Godchild Read online

  GODCHILD

  By

  Vincent Zandri

  Electronic Edition Copyright © 2011 Vincent Zandri

  http://www.StoneGateInk.com

  http://www.VincentZandri.com

  All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  StoneGate Ink 2011

  StoneGate Ink

  Nampa ID 83686

  www.StoneGateInk.com

  First eBook Edition: 2011

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Vincent Zandri

  Cover art by Fuji Aamabreorn

  Published in the United States of America

  PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI

  “Vincent Zandri explodes onto the scene with the debut thriller of the year. As Catch Can is gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting. Don’t miss it.”

  — Harlan Coben, author of Caught

  “A SATISFYING YARN.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  “COMPELLING … As Catch Can pulls you in with rat-a-tat prose, kinetic pacing…characters are authentic, and the punchy dialogue rings true. Zandri’s staccato prose moves As Catch Can at a steady, suspenseful pace.”

  —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  “EXCITING…AN ENGROSSING THRILLER…the descriptions of life behind bars will stand your hair on end.”

  — Rocky Mountain News

  “READERS WILL BE HELD CAPTIVE BY PROSE THAT POUNDS AS STEADILY AS AN ELEVATED PULSE.…Vincent Zandri nails readers’ attention.”

  —Boston Herald

  “A SMOKING GUN OF A DEBUT NOVEL. The rough and tumble pages turn quicker than men turn on each other.”

  —The Times-Union (Albany)

  “THE STORY LINE IS NON-STOP ACTION and the flashback to Attica is eerily brilliant. If this debut is any indication of his work, readers will demand a lifetime sentence of novels by Vincent Zandri.”

  —I Love a Mystery

  “A TOUGH-MINDED, INVOLVING NOVEL…Zandri writes strong prose that rarely strains for effect, and some of his scenes…achieve a powerful hallucinatory horror.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A CLASSIC DETECTIVE TALE.”

  —The Record (Troy, N.Y.)

  “[Zandri] demonstrates an uncanny knack for exposition, introducing new characters and narrative possibilities with the confidence of an old pro.…Zandri does a superb job creating interlocking puzzle pieces.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “This is a tough, stylish, heartbreaking car accident of a book: You don’t want to look but you can’t look away. Zandri is a terrific writer and he tells a terrific story.”

  — Don Winslow, author of The Death & Life of Bobby Z

  “SATISFYING.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Vincent Zandri

  The Remains

  Moonlight Falls

  The Innocent (As Catch Can)

  Permanence

  Pathological (A Digital Short)

  Moonlight Mafia (A Digital Short)

  GODCHILD

  VINCENT ZANDRI

  For Laura Roth

  Zandri

  “There’s all kinds of ways of dying, but only one way of being dead.”

  —Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

  The Land Rover headlights drill through the early morning desert darkness, two fiery eyes burning on the silent horizon barely an hour before the sun rises over Monterrey.

  Four A.M.

  The appointed time.

  She’s been waiting for them, per instructions from her LA. contact. The halogen signal promised just last night in Houston when finally, over caviar, Dom, and cocaine, she signed on to do the deal.

  Her first and last (although that “last” bit will remain her little secret).

  She is a writer by trade. But this morning, she is more like an actor, playing the role of the burrier. A border burrier (a bastardization of burro and courier), all packaged nice and neat in the guise of a beautiful woman. For the sake of the assignment, she has assumed the role of the in-between girl— the paid runner who takes the risk not just for the money, but for the sheer thrill.

  That’s burrier.

  Not courier.

  In the border world between Texas and Mexico, there’s a distinct difference.

  For the burrier, it’s not about the need to run drugs. It’s about the want.

  Technically speaking, she doesn’t need the money.

  According to her phony bio, she doesn’t have a family to feed, a brood of shoeless children living in a one-room shack with no hot water and no father to help carry the weight. What she’s supposedly got instead is a two-bedroom town-house in the Hollywood hills, a loft apartment in Manhattan’s Tribeca, a six-figure modeling contract with the Ford Agency, and a two-hundred-dollar-a-day coke habit.

  But all this is not enough.

  As a burrier she can savor the elation of slipping into a skintight leather jumper and motorcycle boots. The sheer power of firing up a Suzuki GSX1300 Hayabusa equipped with leather saddlebags and a CD/stereo combo with enough lethal amperage to scare off even the most rabid coyote.

  The burriers are as beautiful as they are dangerous, and they are the only gringos the brothers will deal with these days.

  Their philosophy: Why eat bread when you can have pure honey?

  Her philosophy: What a story this is gonna make.

  She may be acting out a role, but the one thing she can’t fake is her beauty.

  She is, as they say, drop-dead gorgeous standing out there in the middle of the desert with cropped auburn hair, blue eyes, and black leather jumper, the zipper running from breasts to navel. Like something out of a Bond film. And right now, as the headlights shine in the near distance, she can feel her heart beating, her throat closing, that little tingle shooting up her spine telling her, It’s time, baby.

  The desert is peaceful this morning.

  Calm.

  There is a sweet, dry, desert smell. And a slight hum that comes from the insects you never see in the dark of .There is the bone cold and the occasional burst of wind to make it even colder, to send the fine granules of sand up into her face, make them stick to the red lipstick that covers her heart-shaped mouth.

  When the doors on the Land Rover suddenly open, one at a time, and the silhouettes of two men appear—one tall and thin, the other short and stocky —both packing shotguns, she knows she’s reached the proverbial point of no going back.

  No amount of acting can stop those bullets should they start to fly.

  She cannot deny the fear any more than she can deny the thrill of it all. She’s the method writer, after all. She’s not interested in facts so much as discovering what it actually feels like to experience something. What are the specific sights, sounds, tastes, and emotions that come together to create an experience? How do you translate these sensations and dimensions to the page so that the experience becomes more real for the reader than if the reader actually participated in it? That’s method writing, and there isn’t a soul on earth who can come close to her ability to convey a true life-and-death experience.

  Now, with every step they take toward her, with every shell they cock into the metal chambers of their pump-action shotguns, she knows she is coming that much closer to death. The real thing. So she rubs her hip up against the saddlebag. Just to make certain that the money and her life is sti
ll a viable option. Because if the money is not there, she knows she has no choice but to hand over her life. No questions asked, no excuses, no “Oh crap, I left it on the kitchen counter.”

  No begging, no pleading, no free sex.

  She’s done the research, so she knows what these brothers are capable of, even on a good day. How they strip you, strap you down naked on your back, all four limbs tied to stakes, baby oil poured over the skin, the hair on your head and sex completely shaved, eyelids taped back against your eyebrows so that when the desert sun also rises, the eyeballs fry while your skin bubbles and broils. What they find of you later—if they find you at all—stands as a coyote-chewed warning, a fleshless message not to fuck with the Contreras Brothers and their Mexicali turf.

  But this morning, she has nothing to worry about as the two men in cowboy boots and Stetsons close the gap. She can feel the bulge the cash makes in the saddlebag when it rubs up against her thigh. The sensation is oddly sexual. She swallows hard when the two men stop dead in their tracks, as though on cue (obviously, they’ve been through the routine dozens of times before). One of the men —the shorter—takes four or five steps forward, meets her face to face, so close she can smell the tequila and cigarettes on his breath.

  “Buenos días, señorita.”

  “Its still nighttime, case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Did you bring our money?”

  ‘‘Did you bring our drugs?”

  “Oooohhh, I like that. A beautiful woman who answers a simple question with a stupid question. Makes my job so much easier”

  “Shall we get down to the job, or shall we stand around and chat?”

  “Well, what do you know. Beauty, brains, and—if you’ll excuse the expression—balls. ”

  He reaches out with his free hand, uses his dirty fingers to pull down her zipper. As much as his touch repulses her, she allows him to do it. Because it’s all a part of the act, a small price to pay for the method writer.

  And it proceeds like that. She standing there, he breathing on her, touching her, while his partner looks on in horny amazement. Until business must be tended to and the saddlebag is opened to reveal its cargo of cash, and then the tailgate on the Land Rover is opened to reveal its payload. As the sun begins to show itself red-orange on the easternmost horizon, the whole deal goes down smoothly.

  That is, until another set of headlights appears. And another and yet another, the bright white lights clearly visible a split second before they hear the telltale wail of the sirens

  PART ONE

  REMAINS HINT AT HORROR IN MEXICO!

  MONTERREY, Mexico (AP)-U.S. and Mexican authorities have resumed their search for bodies in the desert where at least six corpses have been unearthed. FBI informants claim as many as three hundred victims of a powerful drug cartel could be buried in the desert country between the city and the Texas border. Forensics experts, in cooperation with Mexican soldiers and ski-masked police, have been systematically searching the vast area as well as two known desert ranches in Monterrey, once the undisputed territory of the Contreras drug cartel, at one time Mexico’s most powerful and most violent drug-smuggling family.

  Chapter 1

  I was sitting inside Bill’s Bar and Grill, listening to the hard wind that whistled through the cracks in the picture window embedded in the brick wall behind my back. The one held together with duct tape and striped neon piping that spelled out Bud Light and Rolling Rock. I had been kidding myself all afternoon, thinking it was possible to make myself invisible by hoarding a stool in the far, dark corner of the South End bar, all dressed up like a clown in my wedding-day blazer, charcoal pants, and virgin loafers with tassels.

  It was March 21, according to the folded newspaper that sat ignored on the bar beside my right elbow.

  REMAINS HINT AT HORROR IN MEXICO!

  It was supposed to be one of the happiest days of my life.

  But I never made the ceremony. That made it one of the saddest.

  Instead, I’d been hiding out in the corner of this old bar, counting down the minutes until the happy-hour crowd left me alone and Bill the bartender dimmed the lights to make ready for some serious drinking, serious disappearing. If only vanishing were possible.

  Horror in Mexico!

  The world’s business.

  The blues in Albany!

  My business

  After five slow hours inside Bill’s I could tell you exactly who came and went like clockwork. An old man who called himself Kenny P. C. (“P for Pretty,” he slurred, a toothy vampire smile on his ruddy face. “C for Cute.”) and dressed himself in blue polyester slacks, white rayon shirt, and matching blue jacket. A man far older than his years who sat five stools away from me towards the middle of the bar and drank bottom-shelf scotch. Until the head bob began and the space between the bar and his forehead became narrower and narrower. Until the bets were placed for which one final bob would send his skull bouncing off the hardwood. At which time he was escorted to the door, stage right, a taxi already warmed up and waiting for him just outside the picture window.

  Then there was the woman in cheap Sears jeans and white cotton T-shirt who’d come in sometime around one-thirty. She had a pockmarked face and frizzy gray hair. She smoked Pall Mall 100s, one off the other, and carried on one hell of a conversation with herself in a South All-benny accent. On three separate occasions she found her way over to me, set her hand on my thigh, told me how sad and lonely I looked, then offered her body. All three times I told her no. Finally, I flipped her a twenty from my honeymoon bankroll, just to shut her up.

  Maybe I liked being lonely, I told her.

  And then there was the young Mohawk Indian kid who sat four stools down from me, whose hands shook so bad he had to use them both to lift his whiskey glass off the bar, bring the rim to his thick lips.

  I’d gotten to know them all during my disappearing act at Bill’s. I had no way of knowing if my fiancée, Val Antonelli, or my best man (and lawyer), Tony Angelino, had attempted to contact me. No idea if they wanted to contact me. As I removed the pinned carnation from my breast pocket and set it down on the bar, I knew that by now I had to have been recognized. That I wasn’t invisible. And if I had been recognized, then I was also sure that Val and Tony knew exactly where to find me.

  I blamed the Albany cops.

  Maybe I had no idea what their names were or what precinct they worked out of (though Albany wasn’t that big). But as a former maximum-security warden, I’d had gained enough experience over the years to be able to sniff out a cop at twenty paces. It was never the uniform that gave them away. No cop would dare enter this or any other bar for a drink dressed in his on-duty blacks.

  The cops who came into Bill’s were almost always young, almost always dressed in generous-cut Levi’s jeans, immaculate running shoes, maybe a pastel-colored polo shirt or Notre Dame sweatshirt pulled over broad, iron-pumped shoulders. They wore gold Irish Claddagh rings on their middle fingers, and their flattop hair always had that wet, just-out-of-the-gang-shower look.

  And man, talk about the overwhelming aroma of Aqua Velva.

  But if all this were not enough to convince me that the young dude ordering a pint of “Half and Half” was one of Albany’s Irish finest, then I could be certain when he wrapped his arm around Kenny P. C.’s shoulder and addressed the drunk by his first name. Naturally, Kenny would ask the cop if he could spare a couple of bucks. But then the cop would pull out the empty pockets of his jeans, allow them to hang there like little white wings. He’d hold his hands in the air and say, “Kenny, even Jesus Christ Himself could touch only so many lepers.”

  You could always spot a cop at Bill’s Bar and Grill, because everybody knew cops drank for free.

  As a former lawman I knew that the cops must have come and gone immediately after the eight-to-four shift or right after the four-to-midnight action shift. Just in time for last call. I’d seen quite a few of them during my afternoon inside the bar. Maybe I’d gone a li
ttle out of my mind by then, but I knew they spotted me just as easily as I spotted them. I also knew that it was only a matter of time until one of them placed a call to Tony’s downtown law practice to let him know where the hell I was. Tony, in turn, would tell Val. On the other hand, why should she waste her time looking for me? Why even make the effort? I was the one who had left her standing at the altar all alone. I was the one who, for five long hours, had been pissing away our honeymoon money on beer, whiskey, and regrets.

  The wind whistled. Even with my blazer on, I could feel the cold March air on my back. I sipped beer from a long-neck bottle, fired up a smoke, and for the hundredth time that afternoon, hit the playback button in my brain.

  It had just started snowing as I’d passed the stone pilasters marking Albany Rural Cemetery’s south-side entrance. Snowing hard in mid-March. I had pushed on past the old iron gates, feeling stiff and cold in the brand-new wedding-day blazer and loafers. Shuffling toward the plot that had been home to my first wife, Fran, for almost three years now.

  As usual, I was running late.

  In less than fifteen minutes my best man would require my presence in the brick rectory behind Saint Mary’s Cathedral on Eagle Street. According to tradition, Tony and I were expected to “sweat it out” in that back room among the spare chalices, bags of communion wafers, and the same Boone’s Farm wine I used to sneak sips from back when I was still an altar boy. Sweat it out amid the smell of burning candles and incense, until my fiancée (and former Green Haven Prison secretary), Val Antonelli, began her long slow march down the church aisle on her way to a second marriage.

  Hers and mine.

  In my right hand, collecting snowflakes, a weightless bundle of wildflowers wrapped in baby-blue tissue paper. Under my left arm —hidden by the blue blazer—a leather shoulder holster that cradled a two-and-one-half-pound Colt 45.