Tag: #fiction

Posted on

Lost Time – The Legend of Garison Fitch – book 3

Book Three of The Legend of Garison Fitch

Jason Kerrigan and Brownwyn Dalmouth are pilots with the Republic of Texas Army Air Corps. A world war is going on and bombs have just brought an end to Crockett Air Field in south Texas. Jason and Bronwyn, though, are called away from the battle to be test pilots for a new aircraft that-they’re told-will bring the war to an end. The experimental craft lives up to expectations in early tests, but then it lands them somewhere it never should have sent them. Another place? Another time? Another dimension? Somehow, they’ve taken a trip to the future and changed the past. Or did they? The answer to their change of reality may be known to a Justice of the Peace in Colorado named Garison Fitch. To figure it out, though, Garison may have to team up with his least favorite person: Bat Garrett.

Order Today!

.

Reading Sample

When he woke up he was laying face down in the dirt and couldn’t remember how he got there. There was a horrible pounding sound in his ears that was more than just a headache from having been knocked to the ground, but he couldn’t recognize it right off.

He couldn’t recognize anything, he almost realized. The truth was that even when he woke up, he wasn’t really awake. While he might not have a concussion, he was certainly disoriented.

He had enough sense to know that laying down in the dirt wasn’t what he normally did, so he decided to change things a bit. He positioned his hands underneath himself and realized he was pushing gravel. Gravel on tarmac, actually. So he raised himself to his knees and looked around.

What he saw was chaos.

Where once had been buildings, there were smoking ruins. On a military base that had been governed by rules of order and decorum he saw only disorder and panic. The few living people still inhabiting the base were trying their best to walk, crawl or drag themselves to a place that was safe from the bombs. None of these people were visible to him at the moment, though, because of the smoke from the bombs and the fire from the buildings.

That’s what he was hearing, he suddenly realized. The pounding in his ears wasn’t just from the headache (though that was undoubtedly part of it) it was from the bombs.

Overhead, through the fog of dust and smoke that threatened to choke what little life was left, he could see the shadows of the planes. He counted at least three big ones and maybe a dozen fighter planes. It was hard to be sure, though, as they were moving so fast and the visibility was so bad.

He put his hands to his ears not so much to see if they could deaden the sound–he knew that was too much to hope for–but to see if his ears were bleeding. Between the sounds of the explosion, the roar of the low-flying planes, and the whistle-scream of the bombs as they fell, his ears were hurting. He was not only surprised that his hands came away blood free, he was a little surprised that they came away without actual pieces of his ear-drum.

He tried to get to his feet but the concussion of another bomb knocked him back down. He realized quickly that it must not have been too close, for he was still alive. So he raised himself again to his knees, and then his feet. Making a cursory check of his body to see if any bones were broken, he satisfied himself that he was suffering only from a few scratches and a lot of dirt. An attempt to brush himself off (in retrospect he couldn’t imagine why he cared how dirty he was), he brushed his hand across a piece of glass that had been embedded in his uniform and received his first real injury of the day. Fishing out a handkerchief, he wrapped his hand as best he could, ignoring the tableau of standing by himself in the middle of a bomb zone taking so much trouble to treat something so relatively innocuous.

Crockett Army Air Base, his home for the last sixteen months, was being bombed out of existence.

The day had begun ordinarily enough for Captain Jason Kerrigan. Early morning run with the enlisted men, cold shower, then breakfast in the officer’s mess. He had eaten quickly because he had a meeting with General Wright at 0800 and, while Wright was a notoriously lenient commanding officer, Jason wasn’t about to be late for this meeting.

Jason Kerrigan was twenty-six years old, just over six foot tall, and had jet black hair. He was somewhat dark complected, though not overly so, and his build was strong if not imposing. He was a handsome man if not possessing of movie star good looks. In all, he was a pleasant-looking man who one instantly liked but could almost as quickly forget.

Sergeant Carol LeMans had saluted him at the door and told the general by intercom that the captain had arrived. So he stood at ease, feeling like a little kid who had bent sent to the principal’s office, and waited. He looked around at the cinder block walls out of something that couldn’t quite be called interest. The walls were of the standard military color euphemistically known as “olive” and were decorated with a few plaques commemorating the base and the obligatory picture of Sam Houston. It seemed like he was waiting a long time (it was just moments) before the general called him in.

The two officers saluted, then shook hands as the door closed behind them. Jason could tell by the look on the general’s face that the news he was about to receive wasn’t good news. He almost blurted out something to convey his disgust, but remembered where he was and who he was with and kept his peace.

“Won’t you have a seat?” General William Wright had offered. The General was a young man, younger than Kerrigan, even, but he had received a battlefield promotion to Captain two years ago at the Battle of Matamoros, then a jump to Colonel six months after that when he had single-handedly turned the enemy attack at a battle near Thibadeaux. Four months later he had been given command of Crockett Army Air Base and a Generalship to go along with it. He was an excellent officer and bright young man who also owed a large portion of his placement to the fact that the world was at war and fighting men–especially intelligent fighting men–were hard to come by. He was easy-going and lenient, but he knew exactly what he wanted and how to convey it at all times for all that. He also knew that at any other time in history he could have risen no higher than captain in such a short time and meant to do all he could to take advantage of the “blessing” of the war that went on around him.

“Thank you, sir,” Jason said as he sat down. The chairs were big, comfortable, leather chairs and completely incongruous with Crockett. But he guessed they were congruous with a general’s office (and very heavy) so they stayed in place even with the general changed.

Knowing his face had already given away the news, General Wright said, “Your request for a transfer to the front has been denied, Jason.”

“Any reason why?”

General Wright looked like he was about to say something else, then sighed and replied, “The same reason they always give. You’re a crack pilot and we’re going to need you if–”

“If this God-forsaken stretch of desert ever becomes the hotbed of frontline activity they expect it to become.” Jason wasn’t in the habit of interrupting his superior officers, but the frustration had welled up and canceled out his good sense.

“You seem to have this memorized,” Wright smiled.

“Unfortunately. Sir. You’re the third commanding general I’ve heard it from so far.”

“I’m really sorry, Jason. I put all the influence behind this request that I could.”

“Yessir, I’m sure you did.” Jason believed the young general, but he was afraid his voice gave away the fact that this was the third time he had heard that from a commander, too. He looked out the window absently for a moment, watching the fighter planes take off, and said, “Don’t they know you’ve already got two full squadrons of crack pilots wasting away down here?”

Wright stood up and walked over to the window, motioning for Kerrigan to join him. “There goes the 187th now,” he said.

“And I’m better than every one of them,” Jason mumbled. At the General’s glance–which contained a bit of a smile–Jason emphasized, “I am. I mean it, General. They’re all good pilots. I’d fly with any one of them. I have flown with most of them. I’d take any one of them in the 27th with me. And I’m rated on almost every fighter plane we’ve got, from the little scrubs to the big hawks. And you know full well I can outfly any one of them and ought to be somewhere where my skills can be put to use!”

General Wright pointed at the last fighter plane to take off and said, “What about her? Think you could outfly Lieutenant Dalmouth?”

“Yessir. Without a doubt.” Venting his frustration again, Jason said, “And that’s another thing. If we’re so short on pilots that we’re having to rewrite the laws and allow women into combat, then how come they won’t send me where I’m needed? I’m tired of training these new pilots. I want to be out there where I can do something.” Kerrigan watched the last plane soar up into the air and spat, “She’ll probably be sent to the front before I am!”

“Technically, this is the front, Captain.”

“It’s the back of the front, General, and you know it. I’m sorry, sir. I know I shouldn’t talk that way, but–” Jason straightened up all of a sudden and asked, “Permission to be excused, sir?”

“Granted,” the general replied as he returned the salute. As Kerrigan was reaching for the doorknob, though, he said, “Jason?”

“Yessir?”

“I know I’ve told you this before, but I’ve seen the front. And I know how you wish you were out there. I know it sounds glorious when you hear people like me talking about it. The battles, the heroism. But, well, I remember watching one of my best friends–known each other since high school–get literally cut in two by a bomb. The only thing that saved my life was his. I still see that at night.” He sighed, then said, “But I wish I were back out there, too, sometimes. I’ll keep trying to get you there.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jason said as he left.

General Wright turned back to his window and watched at Kerrigan crossed the tarmac, heading towards the hangers. That was Kerrigan. A day off after forty-eight hours on, someone else patrolling the skies, yet there he went to check out his plane and hope against hope he’d have a reason to fly it that day. Wright sighed, knowing no one ever had a reason to do an emergency take-off at Crockett, and turned away from the window.

He never heard the bomb that took out the command center.

Her hair pulled back tightly into a ponytail and tucked into her collar so that she could get the leather helmet and radio-phones over her head, Lieutenant Bronwyn Dalmouth pulled back on the stick and launched herself into the sky. She loved that feeling. There was nothing like it. And even on a day like this, that promised nothing but another patrol around lifeless skies over an almost lifeless desert, she was thrilled.

She loved the feel of the plane around her. With her hands on the throttle and the steering mechanism, she could feel every little wind current, every little wisp of a cloud. She loved the response of the airplane and was confident she could set a gliding record in it if she had to just because she knew it so well. Even her instructors had said it was as if she were one with the airplane.

She pulled up next to her wingman and looked to her right, lifting her hand to give him a thumbs up. Her eyes focused on his smiling face in the cockpit as he was just about to return the signal when his head exploded in a rush of blood and gore against the cowling. Her mind didn’t even have a chance to react to the horrific sight before his plane began to billow smoke and begin its death dive into the countryside below.

Rather than doing what almost anyone else would have done when operating on sheer reflex, she pushed forward and went into a dive herself. Going under the enemy fighter’s guns, she looped around behind him and put about twice as much lead into his fuselage as was needed. As the enemy went into a death dive, she followed to make sure he died, then pulled up at the last second to rejoin the battle above her that was already all but over.

Captain Jason Kerrigan didn’t know how long he had been out but it was long enough for Crockett Army Air Base to be virtually wiped off the map. He looked at his wrist, but his watch was gone. It was probably nearby, he thought, but he didn’t want to look for it. The hangers were burning masses of twisted metal. The airplanes that had been parked out on the flight line looked like a giant child’s uncompleted model kit and a brief glance told Jason there wasn’t a one of them that was flyable or even repairable.

Whoever had planned the bombing raid had known exactly what they were doing, that was for sure. The runway and the flight line were crater-filled and basically useless. The command center was a smoldering ruin, as was every other building on the desert base. Even the infirmary, which had been marked on its roof with a nice big red cross in a white circle, was leveled. It was as if . . .

His steps suddenly got a sense of purpose as he realized that this wasn’t just an “inflict damage on the enemy” bombing run. This was a “wipe them out so completely they can’t even call for help” bombing campaign. Such a campaign would most likely mean that something–something like invasion–was to follow. This was a long way from the sources of power, but that might be just the reason it had been chosen.

And now the sound of the bombs was dying out for there was nothing left to bomb. And the secondary sound he had barely acknowledged–that of the bombers and their accompanying fighters–was dwindling off into the distance. They were heading back to the south, their mission accomplished.

It suddenly occurred to him to wonder what had happened to the 187th. He looked up into the skies and could see the smoke trails of airplanes that had been heading for the ground in an unplanned landing. They must have been caught completely by surprise, he thought. He hoped at least some of them had been able to eject and would be even now trying to make their way back to Crockett.

What would he do with them or for them if they got there? he wondered. Even what little medical skills he had been given as an officer required some sort of implements and bandages. He had nothing but his clothes, which he supposed he would soon be ripping into bandages.

He also thought to hope that someone of the 187th –one, even–had gotten away and was able to get to somewhere to radio for help. If a ground attack were massing on the other side of the river, just waiting for Crockett to be out of the way, he wondered if reinforcement enough could be supplied in time. Whatever he could do, then, needed to be done quickly.

He saw movement through the smoke towards where the motor pool had once stood and started walking in that direction. Whoever was over there had apparently seen him at the same time and was walking towards him. At fifty feet, they were finally able to make each other out. The form in the smoke said, “Captain Kerrigan? Is that you?”

“Corporal Luis?” Jason returned.

“Aye sir.”

As they got closer, Jason asked, “Have you seen anybody else, Corporal?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing, sir. But no, I haven’t seen anyone.”

Jason stopped and looked around, hands on his hips. “Do you have any idea how long ago this happened? I woke up on the ground with my watch missing.”

Corporal Montoya “Junior” Luis, a wiry, dark-skinned young man with perfect teeth, looked at his own watch and said, “At least half an hour ago, sir. Not much more than that, though.”

“Where were you when it happened? How’d you survive?”

Corporal Luis looked embarrassed as he said, “I was in the head, sir. You know, that one on the back of the motor pool. One of the blasts blew a bunch of stuff up against the door but didn’t break the window, somehow. Took me the better part of fifteen minutes to break out that tiny window then squeeze through. When I saw what was going on, I just took cover under a wall that I think used to belong to the enlisted mess and waited for a chance to start looking for another survivor. You’re the first I’ve found, sir.” He quickly added, “But I haven’t looked much, yet.”

Jason looked down with his own embarrassment and said, “I somehow survived a walk across the flight line then slept through the rest. I was just walking towards my plane and then–boom–next thing I know I’m waking up face down on the tarmac. There were bomb craters all around me and pieces of blown up airplanes that had to have passed right over me after I fell. Don’t know why I’m not dead.”

“What do we do now, Captain?”

“First priority is survivors. You head that way, along the west side of the flight line, and I’ll take the east side. Any survivors that can walk, start them towards the motor pool. Any that can’t walk, leave them where you find them until we can try to round up someone with medical experience. Unless we have no choice, we’ll try not to move them until we’ve at least got someone with corpsman training to help.” He started to walk off, then said, “And Corporal, if you spot any kind of communications equipment, see if you can call for some help. Let someone know what happened here.”

“What about the 187th? Surely they’ve gone for help.”

“If any of them survived, yes. But right now, as far as we know, Corporal, you and I are the only two people alive in this part of the world.”

“Except the enemy, sir.”

“Yeah, there’s them. But I think they’ve left . . . for now.”

“Finally got you on the run!” she announced triumphantly.

But then the adrenaline began to wear off just a little and rational thought began to creep back in and she knew they weren’t running. Not from her. Not a whole squadron of bombers and half a dozen zeroes. They weren’t running from her or anyone else.

They were going home. They were going home because they were done with what they had come to do and there wasn’t any reason to stick around. She was just a whispering gnat of an annoyance that wasn’t even worth expending the fuel or lead on.

She thought about chasing at least one of them down and making him sorry for turning his back on her, but she knew they were already out of range. Especially if she had any hope at all of making it back to Marathon or anywhere else. She could no-power further than anyone in a Comal 38, but not that far.

With tears in her eyes, she turned around and started west. Maybe, she told herself, she could catch some sign if anyone else had made it. She was pretty sure all the planes were gone, but she had seen at least two chutes and possibly a third, though she hadn’t been able to tell whether it were one of her friends or not. Maybe she could mark their spots for ‘em and hasten the job of the rescue teams.

Posted on

A Star Falls on Oklahoma

a Mended Lives story


Rising star Sonya Kiel suddenly drops off the grid and lands on the doorstep of her cousin Lynette, who lives in western Oklahoma. Telling herself she’s just slumming and slowing down, Sonya finds herself enjoying the bucolic lifestyle … and Lynette’s best friend, a youth minister named Andy Brockton. Her life begins to be pulled in two directions as part of her desires to return to the bright lights and the silver screen, but another (and previously unknown part) wants to leave it all and follow Andy onto the mission field. Her dilemma becomes, literally, a life and death decision for her family.

Order today on Kindle or paperback

Andy and Sonya also appear in the murder mystery “Ghosts of Families Past“, so make sure you read that one, too!

…

Reading Sample

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” he grumbled as she straightened his tie. “Tell me again how you, a girl from western Oklahoma, have a cousin from England.”

Lynette let go of Andy’s tie and said, “My father’s younger brother was a Rhodes scholar. Smartest member of the Kiel family they say—before me, of course,” she chuckled. “He went to England to attend Oxford and avoid Vietnam and became a stuffy college professor. At forty, he married one of his students and proceeded to have eight children with her before he was fifty.”

“Eight?” Andy asked, though he was afraid of getting distracted from his original objection. “So, which one of the eight are you setting me up with?”

“Number five,” Lynette chuckled. “Or, Sonya, as her family calls her.”

“And she’s how old again?”

“Nineteen. And before you can object again, it’s only a three year difference and she’s very mature for her age.”

“The age is the only thing about this whole deal I’m not objecting to,” Andy quipped as he put on his suitcoat.

“For starters—well, actually, I’m not sure where to start. I’ve only been on one blind date in my life and it was a disaster.”

“Really? When was this?”

As they walked out to her car he said, “Back when I was doing that summer internship in Houston one of the girls in the youth group invited me to go out and play miniature golf with a bunch of her friends. I didn’t realize it was a date until about thirty minutes into it and I started counting heads.”

“‘Counting heads’?”

“Yeah, I realized there was an even number of boys and girls and all but one of the girls was already holding someone’s hand.”

“Was it that bad?” Lynette chided.

“Oh yeah.”

As they got into the car it occurred to Andy that he hadn’t complimented Lynette on how she looked, and she did look nice. The thing was, he and Lynette had known each other since seventh grade and had been best friends since about tenth. They had tried dating a couple times and realized it was like going out with a sibling and had called it off by quick and mutual agreement.

Lynette was pretty, if not a knockout. She was tall and a bit on the thin side, but had a winning smile and green eyes everyone envied. She was very smart, which had intimidated some guys, and it was true that she had a low level of patience for stupidity, but she was his best friend and he wanted the best for her. He thought the guy she was dating now might be the one for her, but he knew her well enough not to hold his breath.

Andy, Lynette thought, was just the type of guy she would like to find—in someone else. He was her intellectual equal, shared many of her interests, and wasn’t too bad looking. A little short for her tastes, but that was mainly because she was taller than average. He had thick, curly black hair that he kept cut too short, and an intriguing face if not actually handsome. His skin was dark but his eyes were atypically shaped and made her think that there might have been some Polynesian blood somewhere in his ancestry. He did have some Native American blood in his veins—Choctaw, to be exact—but it was so far back that it was doubtful if it were a contributing factor to his looks.

The way the evening had gotten started was that Lynette had shown up at his place an hour before, all dressed up, and saying she needed his help. Unwary, he had of course said yes before inquiring what sort of help would be needed. Lynette had then explained that she had tickets to the Wichita Falls Philharmonic Orchestra’s season opening concert for herself and Stephan but that her cousin from England had suddenly arrived unexpectedly and Lynette couldn’t just leave her at home and three was a crowd and so on.

It should probably be explained to the reader that very few inhabitants (i.e. “one”) of Lawton, OK, thought of the opening of the Wichita Falls Philharmonic Orchestra’s season as a big deal. Lynette, though, was an aficionado of classical music, a player of the viola herself, and had not missed an opening in Wichita Falls or Oklahoma City in five years. For four of those years, Andy had accompanied Lynette to the concerts out of friendship and had come to rather appreciate classical music, even if he had yet to buy a classical CD for himself. As a result, he had not been at all upset to find this year that Lynette had talked someone else into going with her to the concert.

Now, most people in Lawton facing a similar circumstance would probably have either called off the concert trip or given the tickets to someone else. This idea had never occurred to Lynette, even after Stephan suggested it. She promptly got online and purchased two more tickets to the concert. She had quickly dressed, then gone to get Andy, knowing if she called him on the phone with the idea of a blind date he might have some way to escape the issue.

So here they were, two well-dressed people on their way to Lynette’s apartment to pick up Lynette’s date and meet

Andy’s. Of course, Lynette knew her, but Andy had never met her, as far as he knew.

“How is it,” Andy asked, as if reading the narrator’s mind, “That I have never met this cousin?”

“You have, actually.” As Lynette sped down Cache Road, she said, “She came and spent a week with me when you and I were fourteen. I remember you came over one day and we all went swimming.”

“Just the three of us or was anyone else there, too?”

“Her sisters, your brother, and the rest of the youth group,” Lynette explained.

“So eight years ago I met an eleven year old girl and you expect me to remember her?”

“No, I don’t expect you to remember her, you just asked if you had ever met her. You’ve seen pictures of her, though.”

“Really?” Seeing all the restaurants they were passing, he asked, “Do I get a supper out of this or am I buying?”

“After the concert,” Lynette answered as she turned off the main road. “We’ll just barely have time to make it there before the overture. And we can go dutch treat if you like.”

“We better,” Andy replied.

As they pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex where Lynette lived, she turned to Andy and said, “I really do appreciate you doing this. And I’ll explain it all to Carly if you like.”

“I’m not seeing Carly,” he said as they got out of the car. At Lynette’s skeptical glance, he said, “I’ve been out with her twice. I don’t know if there will be a third. And I know for a fact she’s dating other people. Which is perfectly fine with me, by the way.”

“Well, thank you, anyway.”

As they walked up the steps, he said, only half-joking, “I never asked you what she looks like.”

“You going to back out if she’s ugly?” Lynette asked, a laugh in her voice that made him curious what she was concealing.

“No. But I’ll get you back somehow.”

“Don’t worry,” Lynette said as they neared her floor. With an even stranger lilt to her voice, she added, “If she’s not the prettiest woman you have ever been out with, I’ll buy your supper tonight.”

“The world’s cheapest graduate student is offering to buy me supper?” he chided in return. “For the first time today, I’m actually anxious to see her.

Andy opened the door to Lynette’s apartment and let her in. As he followed her in, he saw Stephan sitting on the couch. Stephan looked up from a magazine and smiled. “Hey, Andy. How’s it going?”

Andy came over and shook Stephan’s hand as he sat down. “Not bad. You doing all right?”

“Can’t complain … too much,” he added with a laugh, showing perfect teeth in his dark face. Stephan was a first year assistant coach and biology teacher at Lawton High who loved his job but also found it exasperating at times. He had been introduced to Lynette by one of his fellow teachers, who had attended MacArthur High with Lynette four years before. Their personalities had seemed like oil and water initially (she very Type-A, he exactly not) but the fact that he was more than her intellectual equal—and a shared passion for volleyball—had led to, so far, multiple dates.

“I’ll go see if Sonya’s ready,” Lynette said, disappearing into the back of the apartment. It was a one bedroom affair, with the kitchen, living room and dining area all being the same, but it was a nice place and Lynette had fixed it up pretty well. Her parents still lived in town and would have loved for her to move back in, but the idea was anathema to Lynette, even though she had returned to Lawton after her undergrad work.

When Lynette was out of earshot, Andy leaned close to Stephan and asked in a whisper, “This Sonya, is she as pretty as Lynette says?”

Stephan chuckled, then noticed the look on Andy’s face and asked, “Are you kidding?”

“What do you mean?”

Stephan was about to reply when they heard the bedroom door open and Andy sat back in a more normal and casual position. He looked up (again, casually) to try to take a casual first glance of the cousin. His mouth casually hit the floor.

Posted on

The Woman Caught

a Mended Lives story

Alexander “Opie” Gates, a young man from west Texas, finds himself being greeted by a woman in a bar in New York City. At first glance, she’s kind of pretty and he likes the attention. But over the evening, he begins to think she is considerably older than she appears and worn down by life. Over the next few days, Opie finds himself drawn to this woman (who proves to be younger than he thought), but then he makes a horrible discovery about her lifestyle. Telling himself he’s emulating Jesus, he continues to be her friend. But then, two things Opie never anticipated happen almost at once: The woman comes to share his faith, and he begins to fall for her. Suddenly, he’s no longer just trying to be understanding and forgiving of a semi-nameless person. He’s trying to be forgiving of someone he wants to fall in love with but he can’t get over the idea that she’s already violated something he holds very dear.

Order today on Kindle!
…
Reading Sample

Alexander “Opie” Gates sat at the dimly-lit bar of the dimly-lit dive a few blocks from Times Square reading his Bible and sipping on a Sprite. It was an attention-grabbing spectacle and he knew it. It was completely intentional.

He’d got the idea from an old roommate in college. The guy was short of stature and tended to dress like he’d just gotten off a gator-hunting swamp boat, which wasn’t as much of a stretch as one might think. He’d take his Bible—a big, leather-bound job with study notes in the margins and hundreds of handwritten notes on sticky-papers stuffed here and there from Genesis to Revelation—and he’d go to a bar, order something obviously non-alcoholic, and sit and read. He told Opie that, invariably, someone would come over and ask what he was doing, and then Allen would share the gospel with them. The long-term efficacy of such an evangelism approach Opie had always doubted, but he had admired it, nonetheless.

So, with nothing else to do on a night in Manhattan when he couldn’t sleep, he had decided to give it a try. He’d left a note for his host and, wisely or no, had slipped out into the big strange city and found his way to this bar, not so far from his friend’s apartment as the crow flew, but more than half a world from home.

With his red hair and a father who adored “The Andy Griffith Show” to be nick-named “Opie” had almost seemed pre-ordained. When he had read in a book that the kid from the TV show had actually been named after one of the star’s favorite performers, Opie Cates, the name had seemed inevitable. He knew he had been born bald as a bowling ball, so he guessed the only reason he hadn’t been named Opie officially was that they had been waiting to see what color his hair would take.

Now here he sat, clearly a tourist and clearly out of sync with the rest of the bar’s patrons. They seemed a reclusive lot—hiding back in the shadows like rats—and if they paid him any mind at all, it wasn’t for long. He’d only been in the Big Apple for a couple days, but he’d seen enough to know that there wasn’t much that would garner the attention of the locals and a tourist with a Bible barely even registered on the meter.

He’d read a good bit of the middle section of the book of Ezekiel and was thinking about heading back to Rory’s pad when a voice said from beside him, “Is that a Bible?”

He looked up in surprise, answering “Yes” before even seeing who had spoken. He was getting ready to go into his old roommate’s routine when he saw her.

She was a pretty woman, probably in her mid-twenties, just like Opie. She had dark hair and was dressed in tight jeans and a loose-fitting top that showed some cleavage. He caught a glimpse of a tattoo of a rose on her left breast and quickly looked away. Glancing back, making sure he looked only at her face, his second glance made him think she was probably a lot older than him, maybe even pushing forty. But she had expertly applied makeup which created the illusion of a much younger woman.

Suddenly, he felt very sad for her. Probably not the impression she wanted men to take away from her looks, he thought ruefully. If he knew her, he thought, he’d tell her to lose the makeup and just look her age. She might not be as striking, but he was sure she would actually be prettier. He wasn’t about to say such a thing to a complete stranger and any further thoughts were stricken from his mind by the question, “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you sitting in a dump like this and reading your Bible at,” she glanced at the clock over the bar, “Almost midnight?” She tapped a finger against his glass, watched the bubbles move, and added, “And drinking a Sprite?”

He thought back to what his roommate always said in such situations, and suddenly it seemed canned and disingenuous. So he told her the truth, “I couldn’t sleep and I figured if I did this someone would eventually ask me why and I could tell them.”

“So, go ahead and tell me.”

Posted on

First Time – The Legend of Garison Fitch – Book 1

What if history didn’t happen that way the first time?

Garison Fitch was a scientist and something of a celebrity in the Soviet Americas in the early 21st century until dropping off the map to pursue his theories in the remote La Plata Canyon.

An experiment with such travel surprised him when he landed him in 1744. There he discovered a primitive world of somewhat suspicious people, but a freedom he had never experienced before–which may have been most frightening of all.

When he tries to rid himself of his time machine by sending it into the future, however, it took him with it. Now, he finds himself back in the twenty-first century where a woman he has never met claims to be his wife and the country he grew up in is gone, replaced by something called “The United States of America”.

Should he live in this new world, or try to travel once more through time and return the world to “normal”? As he becomes convinced he can’t return to the past, he’s not really sure if he can live in this new world he created, either.

Order today on ebook (in many formats) or paperback!

The Legend of Garison Fitch continues in “Saving Time” and concludes in “Lost Time“!

…

Reading Sample

With a flash of light and a complete absence of noise, Garison found himself swept out of the eighteenth century. He had just begun to have the beginnings of a thought that would have turned into wondering where he was going when the trip ended. In all, he had traveled for a length of time that would have registered on his body as less than a nano-second. To the world, however, the trip took longer. Still, it was not as long as Garison would have guessed it to be.

Garison and the interdimensional machine-come time machine reappeared in his laboratory inColoradoapproximately one point three seconds after it had left. With a pop that signified the nuclear core had just melted all the circuits then collapsed in on itself into a ball of radiation with a half-life of a few millennia, Garison found himself dressed for the seventeen-forties and standing in the early twenty-first century.

He was suddenly assaulted by a woman who threw her arms around him before he could get a good look at her and exclaimed, “It worked Garison! It worked! You were gone and now you’re back!”

There were so many thoughts and so much confusion going through his head that all he could do was stand there limply while she hugged him tighter and tighter, kissed him on the cheek, and went on and on about how proud she was of him and how she just had to congratulate him and how she wanted to hear all about it.

When she had worked her way across his cheek and was on the verge of kissing his mouth, he finally got his wits about him enough to push her away and stand back a pace himself. He backed into a bench and turned to look, momentarily surprised to find a work bench where there wasn’t supposed to be one. He also spotted the tarpaulin under his feet, and kicked it away in anger.

The woman looked at him strangely and asked, “Garison? Is something wrong?”

He looked around the room without answering. It was his lab all right, but it was different. The windows were in the wrong places, but only by a foot or so. The workbenches had been moved and the place was, well, decorated differently. His lab had been strictly utilitarian while this one had curtains on the windows and some sort of wall-paper border half-way up the walls.

But, he told himself, the cameras are in the right place. There were four video cameras, one mounted in each corner of the room, but their lights were showing red instead of green. While the workbenches were in different spots, the tools on them were laid out just as he would have laid them out and there was the right number of workbenches.

Then he looked at the woman. She was beautiful. She stood almost as tall as Garison, probably five-eleven or six foot he estimated. She had shoulder-length black hair, done in loose curls such as the women had worn in the twenty-first century he remembered. She had green eyes like Sarah’s, but was dark complected like someone who spent time out in the sun. Her figure was astounding, and quite shocking in a sweater and form-fitting pants made of, it looked like, the sort of material he had once seen warm-ups made of. On her feet, she wore white leather tennis shoes much like the shoes he had once worn himself.

He looked up at her and noticed that his confused scan of the room somehow troubled her. He looked her over from head to foot once more and asked, “Who are you?”

The look of confusion turned to fright as she stepped forward and started to put a hand to his head, “Are you OK, Garison? Did you hit your head?”

He brushed her hand away angrily and stepped to the side. “No, I didn’t hit my head. I’m fine. Who are you?” In fact, he thought to himself, the concussion symptoms of moments before and the dizziness were completely gone.

She looked as if she still wanted to touch him, but kept her distance. Then, it was as if she were seeing him in a whole new light as she said, “Wait a minute, you’ve changed. How did your hair get so long in two seconds? How did you grow a mustache that quick? And those clothes? Except for that jacket, you look like you’re…from the revolutionary war or something. And you look older.” She looked extremely concerned as she implored, “Garison, what happened?”

He demanded more forcefully, pronouncing each word carefully and distinctly, as if she might not have heard him before, “Who are you?”

“Heather,” she replied, as if it were something he should know. She took a step closer, but he took a step further away, backing down the workbench, keeping one hand on the cabinet as if it would steady him.

“Heather? Heather who? I don’t know a Heather. What kind of name is that, anyway? A plant name?”

“You don’t remember me?” she asked, seeming totally at a loss—and looking genuinely worried.

“Why should I?”

“Heather Fitch,” she told him. “Heather Dawson Fitch.”

“Fitch? You’re not related to me. Just what are you trying to pretend here?”

She reached out to touch him again and again he slapped her hand away, this time with more force. As she brought the hand back, seemingly shocked that the slap had stung, she said, “I’m not just related to you, Garison. I’m your wife.”

“My wife?” he replied with a forced laugh. He stood there and stared at her, wondering what this woman’s game could be. A spy? he wondered. The KGB had been known to use some pretty elaborate schemes to learn information, but he had never heard of one like this. Did they think just sticking a stranger in his lab who claimed to be his wife would make him tell some secret? There had to be more to it.

“All right,” he smiled, “What’s going on? Who put you up to this?”

She reached out again and asked, “What happened to you, Garison?”

He stood there rigidly as her fingers reached out and touched the side of his face very lightly. Did she really think that the touch of a woman would make him break down? He almost smiled as he thought of the futility of her actions. Still, he wondered what the point to her actions were. She seemed to have a point, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be.

She came a little closer and looked intently at him. After a moment, she touched the corner of his right eye and asked with something that sounded like genuine puzzlement, “What are these?”

In spite of himself, he mumbled, “Huh?”

“These lines around your eyes. You never had these before.” She pivoted slightly to look at both sides of his head and said, “And you’ve got gray hair that wasn’t there before you left. How do you turn gray in a couple seconds?”

“I’ve been turning gray for—who are you? Tell me the truth!”

“I’m Heather Fitch. I’m your wife.”

Garison had to give the girl credit for acting. She certainly seemed convinced of her part even if her part were ridiculous. In fact, it actually seemed like she believed what she was saying. Could it have been possible that she had been brain-washed or something into believing what she said? If so, he wondered, what was the point? She had to just be a very good actress, he thought. The whole charade was too stupid to accomplish anything.

Posted on

Toltec Mountain

a Bat & Jody Garrett mystery

Dallas private eye Bat Garrett is called in to investigate a snowboarder who crashed in the “Mind Games”, a made-for-TV spectacular being held at Toltec Mountain Ski Area in New Mexico. What looks like just a routine accident–like the many other accidents that have happened on the slopes–becomes more suspicious when the snowboarder is found dead in her hotel room. Soon, there’s another death, and then another. Is someone stalking the “Mind Games”? Can Bat–and his wife, Jody, who is working the case undercover–unravel the mystery before the bodies pile up higher than the snow?

Order it today on Kindle and paperback!

….

Sample Chapter

It was about lunchtime when I found myself sitting on a bench at “ski-Techers”, getting fitted for boots and skis and poles. Ski boots had come a long way since the first time I had put any on, but they still weren’t what I would call “comfortable”. They were, at best, “comfortable for ski boots”. I think it was Dave Barry who first referred to them as “bowling balls melted down to fit your feet” and they still felt like that in a lot of ways. They had more padding in them than they had back when I first tried the sport, so that was an improvement.

As the tech put my boots to the skis, I commented, “I saw that wreck from Monday with that Nitro lady. Looked pretty rough.”

“Uh hmm,” he replied, checking the bindings against some sort of chart.

But then, one of the other techs, who didn’t have anyone to help at the moment, injected, “Pretty wicked, wasn’t it? Almost looked like she slammed that board down on the rail a-purpose, huh?”

“Really?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, it just seemed to me that no one would land on a rail like that unless they were trying to. Maybe she’s got some new trick that that was supposed to be the lead-in for, though.”

My tech had finally done whatever it was he was doing and entered into the conversation by saying, “I can’t imagine what that would lead into.” Then he laughed and offered, “Unless maybe the board’s made out of some sort of space-age rubber where you hit it on the rail and ‘sproing!!’ you go bouncing thirty feet into the air!”

Who still uses the term “space-age” I wondered? That was like something out of the sixties. But then, so were the ski techs. Not that they were old enough to have been born in the seventies, even, but I had noticed before that a lot of the ski techs (at every mountain I had been to) wished for a decade they hadn’t experienced except on film.

“But normally,” I mused, “Wouldn’t a landing like that just be kind of jarring? I mean, those snowboards are built to take some punishment, aren’t they?”

“Sure,” said the tech that wasn’t working on my gear, “But she hit it hard. They were showing a close-up of the crash on the sports channel last night and she hit it harder than those two chuckleheads that were trying to break a snowboard on the post office steps yesterday.”

I kept my mouth shut.

When I stepped up to the first lift line at about one o’clock, I was a little nervous, as usual. The first ski run of the year never bothered me, but the first attempt to get on and off the lift did. I hadn’t fallen off a lift in years, but the memory of my first couple times skiing—when getting off the lift was clearly my weak spot—still lingered.

Most of it was alleviated when the guy standing there telling people, “Stop here and look for the chair” said, “You’re that private detective, aren’t you?”

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“My brother works at the hotel,” he replied. Before I could pursue that line of thought further, the chair was whisking myself and a middle-aged stranger up the mountain.

“You’re a private detective, huh?” he asked in the gravelly voice of someone who smokes too much.

“Yes,” I replied, trying not to sound too cautious.

“Must be interesting,” he replied.

“It can—“ was all I got to reply …

Before he started in with, “I run an auto parts store, myself. I tell you, somebody ought to do a TV show about my work.” The rest of the ride was filled up with the glorious and lewd antics of the auto parts world. I had to admit: I was surprised there wasn’t a show about it already.

Those first few minutes were a microcosm of how my afternoon went. On an afternoon where the mountains were covered with television cameras and actual (or cable, anyway) celebrities were to be found everywhere you threw a snowball, everywhere I went people wanted to talk about being a private detective.

At first, it was kind of fun being a celebrity, but it quickly grew old. For one thing, I had always enjoyed a sense of anonymity in relation to my job. Not that this particular case required it, it still seemed strange to be known—“made” in the vernacular.

Which led to some wild speculation about why I was there. There was a rumor that someone was stealing the high-end equipment used by the athletes. Another one said there was somebody stalking one of the skiers. Still another said there was some suspicion of financial impropriety in regards to the Games themselves. A couple other rumors alleged that the indoor games were fixed in some non-specific way.

Of all the people I heard from, no one hit on the real reason I was there, which I found strange as I would have guessed that someone would have heard the story of the video I had watched with Penny and Pete. In a way, though, that made me feel a little better about my diagnosis because I was thinking that, if someone really had sabotaged Nitro’s board, that rumor would have gone around.

When the runs closed at 4 o’clock, I checked in my equipment, switched back to street shoes, and made my way to supper where I was invited to dine with a couple of the athletes from the Men’s Downhill Extreme, which I was to learn was the ski version of the terrain park Nitro had crashed on. In fact, it was held on the same park, just targeted toward some different obstacles.

The topic of conversation at supper was that day’s outdoor activities and some trash talking about the evening’s indoor games. If Nitro’s crash of Monday entered anyone’s thoughts on that Thursday evening, they said nothing about it. The big topic was a killer run put in by Steve “Onionhead” Wachowski. He wasn’t in our group, but the word at our table was that he would have to really blow his Scrabble™ game to not finish the day as the favorite for the D-E. Apparently, some new trick with a name that meant nothing to me had been the kicker. Something like the “Double-Back-Front-Triple-Lutz-Alpaca” … or something to that effect. They tried to describe it to me, but the terms they used were not, as far as I could tell, in any known language, so I just nodded like I understood them and we moved on.

From there, I made my way to a couple other popular hangouts, was greeted cordially on the street by people I had never met before, and managed to learn absolutely nothing about the case. Monday’s crash was ancient history. If there was any news in Toltec that evening, is was either that there was a P.I. in town or Onionhead’s mind-blowing run. No other topics were being discussed anywhere—at least in my presence.

Finally, I found my way into The Dive Bar and the presence of a beautiful, auburn-haired young lady who I happened to know was a year older than me but looked like she fit in with the coeds around her. Sipping her smoothie, she did a good job of pretending to play up to me and, maybe, even making any casual observers think she was slightly tipsy. Unless someone had spiked the smoothie against her will, I knew she was no more tipsy than I was.

When it seemed like enough time had passed that I could credibly pick her up, I invited her to leave with me and she did. Back in my “real life single scene” I had always been too chicken to meet girls in such a setting, let alone try to get one to leave with me (I could rarely work up the nerve to ask out even the girls I met at church!), so it was kind of a thrill to walk out of a crowded bar with the prettiest woman there on my arm.

Still, I was really curious about that hair!

And the tat.

Posted on

Death Among Friends

a Bat & Jody Garrett novel

Bat Garrett goes to the funeral of a friend from high school, only to find that there are some family members of the deceased who think the death wasn’t accidental. Bat begins to look into the death and is confronted by old memories, some ex-girlfriends, and the disturbing idea that–if it was murder–it was committed by someone Bat knew.

Now available on Kindle and paperback!

…

Sample Chapter

When I got my private investigator’s license I figured my life would be a lot like the lives of those guys who used to show up late at night in the old shows on cable. High speed car chases, fist fights (where I would always win), and beautiful women who find a guy with a spotty income strangely alluring. Occasionally even solving a case.

Why was I so often surprised back in those days when life didn’t imitate art? Or even TV?

What the TV shows were especially bad at portraying was the stakeout. Oh, you would have the obligatory shot of the guy in his car at night, flashing neon in the distance, as he sips coffee from a thermos to set the mood, but considering the shows were only an hour long (minus commercials) they couldn’t show the reality of a stakeout.

Hour after hour, and sometimes night after night, just sitting there. Trying to stay awake and trying not to drink too much coffee ‘cause then you gotta go to the restroom and leave your post. So you just sit there.

And sit there.

And, if you’re me, drinking no coffee at all because you hate even the smell of it so you drink Dr Pepper like it’s going out of style, which still leads to bathroom issues.

Sometimes, you have a client who wants a meticulous log of everything that happens. “12:15Dog barks. 1:17Pizza delivery. Delivery vehicle license number … “ It sounds miserable and tedious—and it is—but at least with those you have something to do.

This was not one of those nights. I was sitting in my car across the street from an all-night diner that served, based on the smell, fried grease. As a side dish, one could order lard straight. But working in the diner was a woman who was being rapidly stalked by middle age and a husband who was convinced she was having an affair with one of her customers.

Now, you may be thinking that my job would be to watch her through the windows and see if she paid anyone any special attention. Not exactly. The husband was pretty sure who the affair was with, so I was supposed to sit there and watch to see if the Assumed One showed up and, especially, if the Waitress Woman were to leave with him.

Five nights down and not only had the Assumed One never showed, the Waitress had treated all of her customers with the same hostile indifference. Most of her customers left looking less than happy, so I couldn’t really see any of them saying something like, “Hey babe, after that rather belligerent service and a sandwich made—apparently—from old shoe leather, there’s nothing I’d like better than to take a hot mama like you out on the town.” Eight and a half hours after she would clock in (with a thirty minute “lunch” in the middle which she smoked away on a bench around the side of the building from the front door) she would leave and go straight home.

If this were a television show, the reason for the whole farce would be that I had been working on another, more important, case and this whole thing had been cooked up as a means of distracting me. In real life, I had taken this under-paying and boring job because there just wasn’t anything else, and hadn’t been for some time. It was a slack time in the P.I. biz, apparently. And being winter, it wasn’t much of a time for painting houses, either (my other listing in the phone book).

With Jody’s paycheck from her job as a speech therapist barely covering necessities, I was taking any job I could get in hopes of making ends meet. Thankfully, our cars were paid for and we didn’t pay much in rent, but you can’t eat an apartment—even the green moldy stuff on the walls that looks almost edible. We were still newlyweds in a lot of ways but, as much as I like old Glenn Miller tunes, his song about being able to live on love was starting to ring hollow.

Another night looked like it was going to drift by with no consequence when, just after three-thirty in the morning, a car that looked like the one I was told Assumed One drove pulled up in front of the diner. I perked up a little, then. I perked up a lot when the Assumed One, Mister Wally Norris himself, got out of the car. Tall, slatternly, with a one of those big droopy mustaches like country stars wore back in the eighties, I positively identified him from a picture I had been given when he stepped into the lights of the diner’s front entranceway.

As he went into the diner, I slipped quietly out of my car and closer to the diner, camera at the ready. Once in a position where I could get some good pictures of pretty much anywhere in the seating section of the diner, I started snapping.

It was a fairly old—let’s say broken-in—SLRand worked beautifully. For daytime shoots I was transitioning to a digital camera, but for nighttime work nothing beat that oldSLRand some 1200 film. Cameras may have gotten simpler to use as time has gone on, but that old camera could practically take the pictures itself even without auto-focus. It eventually developed a light leak I couldn’t get fixed and I sold it to a collector, but I always regretted it later, thinking I should have given it a place of honor on a shelf in my office. But I didn’t have a shelf in those days, let alone an office, and the collector helped me make a rent payment, which is neither here nor there for this story as it was some years later. Months anyway.

So there I was, getting pictures of him walking into the restaurant. And then there’s a picture of the Waitress looking none too pleased to see him. As I’m snapping away, she points toward the door, instructing him to leave. (It’s clear from the body language; I didn’t have to hear what she was saying.) But Assumed One steps right up to her and grabs her by the arm.

He should have grabbed the other arm—the one carrying a customer’s food—because she slammed the tray full of food upside his head. It was a horrible sight, all that Salisbury steak and candied apple slices spreading across the room. My last picture showed him letting go of her arm as he reached for his gravy-covered face, trying to get the apple chunks out of his eyes.

I dropped the camera—trusting the shoulder strap to take care of it—and darted for the diner’s door. By the time I was through the door, Assumed One had cornered Waitress behind the counter and the one customer was a guy who was rooted in place by fear and shouldn’t have been screaming like that in my humble opinion. His screams were soon drowned out by the screams of Assumed One, who had just taken a saucer of hot grease to the kisser.

No, I don’t usually talk like that, but it is a private eye story.

As Assumed One hit the floor on all fours and clawed at his face, the cook called 911 and the Waitress stood over her assailant with the saucer held in a threatening manner. I wouldn’t have thought it could be done, either, if I hadn’t seen it. If she had been holding a Glock with a round in the chamber, her demeanor could have been no more menacing.

Despite graduating from a correspondence college with a degree in private investigations and a long-ago Boy Scout merit badge in First Aid, I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for “hot-grease-in-face”. Still, it seemed like something ought to be done, so I pulled out my gun.

“The cops are already here?” asked the cook in impressed dismay, popping up from wherever he had been hiding.

“Probably just someone else that wants to kill him,” the Waitress grumbled, remarkably calm about the whole thing. Seeing my weaponry, though, she set down the saucer. Then, told me, “Go ahead and shoot him. I’ll gladly testify it was self defense.”

Assumed One, peaking at me from between his fingers with one red eye, just whimpered and made a larger mess on the floor than had been there previously. “I’m not going to shoot you,” I told him.

“More’s the pity,” said the Waitress.

Posted on

Up to Bat

Book 3 of The Story of Bat Garrett

Dallas private eye Bat Garrett is hired by wealthy Texas oilman Frank Gaston, who thinks someone is trying to kill him.

Bat is skeptical but when Gaston is found dead, slumped over at his desk, the fear seems to have been well-placed.

Darla Gaston, the beautiful young oilman’s daughter, is encouraged by her lawyers to fire Bat and let the police investigate. Darla, however, wants Bat to find out why her father has been calling a number in Colorado for several years. Bat discovers that Gaston has left a trail of lies and deceit, bigamy, and maybe even a decades-old smuggling operation involving children and a massive real estate deal in Oak Cliff.

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”
…

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.”

Posted on

Joyfully Ever After

a Mended Lives novel

Sean Clarke moves to the town of his dreams, to a house he loves, to a life he’s always wanted.  There he meets and falls in love with Angie. a beautiful young woman.  Sean’s family is happy for him, but they are waiting: for that moment when Sean discovers something he doesn’t like about another perfect woman and dumps her.

A novel of self-discovery, about finding out that the things that irritate us most about the faults of other people are when they mirror our own.

Available on Kindle!

To read more about Brad, Allie and Angie, make sure you read the novel Mended Lives!  To read how Joe and Ellen met, check out Hating God – a love story!

…

Sample Passage

He let go of her to hold the picture in both hands.  He was looking at it, but he wasn’t seeing it.  He wasn’t seeing anything.  His mind was gone and it didn’t show any signs of coming back any time soon.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said, when she didn’t think he would ever speak again.  “I never meant to hide this—to hide anything—from you.  But I was so ashamed—”

“You should be!” he blurted out.

“I know, I—”

He jumped to his feet and demanded, “What else are you going to tell me, Angie?  When am I going to start meeting all these guys you slept with?  What about the millions who saw you nude?  When are more of them going to show up and start asking me if I’ve seen what they’ve seen?  When, huh?”

She stood up in front of him and tried to reach out to him.  “I wish I could take back all those pictures, Sean.  I do.  But I can’t.  What can I do?”

“You could leave.”

“Sean!”

“What do you expect me to say?  ‘Hey great!  All the men of England have already seen my fiancé naked but I haven’t!’  Just leave, please.”

He picked up the folder, stuck the picture back in it (but not before seeing that there were other similar pictures in it and actually letting one slip out unnoticed that slid under the rocking chair), and thrusting the folder at her demanded, “Take these with you.”

“Sean—”

“Please, go.”

“Can I come back?”

He took a deep breath and replied, through clinched teeth, “I’ll get back to you on that.”

“Sean—”

He stepped around her and opened the front door.  Gently but firmly, he pushed her outside and closed the door behind her.

She turned around to face the door, but heard the unmistakable sound of the deadbolt being thrown.  She thought about knocking but didn’t think it was the right time.  She sat down on the front porch steps, put her head on her knees, and started crying.

It was almost half an hour later that she got up, smoothed out her dress with her hands and, taking the folder, walked back to the café.  Inside, the cook asked if she were all right, to which she nodded but didn’t answer out loud.  She just put on her apron, then put on her customer face, and went out to deal with the public.  She was relieved that the British couple was gone.

She looked around, though, at the crowd now there and wondered if any of them had ever seen her ads for Sutley’s, or Liverpool football, or any of the other ads she had done?  What about just the magazine layouts?  She remembered when she used to pat herself on the back because she had never done full-frontal, but now it didn’t seem like such a big deal.  “Partly evil is still evil,” she muttered to herself.  Then, noticing that a customer had overheard, she smiled, said, “Excuse me,” and took his order.

After that order, though, she went back and relieved the cook.  Not only did she want to be away from the general public, working with food had long been a way to calm down and think.  She did so, now.

Posted on

the Return of the Nice Guy

Book 2 of The Story of Bat Garrett

Two years after the murder of a prominent north Texas banker has been solved and the killer put in jail, Dallas private eye Bat Garrett is hired by an attractive widow to find out why her husband was killed.
The police (and everyone else) say it was just a robbery gone bad, but the widow thinks differently.
With Jody Anderson still on crutches from her horrific ordeal in “The Nice Guy” but by his side as always, Bat undertakes a case that leads him through an amateur archaeological society in Dallas and into a centuries old mystery in the ancient ruins of Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado.
Did the unassuming banker uncover something someone else would rather have stayed hidden?

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“!

…

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.

Posted on

The New West – Overstreet book 3

The conclusion of the John Overstreet saga. The gunfighters are hanging up their guns, a new century is dawning, and a different kind of fight comes to the You’ll See. But one more gunfight is on the horizon for John Overstreet: the last gunfight.

Available in ebook (in many formats, including Apple) and paperback.

…

Reading Sample

“Aunt Melinda! Aunt Melinda!” Ben shouted as he ran up the road from town. He had run all the way and though he was about out of breath, he was long on enthusiasm and that was making the difference.
Afraid something was wrong, Melinda stepped out on the porch and was relieved that he seemed to be shouting it in a happy way. Still calling her name, he ran up onto the porch and into her arms, panting happily like a dog.
“What is it, Ben?”
He tried to tell her his news, but his wind had finally caught up with him (or left him, depending on how one looked at it) and all he could do was stand there and breathe heavily. He was a blonde-headed boy with his mother’s green eyes and his father’s good looks. A little more stout than his older brother, he was still good-sized for his age and becoming very athletic.
His real passion, though, was art. So he held up a piece of paper and managed, “Read this.”
Melinda took the paper and read, “‘Dear Mister Rathum, We are pleased to inform you that the drawing you submitted has been chosen as a finalist and will be on display in the Denver Museum of Art and is eligible for first prize in The Rocky Mountain News’ Young Artist Competition.’ Oh Ben, this is wonderful!” She gave him a hug, which he barely acknowledged as he took the paper back and read it again.
“Can we go see it? In the museum, I mean?”
“You bet we will!’ Melinda told him with another hug. “We’ll take the whole family. And we’ll be sure and let Jo and Leonard know, too.”
“Can I write them?”
“You sure can.”
“Can I tell Uncle John when he gets in?”
“Certainly.” Melinda laughed and added, “You might want to sit down and breath between now and then, though.”

“Uncle John!” Ben practically screamed as John rode into the ranch yard. “I’m a finalist!”
John got off his horse and, walking it to the Hayloft, asked, “A finalist for what?”
Ben quickly explained the commotion and showed John the paper. John read it and gave Ben a hug. “Aunt Melinda says we can go to Denver and see my picture in the museum.”
“You bet your life we will. Come on, let’s put my horse up, then we’ll go make some plans. Which picture was it?”
“That picture I drew of the Old Homestead with that special pencil you got me for Christmas.”
“That was a good picture.” He tousled Ben’s hair and added playfully, “Must’ve been the pencil.”

“And this drawing,” the tour guide explained, “Was drawn by a member of our very own tour group: Mister Benjamin Rathum of Como. Wave your hand, Ben.”
As Ben shyly stuck up his hand, the group of a couple score people clapped politely and several were heard to remark that it was amazing a child of his age could draw so well. He received several pats on the back and more than one vote of confidence that he would win the prize. Nervous beyond belief, Ben held tightly to John Mac’s hand and just nodded at all the compliments. If anyone noticed that Ben’s blonde hair didn’t seem to fit in with the black-haired family he was traveling with, they were polite enough not to say anything.
Everyone involved, including Ben, thought of him as part of the Overstreet family these days. John Mac followed him around the way Andrew and Emily followed John Mac around and John and Melinda treated him like one of their own. In return, he treated John and Melinda as if they were his parents. Almost from the moment he had come to live with them, there had been a bond of love that was so strong as to be unbelievable. But Ben was a very special boy, one bound to make a mark in the world if in no other way than all the people he would be kind to.
As the tour moved on, Melinda realized that Emily was about to fall asleep where she stood. Melinda whispered to John, “I’m just going to sit in that chair over there and snuggle Emily. She needs a nap and my feet are killing me.”
“We’ll come back and get you before we leave,” John whispered in return.
Melinda sat in a big, surprisingly comfortable chair, and Emily eagerly climbed into her lap. She had chattered on the whole train ride from Como and in the carriage from the train station to the museum and had worn herself out. And while she and Andrew were both giving up their naps as a general rule, Emily could still be persuaded to take one in her mother’s lap now and again.
As she sat there, Melinda found that she was almost tired enough to go to sleep herself. They had gotten up early, then all dressed in their best clothes so they could come straight to the museum, and the long day was suddenly catching up with her. Through half-focused eyes, Melinda absently watched the few other patrons who had elected to tour the museum sans a guide.
There was an elderly couple who talked happily about every picture; a college-aged looking young man who scrutinized every piece of art as if he were a world-renown art critic visiting the Louvre; and a middle-aged woman with fading blonde hair who stopped at every picture, examined the name plate then moved on without seeming to have seen the picture at all.
Melinda found herself watching the woman. She moved slowly, her feet almost dragging, as if she had walked to the museum from a great distance. Melinda had read of people who appeared to be “beaten down by life” and, while she had seen a few such people, this woman was the personification of the idea. Melinda couldn’t see her face, but she could see the slumped shoulders, the tired gait, the hands that reached out to every name plate as if for a life raft.
Melinda began to wonder about the woman and what her story might be. She tried not to stare at the woman—even though she guessed that the woman was oblivious to everything around her—but cast furtive glances her way in an attempt to, somehow, read the woman’s story. Suddenly, Melinda was very awake, but was also thankful that Emily was there. An inveterate people watcher, Melinda had spent many hours watching people while holding one or another of her children on the porch of the Como Hotel or the boardwalk on Rowe Street. She had even done it a few times in Denver and had always enjoyed it immensely for there were so many more people to watch.
The woman was wearing a traveling dress of impeccable style, which would have been incongruous with the picture she put forth except that it was still dusty from travel. In a world where the streets were mostly dirt and carriages mostly open, the dust wasn’t necessarily out-of-place. But the dress was so nice, Melinda realized that what looked odd was that normally someone with a dress like that wouldn’t have stepped out of their railway car without borrowing a brush from one of the porters and giving it a once-over.
The train? Melinda suddenly wondered why she thought this woman had just gotten off a train. She realized, with closer scrutiny, that it wasn’t just dust that clung to the woman’s dress but soot. That fine soot that Melinda had been so careful to brush off her own dress before coming over.
So what would posses a person who seemed so ill at ease with life to hop a train and come to a museum? Maybe, Melinda thought, she’s downtown for something else and stopped by the museum to kill time. There were a few lawyer’s offices nearby and the capitol building wasn’t all that far away.
No. She came to believe as she watched the woman (less and less furtively), that the woman was in the museum for a purpose. There was something in these pictures that she was looking for. What could it be?
No again. As Melinda watched the woman’s movements she realized that the woman was looking not at the pictures but the names. One of these pictures was done by someone that meant something to the woman. A grandchild perhaps? All the pictures in this room were done by children twelve years of age and under and it was unlikely that this woman could have a child in that range.
What is it about a grandchild’s picture that would so enthrall this woman, so entrance her that she would travel across country to see it?
The woman came then to Ben’s picture and stopped. She actually looked at the picture, and then put her hand on the name plate as if it and not the wall behind it were holding her up. She put her other hand to her heart as if to keep it from killing her, and just stared.
Just as Melinda began to shoot various scenarios through her mind to explain these events, she mumbled to herself, “Oh my!”