High Treason by John Gilstrap

Author:John Gilstrap [Gilstrap, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780786030194
Google: GBFvLzD1VJAC
Amazon: B00BPYGP1I
Barnesnoble: B00BPYGP1I
Goodreads: 17239895
Publisher: Pinnacle
Published: 2013-07-30T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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