Chapter 77: Mafia Kings: Massimo: Chapter 78

The asshole must have knocked me out.

When I came to, my face hurt – and so did my hands. They were stretched over my head, my wrists were bound, and I was being pulled along by them. My feet and legs were cutting a trough through the mud as Zollner dragged me behind him.

I tried to scream for Massimo –

But something was in my mouth. Some kind of gag.

I tried to kick my feet –

But my ankles were bound, too.

Suddenly we stopped. Zollner let go of my hands, and I collapsed onto the muddy ground.

Above me loomed a bumper; to my right was a tire.

Zollner opened up the rear hatchback of the vehicle. “This would have been so much easier if you’d just cooperated.”

Then he reached down towards me.

I turned on my side and tried to squirm under the car, but Zollner yanked me back and hoisted me onto my feet.

“Into the back you go,” he said in his cheerful voice.

BANG!

I jerked in fear – and Zollner flinched behind me at the same time.

In the silence that followed, we could both hear a hissing sound:

fsssssssssss

Then a second shot – BANG!

fsssssssssss

“Scheisse…” the weirdo muttered behind me.

“ZOLLNER!” Massimo roared from the darkness.

My heart soared!

Then my stomach lurched as Zollner wrapped his arm around my neck and placed the cold muzzle of his pistol against my head.

“You should have waited to kill me once I had her in the Range Rover, Herr Rosolini,” Zollner said cheerfully. “Shooting out my tires will merely prolong the ordeal.”

“LET HER GO!”

“Mmmm… I think not.”

Zollner dragged me with him, keeping my body in front of him.

I tried wriggling out of his grasp –

“Ah, ah, ah,” he whispered as he pressed the muzzle harder into my skin. “Be still, Fräulein. We wouldn’t want my gun to go off, now would we?”

Zollner kept dragging me along as a human shield.

In front of me, I could see the Range Rover…

And in the distance roared a river, its waters swollen with all the extra rainfall.

Zollner pulled me across a dirt road – now a mud road – and back into the forest.

A shadow ran out of the trees across the road and took cover behind the Range Rover. “Let her go, Zollner!”

“Why don’t you come out so we can talk, Herr Rosolini?”

“I thought you were calling me ‘Massimo.’”

“Well, you refuse to call me anything but ‘Zollner,’ so I assume we aren’t quite at that level of friendship yet.”

“Let her go and we can be friends. Plus I’ll pay you ten times what Aurelio’s paying you.”

“O-ho – the amount has gone up!”

“It has.”

“The offer is appreciated – but I already told you: if word gets out that I can be bought off, no one will ever hire me again.”

“I’ll never tell.”

“But Aurelio surely will – make no mistake of that. IF he doesn’t kill me outright.”

“We can keep this between you, me, and Lucia. We’re leaving tomorrow – you can just let us go.”

From the nearness of his voice, I assumed Massimo had followed us into the woods.

“And ruin my reputation? Tsk, tsk, tsk. I think not. That would be professional suicide, as well.”

As Zollner kept dragging me, the river got louder and louder behind us.

“Then name your price,” Massimo yelled.

“Alright… one beeeellion dollars!”

I swear the motherfucker said it exactly like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers.

Then Zollner burst out laughing. “Do you like my impression? I would do the pinkie at the corner of my mouth, but I must keep the gun at your fiancée’s temple.”

Let me tell you, being dragged through the mud with a gun at your head is no picnic.

But being dragged through the mud with a gun at your head by a certifiable whack job is something else entirely.

“I’m losing patience, Zollner!” Massimo roared.

“Then come out and let me shoot you!” Zollner called out cheerfully.

A second later, I heard a car door opening.

My heart leapt with hope. I thought for sure that Massimo would try to start the engine – after all, he’d hotwired the car in Treporti –

Although I had no idea what he would do once he got it started.

“I have the keys, Herr Rosolini,” Zollner shouted. “Even if you could start the engine, the Fräulein and I are already deep within the trees. There’s no way you can reach us.”

The car’s engine roared to life.

He DID hotwire it!

Zollner sighed in exasperation. “I told you, the trees are too crowded here – you can’t possibly expect to come get us!”

Massimo gunned the Range Rover’s engine.

Its tires spun in the mud – and then it got traction.

It turned hard right across the muddy road, its two flat tires going flap flap flap.

Once it was pointed directly at us, its headlights came on in a blinding burst of light –

Pointed right at us.

“Oh… well, that’s inconvenient…” Zollner grumbled as he continued dragging me towards the river.