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

to the organization and because doing so would make you as guilty as the rest of the group, thereby preventing you from going to the police. Conversely, the only way to leave the mafia was through the shedding of blood as well, only in this case it would be yours. Of course, Nick was the one rare exception to that rule, thanks in large part to his older brother’s influence.

“Do you think they have a hand in this?” I asked tentatively. It was a touchy subject, for obvious reasons. Though mafia activity did fall under the purview of the SDCT, so far, Nick hadn’t been involved in any of the cases that directly dealt with them. It honestly wouldn’t be safe for him to do so. The fact that he’d left the mafia with his life was nothing short of a miracle. To aggravate them further by actively working against them would be akin to having a death wish.

“I don’t know,” Nick answered after a long moment of pensive hesitation. “It has all the benchmarks of the mafia, but it seems too sloppy and risky.”

“It could be some off-shoot, amateur group,” I suggested, “or a new family trying to establish territory.”

Really, there were a lot of possibilities when it came to the mafia. The most powerful and influential Italian crime families were all a part of the Cosa Nostra, but there were also smaller, scattered Italian crime families that operated independently of the main force. Of course, they were always fighting to gain more power and control. That was to say nothing of the non-Italian families, like the Irish and Chinese mobs. Though neither was as powerful in the United States as the Italian mafia, both had a sizable following.

“Agent Park, Nick, I’ve got something for you,” Stein’s voice suddenly jostled me out of my reverie.

“What is it?” I asked eagerly. Sitting around and waiting had always made me antsy, so I really hoped he had something for us to follow up on.

“Turns out Brooks was telling the truth,” he replied as he set a laptop down on my desk between Nick and me. There was a picture on the screen, and I recoiled when I realized it was of a partially decomposed body lying on a filthy mattress.

“What is that?” I gasped, startled by the unexpectedly morbid imagery.

“That,” Stein began, “is the body of Carl Johannson. Police discovered the body after a passerby noticed a rancid smell coming from the inside of a motorhome that hadn’t moved from the same spot in more than two weeks. By the time the police entered the RV and found him, he was already so badly decomposed that it was difficult to tell what he’d died from. However, police found marijuana and heroin in the RV and assumed it must have been an overdose.”

“That does match Ian’s statement,” Nick responded as he calmly scrolled through the photos of the crime scene. It was a little unnerving how composed he was looking at pictures of a dead body. I’d seen death too, of course, but it wasn’t something I ever thought I’d really get used to.

“Ian said he smothered him with a pillow, right?” I asked. “That wouldn’t leave any visible trace, and after baking for two weeks in Miami heat, there’s no way even a coroner could determine that as the cause of death.”

“There’s more,” Stein sighed grimly as he leaned down to scroll to a different part of the police file. “Over the past year, Carl has had multiple police reports filed against him, all by a woman named Angela Martin. Mostly for stalking, though in the most recent ones, she claimed that he attempted to physically abduct her.”

“Was he ever arrested?” Nick glowered.

“A few times,” Stein replied. “He never served any jail time, though. Apparently, Angela tried to get a restraining order on him, but it was denied.”

“Why?” Nick demanded angrily. I understood his consternation. It was frustrating to think that this man might have harassed someone for a year with basically no consequences.

“He was careful to never cross the line into what could actually be considered harassment,” Stein replied bitterly. “In most states, including Florida, unless you’re physically threatened, there’s not a lot that can be done in these cases.”

“What about trying to abduct her?” Nick scoffed incredulously. “How is that not physically threatening?”

“It doesn’t say why it was denied,” Stein shrugged. “If I had to guess, there probably wasn’t sufficient proof, or she was just unlucky enough to get an unsympathetic judge. As sad as it is, most of the time, the police won’t do much until after the victim has already been physically harmed.”

“That's such a load of crap,” Nick sneered.

“Yeah, it is.” I agreed. “It also sounds like a pretty solid motive for wanting someone dead.”

“But Ian was the one who killed him,” Nick muttered. “So who did Angela kill?”

I pursed my lips as I let his words sink in. If we assumed the pattern was the same, it meant that Angela had killed someone in order to prove her loyalty before Ian was instructed to kill her stalker.

“We need to talk to Director Flint,” I declared as I realized what else that meant. “Someone else is in danger.”

“What do you mean?” Agent Stein furrowed his eyebrows at me.

“The woman that killed Senator Rothschild,” I explained. “If she killed Rothschild, then that means she wanted someone dead too, right?”

Nick’s eyes went wide as he realized what I was getting at. We’d been so focused on tracing this line of murders back to the start, we had completely overlooked the fact that there were still potential victims next in line to be killed. Now that Rothschild was dead, it was only a matter of time before the next hit was carried out.

25

Nick

The atmosphere in Flint’s office was tense. Jase and I had rushed over as soon as he’d realized the clock was still ticking on a potential victim. After we’d explained the situation to him, he’d