Blood and Roses (Holly Jennings Thriller) by A.K. Alexander

though.”
    “Okay.” Holly shifted uneasily.
    “It ties in to what I think I found from the note on the back of the form,” he said. “The note read,
In the Mouth of Madness
, which is the name of a movie created by John Carpenter. A horror movie, to be exact.”
    “I’m following.”
    “Yeah, well, John Carpenter used the song ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ in the movie. The song by the duo Richard and Karen Carpenter. No relation, but he did use their song. You know the song, don’t you? ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’?”
    “I do.” She didn’t add that the reason she remembered was because that song had been her wedding song with Jack.
    “The group El Chicano made a rendition of that song as well.”
    Holly sucked in a deep breath, her brain going right where Chad had been leading. “I get it. Oh my God.
We
have only just begun,” she uttered the words. “We may be looking for two killers, not one.”

CHAPTER
----
    13
    Bradley Quentin was a good guy gone bad. He knew that was how many would think of him, but it was far from the truth. Quentin was a good guy. Always had been. Always would be. Quentin knew right from wrong. He knew he’d been wrongly discharged from the military. He had once been so high that the president would have had to look up to him.
    That’s how high.
    And one little mistake. One little mistake sent them all into a tailspin. So much so, they discharged him and did not even listen to the intel he had. Did not care. Did not believe him.
    Quentin knew the truth. He knew the facts on the ground and was prepared to use that knowledge to make the situation right. He knew the intel, and he was prepared to use it and make it right. He had begun masterminding this thing four years ago, shortly after they had “let him go.”
    It all began at a horse race at Gulfstream Park while he was enjoying some R & R in Hallandale Beach. In reality, it had all begun long before that, when he’d come back from the Middle East and changed his name from Darren to Quentin (he had a thing for Tarantino films), and changed his complete identity. Fortunately for him, he knew some good plastic surgeons in places like Brazil, and he knew how to become someone he had not been before.
    It had to be done that way. No matter what the government had assured him with their
we won’t rock the boat, if you don’t rock the boat
rhetoric, Quentin knew that he trusted no one and no entity. His former employers would come after him eventually, because they knew just as well as he did that sooner or later he would rock the boat.
    And he was rocking it now. His official plan started taking form that day in Florida. He hadn’t expected the ideas to come from there. Who would have? He’d been invited to the races by some blonde bimbo he’d met at a bar the night before. She’d given good head and had some serious cash. He wasn’t short on money. Not even close. But coming from money, he liked to hang around other people with money, when he hung around people. Most people—in fact,
all
people—were assholes and cretins. But he was still a human being. Money + blonde + a blow job. That was worth a day at the races. And then his brain started to spin when he heard the name Farooq and the name of a horse. Sheikh Farooq was the owner. Farooq was one of the world’s
peacemakers
. What a joke! He couldn’t ditch the blonde fast enough.
    He raced back to his hotel, turned on his laptop, and could not believe he had forgotten some of the details of the sheikh’s life, especially the one about him owning racehorses and those horses being his passion. And that is when things started to really take shape.
    That was when Quentin knew that he would have to find himself a partner. One fucked-up partner. It took some time. But that was okay. Quentin was a patient man. In his line of work, patience really mattered.
    What that poor bastard who liked to call himself Joque didn’t know was that there was no equality in their