Hostage

14

Vaughan stared into the barrel of her own pistol, expecting Sozinho to pull the trigger any second. She thought about her mother and her father and her life as a little girl. Playing hopscotch and riding a bicycle and pretty shoes and dresses and scraped knees. She thought about chalkboards and erasers and the first day of algebra class and the first time she kissed a boy. She thought about her decision to become a police officer and how proud her parents had been when she graduated from the academy, even though they had tried to talk her out of it. She thought about her husband, and about how Jack Reacher had helped with that situation. She still owed Reacher a favor. A big one. She wasn’t afraid to die, but she didn’t want to leave the world with so much left undone.

There was still too much work to do.

“You’re not going to kill me,” she said. “You still need me.”

Sozinho stared her in the eyes. Snarling. Every muscle in his face as tense as a fiddle string. Vaughan figured he was thinking it over. If he pulled the trigger, she would die, but by killing her, he would probably be killing himself as well. The man in the black leather jacket wanted Vaughan kept alive, to be used as bait for Jack Reacher. If Sozinho killed her before exploiting the full extent of her usefulness, the man in the black leather jacket would then kill Sozinho.

Probably.

Reacher might come to Colorado without hearing Vaughan’s voice over the phone, but he might not. Was Sozinho willing to take the chance that he wouldn’t?

Vaughan didn’t think so.

She didn’t think Sozinho would take the risk, and she was right. He eased the hammer down with his thumb, lowered the pistol and tucked it into his waistband.

“I’m going to kill you,” he said. “But not yet.”

He wrestled the motorcycle to an upright position and wheeled it out of the way. Now Vaughan’s leg was free. Her right leg. Her left foot, the one injured from stepping on a shard of porcelain, had started hurting again. It wasn’t numb anymore, which she supposed was a good thing. At least it was getting some circulation.

Sozinho leaned over and picked her up and started carrying her back toward the archway. When they crossed the threshold, Vaughan caught a glimpse of something through the rectangular hole she’d cut in the vinyl swimming pool cover. It was red and shiny and the late afternoon sun was hitting it at just the right angle for the reflection to beam upward as they passed by.

It was a tail light.

Her tail light.

Sozinho must have peeled back the vinyl swimming pool cover and pushed the police cruiser in nose-first.

The pool had been dry for years. It was a good place to ditch a vehicle. Vaughan never would have thought about it being there. It was just a fluke that she’d seen it.

Sozinho carried her back to the room. He set her on the floor and washed her injured foot with soap and water, sprayed it with something from an aerosol can that felt very cold, and wrapped it with a roll of gauze from a first-aid kit.

“I’m sure you saw the signs on the boarded-up windows,” Vaughan said. “We need to get out of here.”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear another word from you for the rest of the night.”

Sozinho wrapped her legs with duct tape, and then he walked back outside, presumably to deal with the motorcycle and the dead rider. Vaughan figured he would probably hide the man and his bike in the pool with her cruiser.

Sozinho was gone for about thirty minutes. When he got back, he took the first aid kit to the bathroom to work on his own injuries. He was in there for a long time. Maybe two hours. By the time he came back out, the motel room was completely dark, but Sozinho had a flashlight he’d been using and he wanted to make sure Vaughan got a good look at what she’d done.

He sat on the floor beside her, held the light a couple of inches under his chin. Harsh and dramatic shadows accented every line on his face, every wrinkle, every hairy pore. And there, on his left cheek where Vaughan had slashed him with the broken toilet tank lid, was a winding series of crude stitches, a ghastly S-shaped disfigurement that looked like something that had crawled out from under a rock.

“It was not my intention to scar you for life,” Vaughan said. “I was going for your throat. I was trying to kill you.”

“I thought I told you to be quiet. I can tape a rag in your mouth if that’s what you want.”

Sozinho spoke from the right side of his mouth-the only side that was working properly at the moment-which made it seem almost as though he was trying to convey sarcasm. Also, he was having difficulty pronouncing certain consonants, which caused a phrase like I can tape a rag to come out as I can take a nag. Garbled and nonsensical, although Vaughan knew what he meant because of the context.

“I understand they’re doing great things with plastic surgery these days,” she said. “Maybe you can use some of the money you’ve made from killing people to have your face fixed.”

“You don’t understand. They’ll never be able to make it like it was. I’m ruined. One of my main assets was my ordinariness, my ability to walk the streets unnoticed. Now, because of this, I will be instantly recognized everywhere I go.”

“Then I did good,” Vaughan said.

Sozinho glared at her with a hatred that was palpable. He sat there in silence for a few seconds, and then he propped the flashlight against one corner of the bed, aiming it upward so that a cone of light reflected off the white ceiling. While he was doing that, his cell phone rang. He got up and walked over to the table, looked at the caller ID but didn’t answer. It rang again a minute or so later. Same thing. He didn’t take the call.

“You know, I hardly ever use a gun for my work,” he said. “I prefer the intimacy of a nice sharp blade.”

“Is this where I get to hear your speech about how much you’re going to enjoy killing me?”

“Yes. This is exactly where you get to hear my speech about that. I’ve been rehearsing it in my mind, just for you.”

“Save it. I’m not afraid to die. And I’ll go happy now, knowing that I did something-inadvertent as it was-to take one more scumbag out of circulation.”

Sozinho got up and walked over to the bed. Vaughan couldn’t see what he was doing, but a few seconds later she heard the sound of cloth being ripped apart.

“I warned you,” he said.

“But I thought we were having such a nice conversation.”

He knelt down beside her and forced a strip of the cotton pillowcase fabric into her mouth, tore off a piece of duct tape and pressed it over her lips in an arc spanning earlobe to earlobe. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pill bottle and rattled it over her face.

“Narcotic pain tablets,” he said. “I bet you wish you could have one, but you can’t. I might have shared if you’d behaved yourself a little better. Now I’m going to keep them all for myself. I took one in the bathroom a few minutes ago, and I’m feeling better already. How about you? Is that foot hurting you? That’s nothing compared to what’s coming. As soon as the man in the black leather jacket gives me the go-ahead, I’m going to inflict more pain on you than you ever thought possible. You’ll be begging me to let you die, but I won’t. Not until every last nerve has been tapped.”

The cell phone rang again. Sozinho got up and walked to the table and looked at it. A contorted smile curled up on the right side of his mouth as he lifted the device and clicked on to answer the call. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there and listened for a few seconds, and then he walked back over and knelt down and peeled the duct tape off and pulled the rag out and held the phone up to Vaughan’s lips.

She figured there was only one person Sozinho would allow her to talk to.

“Don’t come,” she shouted. “It’s a trap.”

Sozinho clicked off before anything else could be said.

Vaughan never actually heard Jack Reacher’s voice, so she wasn’t a hundred percent certain that it was him on the other end. But if it was, she hoped that he would heed her warning and stay far, far away from Colorado.

She hoped that he would stay away, but somewhere deep in her heart she knew that he wouldn’t.