Dirty Deeds (Dirty Deeds, #1) by SE Jakes

Author:SE Jakes [Jakes, SE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2014-01-07T23:00:00+00:00

Mal had been nine the first time he’d watched someone die.

Back then, someone was always dying—there were wakes held in family living rooms in his community every other day, it seemed. An Irish-Catholic tradition. But paying respects to a dead man laid out in a coffin was really freaking different from watching one bleed out on your back porch.

On that day, he’d cut the last hour of school. Had known he’d catch hell for it, but he caught hell on a regular basis and had figured that he might as well do something to deserve it.

There was no point in being an angel—that lesson had been drilled into him early and often. Hey, the Bible hadn’t been his first choice of reading material, but once foisted on him, he twisted it to his advantage. According to the Good Book, angels got the short end of the stick. Lots of work for very little recognition.

But everyone knew Satan.

When he’d brought that up to his religion teacher, he’d gotten his knuckles rapped so hard two had broken. They still ached to this day.

He rubbed them absently now under the warm spray of the shower, swore he could still smell the stewed cabbage leaking out Mrs. O’Malley’s window, the sour scent mingling with the garbage as he cut through the alley to sneak into his house.

The argument floated through the still air, stopped Mal just short of rounding the corner to his house. Instead, he flattened against the brick wall of the apartment building and peeked around toward his house.

His dad and Jimmy Finn were standing on the porch, both men gesturing with their hands and talking over each other. Nothing new—his father was always arguing with someone, for sport, for business, over politics or money, and it always ended with a handshake and a beer. Or so Mal had thought until his illusions were shattered as easily as Jimmy’s jaw.

After the punch, his father shook his hand out. Jimmy was on the ground in the fetal position, clutching his face, blood dripping from his mouth. Mal’s gut clenched when his father circled around behind Jimmy, grabbed Jimmy by the hair, exposing his throat, and slit it.

That trick was a Dwyer family specialty. And no, the irony of that hadn’t escaped Mal, sat bitterly on his tongue whenever he revisited that day. He didn’t have to close his eyes to see Jimmy Finn lying motionless on the smooth wood where Mal used to run barefoot in the summer, blood spilled where he used to hide out in the coldest winter days so he wouldn’t be inside with his father.

It was also ironic that he’d refused to kill for or in the name of his family, had joined the Navy to escape the mob, and had learned how to be a better killer than his family ever could have dreamed. It was like the violence of the world he’d grown up in had embedded itself in him, taken root, and could never be fully excised.

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