An Offer You Can't Refuse by Sal Bianchi (best beach reads .txt) 📕

sniffed. “I never actually met Shane. I don’t know who the guy I talked to was.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused by his explanation.

“The guy said I had to prove I was trustworthy first,” he mumbled. My heart sank as I heard him say that. This all sounded too painfully familiar to situations that had once been commonplace in my life. “I didn’t want to kill that guy. I tried to call everything off, but he said it was too late. He said he’d send everything to the police unless I did what he said.”

“Ian,” Pence snapped. His voice was cold and threatening, and I could see that his face was red when I turned back to look at him. He glared down at me before suddenly stalking out of the interrogation room.

“Hey!” Jase called as he hurried out after him.

“Did he threaten you?” I asked once we were alone. There was no way a lawyer who had nothing to hide would just abandon their client in the middle of an interrogation.

“No,” Ian shook his head. “I don’t know who he is. I thought my dad would send his usual lawyer, but then he showed up. He knew about everything, so I thought he must be a replacement or something.”

“I see,” I replied tersely. Now I was wondering if that guy was even a lawyer at all. I looked back at Ian. The report we had on him indicated that he was only twenty years old. Without all the drunken bravado of last night, he just looked like a pathetic, scared kid. Still, I couldn’t let my pity for him cloud me from getting the answers I needed.

“Who did you kill, Ian?” I asked calmly.

He bit his lip and started crying with renewed vigor at my question.

“I don’t even know his name,” he sniffled. “All they sent me was an address and a picture of the guy. I snuck into his trailer while he was sleeping. It was so easy. He was so drunk that he didn’t even react. I checked to make sure he wasn’t breathing anymore, and then I left.”

His voice took on a robotic tone as he finished his story, and there was a blank, faraway look in his eyes.

“So after you killed him, what did you do?” I asked.

“I sent a picture to the guy,” he replied. “With my phone. Then they said okay and that Josie would be dead within the next three days.”

“Where is your phone now?” I asked. We might be able to pull information about the person he was in contact with from it.

“That lawyer took it,” he mumbled in response, and my hopes were dashed immediately.

“Great,” I scoffed sarcastically. “Do you at least remember the address of the man you killed?”

“Yeah,” Ian nodded.

“Aright,” I sighed as I reached over to the other seat where Jase had left his work bag. I dug through it until I found a notepad and a pen. “Write it down for me.”

I pushed the two items over to him and watched as he wrote the address down with shaky fingers. I pursed my lips as I tried to digest everything that had just happened. Now we knew that there was someone out there orchestrating all of this, but thanks to the intervention of an unexpected third party, we still weren’t any closer to finding out who that was. Then there was said third party himself, that suspicious, so-called lawyer. What exactly did he have to do with all of this?

The more we dug into this case, the more and more certain I felt that the mafia was involved. And not just any mafia, but my own former Family.

24

Jase

Well, things had certainly taken a weird turn during Ian Brooks’s interrogation. Nick had noticed it first, and I’d been confused when he’d suddenly gotten in between Ian and his lawyer. It wasn’t until the lawyer, Pence, suddenly lost his temper and stormed out of the room that I realized something was up with him.

I’d hurried to follow him out, but he was fast and sneaky. It seemed as though the moment I blinked, he was out of my sight. I’d spent a few minutes looking around the office, but it was as though he’d vanished into thin air. I’d finally returned to the interrogation room just as Nick was finishing up. He’d gotten the kid to confess to killing someone, and we’d gone to Flint’s office to relay everything we’d learned to him.

Now we were waiting for Agent Stein to see what he could dig up about the newest victim. It dismayed me to learn that my fears had been correct, and we had stumbled onto yet another murder case. I groaned as I buried my head in my hands and wondered just how deep this went.

“That lawyer was shady,” Nick grumbled beside me. He had pulled a chair away from an empty desk and was currently sitting next to me. He had folded his arms across his chest, and his leg bounced anxiously. “Ian said that he didn’t recognize him and that he took Ian’s phone when they met.”

“You think he’s got something to do with the cases?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Nick nodded. “Ian said he contacted someone through an online message board, right? And the person who responded agreed to do the hit on the condition that he kill someone first to prove he was trustworthy.”

A chill ran down my spine as an unnerving thought occurred to me.

“That sounds a lot like--” I cut myself off before I could finish my sentence and glanced at Nick. His jaw was set, and he seemed to be staring off at something in the distance.

“Like the mafia?” He finished my sentence with a heavy sigh. “Yeah, it does.”

We fell into an uncomfortable silence then. The notion of “blood in, blood out” wasn’t a myth when it came to the mafia. Part of one’s initiation in joining the Family meant shedding blood, both to prove you were loyal