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It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He was surrounded by drunk men laughing like hyenas. They were sharing rum straight from the bottle, one man taking a swig and then passing it to the next. One of them was on the floor, passed out and completely naked. A mattress was on the floor beside him, no bed frame. A woman, naked from the waist up, was kneeling on the mattress, her face bruised and swollen from slapping—or worse. The look of terror in her eyes cut right through Patrick. Pangs of guilt rose up so powerfully inside that he was almost nauseous.
It was Olga.
Patrick didn’t know how Inkface had figured out she was there to help him. Most likely, someone had overheard them talking in the bathroom, where Olga had tried to keep the conversation short, and Patrick had gone on and on, questioning her motives and struggling to get his head around the fact that she was a prostitute. He’d turned a ten-second encounter into a five-minute meeting between co-conspirators. He’d blown her cover. This was Patrick’s fault.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, though it was impossible to be heard over the loud music and the shouting.
Inkface muted the stereo. The room was far from quiet, and only then did Patrick hear the retching sound of the guy in the corner puking his guts out.
“El Rubio, how do you like what you see?” asked Inkface.
Patrick glared, saying nothing.
Inkface seemed to enjoy his anger. “Ah, see?” he said to his men. “I told you. El Rubio’s got a girlfriend!”
The men laughed, and it was bizarre in so many ways to Patrick, this collective scum who reveled in middle-school jokes for murderers.
“We know Olga likes to suck all night, right, boys?”
They howled like cat-calling construction workers on steroids. Inkface leaned closer to Patrick and spoke in a voice that feigned concern. “But poor El Rubio.You want it to stop, no?”
Patrick did. And then he wanted to kill Inkface.
“Onlyyoucan stop this,” said Inkface. “Do you want to stop it?”
Patrick didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reply, but Inkface grabbed him by the throat.
“Answer me! Do you want to stop it?”
Patrick glared into those cold black eyes. There was no doubt that Inkface would strangle him for the slightest reason, or for no reason at all—just for the fun of it, if he so desired. Patrick nodded. Inkface released his grip, and Patrick could breathe again.
“Negotiations are not going well,” said Inkface. “We know you work at a rich American company. They know we have you. But you must be a pain in the ass to your boss. Nobody gives a shit if you come back alive or not.”
A “pain in the ass”was an understatement, and Buck’s refusal to pay only underscored Patrick’s fears that his trip to Colombia was designed to deal with an employee seen as dangerous, a plan with a darker corporate purpose that he’d been pondering since Javier threw him off the cliff at the order ofel jefe del jefe. But he kept his poker face.
“That can’t be,” said Patrick.
Inkface grabbed Patrick by the jaw and jerked his gaze upward, forcing him to look into his captor’s eyes, those two burning embers. “Are you calling me a liar, El Rubio?”
Patrick shook his head.
“I’m giving you one last chance,” said Inkface. “I’m going to untie your hands and give you a phone. You get one phone call. You call the one person in this world who will pay a ransom. Abigransom. If you do that for me, you live. And your whore of a girlfriend gets the rest of the night off.”
Inkface let go of Patrick’s jaw, untied his wrists, and offered the phone for Patrick’s taking.
“Your move,” said Inkface.
Patrick stared at the phone before his eyes. The thought of paying a ransom to this band of thieves, rapists, and murderers was enough to make him sick. Had he been alone in the room, he would never have taken it. But he glanced in Olga’s direction, and for the first time in his life he cared less about living than about stopping someone else’s suffering.
Patrick’s mind was a trap for numbers of any sort, and he recalled the ten important digits from the text messages she’d sent him.
He took the phone from Inkface’s hand. And he dialed Kate’s number.
Chapter 35
Kate was at a Mexican restaurant, having dinner with a couple of friends from law school, when her cell rang. Her real cell, not her burner. The display readunknown caller,which was reason to ignore it, but with Patrick missing, any phone call could be important. She picked up. The voice on the line was not a woman’s. It was a boy’s, or rather, the voice of the man she still thought of as a boy.
“Kate, it’s Patrick.”