Whitetail Liberator - Softcover

Riley, R. Cameron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1491777753 ISBN 13: 9781491777756

Verlag: iUniverse, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

D'Vaunte "Rocket" Liberatore lives at the end of the law enforcement food chain as a low-level private investigator. His is a life of cheating spouses, thieving family members, and runaway teens. However, he's successfully used his career to avoid his personal battles with drugs, sex, violence, and even his own irresistible charm. When he returns to his native Whitetail Village to memorialize his deceased mother, Rocket makes a choice to cash in on his biggest payday opportunity yet. Things soon spin out of control, though, as his new investigation puts him in the crosshairs of homicide detectives and drug dealers. A firefight explodes on the quiet streets of his childhood. Rocket's actions soon get people killed, including a childhood friend and even an assassin. He can't turn his back and run at the risk of losing more of the people he loves. Instead, he independently takes on the bad guys in a desperate attempt to liberate the innocent from a world of vengeful sociopaths and self-righteous policemen.

Über diesen Titel

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Whitetail Liberator

By R. Cameron Riley

iUniverse

Copyright © 2015 R. Cameron Riley
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-7775-6

CHAPTER 1

The pharmacist gave them his medical opinion. He had told them, over the pounding sound of Jay-Z's "Run This Town," that some of the Rohypnol that Captain Liberatore had ingested was now in the puke on his chin and on his shirt; it was not in his brain. While the haunting vocals "Hey eh eh eh eh eh" pumped from singer Rhianna, and the accompanying rap artist spit out his rhymes from the small speakers of a Walmart CD player with a tin-sounding bass, Liberatore's cognitive abilities were returning.

Rocket Liberatore was beginning to judge that the men who had him were amateurs. A real professional seeking such valuable property would have already had him bloody, without one of his ears, and opened up, guts literally spilling the information forward.

The doctor had also told them that their technique wouldn't work. It was real pain and damage that would release the information he held. Doctor Fox had said that Rocket would just consider this beating a simple ass-whooping that he probably deserved. What they were doing wouldn't even give him reason to retaliate when he discovered who had punk'd him, and the doctor believed that he would learn that.

Rocket wasn't what you'd call a prayerful man. He would occasionally kneel and pray, but it was usually with a small measure of contempt. It would be that contempt, that feeling that he had no other option than to ask for God's help, that would make him shift his message in the middle of prayer. He'd likely tell his God that he had accepted this beating as a message from above. He'd likely tell his Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that he never enjoyed the violence they had placed in his life and that somehow, from the pinch on his leg by an ill-informed nurse helping him search for his first breath, he understood the nature of violence. He would tell his God that from the time he was placed in the arms of a father whose only disciplining skill was to whip a child's ass. From that to the beating he now endured, he understood how violence could be employed as a tactic. Finally, he would tell his God that violence was now a part of his deeper psyche.

Even in his sedated state, Rocket didn't allow any small measure of fear to show. He knew the nature of those who had sent these kidnappers, these abusers, on their mission. So he prepared for the next blow, knowing that his torturer would find and assault his solar plexus again with power and accuracy in an attempt to dislodge him of certain information that now rattled around in his brain.

The next fist came with a force that sent his diaphragm muscle into a spasm and pushed all the air up and out of Rocket's lungs without breaking any ribs that could puncture something vital inside him. Because of that, Rocket knew that he was needed alive. But the pain in his gut and the anxiety of not being able to breathe still crawled up his spine and grabbed his brain for a short-lived visit, staying only long enough for the oxygen he needed to remain conscious to return to his head. With that lack of air, the left side of his brain would direct him to panic and remind him that without breathing there was no life. Alarms of fight or flight would scream. The right side of his brain would balance that with laughter about the rookie mistakes that got him into this victim's chair, a condition he'd never cede to.

Captain D'Vaunte Liberatore enjoyed correcting people on the phonetic pronunciation -- Liberator, saying, "It's not Puerto Rican or Brazilian, muthafucka, it's black and Italian." But there was no correction in this exchange for now as he tried to suck the air back into his lungs. His diaphragm would not cooperate; the muscle so essential to living was temporarily in a painful lockdown. He gasped and struggled against his bindings to try to restart his breathing. He bounced around and wrestled with the duct tape that held his arms and wrists down at his side. His ankles were also bound to the legs of the wobbly, black-walnut kitchen chair crafted in the nineteenth century, placed neatly in the center of the room.

"Relax yourself. Breathe, man ... breathe," Panama Jordy whispered into his right ear. The jaundiced, dark-skinned man of West Indies ancestry rose back up to his five-foot-three stature to be out of the way of the next punch. He looked at his partners in crime and scratched his coarse mini-Afro, as if perplexed. Then he smiled broadly at the man across the room, revealing front teeth that carried a heavy load of tartar and an absence of molars. He shrugged and raised his eyebrows above facial skin that was pockmarked and had an unhealthy looking gray color to it. Yellow surrounded his brown eyes as they focused on his prisoner.

Panama Jordy was standing in his native Franklin County in southern Pennsylvania. He had never been away from his rural confines because he was always broke (or financially challenged, as he called it). He earned his nickname because he hid the needle tracks on both of his arms with long-sleeve Panama Jack shirts. His friends tagged him with the nickname as they joked that the Panama canals on his arms carried cargo to his head. Most of them had never seen the world either.

Jordy nodded his approval, and the boxer stepped forward. Rocket's skills as an observer, the ones that were slowly returning just like the pharmacist said, would allow him to discern that three men held him in the musty, dirt-floor room where a single lightbulb moved above his head. The foul odor coming from such a friendly mouth, noticeable even over the stench of his vomit on his chest, would surely give Rocket other things to remember if he were ever to be released.

CHAPTER 2

As rain pelted on the tin roof for a few seconds, Rocket Liberatore must have imagined a century-old house that was in a serious stage of disrepair. The faint smell of salt pork and hickory smoke rose around him and his captors, seeming to emanate from the floor and the walls. And, not to be over shadowed, the smell of an old and unused kerosene lamp with some leftover soot added to the aromatic stimuli speaking to him.

The dirt floor under Rocket's feet was not the soft type you would find in a barn. It was compacted and had been swept clean. Any loose dirt had seemingly been carried away long ago. The musty smell of dampness swirled about like he was in an old basement, cave, or smokehouse. These were the kinds of locations that Rocket had imagined as a kid, learning about his home and how it had been used 150 years earlier during the height of activity by the Underground Railroad. He loved how his people had participated in the network of safe havens. His favorite history lessons were those that involved that system of hideaways used by the abolitionists to move runaway slaves through his hometown. He enjoyed hearing the stories of those seeking freedom at all costs ... freedom that could be found only outside his country to the north. Those history lessons were all around him in Whitetail Village, as it was just three miles north of the Mason-Dixon border, the famous border that separated Maryland from Pennsylvania — where Quakers refused to return runaway slaves to their slave owners. At every opportunity and in each assignment from elementary school to graduating as high school valedictorian, he researched and presented some aspect of the abolitionist movement.

Those were likely his last observations about his surroundings before he was once again distracted by a fist crashing into his gut. He didn't see it coming. The bandana they had placed over...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1491777753
• ISBN 13: 9781491777756
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 324
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland