Go Kill Crazy! by Bryan Smith Read Free Book Online

to go.
    He crushed the cigarette butt out in the low-hanging, overflowing ashtray, took another swig from the forty, put the cap back on and drove away from the store. The second pass by his house also turned up no signs of surveillance.
    After pulling into the driveway, he dug the 9mm out of the glove compartment, put it in his lap and stayed in the car a few moments longer, his eyes flicking from the house to the rearview mirror and back again several times. He kept the engine running as he sat there and waited for cars to come squealing into the driveway in an attempt to box him in.
    His paranoia was running high for good reason. The bungled kidnapping attack and broad daylight shootout on 2 nd Avenue had been big news. No surprise there. It’d been a pretty brazen move. In hindsight, he should have waited a while longer and formulated a less risky, more foolproof plan to get Keely free of the cult’s clutches. Pure emotion had gotten the better of him, pushing him into acting too soon again after his initial failed attempt at the ranch.
    His name hadn’t turned up in any media reports on the incident, which meant it was unlikely the law had connected him to the fiasco, unless they were playing things especially close to the vest. But he didn’t think that was the case. A high-profile incident like this one, his name and picture would have been everywhere if they had identified him as a suspect. This was at least in part thanks to the precautionary measures he’d taken prior to trying to grab Keely, but the cops weren’t dumb. Even without definitive proof connecting him to the bungled kidnapping, they should have come looking for him, at least to have a chat. That he seemed off their radar completely was worrisome in its own way. It meant the cult wasn’t cooperating in the investigation. The cops might not even know Keely had been the target that day. Knowing what he did about how the cult operated, that was a pretty safe bet.
    Another safe bet was the cult retaliating in some way. You couldn’t fuck with them in so public a way and not face consequences. The one thing he knew for absolute certain about John Wayne de Rais was he did not have a sense of humor about that kind of shit. Which meant returning here was a high-risk move. He needed a new place to stay in another part of town. He meant to do something about that pronto, but there were some things he needed to retrieve from this place first.
    Five minutes passed while he sat there with the engine running. Five long minutes with his finger inside the 9mm’s trigger guard.
    Ten minutes.
    At last satisfied that he was safe for now, he shut the Hyundai’s engine off, grabbed his smokes and the forty bottle and got out of the car. He took a final look around the quiet neighborhood, tucked the 9mm inside the waistband of his jeans, turned away from the street and approached the side door to his house.
    He was flipping through his keys when the door came open and a pair of strong hands seized the front of his shirt and hauled him inside. The forty bottle shattered on the linoleum floor. He made a grab for the 9mm, but the guy who’d grabbed him got to it first and sent it flying across the kitchen. Then a hard fist roughly the size of a boulder slammed into his abdomen and sent him crashing to the floor.
    Casey landed hard on his back. The jarring impact expelled what little air hadn’t already been driven from his lungs by the savage blow to his gut. Though his vision had gone blurry, he sensed a hulking presence looming over him.
    He blinked his eyes rapidly several times and finally got a clearer look at the guy looming over him, who looked uncannily like Godzilla dressed up as someone from the cast of Reservoir Dogs . He was wearing a black suit with a starched white shirt and a narrow black tie. But the main reason for the impression was his sheer mass. He was a few inches over six feet and looked like he was mostly made of bulging muscle. His neck was so