Johnny-Boy

by A. F. Carter, Amy McFadden (Read by)

Overview

Johnny-Boy is a killer. He lives for the thrill of the hunt, the stalking of human prey. Fittingly, he works as a hitman but always finds time for extracurricular activity on the side. When a new assignment sends him to Baxter, a depressed Rust Belt town experiencing a chaotic upheaval at the dawn of a new economic beginning, Johnny-Boy plans to keep things professional. But when he realizes that the streets are awash with drug activity, small-time mobsters, and loads of transitory laborers in town to construct a new car plant, Johnny-Boy sees an opportunity to have a little fun while he's there . . .

The work of cleaning up a town of lowlifes and criminals is a never-ending slog for Delia Mariola, Chief of Detectives. But when a young teenager is found tortured to death, the stakes suddenly feel higher than ever. Delia brings detective Blanche Weber onto the case, and together they set out to discover who the killer is and what he's doing in this town. But having two female detectives lead the case seems to rub a certain segment of the locals the wrong way, especially when one of the women is a hothead, the other is a lesbian, and both have risen to the top due to their excellent and uncompromising work as detectives. As they watch the streets in an effort to catch a killer, Delia and Blanche must also watch their own backs for attacks from within.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874881351
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	10/07/2024
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

A. F. Carter lives and works in New York City and is the author of All of Us and the Delia Mariola series.

Amy McFadden is a five-time Audie Award Finalist, an Audie Award winner, and has multiple Earphones Awards. The narrator of 400 titles across a wide range of genres, she specializes in mysteries, thrillers, and urban fantasy.

Read an Excerpt

Johnny-Boy no longer calls himself Johnny-Boy. Hasn’t in many years. Just now, as he shuts the water off and grabs a towel, he’s Paul Ochoa. Ochoa’s a Basque name, carefully chosen. It means wolf and fits Johnny-Boy’s self-image nicely. A hunting wolf never stops moving, covering mile after mile, relentless, uncompromising. Here I come, ready or not.

And how many miles has Johnny-Boy covered over the years, how many states, how many cities? He’s kept no diary, no record, and for obvious reasons. But maybe later, after he’s caged or killed, which he almost surely will be. There are so many ways a project can fail. A cop happening along at the wrong time, a hidden security cam, a bit of evidence left behind. Eventually, the unforeseeable will close its jaws around the rest of his life. Which won’t be all that long if he’s nabbed in a death penalty state. Like this one.



The task ahead challenges. Johnny-Boy arrived in the little city of Baxter three weeks ago, come to commit a murder, which is how he makes his living. Contract killer wasn’t a profession he sought, but over the years he’s become a thorough professional. These days, a double cutout protects his identity. The buyers contact a facilitator named Braulio Montez who contacts Johnny-Boy’s agent, a man named Sol Cohen. Neither the first cutout or the client, or even Sol Cohen, knows Johnny-Boy’s real name or the name he’s currently using. Sol’s knowledge is limited to an email address in Malaysia and an offshore account in the British Virgin Islands.

Johnny-Boy accepts about half the contracts that come his way, but has few absolute rules beyond no cops, no children. And the why, the motive, doesn’t particularly interest him. He likes killing things, always has, and the pay more than keeps him in groceries. It frees him to pursue his other interests, though murder figures into both, into the business, into the pleasure.

This latest job, the job that’s brought him to the little city of Baxter, included a wrinkle. Johnny-Boy has a recent photo of his target but knows only that Theo Diopolis migrated to Baxter three months ago, along with several thousand others, seeking work on a Nissan factory in the early stages of construction. If he’s to be killed, he must first be found.



Johnny-Boy steps out of the shower and towels off. He dresses quickly, adding a bomber jacket to jeans and a t-shirt before leaving through the back door. Behind him, on the other side of the house, Baxter’s lights are strong enough to cast a faint, distorted shadow of the house over the soybean field before him. Johnny-Boy entered the city only days after a particularly bountiful harvest. The last harvest, apparently. Baxter’s extended its city limits to include this slice of Revere County to the north, as well as a slice of Sprague County to the east. Just as well, because most of the farmland had been purchased by developers before the agreement went through.

Off to Johnny-Boy’s left, a sickle moon barely penetrates the lacy sweep of the stars, leaving the Milky Way to run from horizon to horizon like the ghost of a rainbow. Johnny-Boy grew up on the Florida panhandle, out in the boonies. He’d spent many a night away from the shack his mother called a house. Not star gazing exactly. Johnny-Boy fancied himself a hunter and his slingshot weapon the Hammer of Thor. He stalked rodents for the most part, but also owls perched statue-still on branches, and raccoons who raised up to examine the intruder, maybe imagining that thirty yards was sufficiently distant to ensure their safety. Which it wasn’t.

Johnny-Boy takes a deep breath as he watches a shooting star, then another, then a third, streak across the sky. Nodding to himself, he recalls a drunk late one night in a bar he tended. The bar was a no-name dive on Hamilton Street in Racine and Johnny-Boy was cleaning up as closing time approached. A regular, the drunk had his ass on a stool and his head on the bar. Johnny-Boy was assuming he’d have to carry the jerk out the door when the drunk sat up. Glassy-eyed, he’d waved a finger at Johnny-Boy.

“Hal,” he announced, the name Johnny-Boy was using at the time, “it’s all bullshit. The astronomers, the physicists, the Webb fucking telescope. There’s ain’t no trillions of burnin’ stars out there. There’s only one light and it’s hidden behind a cloth fabric stretched around the earth.” He stopped to look up at the ceiling for a moment, his hands flat on the bar, then returned to Johnny-Boy. “Them lights you see? Them dots you call stars? They’re nothin’ but pinpricks in the fabric of the sky. One light, Hal. Only one fuckin’ light. The light of truth.”



Behind him, Johnny hears, barely, the wail of a train’s air horn. The action never stops at the construction site. Or in Boomtown, or in Baxter. Call it construction fever with developers in every neighborhood fighting to finish their projects. No small feat with construction material in short supply, with the grid and the water system barely able to keep pace, and no guaranteed access to either. At the same time, skilled construction workers have the upper hand and they know it, demanding mid-project raises, threatening to walk up the street if their demands aren’t met.

None of that matters. Baxterites, as Johnny-Boy finds them, are optimists, one and all. Forget the cost of upgrading the city’s infrastructure, or the cost of new schools to educate a swelling population. Baxterites share a vision, a vision of prosperity they embrace as fervently as Pentecostals embrace the Holy Spirit at a mid-summer tent revival.

Johnny-Boy pulls the chilly air down into his lungs. Yes, he’s here to work. If not for the job, he wouldn’t know Baxter exists, the city nothing more than an obscure pinprick on an unfolded map. So, here he is, money deposited in a bank nearly as far away as one of those stars, and truly dedicated to a positive outcome. For Johnny-Boy, at least. But the contract only explains his location, not his true mission. Nor his motto: all work and no play makes Johnny a dull Boy.

Editorial Reviews

08/05/2024

Carter’s brutal yet satisfying fourth case for Delia Mariola (after Boomtown) brings the chief of detectives face-to-face with a misanthropic contract killer. Delia taps Blanche Weber, her best investigator on the police force in the rust belt town of Baxter, to help her solve the murder of a teenager who’s been tortured to death. As their inquiry takes them into the murky world of the local drug trade, the women contend with pushback from those in their conservative, economically depressed town who don’t appreciate two women sniffing around so boldly. Meanwhile, a hired gun named Johnny-Boy blows into Baxter for a job, then decides to do some Dexter-like housecleaning while he’s in town, taking out drug runners and two-bit mobsters on the side. As the bodies pile up, Delia and Blanche try to determine if the deaths are connected to the teenager’s murder. Carter toggles between the perspectives of Delia, Blanche, and Johnny-Boy, which provides welcome variety, but is occasionally jarring, especially when Johnny-Boy’s sections introduce sudden bursts of graphic violence. Still, thriller fans with strong stomachs will have a blast. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly