way. He was not a fan of water.
    And he certainly didn’t want to relive the fiery ball that had whipped out of an explosion far above him from a seaplane. Nor did he want to relive the death of a friendly old guy he had liked immensely. Cameron thought of Hank and Link, the border Collie. He wasn’t the kind of guy who carried regrets. It wasn’t in his DNA. Not like most other people.
    Regret killed.
    Tramping through the hard rain was no time to think about the past, so he shook off the memories and soldiered on.
    When he finally arrived in the city, he had to find a place to go. The rain had hammered him for the better part of an hour. Cameron figured that it was best to get indoors—fast—and dry off before he caught cold or got pneumonia or worse. He walked and searched for a coffee shop or a small diner or a café or a restaurant or a bar or some place to go in and sit down, but Seattle wasn’t a forgiving city. Not in his experience so far. No one took pity on him just because he had been caught in the rain, no matter how badly he was drenched or how brutally it had thrashed him. The people here lived their lives in the rain. Everyone had been caught in the relentless, hammering rain, and far more than their fair share. So why would they help a drifter? That’d be like a native of the Sahara Desert giving him water. What for? He was the one who’d come to the desert in the first place. He should’ve been prepared.
    All the coffee shops and diners and cafés that Cameron came across had customer-only policies written in bold letters on signs stuck to the insides of their front windows, which meant that no one could wander in off the street and stand around and loiter. At least that was his experience on his first several attempts to do just that to get dry.
    Cameron hadn’t intended to loiter, but it made no difference because every place that he entered was crowded. Wall-to-wall. Not an empty space or a booth or table or even counter space where he could stand. Apparently, everyone was trying to do the same as he.
    No way was he going to find a seat. He gave up trying at a Starbucks and came across a knockoff called Coffeebucks. Through the window, Cameron saw that the place even had the same kind of decor as a Starbucks—dark wood and lowlighting in every corner. He went in