The Big Bad Wolf

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, the sort used to carry athletic equipment such as baseball bats or basketballs.
    The leader, meanwhile, took out a thin, very sharp stiletto knife. He slit the heavyset boy’s throat, just as he used to kill pigs and goats back in his home country. Vince hadn’t been purchased, and he had seen the abduction team. Unlike the Couple, these men would never play their own little games, or betray the Wolf, or disappoint him. There would be no more mistakes. The Wolf had been explicit on that, clear in a dangerous way that only he could be.
    “Take the pretty boy. Quickly,” said the leader of the team as they hurried back to their car. They tossed the bulging bag into the trunk of the Pontiac and got out of town.
    The job was perfect.

Chapter 63
    HERE WAS THE DEAL as Francis saw it now, as he tried to be calm and logical about it.
Nothing that had happened to him could possibly have happened!
He couldn’t have been abducted a few hours ago from the campus of Holy Cross by three absolutely terrifying men.
It just couldn’t have happened.
Nor could he have been transported in the trunk of a car for four, maybe five hours to God only knew where.
    Most important, Vince couldn’t be dead. That cruel and heartless piece of shit couldn’t have slit Vince’s throat back at the