Contents
Lies & Lullabies
Copyright
Prologue
-1- Thrill Kicks
-2- Weapon of Choice
-3- Rube Goldberg
-4- Cliché
-5- Mr. & Mrs.
-6- A Rigged Game
-7- A Fitting Welcome
-8- Ready to Begin?
-9- Don't
-10- Friends In Low Places
-11- Creature Comforts
-12- Killing Time
-13- A Song For You
-14- Spin Spin Sugar
-15- Sweet Lullaby
-16- Authority Figures
-17- Meet Jory
-18- Best Days
-19- The Unwinnable Fight
-20- The Last Cherry
-21- Who He Is
Thank you
An Open Letter
End Credits
Lies & Lullabies
Copyright © 2016 by Courtney Lane
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
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Cover Artist: Courtney Lane
Images courtesy of: Shutterstock, Inc.
Edited by:
K. Swiss
Silla Webb
Judy’s Proofreading
Prologue
Marcin
Fourteen months ago…
I grew up outnumbered by women with two sisters—Denice and Jory—a mother who loved the bottle more than her kids, and a father who was never present. He made a decent living for himself and the "family" as the capo for the Di Stefano family; poor decisions dirtied his business.
My father’s death fucked up a lot of things for everyone. My mother’s drinking reached epic levels when he was murdered. Denice’s life became the streets. Jory’s loose hold on her sanity had all but disappeared. If she wasn’t hurting things or people, she was hurting herself.
I started working for Michael Leone indirectly doing odd jobs for his soldiers. A year later, I was stuck doing the same shit, never getting close to the man I wanted to kill.
* * * * * *
Jory trudged into the kitchen. She’d either been depressed or in one of her moods. Pajamas were her uniform and it looked as though a decade had passed since the last time she ran a comb through her hair.
“Morning,” she mumbled and blew by me to sort through the refrigerator. She was never one for affection. She faked it in public—oftentimes, badly. “So are you one of the bad guys now?”
I had many hopes for Jory. She’d never get ahold of her crazy and accomplish any of it. She was satisfied living with our mother, having no hopes or dreams of her own to fulfill. She was the baby of our family, and it wasn’t because she was the youngest of the three of us. Denice had that honor. Jory was blunt, but fragile. She could barely handle much of anything that existed outside her world—a world where her actions never had consequences.
I took care of her as much as I could without resorting to sending her to a psych facility. I lost count of how many times she’d try to take her life, or the life of someone else. Chasing death was her drug and her addiction wasn’t managed. She’d disappeared for a week and recently returned. She wouldn’t say where she went or what she did. Wherever it was, she returned depressed and more volatile.
“Jory, why don’t you go out to the garden?” I sent my girlfriend a closing message after she reluctantly wished me luck with what I had to do today and closed out my texts.
Jory slammed the refrigerator closed. “Hate when you fucking baby me.” Facing me, she bit her nails down to her skin until the nail beds bled, and spit her skin out onto the floor. “I don’t want to go to the garden by myself. The shitbags you’re getting in bed with might be out there and want to kill me…like they did Dad.”
“I’ll be right out in five minutes.” I pulled up Candy Crush on my phone; it was a game I knew would put her obsessive personality into overdrive and take her mind off the things that didn’t matter. “Play this on the way.”
“I don’t do games.”
“Try it.” I gave her a taunting grin.
She plucked the phone from my hands and began to fiddle with it. Within seconds her interest was magnetized. With a nod, she shuffled her feet and disappeared out of the room.
The clacking of heels announced my mother’s arrival from the foyer. The open floor plan of the French chateau carried every sound. Her shoes were drum beats, echoing into the kitchen. “Hello?” The slurring of words indicated my mother had her breakfast of vodka with a little tomato juice. Alcohol had been her diet since she was sixteen, made worse when she met our father.
She was the queen at home, but forgotten when the first pretty woman pushed her tits into my father’s face. Thinking she was never good enough for her husband, and the knowledge of his many affairs, pulled her into a vortex of self-hatred and self-destruction.
My mother came from old money. Combined with my father’s savvy business ways with investing (legally and illegally), our family was set for life.
Last night, the alcohol controlled her and she spilled her secrets to me. My mother knew the location of my sister Denice when she originally claimed she didn’t. Denice was in a brothel in the middle of nowhere—one of Michael’s places. She wouldn’t tell me how she found out the truth, and said she lied because she was ashamed of Denice. Denice, according to her, went willingly to work there.
I didn’t believe it. Michael Leone hadn’t stopped fucking up my family’s life and probably had my sister there against her will. He would kill her when he was done with her. That couldn’t happen. I would find her and get her home before I took Michael Leone out of the picture.
Everything was in the timing.
* * * * * *
Michael Leone entered the foyer of his home in Hidden Hills. Two other men were at his side. They spoke in code not meant for the common person’s ears using pidgin. They were concerned about the disappearance of the consigliere’s daughter—a woman who did work for Michael—and the underboss for the Di Stefano family, who I once thought of as my grandfather. He turned his back on my sisters and me when my father died.
They weren’t able to figure out who could’ve taken them. They were going to find out by torturing and eventually killing everyone they thought was far from a hundred percent trustworthy until they found answers.
A capo mentioned something about a contract hit man’s connection to a little girl who was recently kidnapped—no more than seven years old—from Connecticut. No one would say if they had done it. Another capo said he heard from one of his contacts in the government that the contractor worked for the CIA occasionally and wasn’t a man to be fucked with. The underboss corrected him and said he heard the man was really the son of “The Gun,” also known as the super boss—the elusive man who ruled all the families from coast to coast. Only the administration knew his call name; my f
ather was the only reason I knew of it. No one knew his real name or his true identity.
They made their verbal lists of who to pump for information using tag names and parted ways with satisfied nods.
Michael gestured for me while the underboss was busy whispering indiscernible words in his ear. “College boy, come here.”
“It’s been a long time since I graduated, sir.” I presented him with a curt smile.
He moved forward to quickly greet me like I was family. “A lot of us get our education from the streets, you know.”
I smiled, pretending the mere act of his hands on me and his lips on either sides of my cheeks didn’t send a surge of hatred through me. “I know. My father wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
He nodded to the men on either side of him, telling them to give us privacy. “I knew your father.” A sick smirk was on his lips. “Do you remember me?”
“I do.”
“So?” He gestured around the lobby with dark clunky wood in the floors and the walls. “Is that what you’re here for? Revenge for your old man because of what I did to him? If I remember right, he told you to stay away from me.”
Michael took over my father’s businesses forcefully. Luckily, my father had enough money to take care of the family. I’d never understand the reason Michael killed him. My father gave him what he wanted, and the asshole murdered him anyhow. “And then you broke his nose once for saying that.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “What do you want? His businesses back?”
“If I wanted revenge, I’d have killed you a long time ago. I want to work for you, sir.”
I wasn’t sure if he was offended or impressed. “Listen to this fucker.” His round face brightened into a smile; he laughed as though he had an audience to fall in line and laugh with him. He sat on the edge of the server table. His thick body leaned away from me. “I have enough employees, why do I need you?”
“I’ve done a lot for you, sir, to prove myself to you, and—”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re book smart. I need someone who can fuck around in the streets and get what I need done. I’m full up.”
“But you’re not full up on loyal employees.” I picked up my phone and sent him a video. The chime on his phone widened his eyes.
“What’s that?”
“It’s something you should probably see, sir.”
“What I can’t figure out is why a boy like you who should be out on Wall Street making money for the rich cats or some shit wants to work for me? Your father didn’t want that. He was so against it he stole from me. People tell me you’ve been living high off the fuckin’ hog. It’s got me thinking, maybe your whore mother had the money this whole time.”
Not really bothered by his name for my mother, I flashed a grin. What bothered me more is that he claimed my father stole from him. “No, she earned it legally.”
“So she did.”
Michael picked up his phone and began to play the video. He immediately straightened up. He held his phone so tight his hands turned sheet white. He threw it across the room and turned his back on me. “You know who that was?” he spoke through clenched teeth.
“The woman? I hear she’s your girl. What I do know is she’s really your daughter.” Respect mattered to the organization. Fucking with another man’s woman—mistress, wife, daughter—was a death sentence.
“I can protect her, sir,” I told him. “The guy you sent to watch over her, he’s been talking about disrespecting you by taking advantage of her. He can’t be trusted. I can.”
“When?”
“When what?”
He spun and spat at me, “When did that fucker say he was going to stick his cock into my…my…”
“Your daughter?”
His inflamed cheeks shook with anger. “All right.” He exhaled and brushed his hand over his salt and pepper hair. “You want to work for me? I’ll give you a job. Don’t worry about her, it’s not your job, and the cunt doesn’t matter to me. This man disrespecting me? He does. So if you happen to catch him tripping up…” He made a frown and rolled his shoulders. “Do this right, then we’ll see about what else you can do for me. Come on. Follow me.” He led me into his den, to what I assumed was speak on it more. When he closed the door behind me and three muscled guys began to approach me, I found out pretty quickly that I was wrong.
I backed up for the door but Michael caught me. “Don’t worry, kid. I’m not going to kill you for trying to fuck me through the back door. But what I am going to do is beat the ever loving shit out of you. Every day you’re breathing, I’m going to kill someone you love, and I’m going to keep killing until you’ve got no one else left to love.”
* * * * * *
-1-
THRILL KICKS
Sugar
Present Year
The rain turned into a misty drizzle, swelling my shoulder-length mane and transformed it into a frizzy mess. My thick lips trembled, reminding my body it was November in the desert climate cold when I wanted to pretend it didn’t affect me.
I stuffed my hands in my faux leather bomber coat, holding it closed. My outfit did less than shit to keep my body warm in the chilly night air.
At the beginning of every weekend, I’d make a trip to the Goodwill and pick out a few items to help me blend in with everyone else on the street. At the end of the weekend my hotel room had been broken into, ransacked, and my newly purchased belongings were nowhere to be found. I knew who to blame for it: Temple, the same man who gave me a busted lip.
I committed a sin on the streets. Temple lorded over the block and had his hand in everything: drugs, prostitutes, and illegal fighting. I dared to turn him down when he approached me about working for him. He made me pay for my choice every weekend.
He’d either send someone to my shitty hotel room to clean me out, or had his girls harass me on the street. Temple’s scare tactics worked very well on others; it never received the same outcome when he used them on me. The women who worked for him jumped the second an order was snarled from his mouth. It didn’t matter how much he ran them down or mistreated them; they were too scared to leave.
Temple wanted me to be one of his girls, and not the kind who fought in the ring. He continuously pushed me to sell my body on a corner—known to be a place where girls met a fate worse than death or disappeared—and give him a cut of the profits.
Since his previous attempts hadn’t worked, Temple had taken to sending women to fight me in the cage matches. The girls he sent weren’t anything to sneeze at. They were hand-picked from the streets or recently released prison inmates.
In the arena, wealthy men and women paid a high entry fee to watch amateurs fight in the seedy area of L.A. called The Bottom. Trained fighters, retired fighters, fighters hoping to get experience, or those with deferred dreams and an axe to grind were all found in the ring. For the male fighters, sometimes it wasn’t by choice.
The ones without a family or a place to call home were usually the toughest to beat. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain. They fought to the death.
Saturdays were ladies’ night. The ring owners would wrangle up women against their will, or women who were crazy—like yours truly—to entertain the crowd. Women’s matches were the biggest draws and highest money-makers.
I tugged on the band of my pleather leggings and wrapped my coat, with a broken zipper, over my cut up midriff T-shirt in a last ditch effort to keep warm. Looking down my legs at my mangled shoes, I shook my head at the sad state of my clothes.
The day moved slower than usual. Cars seemed to speed up when they drove past the street full of liquor stores and closed discount clothing shops. Excluding the convenience store I stood in front of, most of the businesses on the street had shut down; their lights dim and their gates were down.
I checked the burner phone clutched in my hand for a message. The phone was provided by the fight organizers. It was the same situation every Saturday night. They would text me
with a time and a location, and I would show up and hand the burner phone to the bouncer at the door.
If my performance went over well, I was given another phone to hold onto until the next match. The matches usually occurred around midnight—it was already a quarter past.
I walked backward and leaned against the nearest building, hoping to steal warmth from the only open store in the area. The window was dressed in garish blue, green, red, and white Christmas lights, celebrating the season a month and a few weeks ahead of schedule. The cashier gave me a dirty look the instant I spotted him through the glass.
Calling the cops on my loitering meant calling the cops on Temple’s girls. The last time the cashier contacted the authorities, Temple destroyed the interior of the store and parts of the manager’s face. Since then, he could only cast disparaging glances at the vagrants in front of his store.
I blew him a kiss, balled my fist, and shot up my middle finger. With a shake of his head, he disappeared into one of the aisles.
Tires pealed against damp concrete, attracting my attention back toward the street. A black sports car worth more than the real estate valuation of the entire block pulled up to the curb and stopped in front of me.
I stepped forward, skeptical. A person who frequented the neighborhood with enough disposable income to waste a hundred thousand dollars on a car was either someone who wanted to get their depraved kicks off with someone who wouldn’t be missed, or an idiot. Men with money had the means to obtain girls of better quality to do what they wanted. If it were drugs they wanted, they probably had a personal dealer.
Figuring it was a deranged serial killer and not a client for one of the women on the street, I kept my distance.
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