Godchild

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 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 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.