Bryan Cassiday [Cassiday - Bolt

BOLT

Bryan Cassiday

Copyright 2019 by Bryan Cassiday

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Bryan Cassiday

Los Angeles

BOOKS BY BRYAN CASSIDAY

Riptide of Fear

The Payout

Force of Impact (Ethan Carr Thriller 4)

Wipeout (Ethan Carr Thriller 3)

Dying to Breathe (Ethan Carr Thriller 2)

Countdown to Death (Ethan Carr Thriller 1)

The Bus Stops Hereand Other Zombie Tales

Two Moons Rising

Alien Assault

Comes a Chopper

Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series

Helter Skelter

The Anaconda Complex

The Kill Option

Blood Moon: Thrillers and Tales of Terror

Fete of Death

Chapter 1

The Calabrian didnt know who he was supposed to kill yet. A sgarrista (soldier) in the Ndrangheta, Marcello only knew he was supposed to kill someone in Los Angeles, California, where he was bound in a Boeing 737 passenger jet.

The Ndrangheta was a criminal organization in Calabria which resembled the Mafia in Sicily, except the Ndrangheta was more powerful. Instead of being composed of families like the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Ndrangheta was composed of ndrine.

The spokesman of the Ndrangheta, the mastro di giornata , had given Marcello his assignment from the boss, the capo crimine , back in Calabria. It was a great honor, reserved for a select few, for Marcello to receive orders directly from the mastro di giornata .

Pushing thirty, Marcello had accepted the contract to hit the mark, hoping it would further his career in the Ndrangheta, jumping at the chance to make more money in the bargain. A sgarrista in the societ minore would have a much better chance at advancement if he notched a killing. He could enter the societ maggiore where he could become a capo bastone , the boss of an ndrina.

To enter an ndrina most people had to be born into it. However, a handful, like Marcello, had been able to join without having any blood ties.

Every day Marcello thanked his lucky stars that he had been allowed to join.

For now, Marcello would settle for being a contract killer, which included a nice bonus.

The capo crimine had probably chosen him to go to California because he spoke English, which he had picked up from his mother, a native New Yorker who spoke both fluent English and Italian. Marcellos father was born in San Luca, where he had met his future wife, who had been visiting the town on vacation.

Marcello had inherited his ice blue eyes and his dirty blond hair from his mother.

As a boy, Marcello had kept aloof from the other boys in the Italian town of San Luca where he had been born in poverty on the hillside slopes of the Aspromonte, a massif in Calabria. Despite his lack of means, he had big dreams for himself.

The other kids had got in the way of his dreams. He never felt like he was one of them. He never felt much of anything. He had no desire to interact with the other kids.

To this day, he never got along with anyonewhich was fine with him. He always felt there was a wall between him and others, preventing him from feeling what they felt. The other kids resented him. They ganged up on him.

To protect himself he had lifted weights and hardened himself, secure in the belief that there was a part of him no one could touch, a part of his mind that nobody could ever penetrate unless he wished to expose it. At the same time, he had realized he could not stay too aloof or they would come hunting for him and tear him apart like a pack of hungry wolves.

In self-defense, he had pretended to feel what they felt, laughing when they laughed and becoming angry when they became angry. Since he had no reason to smile and never would have smiled if he didnt feel the need to act like the others for self-preservation, he had to practice smiling in front of his bathroom mirror.

He wondered if people believed his smiles. He suspected they didnt. Maybe they suspected he was laughing at them. In any case, his bogus smiles didnt make any friends, but they might have saved his life by not making any enemies either.

He kept a low profile, going about his business helping his father ply his trade at his barbershop trying not to attract attention.

Maybe he was destined to be a killer, decided Marcello. Perhaps that was why someone at the Ndrangheta had taken interest in him and why he had returned their interest. Perhaps Marcello had attracted the Ndranghetas attention because of what Marcello had done to Luigi, one of his neighbors in San Luca. Though Marcello had not confided his dark secret to anyone, someone in the Ndrangheta might have heard about it.

He could not say for sure what had brought it about, but he had become a member of the ndrina in San Luca in his twenties. The ndrina had baptized him in their initiation rites, officiated by a capo societ .

At the baptism ceremony, a guarantor named Pasquale, a middle-aged part-time San Luca butcher with a bushy black mustache who lived down the street from Marcello and whose hands always smelled of raw chicken skin, had vouched for Marcellos interest in the gang and offered him to a group of gang members that had stood in a horseshoe shape in a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town ready to initiate him.

As they had stood on the concrete floor, a stranger to Marcello, a stocky fortyish member with avaricious hawk eyes and a bulbous purple-veined nose had cut Marcellos forefinger with a knife drawing blood that dripped on the prayer-card image of St. Michael the Archangel he had held under Marcellos hand. The blood sacrifice to the patron saint of the Ndrangheta consummated, Hawk Eyes had dropped the knife, produced a lighter, and singed one of the cards corners until it had turned brown and curled.

At the end of the ceremony, Marcello had officially become a man of honor in the Calabrian Ndrangheta, one of the most powerful crime syndicates in Italy, rivaled only by the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra.

Weary from his long flight, Marcello nodded off in his aisle seat on the plane.

Chapter 2

Brody was eating a hamburger at McDonalds in West LA staring at the sunbaked road outside jammed with traffic.

Los Angeles. A rootless city that didnt belong here. Nothing belonged here. Nothing could take root here because nothing could grow in the arid desert, which was where LA had been built. The only things that could grow here were dreams, big dreams, because dreams had no roots.

The robber barons had moved in, hijacked the Colorado River, and mirabile dictu, Los Angeles had water, and a city had blossomed into being, home of Hollywood, the biggest manufacturer of dreams in the world.

The cell phone vibrating in his trouser pocket snapped him out of his reverie.

Six two, he was hunched in a tiny plastic orange chair at a white table near the window, his knee rubbing against the metal column supporting the tabletop in the center of the table, half a dripping Big Mac in his hand. He put the hamburger down on his plastic tray and answered the call.

Brody, he said.

Are you the private investigator? said a woman.

The one and only.

I want to discuss hiring you.

You have my attention.

Wheres your office? I couldnt find its location on the Internet.

I dont have one.

The woman paused in confusion. How do you operate a business without an office?