John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

“You’re doing good,” Jonathan encouraged. “The next part’s going to seem worse than it is, so don’t panic. Once my friend puts you down, just stand still. This will all make sense in a minute.”

In the dim light cast by a half dozen bare lightbulbs suspended from the twenty-foot ceiling, Boxers carried his charge to one of the twelve-by-twelve-inch hardwood columns that held the roof up. He rotated the kid off his shoulder into a standing position, and then held him tightly against the post by a massive hand pressed to the center of his chest.

“This is the scary part,” Jonathan soothed. “Just relax, and nothing will hurt.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Jimmy begged. He couldn’t help himself.

Mr. Horne had driven an enormous nail into the center of the post, per Jonathan’s instructions, exactly six and a half feet off the floor. On it, he’d placed a thick leather dog’s collar, with a leash hanging from the built-in loop. Without saying a word, Boxers took the collar from the hook and looped it around the prisoner’s neck.

“We’re not going to choke you,” Jonathan said, getting ahead of the natural panic. “We’re not even going to cinch it tight. We just need you not to get away.”

The kid’s breathing rate doubled.

Boxers did just as Jonathan had promised, securing the collar with two fingers’ clearance around the skin of Jimmy’s neck. Then he secured the leash to the spike with enough slack to keep Jimmy from choking, but not so much that he might forget that he was helpless. They let him stand there for the better part of a minute, no one saying anything as Boxers returned to the van to retrieve his tools for the next stage.

Jonathan felt his own heart hammering as the big man leaned into the open doors and removed a heavy rubber truncheon. About the size and shape of a baseball bat, the weapon had enough flex that it wouldn’t break a bone, but enough heft that it would hurt like hell.

Boxers rolled his shoulders to loosen them up as he returned to his spot at the kid’s left and set his feet in a batter’s stance. He glanced to Jonathan for the final go-ahead, and when he saw his boss nod, he let loose with a homerun swing. The truncheon’s sweet spot connected squarely on Jimmy’s hip bone with a sound that reverberated through the barn like a muffled pistol shot.

Jimmy howled. It was a guttural, choking scream that was equal parts fear and agony. Blinded by the tape over his eyes, he couldn’t know what had caused the pain, and with his arms shackled and his neck secured, he couldn’t protect himself. “Please!” he shouted. “What do you want from me?”

Jonathan let ten seconds pass before he answered. He abhorred these kinds of interrogation techniques, but two children were missing, and he had neither the time nor the luxury to be subtle. By establishing a baseline for pain, he hoped that the one swat with the truncheon would suffice.

As he watched this nineteen-year-old sob for mercy, Jonathan felt sympathy for him. “Jimmy, I need you to listen to me,” Jonathan said softly. He made his voice sound gentle.

“Please don’t hit me again.”

“Don’t make me, and I won’t,” Jonathan said. “But you need to know that what you felt right then is only the opening act. We can keep that going all night long. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

Jimmy shook his head frantically. “I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“I hope so,” Jonathan said. “But I’ll be honest with you. My friend hopes just the opposite. He would like nothing better than to beat you till you’d spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.” It was a classic good-cop, bad-cop banter, but in this case, it was a statement of fact.

“I swear to God, I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“All right, then. Let’s start with last night. When I know everything that you know, I’ll be out of your life.”

“All I did was drive,” Jimmy whined. “I never went inside. I had nothing to do with the shooting. I swear to God.”

“But you knew you were there to kidnap children,” Jonathan said.

Jimmy said nothing.

Jonathan figured he was looking for the right answer. “Lying to me will be a mistake,” he said. “Do we need to hit you again?”

“Yes,” Jimmy said. “I mean no! You don’t have to hit me again. Yes, I knew that we were going to be snatching kids.”

“For what reason?”

“They never told me.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

Jimmy shook his head. “I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need to know.”

“You must have heard names,” Jonathan prompted. “You must have heard who they were coming to get.”

“I knew there’d be two,” Jimmy said. He spoke emphatically, clearly anxious to prove that he was being truthful. “But I only heard one name. It was Evan something. An Irish name.”

“Guinn,” Jonathan said.

“That’s it. But then they came out and I heard they’d shot somebody. I was like, what the fuck?”

“So Evan Guinn is the only name you heard,” Jonathan recapped.

“I swear to God.” Despite the slack in his leash, he stood on tiptoes and kept his jaw extended.

“Why him and not the other one?” Jonathan asked.

Jimmy’s breathing quickened again. It was his tell for not having the answer he thought they wanted to hear. “I don’t know. I swear to God. I only know about Evan Guinn because I overheard the name.”

“Why did they take him?”

“They didn’t say.”

“You mean you didn’t ask.”

Jimmy hesitated. “Yeah, that, too. Look, all I know is that this guy paid me six hundred bucks to drive a car, okay?”

“You knew it was for kidnapping children,” Jonathan pressed, “but you never thought to ask why?”

Jimmy dared to bring his heels to the ground and lean against the column. “I figured it was obvious,” he said with a barely perceptible shrug. “I mean that place is an orphanage for criminals’ kids, right? I figure somebody pissed off somebody else, and they wanted to snatch their kid because of it.”

Before Jonathan could intervene, Boxers swung his rubber truncheon with everything he had into the heavy timber pillar, shaking the barn with an enormous boom. “And that seems all right to you?” he growled.

“Hey, I’m just telling you what happened!” Jimmy yelled, once again on his toes.

Jonathan held out a hand to settle Boxers and fired a glare that told him to back off. The vigilante that lived in Jonathan’s soul wanted to beat the kid to death, too. But they were professionals, and they had a job to do. There was no room for that kind of outburst.

“Everybody just calm down,” Jonathan soothed. “Take a deep breath, both of you. And I mean that literally.” He gave himself a few seconds to follow his own advice. “Jimmy, it’s hard for us to understand how someone can agree to kidnap a pair of children and not ask why.”

“If they wanted me to know why, they’d have told me why,” Jimmy said. “Plus, like I said, I figured I already knew. It’s about criminals doing what they do best.”

“Who hired you?” Jonathan asked.

“A guy named Sjogren. Jerry, I think. Or maybe George, I’m not sure. A J sound. But I’ve done a couple of things for him before.”

“Kidnappings?” Jonathan asked.

Jimmy shook his head vehemently. “No, nothing like that. One bank thing that didn’t turn out to be much, and a convenience store thing. Nothing where anybody got hurt.”

“But they could have,” Boxers suggested.

“They didn’t. ”

Jonathan shot another disapproving glare. Boxers knew better than this. For an interrogation to work, there had to be one contact, one focus. Boxers knew this as well as anyone, but he was pissed.