by Jude Hardin
“How much is he paying you?” she said.
Sozinho choked on his water.
When he finished coughing, he said, “Don’t you think it’s a little rude to ask about that? I would never ask you about your salary.”
“I’m just curious. How much money does it take for you to end the life of another human being?”
“I don’t even think about it in those terms. Anyway, as it turns out, this little number is going to be gratis as far as any monetary compensation is concerned. It’s not the way I wanted it to be, but I wasn’t given much of a choice in the matter.”
“There’s always a choice,” Vaughan said. “Instead of going after Reacher, you could go after this enigmatic man in the black leather jacket you keep referring to. You could give yourself up right now, cut a deal for testifying against him. And if this guy’s organization is as big as you say it is, we might even be able to get you into the witness protection program.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, so maybe you should just be quiet for a while.”
Vaughan closed her eyes. If she couldn’t entice Sozinho into surrendering, then she needed to make an attempt to get away from him. She couldn’t wait for the cavalry to show up, like it happened in the movies. It was doubtful that the FBI would ever find her, and it was doubtful that Reacher would ever find her. Not in time. She needed to make a move, and she needed to do it now. The sooner the better.
“I have to use the restroom,” she said.
6
Retro put on a pair of gloves and grabbed an evidence bag. He climbed out of his cruiser, walked over to the sock, crouched down and picked it up. It was damp and there was a strong chemical smell rising from it.
He dropped the sock into the bag, squeezed the air out and closed the plastic zipper. He felt a little lightheaded when he stood up. Like he might pass out. He took a few deep breaths, and the sensation finally faded.
That was when he noticed the rusty chain on the gate leading into the plant. He tossed the sock into the back seat with the can of spray paint he’d bagged earlier, walked over to the gate to take a closer look. The chain was dangling loosely, and the padlock that had been securing it was on the ground.
The lock hadn’t been opened with a key.
It had been cut.
Retro called Ashley on his cell.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Old Slaughterhouse Road. At the gate to the meat processing plant.”
He told her about the sock he’d found, and about the breached entranceway.
“Don’t go in there by yourself,” she said. “Wait for backup. A team from the state police is on the way. I’ll call their dispatcher and have a couple of units sent—”
“Vaughan might be dead by the time they get here,” Retro said. “I need to go in and check it out. I worked at the plant three summers in a row when I was a teenager. I know all the buildings, and I know the layout of the interior spaces.”
“Negative. You need to wait.”
Retro didn’t have time to argue with her. He clicked off and clipped his phone back onto his belt. It rang a few seconds later, but he didn’t answer it. Vaughan was his friend, and her life was at stake, and even though his career as a police officer would be over in just a few days, nothing was going to stop him from trying to rescue her.
He pulled his pistol and held it toward the ground as he opened the gate and walked onto the property.
7
Sozinho had started to pull away the duct tape wrapped around Vaughan’s ankles so that she could get up and use the toilet, but his cell phone trilled before he could finish.
“I better get that,” he said.
“I need to go,” Vaughan said. “Bad.”
“You’ll just have to hold it for a few minutes.”
Sozinho walked back over to the table and answered the phone.
“You’re an idiot,” the man in the black leather jacket said.
“Excuse me?”
“I just heard from one of my contacts. A cop named Retro found your sock in front of the meat processing plant. Now he’s in there looking around.”
The sock.
Sozinho had been on the road driving toward his destination for a few minutes before he realized it was missing. He’d thought about going back, but he’d decided that it would be too risky, especially since he was driving a police car. Anyway, it was just a sock. One soaked in chloroform, but still just a sock. There was no way to trace it to anything.
“Sorry,” Sozinho said. “But I really don’t see how it could—”
“Ever hear of a little thing called DNA? Your skin cells are all over that fabric. In a few days, every police agency in the world will have access to your genetic profile.”
“It doesn’t matter. I have too many aliases, too many layers of protection. That information will be useless to them.”
“Unless they catch you in the act sometime in the future. Then that information will be very valuable. And if that happens—”
“It won’t,” Sozinho said.
There was a long pause, and then the man in the black leather jacket said, “I thought I was dealing with a professional, but it seems I was mistaken. Now I’m going to have to send someone else to keep Officer Vaughan company until Reacher gets to Colorado, someone I can trust to get the job done without making any mistakes. I should have known better than to give you another chance. As soon as I hang up, I’m going to reactivate the circuit implanted in your neck. At that time, you’ll have five minutes to live. I just called to let you know.”
Before Sozinho could say anything, the phone went dead.
8
The front of the meat processing plant, the part that people driving by on Old Slaughterhouse Road could see, was a modern three-story steel and glass office complex, a building that could have housed a software company or the headquarters of a bank or a gleaming new lecture hall at a university.
But it didn’t house any of those things.
It housed death.
Or it had, anyway.
As Retro made his way past the concrete fountains and the overgrown rock beds that had once been so meticulously maintained, as he carefully rounded the corner toward the staging corral where the trucks from local farms had made their deliveries, he could almost hear the frantic squeals and moos and bleats from the livestock, animals that somehow seemed to know they didn’t have long to live.
Retro had worked at the plant three summers in a row when he was in high school, and it was during that time he’d decided to become a vegetarian. He just couldn’t bring himself to slice into a thick juicy steak after witnessing the terror in the animals’ eyes on a daily basis. Fish was the only flesh food he’d been able to stomach since he was fifteen, and he only ate that once in a while. For the most part he lived on fruits and vegetables and grains and legumes, foods that kept his waist lean and his conscience clean. Most of his friends and family members ate meat, and he didn’t have a problem with that, but he just couldn’t do it himself. He just couldn’t.
Retro walked around the entire perimeter of the office complex, and it didn’t appear as though the building had been broken into. All the windows were intact, the deadbolts on the doors secure. If Vaughan and the man who’d abducted her were on the property, they were probably somewhere in the crumbling brick structure on the other side of the corral, somewhere inside the original processing and packaging rooms that once provided employment for nearly half of Hope’s residents.
Retro knew that Ashton was right, that he should wait for backup. The inside of the plant was a labyrinth of hallways and staircases and conveyor lines and packaging stations, scaffolds and storage tanks and hooks and grinders, drip pans and mixers and slicers and smokers, everything necessary to change a fresh carcass into something that could be slapped onto a sandwich bun. It was a dangerous place to be, even under the best of circumstances.
Retro knew he should wait, but he couldn’t.
He just couldn’t.
9
Caminha Sozinho figured he had about three more minutes to live. He hadn’t been keeping track of the seconds ticking by, but he figured that was about right. In three minutes or so the electronic circuit implanted in his neck would burn a hole in his right carotid artery. The blood supply to that side of his brain would trickle out and spread into the surrounding tissues, creating what would appear to be a massive bruise on his neck and chest and shoulder as he collapsed and died.
The man in the black leather jacket was the only person on the planet who could stop it from happening.
Sozinho punched in the number to call him.
No answer.
He tried again.
And again.
And again.
Finally, the man in the black leather jacket picked up.
“There’s nothing you can say to change my mind,” he said. “You might as well accept the fact that you’re going to die now.”
Before walking out onto Second Street with a can of spray paint and luring Officer Vaughan out of the diner to arrest him, Sozinho had soaked one of his socks in chloroform, a compound once commonly administered as an anesthetic for medical and dental procedures. His left foot was stinging now where the chemical had come in contact with his skin. If he’d been a little bit smarter, he would have wrapped his foot in plastic before slipping the sock on, thereby avoiding the skin irritation and the man in the black leather jacket’s concern about DNA being left on the fabric.
If he’d been a little smarter, he would have thought of that.
It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, but there was no reason he couldn’t try to convince the man in the black leather jacket that it had.
“The sock never touched my foot,” Sozinho said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I used a plastic grocery bag to protect my skin against the chloroform. I put the bag over my foot and trimmed off all the excess plastic, and then I put the sock over the bag. I wasn’t even thinking about DNA at the time, but of course—”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” the man in the black leather jacket said.
“It’s a little hard to think when someone is telling you that you only have five minutes to live.”
There was a long pause.
“My contact in Hope said that the officer found the sock,” the man in the black leather jacket said. “She didn’t mention anything about a plastic bag.”
“The wind probably picked it up and blew it away,” Sozinho said.
Silence.
Sozinho figured he probably had less than two minutes now. His heart was hammering in his chest. He reached up and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his free hand, looked over at Vaughan lying there on the floor by the bed with a pleading expression on her face. She needed to use the restroom, and Sozinho certainly wasn’t going to be able to help her if he was dead.
“I’m going to deactivate the circuit again,” the man in the black leather jacket said. “But don’t forget it’s there. I can switch it back on at any time.”
Sozinho let out a sigh of relief.
“Thank you,” he said.
The man in the black leather jacket disconnected. Sozinho set the phone on the table, tucked the gun into his waistband, and went back over to where Vaughan was lying on the floor. He crouched down and started unwrapping the tape on her legs.
“What was that all about?” she said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay. I won’t. But you need to worry about getting me to the bathroom, or there’s going to be a wet spot on the floor.”
Sozinho finished unwrapping the tape, and then he helped Vaughan get up.
10
Vaughan’s hands were still cuffed behind her back, but her legs were free now.
Sozinho guided her to the bathroom.
The water to the motel room had been shut off, probably years ago from the look and smell of the place, but someone had positioned a portable camping toilet on the floor next to the bathtub.
There was a partial roll of cheap-looking paper on the closed lid.
“There you go,” Sozinho said.
“I need my hands.”
“Sorry. You’ll just have to do the best you can.”
Vaughan took a step forward. She was dizzy, and her tongue felt as though it had been coated with some sort of toxic chemical. Her jaw hurt where Sozinho had punched her.
“You going to stand there and watch?” she said.
There wasn’t much light in the bathroom, and Vaughan knew that if she closed the door there wouldn’t be any. She didn’t like the idea of fumbling around in the dark, but she figured being out of Sozinho’s line of sight for a couple of minutes would be her only chance to do what she needed to do.
“I’ll turn my head,” Sozinho said.
“No. I need to shut the door.”
“Not going to happen.”
Vaughan thought about making a move right then and there. She was close enough to Sozinho to stomp on an instep or kick him in the groin, but he’d taken her shoes off while she was unconscious, and she was concerned that she might injure her feet if she started using them as weapons. Then she wouldn’t be able to run.
And she needed to run.
She decided to be patient and proceed with her original plan.
“It’s not like I can go anywhere,” she said. “There’s no window in here, so what do you think I’m going to do? Kick my way through the wall or something?”
“Why couldn’t my assignment have been to kidnap a male officer?” Sozinho said, clearly annoyed with Vaughan’s demand for privacy.
He reached over and grabbed the knob and pulled the door shut.
“Thank you,” Vaughan said.
“Just hurry up.”
Vaughan immediately crouched down and rolled onto her back. The floor was hard and cold and it reeked of urine. Vaughan wondered if vagrants had broken in at one time or another. Surely Sozinho couldn’t have singlehandedly caused the place to smell so bad in such a short time.
Vaughan had gained a little weight over the past few months, and her uniform pants had gotten a little tighter. Her fortieth birthday had come and gone and she wasn’t quite as flexible as she used to be, but with a great deal of effort she finally managed to bend her knees to her chest and thread her feet under the handcuff chain.
Now her hands were in front.
Her heart was pounding, and she was a little short of breath. She promised herself that if she got through this she would start spending more time at the gym and less time at the Second Street diner. No more bacon and eggs and toast and hash browns before driving home and climbing into bed after every shift.
She stood and started feeling her way around the bathroom, trying to be as quiet as possible. She ran her fingers along the edge of the vanity, and then over to the top of the toilet tank. Not the plastic portable thing, but the original toilet that had been plumbed in to the motel room. She tucked her fingers under the overhang and lifted the lid off the tank. It made a slight clinking noise, but Sozinho didn’t say anything, and he didn’t come barging through the door, so he must not have heard it.
The lid was heavy and cumbersome with Vaughan’s hands bound so closely together. Straining, the muscles in her fingers and wrists burning toward complete exhaustion, she wrestled it up and rested it on the top of her head so that one of the smaller sides of the porcelain rectangle was pointing toward the door.
She took a couple of deep breaths.
“Okay,” she said, a hot bolus of adrenaline surging through her veins. “I’m done.”
As soon as Sozinho pushed the door open, Vaughan stepped forward and slammed the toilet tank lid into his forehead like a club. The lid shattered. Most of it fell to the floor, but a few slivers found a home up around Sozinho’s hairline, and a nice big ugly shard stayed in Vaughan’s grip. As Sozinho staggered backwards, Vaughan moved in and swiped
at his head and opened a gash along his left cheek. He shouted and shrieked and pressed his hands against his face, ineffectively trying to stop the flow of blood from multiple wounds.
“I’m going to kill you,” he said, pulling the pistol from his waistband and firing wildly in her general direction.
Blood trickled over Sozinho’s eyebrows, and he probably had a concussion from the vicious blow to the head. His ability to aim straight had been adversely affected, but Vaughan knew from experience what one bullet could do to human flesh, and she didn’t want any part of it. She’d gambled with an act of aggression, but her best bet now was to get away from Sozinho as fast as she could.
Trying to use the deafening blasts to her advantage, she ducked down low and slung the jagged chunk of porcelain aside and went for the door. She frantically slid the security chain out of its slot and twisted open the deadbolt and ran out onto the concrete sidewalk in front of the room. Squinting against the afternoon sun, she darted into a large open area that led to an outdoor lounging deck and swimming pool. She figured her best chance at freedom was through a stucco archway on the other side of the courtyard.
The pool had a blue vinyl cover stretched over the top of it, faded from the sun and stained with rust where it snapped onto the edges. As Vaughan ran past it, she noticed that she was leaving a trail of blood.
11
With a flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other, Retro had checked every inch of the meat processing plant. Every hallway, every staircase, every nook and every cranny. A crumpled cigarette pack and a condom wrapper and a few dirty insulin syringes were the only indications that anyone had recently occupied the spaces.
Like a lot of small towns across the country, illegal drug use had found its way to Hope, Colorado, and apparently some of the users had found their way inside the plant.