The Reformed

Read The Reformed Online

Authors: Tod Goldberg

Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #Crime

 
Table of Contents
 
 
 
Praise for the Novels and Stories of Tod Goldberg
 
Finalist for the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize
 
“A keen voice, profound insight ... devilishly entertaining.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“Goldberg’s prose is deceptively smooth, like a vanilla milk shake spiked with grain alcohol.”
—Chicago Tribune
 
 
“[A] creepy, strangely sardonic, definitely disturbing version of Middle America ... and that, of course, is where the fun begins.”
—LA Weekly
 
“Perfect ... with all the sleaze and glamour of the old paperbacks of fifty years ago.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Striking and affecting.... Goldberg is a gifted writer, poetic and rigorous ... a fiction tour de force ... a haunting book.”
—
January Magazine
 
“Well plotted and deftly written.... Goldberg serves up heaps of Miami’s lush life and lowlifes while exposing its drug and arms underworld.”
—
The Huffington Post
 
Praise for the Series
 
“Likably lighthearted and cool as a smart-mouthed loner ... cheerfully insouciant.”
—The New York Times
 
“Brisk and witty.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
 
“[A] swell new spy series ... highly enjoyable.”
—Chicago Tribune
 
 
“Violence, babes, and a cool-guy spy ... slick and funny and a lotta fun.”
—New York Post
 
“Smart, charmingly irreverent ... pleasantly warped.”
—Detroit Free Press
 
 
“Snazzy.”
—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Terrifically entertaining ... neat and crisp as citrus soda.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
 
“Breezy cloak-and-dagger ingenuity. [A] nicely pitched action-comedy hero: handsome, smart, neurotic, tough, funny, sensitive ... Michael Westen is Jim Rockford and MacGyver filtered through Carl Hiaasen. Entertaining, in other words.”
—LA Weekly
The Burn Notice Series
 
The Reformed
The Giveaway
The End Game
The Fix
 
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, January
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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eISBN: 9781101486580

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For Wendy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
I am, as ever, eternally thankful to Matt Nix for letting me add my two cents to his wonderful creation. As no book really gets written alone, I must also thank Lee Goldberg for his continued advice; my agent, Jennie Dunham, for her diligent and ever-mindful assurances; my fine editor, Sandra Harding, and the whole team at NAL, who manage to find all of my errors just in time; Chris Alessio for his excellent insight into paintball markers (anything that is off in this book is my fault, not his); Julia Pistell for finding a title for me; and, of course, my wonderful wife, Wendy, who must tolerate my muttering “When you’re a spy ...” for months at a time.
I’d like to think no one would read this book and then attempt to do anything they’ve read about. But, as a realist, let me remind you: Please do not attempt to blow anything up, counterfeit money, modify weapons or, well, anything else you’ve read here. It won’t work, and you’ll probably explode. You’ve been warned.
1
 
When you’re a spy, the amount of time you spend in a church, a temple or a mosque depends on simple local custom: If the people trying to kill you have a healthy fear of their god, going to a church, a temple or a mosque is a great way to avoid a bullet in the head. Even the most cold-blooded killer will think twice about spraying gunfire inside of a holy place, because though the idea of sanctuary may sound like something from a genteel, antiquated past, so it would reason that even the most nonreligious person might give even more consideration to shooting a gun in a holy place when given time to contemplate his particular god’s wrath—even if he doesn’t particularly believe in that god.
All of which is why I always make sure to have my gun on me whenever I’m near a church. It’s just better to be the one guy who isn’t thinking twice about things, which is precisely why I didn’t want to stop at the Church of the Gleaming Spire’s youth-group car wash, despite my mother’s sudden desire to be a good citizen.
“Michael,” my mother, Madeline, said, “when you were a boy, you played basketball there every day after school.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“Well, you could have,” she said. “And done arts and crafts, too.” We were stopped at a red light down the street from the church, and there were three teenage girls with a sign for the car wash, waving at us on the corner. I kept my eyes forward. You never want to engage the enemy if you don’t have to.
“Ma,” I said, “I prefer to wash my own car. It’s an issue of pride.”
My mother ran a finger over the Charger’s dashboard, leaving a trail in the dust. “Apparently not,” she said.
“I don’t like people touching my stuff,” I said.
“Your father kept this car so clean,” she said.
“No, he didn’t,” I said. Of course, he also didn’t use the car as the frequent base of operations for clandestine missions with his friends, so maybe I had a decent excuse for the Charger being periodically dusty. In the past few years, since I’d received my burn notice and been sent back to Miami, minus my life, Dad’s Charger had been set on fire, shot at, slept in and, occasionally, crashed into stationary objects.
“I’m just saying, Michael,” my mother said, “that it wouldn’t kill you to help those nice kids out by giving them a few dollars of your blood money.”
“Ma,” I said, “I have an AK-47 in the trunk.”
“So don’t have them clean out your trunk,” she said. “And, anyway, it’s a good cause. Maybe it will keep these kids from becoming gun-toting mercenaries like you and Sam.”
That my mother was not fazed by the fact that I had an assault rifle in my trunk should have been disconcerting, but since I’d been back in Miami, many of the secrets of my life had been demystified. To my mother, Sam was no longer just a friend of mine from the military with questionable taste in women; these days he was also, well, essentially, a gun-toting mercenary. And my ex-girlfriend Fiona wasn’t just a nice Irish girl without a discernible job (it’s hard to tell your mother that the girl you’re dating robs banks for the IRA), but, well, essentially, a gun-toting mercenary these days, too. That both Sam and Fiona were really just out to protect me was clear to my mother, too, but something told me she didn’t think I needed protecting most of the time.

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