by Mike Dagons
They took the five minute ride over to the Hôtel George V, and got there in time to see two men dressed in overalls loading a wooden shipping container, like the one they left back at the hotel, on a truck. “She’s probably in that crate,” Sam said.
“It’s only three of them. We can try to take them,” Chanay suggested.
“Just wait,” Severe said, and then scanned the surrounding vehicles.
After the crate was loaded, the two men dressed in overalls got in the cab of the truck, and the one dressed in a gray suit walked across the street, and got in the backseat of a black Benz.
“There are two more vehicles with them, and I don’t know how many men,” Severe said. “I guess that guy wasn’t lying about not coming alone.”
“You think somebody was watching us when we left the hotel?” Chanay asked.
“I didn’t spot a tail,” Sam answered.
“If they were out there, they’re still there waiting for their crew to come out pushing that oversized container they were going to put us in. This is Kenyah’s fuck up. I’m not going to risk our lives to try to save her. We’re leaving for Marseille right now. Get us out of here, Sam,” Severe said.
They left Kenyah behind, and Sam drove them away from the Hôtel George V, and the danger waiting for them there. Severe hated that Kenyah had been captured, but she couldn’t help feeling relieved that she no longer had to worry about her recklessness getting them all killed.
Chapter 17
By his calculations, Choc had been in the cage about twenty hours, give or take an hour or two. Nobody had spoken a word to him since he’d been there. He had been given three meals, and plenty to drink. A commode, a sink, and a thin twin mattress on the floor were the only things in the cell. There was a small rectangle window up high near the ceiling, and when the sun went down, the lights went out in his cell.
They had been waiting for him at the dance studio. A half dozen heavily armed men already had their guns pointed at him when he stepped through the door, and they had reinforcements backing them up.
He was ordered to hand over Beauty, which was his name for his custom gold plated Glock, and then told to get face down on the floor. He did what he was told, and hoped Rayce was going to stay put, and not try to rescue him.
They put a black bag over his head and led him out the building, and put him into a vehicle he had to step up to get in. He had been taken directly to this building, and locked in the cell he was in.
It was extremely warm in his cage, and Choc had stripped naked to his waist in an effort to stay cool. He was relaxing on the mattress when Jeff Basin came around. “I see you’ve been treated well, as I instructed. Although, they should have given you a fan in this heat,” he observed.
Choc sat up slowly when he heard his voice, and glared at him through the bars. Basin was leaning against the wall with his legs crossed at his ankles, smirking at him.
His dark brown complexion was glowing and healthy looking. He was handsomely dressed in an open collar monogrammed shirt, and expensive tailored slacks much like he’d been wearing the last time Choc had seen him. He was still wearing his hair cropped low, and sporting a neatly trimmed goatee that made him look a lot like Trent.
“If you’re keeping me alive in hopes of luring Ice here, then you’ve put too much value on my life.” Choc got up and walked over to the bars.
“I’m not using you as bait, Segal, or should I use your given name and call you Charles Baltimore?” Jeff got up off the wall, and stood face to face with him.
“I prefer Choc,” he answered coolly. “Then what’s this all about? You’ve had me here at least a day, and nobody’s spoken a word to me.”
He studied Choc instead of answering the question. “Choc, I hear that you and Avenia Hall, I mean, Rayce, are not really lovers, and like your names. It was just part of your cover story. I was a little hurt that she never returned any of my calls or text messages. Thinking she was avoiding me because of her commitment to you, had me heartsick. I was really happy to learn that wasn’t the case. Knowing that the reason she didn’t keep in touch was because she didn’t want me to discover she wasn’t who she claimed to be, made me feel better.”
Choc deliberately avoided talking about Rayce. “You have me here, so what’s next, torture and a slow death?” He stared him in his eyes.
“That’s Luther’s style, not mine, or it wasn’t until your friend, Ice, killed my innocent parents the way he did.”
“You killed his wife, and everybody knows he’s a hothead. You should have expected him to come for you.”
“Come for Luther, yeah; for me, not so much. I expected him to go ballistic on Luther, but come for our families and cut out the hearts of children and shit. I never saw that coming. You must admit. That kind of shit is a little dark for him.”
“His wife was pregnant. She was a loving and kind person who’d never hurt anyone. I can’t judge him on how he responded to her murder because maybe I’d be doing the same thing in his position.”
“I guess I seriously underestimated how much he cared,” he shrugged. “I still think his response to her death was extremely unprofessional.”
“Maybe, but in all fairness, he’s only doing what you and Luther did. You hunted his wife down, blew up his brother’s business, kidnapped and tortured his friends. Y’all made Lincoln Scott’s death a family affair. And I guess it’s what you still doing. Ice is my friend. Ain’t that why you got me here right now?”
“No, not exactly, no,” he disagreed. “Make no mistake; I was willing to do whatever it took to find him because it was what I was being paid to do. But it wasn’t personal for me until he killed my mama. The way I see it, he went on a rampage and killed my parents to retaliate against me about the shit Luther’s men did, when Luther never actually meant to kill his wife and unborn child.”
“Since Luther just meant to torture, not kill them. Ice shouldn’t be so fucking upset about it. Is that what I’m hearing, Jeff?” he asked in an unemotional tone that was typical Choc.
Given the unfavorable predicament Choc was in, Jeffrey couldn’t help being amused by his cynical disposition, and he laughed. “You are as amazingly cool as your dossier reads. What I’m saying is, until Ice did that bogus shit to my parents. I was just a bystander. He made me a player, and now I want him dead, too. But, I don’t want to be a part of this genocide war him and Luther got going on. I only want to kill him. Not his family and friends.”
“If you feel that way, then why you got me here locked up in this muthafuckin’ cage?”
“I like you, Baltimore. You did my family a solid back at Big Foot, and you helped protect my house. I cannot in good conscience forget what you did for my family. The problem is…Luther wants blood. He knows your brother, Trent, is the reason Lincoln was arrested, and he suspects Ice killed Lincoln to keep him from killing Trent.”
“You supplied him with that information,” Choc chuckled.
“Of course I did. Supplying him with essential information is what he employed me to do, and as you’ve probably noticed. I’m extremely good at doing my job.”
“I see,” he shrugged.
“Do you, Choc?” he eyed him intently for a beat before he continued. “Do you really understand Luther’s blood lust, and his desire to retaliate against anyone who was involved in his brother’s death? Because I do, and even though, I disagree with some of Luther’s methods. I will not go to war with him about how to punish the guilty.”
“So he’s the one who is going to kill me to retaliate against Trent, not you,” Choc concluded, and then chuckled dryly.
“No, I’ve appealed to his sense of decency, and asked him not to hold you accountable for the things Ice has done. I have done this because I owe you a debt. As a courtesy to me and our business arrangement, Luther has agreed to spare your lives. However, he has insisted on a measure of retribution. I’m asking you to play along.” He turned his eyes upward, and motioned with them to the nearly i
nvisible surveillance camera in the ceiling behind him.
Choc had already seen it, and he was surprised that Jeffrey was deliberately making him aware of it. “You care to be more specific?” he asked.
“I have negotiated a pardon for you and your brother in exchange for you delivering a message to Ice for us.”
“What kind of message?”
“I will give you a phone number. All you have to do is give it to Ice and ask him to call me.”
“You didn’t need to bring me here for that, so let’s hear the rest of it.”
“We have Trent Real, and as I’ve said, Luther wants retribution. Although, he has agreed not to kill your brother, he has insisted on spending some quality time with him. Your punishment will be to watch.”
Choc’s expression didn’t change, but his heart seized in his chest. He stared at Jeff Basin through the bars, and he wished he would take a step closer so he could get his hands around his arrogant neck.
“We have read that you are a man who never loses his cool. I hope that is true for your brother’s sake because he will be killed if you do not control your temper.”
“I thought you wanted to stop the genocide,” Choc gripped the bars to keep his hands from trembling in anger.
“I do, and I promise this will go a long ways toward making Luther see things my way.”
“And your way is to make me watch him butcher my brother?”
“I assure you. You will understand things better in a little while. All you have to do to keep you and your brother alive is keep your mouth shut. You will not be asked to betray any agency secrets,” he walked away.
Choc watched after him until he disappeared through the door at the end of the long hall, and he hoped he was lying about them having his brother. He hadn’t spoken to Trent since he left him on the island with the Genesis team.
He knew that his team would die before they turned Trent over to Luther, and he wondered if Jeff was telling him that Melvin and the others were dead. He didn’t want to believe that either.
Then he thought of another possibility. Kenyah had been riding Trent about Melvin’s decision to have them leave the island separately. She had been real vocal about not wanting to be separated from him. Choc hoped that Trent hadn’t let his wife persuade him to leave the safety of the team to follow her.
“God, please don’t let him be that damn pussy whipped,” he sighed.
Chapter 18
Choc was still standing at the bars when he saw two men escorting Kenyah up the hall towards his cell. Her blouse was perspiration stained, and her hair was tousled. “Choc, you have to help us,” she said when she saw him. She broke away from the men, and clamped her fingers around the bars. “They say they want you to do something for them. Please, do whatever they want, so they can let us go,” she begged.
Choc stood there stoned faced while they pried her fingers from the bars, and then dragged her away screaming for him to help her.
When they were out of sight, Choc turned his back to the bars and the overhead camera, and scowled. He hated to think that his brother was so fucking weak for Kenyah, but it looked like he had allowed her to bitch him into acting recklessly. Now they were both Luther’s prisoners. He wondered if Luther was going to use her to hurt Trent. Watching her being abused would certainly break him down. It would any man who loved his woman the way Trent clearly loved her.
He walked over to the commode and took a piss, and then he sat back down on the mattress and waited, which was the only thing that he could do.
There wasn’t a clock on the wall, but Choc figured about an hour had passed since he’d spoken to Jeff. Someone brought him a lunch tray and a bottle of water. He ate it because dying from poisoning had to be quicker and less painful than whatever Luther had planned for him to watch him do to Trent.
About an hour after Choc finished his lunch, four armed men came for him. They cuffed his hands behind his back, and then escorted him out of the cell and down the hall to the door he had seen them drag Kenyah through earlier.
Choc was shoved through the door and into what looked like the lobby of an abandoned police station, and he realized they had been keeping him in one of the holding cells.
All the furnishing had been cleared out of the large room, except for a few wooden chairs, and there was a waist high interrogation table bolted to the concrete floor with a naked man tied face down on it. He assumed that it was Trent, but he was ushered by him and to the other side of the room so fast, he barely got a glimpse of him in passing.
Jeff Basin was sitting in a chair in the far corner watching as they marched Choc over to the ropes they had rigged to an overhead pulley wheel. He had told Choc that he trusted him to be cool, but he had four men on him, just in case he couldn’t be.
There were a lot of men surrounding him, so Choc hadn’t been able to get a good look at his surroundings, yet. They tied his cuffs to the pulley ropes, and then pulled up on them until his feet left the floor. The pain was horrific as his shoulder joints were stressed to the point of dislocating from the burden of bearing his weight.
“Let him down!” Jeff snapped the order. “I told you that Luther wants him standing upright so he can enjoy watching the show!”
Immediately, they released the tension in the ropes. His feet settled on the floor, and his arms were lowered so that he could stand comfortably.
The men stepped away from him, and moved to different locations in the room, and Choc got his first look at the entire room.
He was positioned so that he had a side view of Trent on the table, which was less than twenty feet away from where he was tied to the pulley. Trent had a black bag over his head, and he was bent over the table with a rope tied to each of his wrists, and then stretched taut under the table and tied to each of his ankles.
Kenyah was in a chair that was placed directly in front of his head. Her hands were tied behind her back, and her mouth was covered with duct tape. He was going to make her watch too, and Choc hoped that it was all Luther was going to do to her, for Trent’s sake.
The windows and the double entry doors to the building were boarded up, so there was no natural light, and two of the overhead fluorescents were out, so the room was not bright. There was a reverse fan in the wall over Jeffrey’s chair which was keeping the place from being unbearably hot.
Ryan had sent him and Rayce out first before he divided everyone into groups to travel. Choc wished he had insisted on Trent going with him, although given his current situation, the results wouldn’t have been any different.
Basin had made it clear that this wasn’t going to be an interrogation, so there would be nothing Trent could do or say to stop the butchering.
Choc thought he might die just from the pain of seeing his brother tied up like a hog waiting to be slaughtered. He cut his eyes at Jeff, who was sitting in a chair in the corner calmly watching him, and he understood why Ice wanted to make him hurt before he killed him.
They were all in the room at least ten minutes before Luther Scott made his dramatic appearance. He walked into the room looking like a tribal warrior.
He had the same rich brown complexion and frosty blue eyes as his brother, Lincoln. His golden mane of hair was blow dried straight, and pulled back off his hairless face in a ponytail that sat high up on the top of his head and hung down his back nearly to his shoulder blades. He was tall, at least six three or four, with the muscular physique of a bodybuilder. He was shirtless, and his chest was hairless. He was wearing loose fitting black slacks that had a drawstring tied waist.
He was followed in by a half dozen armed men who spread out in the room, and took positions near the men that had escorted Choc in earlier.
Luther walked right up to Choc, and stood in front of him wide legged. “So, you are the cool Charlie Baltimore,” his voice had the musical tone of a native Australian.
He gripped Choc’s chin and stared him in his eyes. He noted that Choc didn’t shrink away from him in fear like
his brother had. “You are braver than your brother,” he said.
You ain’t telling me a damn thing that I don’t know, Choc thought about saying, but responding to the comment may have made things worst for Trent, so he kept his mouth shut.
Luther held his gaze for a beat, and then released his face with a not so gentle slap. “I see you want your brother to live,” he chuckled.
Choc just continued to glare at him. He did want his brother to live. But more than that, he wanted to live. So he could kill this muthafucka for what he was about to do to Trent.
“I have promised my friend that I will have mercy on you, but I have made no such promises about your brother,” he growled, “You have done well,” he said to Basin in French, thinking that Choc wouldn’t understand it, but he did.
Luther backed away from Choc, and walked across the room to the side of the table where Kenyah was sitting. Choc followed him with his eyes as he walked around behind her chair, and then rested his big hands on her shoulders. Her eyes darted to Choc, and she looked absolutely terrified.
“My men found them in a hotel in Paris registered under false names,” Luther rubbed his hands down over her breasts and laughed robustly. “I had them shipped back to the states in a cargo plane like the animals that they are, Baltimore.”
“I have my friend, the computer genius over there,” he motioned to Jeff with a hand, as he moved around and stood beside Kenyah’s chair, “to thank for locating them. He tells me that it was easy to follow them. He convinced me not to kill them on the spot. As always, he was right. I am going to get so much more pleasure out of doing it this way,” he boasted.
“They were in the middle of making love when my men arrived,” Jeff interjected. “I’m a nice guy, so I ordered them to wait until they were finished before taking them,” he spoke directly to Choc. “Your brother is quite the stallion. My men had to wait for almost two hours for him to finish riding her.”
“You are too nice, my friend. I would have ordered them to finish it for him,” Luther and his men laughed loudly, and then he pulled the hood off Trent’s head. His mouth was taped like hers, so they could only speak to each other with their eyes, and Kenyah’s were as round as saucers.
