Hostage

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The last thing Caminha Sozinho remembered was a fat black gun barrel pointed at his face.

He opened his eyes.

He was flat on his back on a king size mattress. Blurred vision, throbbing headache, sharp stinging pain on the right side of his neck. He touched the center of his forehead with the tips of his fingers, felt the hard knot that had formed there, wondered why he wasn’t dead.

He raised his head and looked around, felt a wave of nausea come and go. He was still in the motel room he’d rented after leaving the CHOKE compound. The man in the black leather jacket-the man who’d hired him for the hit-was sitting on the foot of the bed switching television channels with the remote control. He stopped on an old cowboy movie.

“What time is it?” Sozinho said.

“It’s night. After ten o’clock. You’ve been out for a few hours.”

Sozinho had accepted a large sum of money to assassinate a former army officer named Jack Reacher. He thought he’d been successful, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Apparently he’d shot the wrong man. He’d expected the man in the black leather jacket to kill him and take the money back. Now he wondered if some sort of fate worse than death awaited him. Daily torture sessions, perhaps. He’d heard rumors that the organization the man in the black leather jacket belonged to did such things just for entertainment sometimes.

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