Godchild: A Jack "Keeper" Marconi PI Thriller Series
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About this ebook
He wanted justice, truth, revenge... whichever came first.
Prison-warden-turned-P.I. Jack "Keeper" Marconi understands the criminal mind. And he knows what it takes to break a man. His own life came apart the day a black Buick broadsided his car--and his wife died horrifically in the seat beside him.
Years later, on the eve of his second marriage, Marconi catches a split-second glimpse of the driver who killed his wife. Suddenly hurtled back into the past, he is determined to take one last shot at hunting him down. That is, until he is offered a job he can't refuse: to bust a beautiful woman out of a hellish Mexican prison.
Now Keeper's chase through Mexico follows a trail of bodies and lies back home: to the truth about a woman on the run, to a man sitting behind the wheel of a black Buick, and to a story that someone will kill to bury.
Greab your pulse pounding thriller now!
"Sensational . . . masterful . . . brilliant."
—New York Post
"(A) chilling tale of obsessive love from Thriller Award–winner Zandri (Moonlight Weeps) . . . Riveting."
—Publishers Weekly
Vincent Zandri
"Vincent Zandri hails from the future." --The New York Times “Sensational . . . masterful . . . brilliant.” --New York Post "Gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting." --Harlan Coben, New York Times bestselling author of Six Years "Tough, stylish, heartbreaking." --Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of Savages and Cartel. Winner of the 2015 PWA Shamus Award and the 2015 ITW Thriller Award for Best Original Paperback Novel for MOONLIGHT WEEPS, Vincent Zandri is the NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and AMAZON KINDLE OVERALL NO.1 bestselling author of more than 60 novels and novellas including THE REMAINS, EVERYTHING BURNS, ORCHARD GROVE, THE SHROUD KEY and THE GIRL WHO WASN'T THERE. His list of domestic publishers include Delacorte, Dell, Down & Out Books, Thomas & Mercer, Polis Books, Suspense Publishing, Blackstone Audio, and Oceanview Publishing. An MFA in Writing graduate of Vermont College, his work is translated in the Dutch, Russian, French, Italian, and Japanese. Having sold close to 1 million editions of his books, Zandri has been the subject of major features by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Business Insider. He has also made appearances on Bloomberg TV and the FOX News network. In December 2014, Suspense Magazine named Zandri's, THE SHROUD KEY, as one of the "Best Books of 2014." Suspense Magazine selected WHEN SHADOWS COME as one of the "Best Books of 2016". He was also a finalist for the 2019 Derringer Award for Best Novelette. A freelance photojournalist, freelance writer, and the author of the popular "lit blog," The Vincent Zandri Vox, Zandri has written for Living Ready Magazine, RT, New York Newsday, Hudson Valley Magazine, The Times Union (Albany), Game & Fish Magazine, CrimeReads, Altcoin Magazine, The Jerusalem Post, Market Business News, Duke University, Colgate University, and many more. He also writes for Scalefluence. An Active Member of MWA and ITW, he lives in New York and Florence, Italy. For more go to VINZANDRI.COM
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Godchild - Vincent Zandri
Begin your Moonlight journey today with a FREE copy of MOONLIGHT FALLS, the first novel in the Thriller and Shamus Award winning series.
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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
There’s all kinds of ways of dying, but only one way of being dead.
—Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me
GODCHILD
A Jack Keeper
Marconi PI Thriller
Vincent Zandri
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 jumpsuit 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 jumpsuit, 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 night. 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 return.
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 still 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 that the cash makes in the saddlebag when her thigh contacts it. 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.
It’s 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 tail¬gate 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 the trio hears 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.
1
I was sitting inside Bill’s Bar and Grill in Albany, New York, 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, a matching blue jacket, and a white rayon shirt. A man far older than his years, he sat five stools away from me toward 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, and 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 ad¬dressed 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 little 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 en¬trance. 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 2½-pound Colt .45.
The low midday clouds showered the sloping landscape in wet snow. The white stuff came down fast and furiously as it fell against the crooked, leafless branches of the trees, against the bleached marble headstones and miniature churchlike mausoleums.
I stood over the five-by-ten plot with the granite marker at its head inscribed with Fran’s birth and death dates.
Setting the bundle of wildflowers on the plot, I watched the petals begin to disappear in the falling snow. But what I saw was a battered black, four-door Buick sedan with tinted windows slamming directly into the passenger side of my Ford Bronco at fifty miles per hour; Fran’s head and shoulders going through the windshield, the jagged edge of the glass taking her head clean off as though it were a razor blade; her body slumping back into the seat like nothing at all had happened. Like her life hadn’t slipped away in the split second of time it took for that windshield to shatter. Then the screaming of the witnesses and the spattered blood and the sight of that black Buick tearing away. But not before the driver rolled down his window, just long enough for me to get a good look at his bald head, hoop earring, and the thin mustache that covered only half of his upper lip.
The Bald Man...
I stood in the falling snow and I recalled the two full years I’d spent in search of the Bald Man, only to come up empty. There were the endless hours spent sifting through mug shots, photographic kits, evidence folders, and case files. There were the posters printed with the Bald Man’s likeness—the likeness I viewed for only a split second but committed to memory—that I stapled to telephone poles all across the state. There was the ten-thousand-dollar reward offered for any verifiable information
leading to his whereabouts.
The entire two-year effort now resided in my brain, neatly categorized under FAILURE with a capital F. I knew that with my marriage to Val only a few minutes away, I had no choice but to once and for all give up the search for good; call it another unsolved mystery, just like the Albany cops did less than a year ago. All that was left was to move on with my life, remember Fran the way she had lived.
I stepped away from the plot.
The wildflowers were gone now. Completely covered over. I had barely ten minutes left to make it—you guessed it—to the church on time. Ten minutes to put the past behind me for good.
I might have made it, too.
If it hadn’t been for the battered black Buick sedan that drove in through the cemetery gates.
It was the car I remembered. The car that rammed into my Ford Bronco, sending Fran to her death.
The Buick.
My black Buick with the tinted windows, just sitting there idling, the engine running, exhaust smoking out of the rusted tailpipe gray-black in the falling snow.
Here’s what I should have done: pulled out my .45, blasted a couple of rounds over the roof of the car. Or maybe blown out a rear tire.
But here’s what I did instead: not a goddamned thing.
I just stood there, as stuck to the ground as Fran’s marker, while the driver of the Buick backed up, spun the front end around, and drove back out the same way he’d come in.
Some time went by before I was able to move.
I wasn’t sure how much time.
Seconds maybe. Or minutes.
Time was relative. It was hard to read.
But at some point I forced myself up off my knees, made my way back to my 4Runner through the snow and ice to place a call to the APD, South Pearl Street Division, the precinct that had originally spearheaded Fran’s hit-and-run. I sat inside the SUV, drinking sweet whiskey from the emergency fifth I kept in the glove box, fighting off the tremors, waiting for the cops to arrive, knowing I should have been calling Saint Mary’s rectory to explain what had happened. Explain why I hadn’t shown up yet for my own wedding.
But there was no explaining anything.
I just sat there, watching the snow fall, drinking from the bottle, feeling my body shake and my brain buzz. It was all I could do to swallow the whiskey without bringing it back up. And that was that.
By the time the cops pulled up, I was already ten minutes late for the ceremony. The two black-and-whites that parked outside the cemetery gates made me think of the black-and-white taffeta gowns Val had chosen for her bridesmaids to wear. I pictured the dark blazers and white button-downs my best man and ushers were wearing at that very moment. I imagined their blank expressions and their wide eyes staring into watch faces that didn’t lie. From where I sat shivering inside the 4Runner with the heat blasting against my wet shirt, I saw the small beads of sweat that had begun to form on their foreheads when the guests who had filled the church pews started whispering to one another, I’ll be damned, Keeper’s not coming.
It was the tinny drone of a cop radio that broke the spell as a tall, black-haired detective by the name of Ryan tapped on my windshield. Ryan claimed he was a new guy, having just been transferred from the New York State Office of General Services to South Pearl Street’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. Together we walked to the spot where I’d seen the black Buick. Wearing a leather car jacket with wide epaulets and buttons, this thirty-something Detective Ryan checked my PI license along with my laminated permit for carrying a concealed weapon. He then questioned me calmly and methodically while we walked, sometimes asking and re-asking the same question two and three times to check for accuracy and consistency of testimony.
But then, sometimes cops forget that former wardens know as much about due process as they do.
It all went as smoothly as something like that can on a snowy day in March. That is, until we came to the spot near Fran’s grave where I’d first seen the Buick. The problem, if you want to call it that, was that no sign of the Buick remained. The ruts that its tires had made when it peeled out were gone, wiped smooth by the still-falling snow. Or, in the words of Detective Ryan, Just maybe, Mr. Marconi, the tire tracks, along with the Buick, were never there to begin with.
The snow,
I insisted. It must have covered the tracks.
I slipped and skidded my way to Fran’s plot. I dug my hand through the snow. I pulled up the bouquet of wildflowers, shook them off.
I’m not imagining these,
I said.
Ryan stood there,