Flicker & Burn: A Cold Fury Novel by T.M. Goeglein Read Free Book Online Page A

anaconda swallowing a deer, and then a seventeen-foot python gag down a startled antelope. In both cases, their respective dinners were enough to satisfy each reptile for days. And then came
Carcharodon carcharias,
or as generations of terrified beachgoers and moviegoers know it, the great white shark. As the segment began, Lou elbowed me and said, “Pay attention. This monster is
never
satisfied.” And he was right. The twenty-foot-long floating predator ate tunas, seals, porpoises, manta rays, charming dolphins, inattentive dogs, paddling people, other sharks, surfboards, and then, following a quick nap, started all over again.
    After blowing out the windows earlier in the day (it would be open-air living until they were replaced), I locked myself in the office/bedroom with the notebook on Sunday evening. Hours and chapters later, I put it aside, thinking of the Outfit as a great white shark.
    First, there will never be enough money to satisfy its greed.
    Second, it’s a monster that, through a chilling combination of bland anonymity and appalling brutality, is more terrifying than any red-eyed ice cream creature.
    Its hunger for cash means there will never be enough things to steal and fence, never enough businesses to defraud and extort, and never enough people to betray, exploit, beat, and kill. I read about schemes and tactics great and small, mundane and murderous. One was the “Wedding Party”: Outfit thugs consult the newspaper, pick a wedding reception in a ritzy neighborhood, and hold it up at gunpoint, making off with cash and gifts. There was the “Brick Job,” an act of brutal, simple extortion where, unless a certain amount was paid, a victim is put into the trunk of a car loaded with bricks and driven wildly around a parking lot, being crushed, battered, and cut to pieces by the heavy, sharp stones. Consistent Outfit income was supplied by juice loans (desperate suckers pay astronomical weekly percentage rates on cash loans), street tax (a huge monthly fee paid in order to run a business without interferences such as arson or death), bleeding a business (the Outfit forces itself in as a partner and then slowly liquidates the business for cash until there’s nothing left), and the old standbys of drugs, hijacking, gambling, car theft, and prostitution. I learned that the Outfit financed casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, but over the decades had invested much more into the ownership of politicians and law enforcement (I can’t believe the names I read—mayors, governors, cops and FBI agents, senators, congressmen, foreign heads of state, two former U.S. presidents) in order to protect its businesses.
    The Outfit’s monstrosity is very good for business.
    It’s rooted in the pathological ease with which it kills.
    It will kill to eliminate competition, kill non-payers and underperformers, and, like the great white shark, kill its own out of insatiable hunger.
    The Outfit places no value on people other than as potential, disposable ATMs. It follows no code of moral conduct, has no sympathy or empathy, and is loyal only to self-enrichment; if its members ever had souls, they sold them long ago, stole them back, and fenced them again. I paused at this conclusion, uncomfortably recalling the thrill of inhuman power I possessed (or which possessed me) while in the grip of the electricity, opened to the chapter entitled
“Nostro”
(“Us”) and flipped to a section that discussed the Sicilian village of Buondiavolo, where my family had come from. In 1906, a team of researchers traveled there to investigate a legend: the remote village was inhabited by ancestors of an ancient, blue-eyed Egyptian tribe that had once been the preeminent fighting unit of Alexander the Great’s army. According to folklore, the tribe’s chief claimed that his people’s power came from eating gold—that over the centuries, the rare salts contained in the precious metal had infiltrated their blood and brains, endowing