Supreme Justice

Chapter Twenty-four

The first thing John Finley noticed when he came to was the pain. His side was on fire where he’d been shot, and he felt like someone had slammed a hatchet into the back of his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth. When the pain was bearable, he tried to figure out where he was.

That proved to be easy. He’d been placed in a confined space that admitted almost no light. Suddenly his body was lifted up and his head struck a hard surface. The pain was excruciating. After one more jolt, Finley figured out that he was in the trunk of a car that was driving on an unpaved road. He set himself to resist the next bump, but his hands were cuffed behind him and his ankles were bound together. His head smashed into the top of the trunk again. Then, mercifully, the car stopped.

Finley tried to remember what had led to his imprisonment. There was the ship. He’d killed Talbot on it, and he’d been shot. He remembered driving to Sarah’s condo. His wound had been bleeding badly when he arrived. The duffel bag! He’d hidden it, and he was heading for the stairs that led up to Sarah’s bedroom when two men burst in through the front door.

Finley remembered putting all of his strength behind a punch that caught the first man flush in the face, sending him stumbling across the foyer. Then he was grappling with the second man on the floor, weak from blood loss and barely able to put up a fight. A forearm had been jammed across his windpipe. He’d been struggling for breath when Sarah called his name. The last thing he remembered was a gunshot.

Car doors opened and slammed shut. Moments later the lid of the trunk popped up. Finley could see the silhouette of two men from their knees to their shoulders. One man bent down and reached in to drag him from the car. Finley resisted and was hit in the face.

“Don’t make this hard on yourself. You’re going to die no matter what you do,” said the man who had hit him.

Finley wanted to fight but he didn’t have the strength. The two men manhandled him out of the trunk and threw him on the ground. Pain lanced through his head and side, and he had to fight to keep from throwing up. The men watched him roll back and forth. When Finley stopped, he saw stars and the outline of tree limbs and leaves high above. The cold, unpolluted air and the absence of ambient light told him that he was somewhere in the countryside, probably in the mountains.

“On your knees, fucker,” one of the men commanded. Finley squinted at the speaker. He was thick with curly black hair, but the darkness obscured most of his features. When Finley didn’t move fast enough, his reward was a vicious kick to his ribs near his gunshot wound. The pain almost made him black out. Rough hands grabbed his hair and yanked him upright, and a gun barrel was jammed against the back of his head. The man who was standing in front of Finley smiled sadistically.

“No more pussy for you,” he said. Then he laughed.