The Kill Club
Wendy Heard
On Sale Date: December 17, 2019
9780778309031, 0778309037
Trade Paperback
$15.99 USD, $19.99 CAD
Fiction / Thrillers / Psychological
368 pages
Summary:
A haunting thriller about a woman who attempts to save her brother's life by making a dangerous pact with a network of vigilantes who've been hunting down the predators of Los Angeles.
Jazz can’t let her younger brother die.
Their foster mother Carol has always been fanatical, but with Jazz grown up and out of the house, Carol takes a dangerous turn that threatens thirteen-year-old Joaquin’s life. Over and over, child services fails to intervene, and Joaquin is running out of time.
Then Jazz gets a blocked call from someone offering a solution. There are others like her, people the law has failed. They’ve formed an underground network of “helpers,” each agreeing to murder the abuser of another. They're taking back their power and leaving a trail of bodies throughout Los Angeles—dubbed the Blackbird Killings. If Jazz joins them, they’ll take care of Carol for good.
All she has to do is kill a stranger.
Jazz soon learns there's more to fear than getting caught carrying out her assignment. The leader of the club has a zero tolerance policy for mistakes.
And the punishment for disobeying orders is death.
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Excerpt:
THE CEILING ABOVE the crowd sparkles with
strings of golden lights. They twinkle just bright enough to illuminate the
faces. I adjust a microscopic issue with my toms and run my fingers through my
bangs, straightening them over my eyes. The guys are tuning up, creating a
clatter of discordant notes in the monitors. When they’re done, they approach
my kit for our usual last-minute debate about the set list. Dao humps his bass
in his ready-to-play dance, black hair swishing around his shoulders. “Dude, stop,”
Matt groans and readjusts the cable that connects his Telecaster to his pedal
board.
“Your
mom loves my dancing,” Dao says.
“You dance like
Napoleon Dynamite,” Matt retorts.
“Your mom dances
like Napoleon Dynamite.”
Andre raises his
hands. “Y’all both dance like Napoleon Dynamite, and so do both your moms, so
let’s just—”
I wave a stick
at them. “Guys. Focus. The sound guy is watching. We’re three minutes behind.”
I have no patience for this shit tonight. This all feels extra and stupid. I
should be doing something to help Joaquin. His dwindling supply of insulin sits
at the front of my brain like a ticking clock.
The guys get
into their spots, the distance between them set by muscle memory. Andre leans
forward into the mic and drawls, “Arright DTLA, lez get a little dirty in
here.” His New Orleans accent trickles off his tongue like honey.
The room
inhales, anticipates, a sphere of silence.
“Two three
four,” I yell. I clack my sticks together and we let loose, four on the floor
and loud as hell. I’m hitting hard tonight. It feels great. I need to hit
things. My heart beats in tempo. My arms fly through the air, the impact of the
drums sharp in my joints, in my muscles, the kick drum a pulse keeping the
audience alive. This is what I love about drumming, this forcing of myself into
the crowd, making their hearts pound in time to my beat.
Dao fucks up the
bridge of “Down With Me” and Andre gives him some vicious side-eye. The crowd
is pressed tight up against the stage. A pair of hipsters in cowboy hats grabs
a corresponding pair of girls and starts dancing with them. I cast Dao an
eye-rolling look referring to the cowboy hats and he wiggles his eyebrows at
me. I stomp my kick drum harder, pretending it’s Carol’s face.
The crowd surges
back. Arms fly. A guy in the front staggers, falls. A pair of hands grips the
stage, and a girl tries to pull herself up onto it.
Matt and Dao
stop playing. The music screeches to a halt.
“What’s going
on?” I yell.
“Something in
the pit,” Dao calls back.
Andre drops his
mic and hops down into the crowd. Dao and Matt cast their instruments aside and
close the distance to the edge of the stage. I get up and join them. Together,
we look down into the pit.
A clearing has
formed around a brown-haired guy lying on the floor. Andre and the bouncer
squat by him as he squirms and thrashes, his arms and legs a tangle of
movement. Andre’s got his phone pressed to his ear and is talking into it
urgently. The bouncer is trying to hold the flailing man still, but the man’s
body is rigid, shuddering out of the bouncer’s grip. He flops onto his back,
and I get a good look at his face.
Oh, shit, I know
this guy. He’s a regular at our shows. He whines and pants, muffled words
gargling from his throat. Some of the bystanders have their phones out and are
recording this. Assholes.
The man shrieks
like a bird of prey. The crowd sucks its whispers back into itself, and the air
hangs heavy and hushed under the ceiling twinkle lights.
Andre is still
talking into his phone. The bouncer lifts helpless hands over the seizing man,
obviously not sure what to do.
I should see if
Andre wants help. I hop down off the stage and push through the crowd. “Excuse
me. Can you let me through? Can you stop recording this and let me through?”
I’m suddenly
face-to-face with a man who is trying to get out of the crowd as hard as I’m
trying to get into it. His face is red and sweaty, his eyes wild. “Move,” he
orders me.
Dick. “You
fucking move.”
“Bitch, move.”
He slams me with his shoulder, knocking me into a pair of girls who cry out in
protest. I spin, full of rage, and reverse direction to follow him.
“Hey, fucker,” I
scream. He casts a glance over his shoulder. “Yeah, you! Get the fuck back
here!”
He escalates his
mission to get out of the crowd, elbowing people out of his way twice as fast.
I’m smaller and faster, and I slip through the opening he leaves in his wake.
Just before he makes it to the side exit, I grab his flannel shirt and give him
a hard yank backward. “Get the fuck back here!” I’m loose, all the rage and pain
from earlier channeling into my hatred for this entitled, pompous asshole.
I know I should
rein it in, but he spins to face me and says, “What is your problem, bitch?”
And that’s it. I haul back and punch him full in the jaw.
He stumbles,
trips over someone’s foot and lands on his ass on the cement floor. His phone
goes clattering out of his hand, skidding to a stop by someone’s foot. “The
hell!”
“Oh, shit,”
cries a nearby guy in a delighted voice.
“Fucking bitch,” the guy says, and this is the
last time he’s calling me a bitch. I go down on top of him, a knee in his
chest. I swing wild, hit him in the jaw, the forehead, the neck. He throws an
elbow; it catches me in the boob and I flop back off him with a grunt of pain.
He sits up, a hand on his face, and opens his mouth to say something, but I
launch myself off the ground again, half-conscious of a chorus of whoops and
howls around us. I throw a solid punch. His nose cracks. Satisfaction. I almost
smile. Blood streams down his face.
“That’s what you
get,” I pant. He crab-shuffles back, pushes off the ground and sprints for the
exit. I let him go.
My chest is
heaving, and I have the guy’s blood on my hand, which is already starting to
ache and swell. I wipe my knuckles on my jeans.
His phone lights
up and starts buzzing on the floor. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand.
It’s an old flip phone, the kind I haven’t seen in years. The bright green
display says Blocked.
Back in the pit,
the man having a seizure shrieks again, and then his screams gurgle to a stop.
I put the phone in my pocket and push through the onlookers. I watch as his
back convulses like he’s going to throw up, and then he goes limp. A thin river
of blood snakes out of his open mouth and trails along the cement floor.
The room echoes
with silence where the screams had been. A trio of girls stands motionless,
eyes huge, hands pressed to mouths.
The flip phone
in my pocket buzzes. I pull it out, snap it open and press it to my ear.
“Hello?”
A pause.
“Hello?” I
repeat.
A click. The
line goes dead.
A set of
paramedics slams the stage door open, stretcher between them. “Coming through!”
They kneel down and start prodding at the man curled up on the concrete. His
head flops back. His eyes are stretched wide and unseeing, focused on some
point far beyond the twinkling ceiling lights.
Next to him on
the concrete lies something… What is it? It’s rectangular and has red and—
It’s a playing
card.
Excerpted from The Kill Club by Wendy Heard, Copyright © 2019 by Wendy Heard. Published by MIRA Books.
About the Author
Wendy Heard, author of Hunting Annabelle,
was born in San Francisco and has lived most of her life in Los
Angeles. When not writing, she can be found hiking the Griffith Park
trails, taking the Metro and then questioning this decision, and
haunting local bookstores.
Social Links:
Twitter: @wendydheard
Instagram: @wendydheard
Facebook: @wendydheard
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