The Recruiter (A Thriller) by Dani Amore Page A

shuddering. For a moment he was back there—back in the closet. He realizes he’s sweating and that his mouth is dry. His stomach churns the small breakfast he’d eaten less than forty minutes ago. He turns, his legs like rubber and walks away from the cemetery. Suddenly, he wants to be very far away from this place. He runs toward the car, gasping for breath. His shiny black shoes, pounding on the pavement. He trips on the asphalt and skins the palm of his hand. The knees of his uniform are white with scrapes. He runs to the car, throws the door open, and gets behind the wheel. He slams the door shut and closes his eyes, forcing the horror of the past from his mind.
    He slams the car into gear and roars away from Lake Orion Cemetery.
    He must hurry.
    He’s going to be late for his first day of work.

Thirty-Seven
    The nose is Italian. There’s just no getting around it. It’s not a Jimmy Durante nose or the one like that baseball manager—what’s his name? Joe Torre. It’s not as big as those two. But the nose in the mirror is definitely Italian. The pores are bigger too. If you look closely at the tip of the nose, where it gets kind of bulbous, you can see the pores are bigger.
    Both of her parents were Italian. Her father had finer, sharper features, which three of her brothers inherited. The other brother and she got her mother’s more bulbous face. Julie imagines her mother, admires her beauty, but sees none of it in herself.
    She just sees the nose.
    Julie Giacalone looks at her face in the mirror. Her eyes seem to move on their own volition to her nose. It’s relatively normal at the bridge, but as it moves on, it spreads out and seems to inflate a little bit at the end. She would be pretty, she thinks, except for the nose. No, that’s not right, she corrects herself. That’s too harsh. She is pretty. Just not as pretty as she would be with a smaller, more normal nose.
    The nose is just so Italian.
    Like she does every morning, she remembers the day she went to the plastic surgeon after having painstakingly saved the six thousand dollars necessary to do the procedure. She’d even picked out the nose in a book. Very similar to what she already had, just a slimmer end. She didn’t want a drastic nose job, the kind where people didn’t recognize you. Just a somewhat subtle improvement. Where people would recognize you, but then immediately ask if you’d lost weight or were wearing a new dress. That was the kind of nose job she’d wanted.
    She followed all the pre-surgical rules to the tee. Had driven to the doctor’s, got as far as the waiting room when she had suddenly changed her mind. She would not fix her nose. The very idea of keeping it sent a sudden burst of pride through her, and she turned around and walked out.
    Now, like nearly every morning since that fateful day, when she looks into the mirror she wonders if it was a mistake.
    Instead of a new nose, she drove immediately from the hatchet man’s office to the car dealership where she got rid of her rundown, piece-of-shit Toyota Corolla and bought a jet-black, brand-new Ford Mustang. And she gave a six-thousand-dollar down payment.
    She had, in fact, traded her new nose for a new car.
    Now, Julie walks from the bathroom to her bedroom and stands before the full-length mirror. The only thing she’s wearing is a dark-purple thong. She looks over her body. It’s lean and firm, but she’s no petite thing. Having four brothers forced her body to adapt. From when she was small, she ran, chased, tackled, and fought with all of them. She understands why she’s in the Navy—she’s used to being outnumbered by men.
    She’s tall, with long legs and broad shoulders. Her breasts are smallish, her hips full and curvy. She lingers for a moment on her breasts. They’re small, she thinks. But she remembers hearing somewhere that the perfect-size female breasts fit nicely into a champagne glass. She’d tried it once when she was drunk—on champagne