The Big Bad Wolf - James Patterson [55]
The Campus Arboretum at Holy Cross had long been a hangout for students who wanted to be alone and those who had romantic intentions. The garden area boasted over a hundred different kinds of trees and shrubs, and overlooked downtown Worcester, “Wormtown,” as it was sometimes called by students.
That night Vince and Francis, dressed in athletic shorts, T-shirts, and matching purple-and-white baseball caps, strolled down Easy Street to a brick patio and lawn area known as Wheeler Beach. It was crowded, so they continued on to find a quiet spot in the arboretum.
There, they lay on a blanket under a nearly full moon and a sky studded with stars. They held hands and talked about the poetry of W. B. Yeats, whom Francis adored and Vince, a pre-med student, tolerated as best he could. The two men were an unusual couple physically. Vince was just over five-foot-seven and weighed one eighty. Most of it was solid, due to his obsessive weight lifting at the gym, but it was obvious he had to work hard at it. He had curly black hair that framed a soft, almost angelic face that wasn’t too much different from his baby pictures, one of which his lover carried in his wallet.
Francis could make either sex drool, and that was Vince’s private joke when they were among coeds, “Drool, fools!” Francis was six-foot-one, without an ounce of fat. His white-blond hair was cut in the same style he had adopted as a sophomore at Christian Brothers Academy in New Jersey. He adored Vince with all his heart, and Vince worshiped him.
They came for Francis, of course.
He had been scouted, and purchased.
Chapter 62
THE THREE BURLY MEN were dressed in loose jeans, work boots, and dark windbreakers. They were hoodlums. In Russian they were called baklany or bandity. Scary demons wherever you met up with them, monsters from Moscow let loose in America by the Wolf.
They parked a black Pontiac Grand Prix on the street, then climbed the hill to the main campus at Holy Cross.
One of them was short of breath and complained in Russian about the steepness of the hill.
“Quiet, asshole,” said group leader Maxin, who liked to call himself a personal friend of the Wolf’s, though of course he wasn’t. No pakhan had real friends, but especially not the Wolf. He had only enemies and almost never met those who worked for him. Even in Russia, he had been known as an invisible or mystery man. Here in the U.S., virtually no one knew him by sight.
The three thugs watched the college students on the blanket as they held hands, then kissed and fondled.
“Kiss like girls,” said one of the Russian men with a nasty laugh.
“Not like any girls I ever kiss.”
The three of them laughed and shook their heads in disgust. Then the hulking leader of the team strode forward, moving very fast given his weight and size. He silently pointed at Francis, and the two other men pulled the boy away from Vince.
“Hey, what the hell is this?” Francis started to yell. He was stopped by a wide strip of electrical tape pressed over his mouth, cutting off all sound.
“Now you can scream,” said one of the smirking hoods. “Scream like a girl. But nobody hears you anymore.”
They worked together quickly. While one thug wrapped more black tape around Francis’s ankles, the other bound his wrists tightly behind his back. Then he was stuffed inside a large duffel bag,