Gone

CHAPTER 87

Neves was in his underwear, lying on his back at the bottom of an empty, dated six-person hot tub. He had a puffy black eye and was gagged with tape. He was also handcuffed at the ankles and the wrists, and he was wearing a forty-pound weight vest that pinned him down flat onto the floor of the tub.

When I saw Neves lying there, scared and helpless in his underwear, I felt my resolve waver for a second. Gangbanger or not, Neves was a man. A man we’d kidnapped. A man we were about to extract information from by force, if necessary. Staring down at him where he lay shaking, I felt wrong, sick inside.

Then I remembered that somewhere right now, Perrine had my family, my kids, and I steeled myself with a long, deep breath.

Diaz lifted another vest from a corner and stepped into the tub. There was a ripping sound as he tightened up the Velcro straps of the second vest around Neves’s lower legs.

Diaz plugged the drain before he stepped out of the tub and sat on its edge. Bassman flicked open a butterfly knife and slid the blade in between the tape and the man’s mouth. When he cut the tape away, a thin string of blood flowed from a slit in Neves’s lip.

“Dang. Nicked you there, Tomás. My bad,” Bassman said as he violently tore the rest of the tape off Neves’s face.

Neves’s chest heaved as fresh tears sprouted in his light-brown eyes.

“Please,” he said between hacked-off sobs. “Please. My wife, man. Please. She’s pregnant, man. Two months. Don’t hurt her like that. Don’t give her the monster. The baby get it, too.”

When I heard the amount of genuine pain and fear in Neves’s voice for the second time, I felt something sway unsteadily inside me. I squeezed my hands into fists, willing myself to ignore him. I had no other choice.

“Hey, don’t worry so much,” Bassman said, pinching the gangbanger’s raw, red cheek from the other side of the tub. “I hear they’re doing amazing things on the AIDS front these days. Making some real medical break-throughs.”

Neves closed his eyes, his bloody lip quivering as he cried.

“OK, OK, OK!” he suddenly yelled. “You win! What do you want? Get me a cell phone. I’ll give you everything I have. I got eighteen kilos at a safe house right now. Eighteen. You can have everything.”

“We don’t want everything. We want Perrine. Where is he?” I said.

Neves did some more flopping around and moaning.

“Shit, shit,” he said.

“You in the shit, all right, Tomás,” Bassman said, loudly palming Neves’s head. He banged it back loudly against the floor of the hot tub. “You heard of quicksand? Well, you just stepped in quickshit.”

“He’s in Mexico, OK? He was here in LA. We set up some houses for him, but he’s gone now. I swear to God. Perrine went back to Mexico early this morning. One of my guys got him over the border.”

“To where?!” I said. “Where did he go?!”

“I don’t know. You think he’d tell me? I don’t know.”

“Wrong answer,” Diaz said, squealing open the tub’s tap full blast.

“No! It’s true! It’s true!” Neves yelled out over the water splattering loudly off the side of his face.

We stood there as Neves screamed, lying flat on his back, and the water rose. In thirty seconds, it was up to his earlobes. After a minute, the water had reached his cheeks. He strained his neck, trying to raise himself up. Covered in the segmented weight vests, he looked like an overturned turtle trying to pull himself unsuccessfully out of his shell.

“He went to his summer place near Mexico City,” Neves finally said, sputtering, the water now at his lips. “I’ll tell you exactly where on the map. Just turn it off! Turn it — ”

Diaz put a hand to my chest as I reached in to grab the criminal who was screaming bubbles now under the rushing water.

“Give him a second, Mike,” Diaz said. “He needs to see how serious we are.”

“Exactly,” Bassman said, taking out a smartphone and thumbing it. “Let this guy soak his weary bones for a minute in peace, Mike. Can’t you see he’s had a hard day?”