Blood Oath Read Online Free PDF

snacks to office parks.
    He saw both jobs as beneath him. In fact, he saw most jobs as beneath him. If his father weren’t such a prick ...
    Dylan was supposed to be rich. His father had been a successful singer/songwriter, with a series of minor hits in the ’80s. He was never famous himself, but he wrote and produced for people who were. He made a shitload of money. It kept coming, in the form of residual checks from car commercials and greatest hits compilations.
    Dylan’s parents had moved from L.A. to Orange County when he was born, in search of a more wholesome family environment.
    They found it. Dylan grew up marinating in wealth and privilege with kids just like him. Vacations in Cabo, private schools, and a Porsche at sixteen.
    It was something of a shock when Dylan’s dad sat him down at twenty-three and said it was time to get a life.
    This was just after Dylan had been kicked out of the third and last college he would attend. He majored mostly in beer-drinking and hangover recovery. While the first two schools simply flunked him, his academic career ended for good with an unsuccessful date-rape and a faceful of pepper spray.
    Criminal charges were avoided with a generous settlement. That’s when Dad decided it was time to talk man-to-man with his son. They sat on the patio of the house in Newport Coast as the sun set into the Pacific. It was beautiful. Father and son cracked open several beers to get over their mutual discomfort, then got down to business.
    Dylan’s father admitted he hadn’t been around much. His marriage to Dylan’s mom ended, and a series of increasingly blond, pert and young stepmothers followed. While they talked, Dylan’s dad kept touching his new hair plugs, like a gardener tenderly checking new sprouts.
    He asked Dylan what he wanted to do for a living.
    Dylan said he’d like to go into the music business, like his father. Start a band. Maybe go on tour. It would take about fifty grand in operating capital.
    Dylan’s father offered the opinion that it might be a good idea to learn an instrument, and perhaps how to read music, first.
    Dylan countered with the observation that his father’s music sucked, and he didn’t need to read music to do better than that “dentist’s-office crap.”
    Things deteriorated from there. Dylan’s father finally threw up his hands and walked into his home office, where he smoked a joint and wondered how he’d managed to raise such a thoroughly unpleasant little shit. Twenty years of voting Republican, and for what? He blamed the schools.
    Dylan found his credit cards canceled, his trust fund locked up tight until he turned forty. His mother convinced her current husband to allow him to live in the guesthouse on their property. After six months of his moping, she insisted he take a job, and her husband called in a favor from a friend, getting Dylan a truck on a vending-machine route.
    It was about that time when Khaled got in touch with him again. Dylan was playing Grand Theft Auto: Vatican City online at three a.m., after another unsuccessful band practice, taking out his frustration by slaughtering his opponents with an Uzi. The instant-message window on his computer popped up.
    It was Khaled, a guy he’d known back at school. Khaled had been a Saudi student living in the dorm on the same floor.
    Ordinarily, Dylan would have been the first to mock and abuse a foreigner living within such close range. But Khaled was awesome. He spoke English better than Dylan, wore jeans and T-shirts, and listened to hip-hop and rap. It also didn’t hurt that he had more money than God, and always scored good drugs.
    They started IM’ing regularly over the next couple of months. Between rounds of virtual carnage, Khaled sympathized with Dylan’s troubles. He recalled the unfortunate incident with the girl and the pepper spray. Men—men like Khaled and Dylan—were cut off from their natural role, which was to command. To be respected. That woman who maced