CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Joey was cold. So very, very cold. And scared. Shivers consumed him, convulsing him from his feet to his shoulders.
He took a deep breath and held it, trying to get control. It didn’t work. Well, maybe a little. He tried again.
His head hurt. Not in the way that it hurt when you had the flu, but the way it hurt after someone hit you really hard and made sparks fly behind your eyes. The stars were still there, if he looked for them, little colored spots that swam through the darkness in the space between his eyes and his brain.
When he first awoke, he thought maybe he was blind — it was that dark — and then he remembered them slipping the hood over his head. It was heavy and thick, and now that he thought about it, it made breathing more difficult, and that launched another bout of panic until he realized that breathing was breathing, and he was doing it.
Who were these people?
Somehow, he knew that this was about his father, because the language the men were speaking in the room sounded like Russian. Joey didn’t understand Russian, but he recognized the hard vowels and the gurgling throat sounds as the ones he heard when his dad spoke with his babushka — the lady who was married to the president of the United States, whom he wasn’t supposed to talk about.
The floor moved and made him bounce. In that moment, Joey realized that he was in a car of some sort, and that it was moving. He wondered if he was in the trunk, and that thought triggered another flash of fear over running out of air. When you’d been kidnapped and beaten, it was really amazing how many things there were to be afraid of.
Why are they doing this to me?
That was the question of questions. He’d spent the entire evening gaming — and yes, exploring porn — but that was no reason to yank him out of bed and throw a sack over his head.
And why did they have to hurt him like that? They punched him in the balls and in the stomach and yanked his arms behind him, doing that stretchy thing that Simon Parker did in gym class that made your shoulders feel like they were going to pop right out of their sockets. And then they punched him in the head. Twice. At least twice.
Maybe it was because he was fighting back so well. He liked the thought of that. He liked the thought of being tough.
Unless that toughness pissed them off and made them decide to bury him alive in the trunk of a car with a sack over his head.
The shivering returned.
“Stop it,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice startled him.
“Josef?” a voice said. “Joey?”
“Dad?”
“Are you hurt, son?”
Joey nodded, and the nodding hurt his head. “Yes,” he said. And right away, he knew it was the wrong thing. When you’re being brave, you’re supposed to say that everything is all right. “I’m okay,” he added quickly.
“We’re going to be fine,” Dad said.
“What’s happening? Why are they doing this? I’m scared.”
“I’m scared, too, son. I don’t know why this is happening. But we’re going to be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
For just the flash of an instant — the space of a heartbeat — Joey considered asking if his father’s hands were also tied behind his back, and if so, how was he going to keep anything from happening to anybody. He didn’t ask, though, because he knew that Dad was trying to be brave, too.
“Are we in a car?” Joey asked.
“I think it’s a van,” Dad said. “I think we’re being taken someplace.”
Joey felt his heart race. “Why? What did we do?”
A long silence followed.
What did we do? How do you answer a question like that when it’s coming from a thirteen-year-old? Do you go for the harsh truth, or do you try to shield him? When you’re blindfolded and tied, the harshest truth was hard to shield.
“I don’t think we did anything, son. Don’t think that way. You did nothing wrong.”
“Then why—”
“I don’t know.” Only a couple dozen words into this, and he’d already told his first lie. He had a good idea that this had something to do with his mother’s past, but how could he say that when Josef didn’t even know about that past?
“They were speaking Russian,” Joey said. “Wasn’t that Russian? Isn’t that the language you and Babushka talk to each other in?”
“Yes.”
“What were they saying?”
“You said you were hurt. Where are you hurt?” It was a deliberate change of subject, but a topic far more important than the lethal threats of Russian Mafia thugs.
“A little bit everywhere. My head and my cheek where they hit me, but that will be okay. Mostly it’s my shoulders and wrists now.”
“From being tied,” Nicholas said.
“Why do they have to do it so tight?”
Because they’re ruthless asshole bullies, Nicholas didn’t say. “Maybe they’ll loosen them soon.”
Silence followed for the next minute or two, filled only with the hum of tires on the roadway, and the sound of his own breathing, amplified and warmed by the hood. If he were a better father — maybe a full-time father — he would know what to say to calm his son. He would tell a story or sing a soothing song. He’d do something other than tell a lie or just be silent.
“Are they going to kill us?” Joey asked. For the first time in months, he sounded like a little boy again.
“I won’t let that happen,” Nicholas said again. Another lie, because he believed that the truth was one hundred eighty degrees separated from the answer he’d just given. No guilt for that one, though. Some things didn’t need to be said aloud.
It took a crazy kind of courage to kidnap the president’s stepson — the kind of courage that he couldn’t imagine would have a good outcome for the victims.
Enter, yet again, the face of bad parenting: Nicholas had been offered yet had turned down Secret Service protection for himself and his family. He wanted nothing to do with Tony Darmond or his policies or his lies, and he certainly hadn’t wanted anything to do with his henchmen.
How’s that one working out for you now, Nicky? He could almost hear Tony’s mocking tone in his head, almost see the self-righteous smirk.
You didn’t see much of that smirk during the last few years when Nicholas was leading the protests against the son of a bitch.
Come to think of it, after all of that, maybe Nicholas had earned some portion of the smirk he saw in his head.
So, now Nicholas’s stubbornness was going to cost the life of his son. For all he knew, Marcie might have been swept up in this, too.
No, that didn’t make sense. Whatever was happening, it had everything to do with Nicholas being related, however distantly, to the president of the United States.
“Will my hands have to be cut off because I can’t feel them anymore?” Joey asked.
“Wiggle your fingers,” Nicholas said. “Can you wiggle your fingers?”
“I think so, but they feel funny.”
“Feeling is feeling. That’s a good sign. Try moving your shoulders, too.” He tried to tell himself that this discomfort had to end soon, but reality came knocking yet again. He’d heard stories of Russian mobsters who’d learned at the feet of the KGB, who’d learned at the feet of Stalin’s torturers. The notion of taking mercy on children was an entirely Western notion. In the rest of the world, a boy was merely a future enemy, to be treated with the same brutality.
“How are we going to get away?” Josef asked.
Nicholas took a deep breath that turned out to be far noisier than he had expected. “If we find our chance, we have to take it,” he said. “But you have to leave that to me, okay? Will you promise that you’ll leave that to me?”