AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“His daughter,” I pressed anyway. “How old was she? Just that one. Tell me that, and I’ll drop it.”
“Four. She was only four.”
The ache in my heart ripped open into a full-blown canyon.
“His wife was probably a supermodel, wasn’t she?” I asked.
“You’re not doing so well at the dropping it that you just promised.”
“I’m sorry,” I added quickly. “I just can’t picture him with a family. Just some regular guy, doing daddy-daughter things, taking his wife out for a weekly date night to keep the spark alive, watching Disney movies, reading bedtime stories.”
“I don’t know how regular he really was,” Memphis said and laughed. “He was still a Raider.”
“He mentioned that. I definitely thought it was something he was just making up. The Marine thing was believable, but I’ve never heard of Raiders.”
“I don’t think many people have,” she said. “Think Navy SEALs, but better. Or worse, I guess, depending on which end of them you’re experiencing. I looked into them back when Jersey was first assigned to me. He was scary way before he was doing this job.”
“He wasn’t just a soldier?”
She laughed, and it made me terribly uncomfortable.
“No. He was not. They’re expected to be able to just survive in what they call spartan conditions in small teams. Like drop these guys in any setting, any climate, anywhere in the world under duress, and expect them to just do what they’re told and get the fuck back out.”
“Like a bunch of mercenaries?” I asked.
“I don’t think they’d take too kindly to that label,” she laughed. “I think the preferred wording is that they prevent, deter, and respond to terrorism. They just happen to also receive training in unconventional warfare capabilities to make sure they’re successful by any means necessary.”
“So, we really might not have to do anything at all to get him back ourselves? Maybe if we just wait long enough, he’ll do it all himself?”
CHAPTER THREE
jersey
I felt like an eighty-year-old man by the time they were dragging my body out of the trunk of that car. Every muscle ached; everything was sore. They hadn’t even so much as opened the trunk since they’d put me in it, so I’d pissed myself. If I’d had a way to get my pants down, I would’ve shit everywhere in that trunk just to make sure they’d also have to clean that up. If anybody here thought denying me the most basic of human decency would break me that quickly, they were about to be in for a real treat. I’d play this game for as long as my mind could withstand it, and then something much worse would take over and finish it for me.
Just knowing that some creature form of myself would eventually take over when I needed it to, didn’t take away the very real pain that was still deep in the tissue of my shoulder when they lugged me from the car and toward a giant building. They didn’t waste much time in getting the bag back over my head, so I didn’t get a clear look at where we were, but once they’d pulled me inside, the noise was almost deafening. It sounded like hundreds of voices all talking at the same time. There was a constant mechanical whirring of what sounded like heavy machinery. Several sets of footsteps moved around us in all directions. More than one foreign language was being spoken throughout the space as we walked through it. The sound of a door closing behind us muffled the noise some, but definitely didn’t drown it out completely.
Rather than offering me the kindness of a chair, someone kicked the backs of my knees to drop me straight to the ground. Apparently, my old man bones weren’t already throwing a big enough tantrum after being cramped in that trunk for what felt like days.
“You smell like piss and B.O., Mr. Jersey,” an oddly calm and smooth voice said from somewhere in front of me.
“You work up a sweat when you have to kill a house full of thugs,” I said into the bag, and mistakenly tried to shrug my shoulders. Suddenly, I was thankful that the bag was still hiding the very noticeable wince all over my face from the movement. “I would’ve showered and made myself pretty for whatever this is, but your boys didn’t seem particularly interested in letting me out of that trunk for any reason.”
“Well, I think we can all agree that it was better safe than sorry. Getting the carpet cleaned in that trunk is something we have to have done pretty regularly anyway. I’m sure you can relate.”
Somebody ripped the bag off my head in a less-than-gentle fashion, and the fluorescent lighting in the room nearly blinded me. When my eyes finally focused, everything about the suit-wearing man who stood before me was confusing. He was tall and thin, with hair that was somewhere between blonde and gray. The permanent wrinkles around his eyes made me think he was probably older than me, and the pale, dead green of his eyes made me think he’d probably even seen much worse than me.
“I’d like to know why you made the choice that you did about my daughter, Mr. Jersey.”
I don’t know what I was expecting the President of our organization to look like, but whatever I was prepared for, it was not this man. Nothing about him suggested that he ran the underworld of Philadelphia, or that people across this country and several others feared him.
“Somebody used my face to try to knock the mud off their boots so I’m actually a little fuzzy myself about what happened,” I said.
He smiled and something inside me was instantly aware that he’d earned every bit of fear he’d ever pulled out of the people around him. He didn’t come to life at the thought of inflicting pain on someone else. He somehow actually looked — more like death. Like it wasn’t exciting to prepare to drain the life from another human, but rather that it was just another mundane task in his day. He walked toward me and stopped when the tips of his shoes were directly in front of my knees. He took my chin between his thumb and his index finger to make sure I was looking right at him.
Shame I was too dehydrated to have to piss again. There would have been no better time.
“I’ll get my answers eventually, Mr. Jersey.”
