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is,” he said

CHAPTER 87

NEVES WAS IN HIS underwear, lying on his back at the bottom of an empty, dated six-person hot tub He had a puffy black eye and was gagged with tape He was also handcuffed at the ankles and the wrists, and he earing a forty-pound weight vest that pinned him down flat onto the floor of the tub

When I saw Neves lying there, scared and helpless in his underwear, I felt er or not, Neves was a man A man we’d kidnapped A man ere about to extract infor down at hi, sick inside

Then I reht now, Perrine had , deep breath

Diaz lifted another vest fro sound as he tightened up the Velcro straps of the second vest around Neves’s lower legs

Diaz plugged the drain before he stepped out of the tub and sat on its edge Bassman flicked open a butterfly knife and slid the blade in between the tape and theof blood flowed from a slit in Neves’s lip

“Dang Nicked you there, Tomás My bad,” Bassman said as he violently tore the rest of the tape off Neves’s face

Neves’s chest heaved as fresh tears sprouted in his light-brown eyes

“Please,” he said between hacked-off sobs “Please My wife, nant, ive her the et it, too”

When I heard the aenuine pain and fear in Neves’s voice for the second ti sway unsteadily inside nore him I had no other choice

“Hey, don’t worry so er’s raw, red cheek fro things on the AIDS front these days Making sohs”

Neves closed his eyes, his bloody lip quivering as he cried

“OK, OK, OK!” he suddenly yelled “You win! What do you want? Get hteen kilos at a safe house right now Eighteen You can have everything”

“We don’t want everything We want Perrine Where is he?” I said