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The Nice Guy (a Bat Garrett mystery)

Dallas PI Bat Garrett has no idea just how out of his league he is.

Bat Garrett has spent two years photographing cheating spouses and waiting for a case that matters. Then a secretive government agency sends the young Dallas private eye across the Southwest with reluctant operative Jody Anderson – legally married for cover and unsure whether they can trust each other.

Routine surveillance turns into an explosion, gunfire, missing records, and equipment that fails at suspiciously useful moments. The official reports never match what Bat and Jody witnessed.

Bat wanted to become an agent. To get them both home, he must remain an investigator – and determine whether their target is really the greatest danger in the operation.

…

Order today on Kindle or in paperback!

To read more about Bat (and Jody), be sure and pick up the next book in the series “The Return of the Nice Guy“!

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Reading Sample

I was in what was then the only non-smoking pool hall in Dallas-if not in the world-and about to sink the seven ball when someone tapped me on the shoulder. Tapping someone on the shoulder in a pool hall-when they’re setting up for a shot, no less-is not usually a wise move. Even in the higher class establishments, there’s still just a bit of the pool hall mentality lingering in the air. This particular tap hadn’t been one of those light, “excuse me” taps, but a hard, insistent tap.

Thinking it might only be a case of someone accidentally bumping into me, though, I turned around affably and asked, “Excuse me?”

Staring me in the face was a vaguely familiar, unshaven mug of a man. He looked mad enough to chew barbed wire and spit nails. His teeth made me think he might have even tried it once upon a time.

He stood about an inch below my six foot, but he would have made two of me in girth. He wore the outfit of a mechanic and something about those coveralls from “Jimbo’s Transmissions” reinforced the idea that I knew the guy from somewhere. On the other hand, I was relatively sure I had never met him before. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered the smell.

“Your name Garrett?” he asked in a gruff, demanding voice.

“Yeah,” I replied cautiously. I had never had any work done at Jimbo’s Transmissions, so I couldn’t imagine what this guy would want me for.

“You the private detective?”

“Yeah,” again, cautiously.

I noticed the pool cue he was holding in his left hand just as he swung it at me. I ducked just in time and the cue splintered as it smashed into a post just to my right. I took the momentary disorientation he was experiencing as a result of missing me to put the post between us. He recovered quickly and tried to take another swing at me, but it was again blocked by the post. I knew that tactic could only last so long, though, so I looked for my next point of defense.

“You mind telling me what this is all about?” I asked hurriedly, retreating to the far side of the pool table. I held my own cue up as if it were a sword and tried to parry his blows. Fortunately, he wasn’t any better at fencing than me and the blows didn’t land on anything except the table. I was hoping someone from management was watching because I didn’t want to have to pay for the gashes in the felt.

“You know what it’s about!” he shouted, a rage pouring out of him like I hadn’t seen since I rode my bicycle through Mrs. McClarty’s petunia garden in third grade.

“I promise you I don’t! But if you’ll tell me what it is that has you so worked up, I swear I’ll do whatever I can to rectify the situation.”

“I’ll rectify you! You lousy, worm-eaten shutter-bug!”

“Shutterbug?” I mumbled, more to myself than to him. As an errant swing of his pool cue smashed the three-bulb light over the pool table, a light went on in my own head and I suddenly said, “You’re Mister Watkins, aren’t you?”

“Got that right, punk. And you better stay away from me and my wife, you hear?”

“Stay away? Your lawyer hired me!”

“What?” he asked, still swinging but obviously befuddled.

“Isn’t your lawyer Randolph Shertz? Of Shertz and Osborne?”

“Yeah … ” The swings of the pool cue definitely had less power behind them. The last one had only broken one bulb.

“Randolph Shertz hired me to trail your wife and find out who she was seeing. I followed her and took some pictures. This afternoon I’m supposed to deliver them to Shertz and be paid.”

Watkins reached into the pocket of his once-blue coveralls and pulled out a dirty brown envelope. He tossed it across the table to me, then asked, “These the pictures you took?”

Before I even had the envelope open, I replied, “Nobody’s seen the pictures I took, ‘cept me. I just developed them this morning. Well, me and the folks at the one-hour photo place. And my next door neighbor. He saw ‘em because a couple of the pictures were of his cat.”

I pulled some photos out of the envelope and took a look at them. They were pictures of Mister Watkins kissing-making out, really-with a young blonde woman who definitely wasn’t Mrs. Watkins. I had never met the wife of this wonderful couple, but I had followed her enough for four nights to know what she looked like. The woman in these pictures definitely wasn’t the woman I had been following. This woman had a figure while Mrs. Watkins was, basically, round. I looked up from the photos to Mister Watkins and asked, “Who is this?”

“A friend,” he replied, as if suddenly realizing that his whole appearance in the pool hall that afternoon was, at best, ill-conceived.

“Must be a good friend,” I commented.

“You didn’t take those?” he asked, a little bit of hope that I did take them showing through in his voice. He was suddenly realizing that, if I didn’t take them, then someone else entirely knew about his tryst and he had just told me about it for no reason.

“No, not my work. How did you get the idea that I had?”

Watkins was shifting his feet and absently fumbling with the broken end of his pool cue when he finally replied, “I was looking for the checkbook when I stumbled across some of my wife’s files and found that she had been seeing my lawyer. I wondered why. Then, I ran across your name on one of the sheets and it said you were a private eye. When I got them pictures, I figured Shertz must have hired you on her behalf to trail me and find out if I was cheating on my wife.”

“Well, I didn’t take these pictures.” I went over to my jacket, which was hanging on a near-by hat tree, and pulled an envelope out of the righthand pocket. I tossed it to Watkins and said, “These are the pictures I took. See? I have a much better sense of composition and style.”

He pulled out the photos and a strange smile appeared on his face as he flipped through them. I knew what was in those pictures and was wondering what a husband would find amusing about them.

“I’ll be dogged,” he remarked. “So she was cheating on me while I was cheating on her. Who’d’a thought?”

I was puzzled and asked, “You didn’t know your wife was cheating on you?”

“Not a clue,” Watkins replied. He smiled a gapped grin and asked, holding up one of the pictures of his wife, “If you were married to that, would you ever suspect her of cheating?”

“I think I’d rather not answer that.”

Watkins shrugged and muttered something like, “No matter.” He seemed to be taking it awfully calm, but that may have been because he had just been caught with his own coveralls down.

I was talking mostly to myself when I asked, “Then why did Shertz hire me to take photographs of your wife? I don’t get it.”

“Huh?” he looked up from the pictures as if he hadn’t been listening.

“Your wife goes to Shertz to start divorce proceedings. Shertz, it would seem, hires a private detective to catch you in the act of infidelity; a job that is done quite well. So, why would he also hire me to trail his client and catch her cheating?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. It seems like his best bet would have been to make his client come out looking virtuous while you look like a jackrabbit. But, as long as I get paid …” I pointed to the contents of his hands and said, “Can I have my photos back?”

“Uh, sure.” He handed them across the table and picked up the photos that had heated him up and sent him after me in the first place. Then, much to my surprise, he extended his hand across the table and said, “Sorry about trying to brain you with the pool cue.”

“It’s all right,” I told him, shaking his burly hand. “I’d have probably been more upset if you had been successful.”

“I was just all worked up when I thought you were going to blackmail me. I’ve been through that before.”

As much as I would have liked to know what he meant by that, I was already thinking along other lines. My brow furrowed with confusion, I asked, “But you aren’t that upset now that you know she was cheating on you?”

“Well, you know what they say: turnabout is fair play.”

“In bowling, maybe. But this is a marriage you’re talking about.”

“Eh,” he dismissed with a wave of his hand, “It wasn’t much of a marriage.”

The attitude was completely incomprehensible to me, but suddenly, I had a pretty clear idea about why his marriage wasn’t working.

“I guess I better go back to work.” He said it like it was just the most natural thing to do; like this sort of thing happened on all his lunch breaks. “Reckon I ought to give Shertz a call on my coffee break and find out when the divorce proceedings will start.” He laughed good-naturedly and added, “Them lawyers. They sure play both ends against the middle, don’t they?”

He left without further ado. Me, I just stood there with my pictures of Mrs. Watkins and the butcher. I got to thinking that-if I’d had any idea the marriage had such casual views of fidelity-I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. Rather than skulking around and taking pictures from house-tops and rose bushes, I probably could have just asked Mrs. Watkins and her paramour to pose for me. I cast one more glance at the ugly couple-now even more distasteful to me since I knew more of the story-then shoved the pictures into my pocket.

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the Return of the Nice Guy

The archeologist may have uncovered a thousand year old mystery someone would rather stay secret.

Book 2 of The Story of Bat Garrett

Angela Carroll knows who murdered her husband. Texas found him, tried him, convicted him, and put him in prison.

She would still like to know why.

The official motive is robbery. The convicted man claims innocence. Conrad’s former colleagues offer several incompatible versions of the man he was. Bat Garrett accepts the case because unanswered questions rarely improve with age.

Journals with missing pages and a valueless baseball-card album point Bat and Jody toward an old dispute – and records that vanish as soon as they become useful. The courts have finished with the murder. Somebody else has not.

Order Today on Kindle and paperback!


Make sure you read the prequel to this book, “The Nice Guy” and book 3 in the series, “Up to Bat“!

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Reading Sample

Without a doubt, that was the best summer, fall and winter I had ever had.

As we have come to expect from the geniuses in government accounting, the Home Agency let me keep the money they had paid me for the job I had done for them back in the spring. It was way more than the job was worth—well, I should probably …

Anyway, I took the money and invested it in a friend who was opening up a baseball card and comic book store in Farmer’s Branch. As investments go, that wasn’t a whole lot better than just piling it up in the back yard and setting fire to it, but it gave me a chance to help out a guy who had been a good friend for a long time—and especially when I had needed one.

My private investigating business was starting to take off, too. I wasn’t getting any glamorous cases, but word had somehow gotten around that I was a pretty good hand at surveillance and so I was getting fairly steady work—some of it even from other investigation firms. I’ve always been a pretty plain guy, so I was a natural at hanging around in the background and watching other people without being observed myself.

Of course, the thing that made that summer, fall and winter better than all previous summers, falls and winters was that I had a girlfriend. A real, honest-to-goodness, she-likes-me-as-much-as-I-like-her girlfriend. I had never really had one of those before. Well, there had been Thalia, but that had been … oh, never mind.
Her name was Jody Anderson and she was the love of my life. The one you know that—even if things were to go sour—she’d always be the one you’d think of as “the one great love.” The kind you’d write songs about if—unlike me—you had rhythm or any sense at all of musical style.

She had shoulder-length hair that was somewhere between auburn and brown, tending to the red in the sunshine. She was petite of build but a perfectly shaped figure for all that. And she had this great little mole just above the left corner of her mouth.

She might not have thought of that summer as a great time, because she spent most of it in the hospital, or in rehab. She had shattered her right leg—above and below the knee—and there was talk on more than one occasion that it might have to be amputated. I think she kept it strictly out of will-power.

She had broken the leg while on the job with me for the Home Agency. She had also been shot, but that—by comparison—was easily dealt with. I mean, by itself, it would have kept her in the hospital for a couple weeks at a minimum. But then she would have been out and rehab would have probably consisted mainly of walking and getting her lungs back in shape. The leg, though, was a process of multiple surgeries and rehab that lasted well past Christmas.

So I say that the government overpaid me, but I doubt that Jody would say the same thing about the remuneration she received. They took care of her medical bills, of course, but no amount of money would be worth that kind of pain and suffering.

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After Time Ends

Available Now on Kindle, paperback, hardback and many other formats! (Including Apple, Smashwords, Everand, Tolino, Gardeners, Vivlio, BorrowBox, Fable, Nook, Bookshop, CloudLibrary, Overdrive, Hoopla and Kobo!)

Gabriel’s trumpet has sounded.

In a flash, the wicked have been swept away and only the saved are left. All aches and pains and worries are gone, but this isn’t what those left were expecting. It’s not what they had been taught.

One by one, the saved are finding themselves drawn together; in praise, in worship, in Scripture. The children aren’t children and the elderly are no longer old. There is no more sorrow and no more death.

What comes next?

And where is the Lord?

Sample passage

Clarity woke up suddenly, thinking she had heard some incredibly loud sound, but sitting up in bed with her heart pounding she couldn’t remember what it was. A car back-firing? The city’s tornado sirens? She had no idea and, if a siren, it wasn’t blaring now.

Looking to her left, she was surprised to see that the bed was empty. Had he heard the sound, too, and jumped up to go see what made it? Had someone broken in? Had something fallen somewhere in the house?

It was only then that it registered on her just how light it was outside. As she rubbed her eyes, she mumbled, “Just how late is it?” She glanced over at the clock but it’s face was dark. No numbers, nothing. She glanced up and saw that the ceiling fan wasn’t turning.

“No power,” she muttered. As she got out of bed and put on her summer robe, she assumed then that the noise she had heard was probably what had knocked out the power. Maybe someone had plowed into that transformer on 44th. That seemed the most likely, for there were frequent crashes and fender-benders on that street. How long had it been since that motorcyclist had been hit and killed? Two months? Three?

Stretching, she then walked out into the house calling, “Tim? Are you up?

“Of course he’s up,” she chuckled to herself. “If he weren’t up, he’d still be in bed.” She knew that wasn’t true, for some nights he couldn’t sleep and went out to the living room to watch TV or read and then fell asleep in the recliner.

But no voice answered in return.

Clarity glanced into the guest bedroom as she passed it, for he sometimes slept there rather than come back to bed and wake her up, but no one was there. The home office was equally bereft of occupants. “Tim?” she called again, seeing that no one was in the living room. Neither did any sounds come from the kitchen. The back deck, pleasant at that time of year, was empty as well.

It was coming on to summer, so maybe—she reasoned—he took off early for his daily walk. When she glanced out the window and saw that both cars were there, she nodded, thinking that had to be it. He just went out on his morning walk and would be back at any time. He had done that before. And while he was usually really careful about closing the front door as he left, she was betting the wind had jerked it out of his hand and that was the loud noise she had heard.

Stretching again, yawning, she went to the fridge and pulled out the milk for her cereal. Even knowing that the power was out, she was still surprised when the fridge was dark inside. She laughed at herself for that.

As she sat down to eat her bowl of frosted wheats, she noticed that Tim’s phone was still on the counter. She frowned, but not really with worry. She was always reminding him to take his phone with him when he went on walks. He had never, in all their years of marriage, needed to call her from a walk, but she always wanted him to be able to, should he need to. The truth was, she admitted, that she had always wanted the ability to call him, though that need had rarely arisen. (And the times of “need” were a loose definition of the word.)

“Oh well,” she said with a chuckle and a shrug. He would be back in a bit and she’d give him a light-hearted scolding and he would say, “I’m fine, see?” and they would both laugh at her worry.

Breakfast came and went, though, without his return. She rinsed her dishes and then headed to the bathroom. She left the bathroom door open so she wouldn’t have to shower in the dark, but she still hastened through the ablutions for some reason. “Who am I expecting to walk in?” she asked aloud, with a chuckle. The kids would all be at work by that time, so she need not worry about one of them dropping in—not that they had ever dropped in that early anyway, even when they had lived in town.

When she was dressed and he still hadn’t come back, though, she thought she ought to go look for him. Surely nothing had happened, but if something had, he had no way of calling her. She was betting he had been outside when whoever had plowed into the transformer and, like a little boy, was over there watching the police and firemen and people from the electric company take care of the business at hand.

“But there haven’t been any sirens,” she mumbled aloud. In fact, she thought to herself, I’m not hearing any traffic. The house had new, double-pane windows—put in just last year—and while they had cut down on outside noises considerably, they hadn’t eliminated them entirely. She wasn’t hearing anything, though. Normally, there would be the sound of at least one hopped-up ride on the main street a block away, or just the dull hum of traffic in general.

And it was Tuesday. Shouldn’t she have heard the trash trucks by now? And all the dogs barking at the trash trucks? Even her wonderful windows couldn’t completely eliminate that!

She decided, then, to make up the bed and, if Tim weren’t back by the time she was done, she’d go for a walk herself. She’d head for that transformer first, she determined with a smile, sure to catch all the grown-up men of the neighborhood watching the heavy machinery like little boys. Some of them with their little boys in hand.

She picked up Tim’s pillow and, beneath it, there lay his wedding ring. She picked it up curiously, noting within herself that there were no thoughts of panic or approbation. Just curiosity.

With the ring still in her hand, she pulled back the covers so as to straighten the sheets—how Tim could wrinkle the sheets for a guy who rarely ever moved once asleep!—and there were his boxer shorts. She started to reach for them, then realized they were right where they would be if—

And the ring. He often slept on his stomach—as the shorts would indicate—with his hands under the pillow. The ring was right where it would be if—

Slipping the ring into her pocket and her feet into her shoes, she rushed from the bedroom and out of the front door. Down the steps and into the yard, she looked around and …

Didn’t see another soul.

No one. That the neighborhood would contain empty front yards was not strange, for hadn’t she and Tim both remarked over the years that people just didn’t hang out on front porches anymore? Some even had furniture on their front porches—nice little matching chair and table sets—but she could count on one hand the number of times she had seen people sitting thusly. People came out of their houses just long enough to get to their cars, or go from their cars to their houses. If no one were mowing, no one was in their yard. There were lots of times when she had gone out herself and seen no one else.

But there were no cars moving along 44th, one of the city’s major arteries. And there were no sounds of cars in the distance, or airplanes. Or much of anything else. No machinery at all. No air conditioners spinning. The only sounds she was hearing were that of a few birds, maybe one distant dog barking, and the sound of a sprinkler three houses to the north.

She looked at the sprinkler and watched it spin for a moment. Just a simple, old-fashioned sprinkler on a hose. But it, the wind, the birds and that one dog were the only sounds she could hear. Now there were two dogs barking, but neither seemed frantic. Just the normal greeting of dog to dog.

And yet, she wasn’t afraid. She thought maybe she should be, but she wasn’t.

“Tim!” she called loudly, and then again.

There was no answer, from anyone.

“Maybe I’m dead,” she said, in a normal, casual voice. The thought didn’t scare her.

She was curious, though. What was going on? Where was everyone?
“Surely I’m still asleep,” she said with a laugh. “Yeah. I have to be.” She took a few steps out onto the grass of her front lawn and said, “Yeah. That’s got to be it. Doesn’t feel like a dream—feels too real—but it’s got to be a dream. If this were real, there would be stickers,” she added with a chuckle.

“What else could it be?”

She dropped to her knees and began to pray, but didn’t know what to pray for. She realized, though, that she knew what had happened and where Tim was. With perfect clarity of mind, Clarity still found herself weeping, wondering what she could have done differently, while still praising God for his sovereignty.

Available Now on Kindle, paperback, hardback! Also available on Smashwords and Nook, Kobo & more!

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Up to Bat

Franklin Gaston is one prolific guy and I think it's bigamy to admit it,

Book 3 of The Story of Bat Garrett

Franklin Gaston has one daughter, a dead wife, a dead brother, and no known enemy. After he is murdered, every part of that family history begins to break apart.

Telephone records reveal another household in Colorado. A bank key hidden beneath a carpet opens a box under an alias. Inside are photographs connecting people who were never supposed to know one another.

Gaston’s daughter wants the truth. Bat Garrett and attorney Heather Dawson follow the pictures through divided families, old loyalties, and a secret somebody has spent years trying to recover. The killer is only one part of the mystery Gaston left behind.

It’s the biggest case Bat’s ever had, but it may cost him more than he’s ever had to give.

Available on Kindle and paperback.
Make sure you read the whole Bat Garrett (& Jody) saga, beginning with “The Nice Guy“, followed by “The Return of the Nice Guy“, then this book, then concluded (this arc, anyway) in “Last at Bat”
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Reading Sample

My name is Bat Masterson Garrett. I’m a private detective. I always dreamed of leading a glamorous life like the P.I.s on TV, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way in real life. Real life private detectives track down husbands who don’t pay their alimony, or find out if someone is having the affair their spouse suspects them of having. Once in a while, there is a fight; but there aren’t many shootouts or car chases. I sometimes wonder why I wanted that stuff in the first place.

Detectives on TV always get the girl, too. That never happens. Like I said, the people I deal with are usually already married (albeit trying to remedy the situation). Besides, people in real life don’t even look like the people on TV. Well, some people (my former fiancé Jody Anderson) used to accuse me of looking like Kevin Costner.

Well, what she said was that I probably weighed the same as Kevin Costner. My hair’s almost the same color as his, but I have blue eyes and am only about an even six foot—while I’ve always figured him to be taller. Some girls think I’m attractive, some don’t, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

One day, I was sitting in my apartment in North Dallas looking at my baseball card collection when the phone rang. My phone never rings, so it liked to scared me to death. I hastily picked up the cards I had dropped and went over to the phone, sorting them on the way. I figured the odds were that the cards were more valuable than the phone call and deserved my attention. Having once owned a baseball card shop of my own (for about six months), I knew something of their value.

I answered and a man asked, “Is this B.M. Garrett Investigations?”

“Sure is, what can I do for you?” I was real surprised that anyone wanted me to investigate something. I’m also listed in the yellow pages under “Painters: House”, and that seems to generate the majority of my calls for gainful employment. A couple times people have tried to hire me as a body guard, but I don’t much care for the “rough work” after my limited experience with it. I’m not exactly a “big dude”, anyway, and most of my schooling in self defense would fall under the heading of “run”.

“This is Franklin Gaston,” he told me, “Of Gaston Oil.” He put in a pause like I ought to have heard of him but I hadn’t so I just mumbled noncommittally. I don’t keep up with the oil market except to the extent that I go to the cheapest gas station.

He continued, “I think I am in need of the services of a private investigator, Mister Garrett. You are Mister Garrett, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but call me Bat.”

“Pat?”

“No, Bat. Like those things that sleep upside down in caves.”

“Well, yes,” he said as he tried to regain his train of thought. My name always does that to people. Thanks, Dad.

“What did you need, Mister Gaston?”

“Well,” he said cautiously. “I really think it would be much better for us to meet in private—and in person. I’m confident no one is listening in, but I would just feel more confident if I could talk to you in person.”

“I understand,” I told him. It already sounded like he was going to ask me to trail his wife and find out if she was cheating on him. If that were true, I thought, he was probably afraid she would walk into the room he was in and overhear the conversation. Maybe she was already in there. You never know about these people. One guy hired me to watch his wife then told her I would be there. I didn’t get much on her for some reason.

“Where would you like to meet, Mister Gaston?” I asked. “I’m pretty flexible.”

He seemed to be thinking a minute, then replied, “It needs to be some place out of the way. Do you have any suggestions?”

“I know just the place. It’s on Northwest Highway—”

“That’s not out of the way,” he told me.

“In a way, it is. Think about it, if you were having a secret meeting, would you normally go to one of the busiest streets in town? See, the idea is to do what’s not expected. Like in football, sometimes you run the play that seems like the worst choice because the other team is confident you won’t run that one.”

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Last at Bat

The girl in the shop once was dead but now it seems she's not.

a Bat Garrett story

The woman behind the counter looks exactly like Jody Anderson, down to the scars Bat Garrett watched her acquire.

That should be impossible. Bat saw Jody die. The Houston saleswoman insists she is Janet Alexander, and the records support her – for a while.

Her transcript has no matching yearbook photograph. News archives contain incompatible deaths and returns. A family album appears to have been altered. Then Janet remembers something only Jody could know.

As one life becomes credible, the other looks carefully manufactured. Bat must discover who assembled Janet’s history, how they made it hold together, and why they still need her to believe it.

Order Today!

Kindle or Paperback

To read more about Bat Garrett, be sure and check out “The Nice Guy“, “The Return of the Nice Guy” and “Up to Bat“. All available on Kindle & in paperback! And, if you want to read this story from Jody’s perspective (as well as find out what happened next), be sure and read “Cheerleader, Gymnast, Flautist, Spy“!

…
Read a Sample

“What is it we’re going to go look at?” Dave asked as we walked through the mall. I was surprised how few people were there shopping, but I guessed it was because it was a week day.
“Sunglasses. I’m telling you, Dave, these are the ugliest you’ve ever seen. They would have been great for that day in college when we had the ‘Ugliest Outfit’ contest.”
“I didn’t know the Galleria had a gag shop.”
“It’s not intended to be, but these will make you gag.”
As we were nearing the store, I saw a girl walk into the shop ahead of us who just about took my breath away. I stopped dead in my tracks and could feel my heart pounding in my chest like faulty pistons in a Ford Granada. If I had been prone to such things, I think I would have had a heart attack. The quick and unexpected (even to me) stop on the crutches almost made me fall on my face, so I had to take a moment to regain my balance.
“What—what is it?” Dave asked. The look on my face must have scared him. I imagine I went almost completely white—maybe even green.
“That girl that just walked in.”
“So? She was cute; but we’ve seen several of those today. She wasn’t as pretty as Heather, I didn’t think.”
“No. This girl looked like … like someone I used to know.”
“Let’s go see her,” he said. “Maybe it’s her.”
“Couldn’t be.”
“Why not? Houston’s a big city.” He smiled, “Shoot, I bet there’s more than two hundred people in this town. I hit that many cars in the parking lot.”
“But this couldn’t be her, Dave.”
“It’s a small world, Bat.”
“But it’s not the Twilight Zone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The girl she reminded me of is dead.”

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The Final Book in the “Martyr’s Fire” Series!

The finale is finally here!

You can order the finale to the Martyr’s Fire series in paperback or for Kindle! And be sure and go back and read the other books in the Martyr’s Fire series: Noiné’s Child, Noiné’s Prayer and Noiné’s Eyes! See the whole series here! Order many copies for yourself and give the extras to your friends!

Description:

6471 A.D.
They said they would never forget. A millennia ago, mankind set aside all boundaries of religion, geography and tribal allegiances to fight the greatest battle in the history of the world.
That battle is now the stuff of legend. People rarely talk about it anymore, and those few who do doubt that it really happened. The old walls are back up, and the old animosities.
In the mountains, Adam Forest is growing to manhood while dreaming of only one thing: flight.
On the plains, Noen is growing up with dreams of a world outside her little community, where the old legends still hold sway and people can believe in the ancient God without fear.
But between the plains and the mountains an ancient evil has been revived. Even if it can be beaten back, is it too late, for the cultures on the mountains and the plains are collapsing. Is there any hope left?
Who knows? Who still remembers?

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Overstreet (the series)

John Overstreet was a cowboy for a west Texas ranch when he killed a man in self-defense and was forced to leave the country or fight the man’s whole family. He follows his fortune to Como, Colorado, and the ULC Ranch. As the years go by and he tries to build both the You’ll See and himself into something, he must face blizzards, fires and gold-hunters. He pursues love and fortune as he sees the turn of the century bring changes to transportation and every aspect of life. But he must keep looking over his shoulder, for the family of the man he killed doesn’t forget … or forgive.

Available in paperback for just $21.69 for volume 1!! Or check out the whole trilogy here! (You’ll have to scroll down a bit and, even though the page says the books are “in progress” they are all finished and available.)

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Reading Sample

They could see the lightning hitting the near-by peaks and the thunder seemed to shake the building on occasion.  Still, the lightning did not seem to be too close, most of it centering around the upper reaches of Silverhills, so none of the observers were scared.  Worse storms than this one had been seen just about every week and it was just something you got used to, like catching a cold in the winter or getting a splinter when chopping wood.

Lars, however, commented, “I wish I were up there with Charlotte.  She’s never enjoyed storms too much, and especially with her being down with this sickness.”

He had no sooner said the words than a tremendous bolt of lightning crashed from the sky to the south of them and the accompanying smash of thunder told them this one had hit quite near—possibly even on the ranch.

Lars ran over to the nearest saddled horse and leapt aboard.  John stepped in front of the horse and said, “You can’t go out in this weather, Lars!  Look at that water coming down.  It could knock you off your horse!  If that bolt hit anything this rain’ll put it out.”

Lars ignored John and stepped the horse around him.  He was out of the barn and into the rain in a flash.  John shrugged and jumped aboard the next closest horse.  Fortunately, he thought, Lars took the slowest horse in the barn.

“Where you goin’?” Claud asked.

As John darted out the door and into the rain, he replied, “Wherever he’s going!”

Claud and Bob looked at each other with puzzled looks.  Shrugging, they each grabbed a saddle, threw it on a horse they thought could stand the storm in good stead and took off into the rain in pursuit of Lars and John.  They did, however, take a moment to slip into their slickers first.

They rode up the trail through the woods to the ranch house and John was able to catch up with Lars before the big German could reach the house.  They both saw at the same time, though, that what Lars had feared had happened.  The bolt had hit the house.

Apparently the house hadn’t been wet enough to withstand the strike for it was now ablaze.  The sap that still resided in the log walls was bursting into flame faster than the rain could put it out with a pop-hiss sound that was eerily, deadly like rapid gunfire.  In a matter of minutes, the cabin would be gone.

As Lars jumped off his horse, John realized immediately what the man was about to do.  John leapt from his horse onto Lars, knocking him to the ground.  Through the rain and mud, John said as he struggled to hold onto Lars, “It’s too late, Lars!”

Unheeding, the big man shoved John off and stood up.  The rain was cascading off the brim of his hat, making it hard to see and he was covered with mud from John’s tackle but he took no notice.  Before John could get another hold on him, Lars had rushed into the inferno to try and save his wife.

Just as he disappeared into the flames, John saw a ceiling beam crash to the floor and heard Lars call out in pain.