Vauvert had to restrain himself from reacting instinctively. He could have grabbed the kid’s arm easily and fractured his wrist, which would have been a very stupid move, of course.
And so he did nothing. It was not the kid’s fault his superior officer was a moron.
“Wait,” he asked again. “Please.”
In reply, the butt of the gun came down on his head again.
“You fucking idiot.”
“And he’s insulting us, on top of everything else,” the superior officer sniggered. “You and I are not going to be buddies, you know that?”
“You’re right,” Vauvert muttered. “I don’t think you’re going to like me very much.”
“Is that a threat?”
Vauvert did not say anything.
“All right, let me do it,” the superior officer said as he walked toward him. He reached for the handcuffs on his belt. “I’m going to cuff him myself. Pierre, if this psycho makes a move, you pull the trigger, is that understood?”
Vauvert felt the barrel of the young man’s gun against his neck.
The weapon was shaking slightly.
He let the superior officer come to him without making a move.
“Your hands, dickhead,” the officer ordered.
Vauvert took a deep breath and then drew back. He thrust his foot and kicked the officer in the shin.
The man gave a yelp of surprise and pain. Everything happened too fast for him to defend himself. Before he knew it, Vauvert was behind him, twisting his arm forcefully, nearly dislocating it.
“No! Shit!” the man bellowed. “Shit! Shit!”
Now Vauvert was facing the younger officer, who was still pointing his weapon at him. The young officer’s face was as pale as a ghost.
The man bellowed again, “Lower your gun, you dick! Holy shit! Pierre, lower your fucking gun right now!”
The officer did what he was told.
“Don’t hurt me,” the man begged in a broken voice.
Vauvert’s only reply was to take his handgun and lock his other arm around the man’s throat. His larynx compressed, he stopped whining.
“Let him go! It’s an order!” the third cop shouted.
He pressed his gun against Leroy’s neck.
“Right now!”
62
“You hear me? Let him go!” the third cop repeated.
His voice panicky. He’d never been trained to face this kind of situation.
Vauvert, for his part, was trying to assess the situation as best he could.
He decided to up the ante.
He leaned back a little, and his hostage was lifted onto his toes, gasping for air.
He held him this way and pointed his weapon at the two stunned officers.
“Let go of me,” the officer kept pleading. “Please. Don’t hurt me.”
Vauvert brought his lips to the man’s ear and said, “Listen very carefully. We don’t want any fuck-ups, do we? We’re all on the same team. The reason we came here is to try to save a colleagues’ life. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
His hostage nodded as best he could.
“All I’m asking of you is to let me see if there’s another house over there. We’re all going to go over there and look together. If we don’t find anything, I swear that we will let you take us. Is it a deal?”
“Let him go!” shouted the officer holding Leroy at gunpoint.
Leroy was not saying anything, but his face was ghostly pale.
Vauvert squeezed his hostage’s throat a little more. His feet were almost dangling above the ground, and he was choking.
“Lower your weapons,” he told his two young officers in a raspy voice. “Please, lower… your… weapons”
The two boys exchanged powerless looks and decided to obey.
“Remove his cuffs!” Vauvert barked.
One of them inserted the key in the tiny lock. The cuffs sprang open.
“Give him your weapons. Go on!”
They complied, passing over their guns. But Leroy didn’t take them. Instead, he turned to Vauvert and said, “Wait, we’re all colleagues, here.”
“That’s what I kept trying to tell them.”
The two young officers were shaking like leaves.
“It’s okay. Relax now,” Leroy told them. “We don’t mean to harm you. We just need your help.”
Vauvert put his hostage back on the ground and pushed him toward his partners. The man broke into a coughing fit.
“You sick fucks! Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“My job, that’s what I’m doing,” Vauvert shot back. “And I’m just asking you guys to do yours.”
He put his weapon back in its holster and slowly raised his hands in a gesture of appeasement.
“God dammit, can’t you just trust another cop? I promise you can book us as soon as we’re done with what we came here for. Is that all right?”
The man remained silent. His eyes gleamed with anger, and Vauvert understood that he would have to be wary of the guy, no matter what happened.
“What’s your name?” he asked, trying to break the ice.
The officer gave him a dagger-filled look before answering, “I’m Captain Ludovic Nadal. My men here are Pierre Lascrosse and Arnaud Puech.”
Vauvert gestured at the path in the bushes.
“So, Ludovic, if it’s okay with you, we’ll go this way. All of us.”
But barely after they started along the path, it ended.
A fence rose in the middle of the tall grass. It looked like an ordinary fence, but this one was topped with a thick nest of barbed wire.
“Can’t you see that there’s nothing for us to find here?” the officer named Lascrosse whined. Vauvert pointed his flashlight at the fence. He had seen barbed wire like that before.
The Salaville farm had been protected exactly the same way.
“We keep moving,” he announced. “Let’s climb over it. Come on.”
They found a space where the barbed wire had come apart just a little, and the officers did as they were told. They managed to get over the fence with just a few cuts and scratches.
“There’s nothing here,” one of them said after he had jumped to the other side.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Vauvert said, following them over the fence.
The metal prongs ripped his trousers, but at that point he did not care.
If there was actually something to be discovered on this piece of land, they were getting very close to it.
And so they moved along. They followed an old overgrown path until their flashlights found a square stone structure amidst the coniferous trees.
“What’s that?”
“A sheepfold house,” Lascrosse said. “They’re everywhere out here. Usually they’re abandoned. No one
