Hostage

“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?”