Tag: #mystery

Posted on

The Body in the Floor

When a skeleton is found in the remains of the burnt-out courthouse, most folks just treat it as a curiosity. Ira “Doc” Pearson knows it was murder and wonders if the murderer is still around.

Published by Outlaws Publishing and available on ebook (in many formats) and in paperback!

See all of the Ira “Doc” Pearson novels here!

The Van Bent courthouse burns down and a body is found to have been stuffed into the floorboards years before, when the building was built. Ira Pearson is determined to discover the identity of the woman, but Sheriff Wood has little interest in the matter for he has more important matters on his hands–including a numbers runner and big city tough who came to Van Bent for some reason and promptly lost a thumb in an alley fight. Could the back alley fight and the woman in the floor somehow be connected?

Sample passage

“What’s going on, Chief?”

“I just—you need to see, first.”

The chief led the way over to the smoldering remains of the courthouse and to a ladder that had been lowered into the basement. He handed Ira some big, rubber boots, saying, “Put these on. Foller me. It’s safe,” Buckler directed as he descended the ladder.

Ira hesitated, but the man seemed to be going down with no fear. And it did look like everything was safe but soaked, hence the boots, which he put on. He took a breath, then followed the man down the ladder and into the pit that had so recently been the courthouse basement. He was glad of the rubber boots if for no other reason than that they came up to his knees and the piles of muddy ash were at least that deep.

They slogged over to a space almost in the center of the building’s footprint—which seemed surprisingly small to Ira, now that the building was gone—and Buckler knelt down and pointed. “Looky here, Doc.”

Ira bent over and saw instantly what the man was pointing at. “Human hand, ain’t it?” Buckler asked.

“Sure looks like it. Right hand.”

“No chance it’s just a fake of some kind? I seen a human skeleton over to El Paso once made out of plaster. This looks real to me, but I ain’t seen all that many human bones in my day.”

Ira moved in closer and peered at the strange object before him. “My early thought is that it’s real. Is there more?”

“We stopped work when we seen this,” Buckler answered. “If there is, I reckon it extends in under that pile there,” he continued, pointing. “I didn’t want to go no further ‘til we had you here to supervise. Thought you could tell us if this person died in the fire.”

“At an early guess, I’m going to say no. As hot as that fire was, if this were a, um, ‘fresh body’, there would probably still be more signs of flesh. And the burn marks on the bones would be different if flesh were melted off or if it were just bones in the fire.”

Buckler nodded and said, “I git ya, Doc.”

“Chief, you know of any reason there would be a skeleton in the courthouse?”

“None I can think of. Nobody had one in an office or anything—that I know of.”

“And this is on top of some things,” Ira commented, mostly to himself. Realizing he had said it out loud, he explained, “Not like this courthouse was built on top of an old cemetery and this was someone buried here. This person is above the rock of the basement. Any chance this person was stored in the basement?”

“What for?” Buckler asked, almost laughing.

“Who knows? Any old rumor that there was a body in the basement, though?”

“None that I ever heard. An’ I been here since the foundation was laid on this place. Before that, even. I helped to dig the hole.”

“All right,” Ira said, standing up. He looked around, then said, “This person’s dead, so it’s not like we can hurt him—or her—in any way. Still, let’s see if we can dig him out without jostling the bones around any more than we have to.”

“Okey-dokey,” Buckler said. “We’re going to need to brace that west wall, though. It’s bucklin’ a little and liable to collapse on us if we don’t.”

Ira nodded and said, “You get some men on that. You and me, let’s get some shovels and maybe a pry bar and see if we can find out whether there’s more under here than just a hand.” As the fire chief went off to put those instructions into action, Ira looked at the hand and remembered how finding a hand like this had landed his friends the Jameses in all sorts of trouble. He hadn’t been there, but he had heard the story. He also had thought over the years that, if he had been there, he could have kept Polly from spending that year in prison that she hadn’t deserved.

Buckler was soon back and, as three men worked to shore up the west wall, he went to work with Ira at pushing the ash and dirt away from the hand.

Soon, they were seeing a wrist, and then part of a forearm. And then, it seemed as if the arm were reaching out from within a wooden frame. “A casket?” Buckler asked as he looked at the wood.

Ira took up one of the shovels and scraped some of the dirt and ash away, then said, “Look at this, Chief. This isn’t a casket. Not built like that.”

Buckler shoved some of the dirt away himself and said, “That there’s flooring.” As Ira nodded, Buckler commented in worried awe, “This body was inside a floor! Somebody hid a body in the floor.” He reached out and rubbed some ash away from the top, saying, “That’s the tile from the first floor. I’m picturing in my mind and them joists for the first floor was foot-wide beams. Two foot on center.”

“Plenty of room to hide a body,” Ira commented.

Buckler tried to made a joke as he said, “Ain’t nobody goin’ to fit me in a foot-by-two space lessen they squeeze me down a might.” He looked up suddenly and asked, “You don’t reckon it’s a child, do ya, Doc?”

“Based on the size of that hand, I’d say it’s at least someone fifteen years old, or more. Not a big person. Might be a lady.”

Buckler took off his hat, as if at a funeral, and said with reverence, “God be with us.”

Ira raised up, tapped through the mud and ash in a couple places, then said, “Looks like there’s a fair-sized portion of that floor here still intact. Relatively speaking, anyway. Let’s clear it off and get some more pry-bars over here.”

“Think the whole body’s still together?”

“I’d have to say that would be beyond belief, but finding this at all is pretty incredible. And somebody better go fetch Sheriff Wood.”

“After all this time?”

“Whether we can figure out how this person got here I have my doubts, but it’s not likely to have been for benign reasons that someone hid a body in between floorboards. I think the sheriff needs to know.”

Buckler nodded again, then detailed someone to go get the sheriff and the other two men to help them pry the boards apart. It was not easy for the floor had been well made and they were trying to not disturb the bones any more than absolutely necessary.

Sheriff Wood was with them a while later—and quite a crowd had gathered nearby though the volunteer fire department men and Wood’s deputy Chubby were keeping them back—when they finally got the right boards pried up. There were a couple of reverent exclamations, the Catholics present crossed themselves, and Ira was the first to articulate any recognizable words.

“This was a woman,” he said. Though the visage before them was mostly of bones, there was just enough muscle and tendons still clinging to the form to keep the skeleton intact.

“How old, you reckon?” Buckler asked, watching with great curiosity, but also with a clear reluctance as to touching the bones.

Ira shook his head, but leaned closer and said, “I can give a better answer with more study, but her hips make me think she was old enough to have given birth. There was no sign of arthritis in that hand we saw first.” He then pointed and said, mostly to Wood, “Look there, Sheriff. However she came to be between these boards, someone murdered her to get her here.”

Wood looked, as did the other men close by, and could see the crack in the skull Ira was pointing to. Wood, feeling the need to say something, “She was either dead when she was put in here or close to it. Nobody would have lived long after a rap like that.”

Ira nodded in agreement then said, “It’s been a long time, Sheriff. Trail’s going to be colder than a polar bear. But this fire just revealed a murder.”

Posted on

A Hand With Women

Louis L’Amour meets Agatha Christie in this mystery set on the Texas plains in the late 1800s. A mysterious woman, part of a human body, and a posse all converge on a lonesome cowboy named Morgan James.

Published by Outlaws Publishing

Available for ebook (in many formats) and in paperback.

Morgan James left McKeon, Texas, ahead of a neck-tie party the esteemed locals were preparing to throw in his honor.

His horse had been tired when he hit McKeon to start with, and after a night of hard riding, it was about done in—and so was Morg. So he stopped at what looked at first glance in the early morning sun like a deserted ranch for water and a rest. It wasn’t so deserted as it looked, for a woman with a haunted look about her lived there. She offered Morg shelter, but there was still something about her that gave him the willies.

The ranch was called the T-Bell and there were those who said that death stalked the T-Bell range. Others said it was the woman who ran it that was being stalked, while still others said she was crazy, or a witch.

And then Morg found the better part of a dead body on the part of the T-Bell range that backed up on Palo Duro Canyon and suddenly all those wild stories he had been hearing didn’t seem half-wild enough.

…

Sample reading

I was never much of a hand with women. Not that I had ever been around many of them I wasn’t related to, but when I was, words flowed about as freely from me as water did in those dried-up creek beds back home.
The more I think about it, that’s a pretty good description all the way around ‘cause when rain did come back home, the creeks would suddenly swell up and overflow and cause all kinds of destruction. That’s me, too. Around women, I’d get tongue-tied and couldn’t hardly make a word come out that made sense, but then, sometimes, I couldn’t shut up. I’d talk like a carnival barker and, generally, make a fool of myself.
So I had learned, mostly, to be even quieter. When there was a woman around, she didn’t generally take much notice of the quiet, homely man—whether I was standing in the corner (not unusual), or right next to her. What I did know about women-folk, they was more likely to look at and admire a fancy piece of furniture than a guy like me.
Looking back now, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten in so much trouble if’n I’d knowed how to talk to women. Or, at least, had knowed how to let them talk to me and still keep my wits about me.
You take my pa. Why, he could talk to a woman just as easy as talking to a fella. Just had that easy, friendly, way some men have about them even though I’d say he weren’t no better looking than me. But he could walk into a room and folks would notice, or he’d start yarning and the women folk would be listening as close as the men.
Don’t get me wrong: my pa loved my ma and anyone who even hinted that he might have stepped out on her would find themselves on the business end of a punch to the nose, from me or anyone who really knowed my pa. He was just … I heard someone describe him once as “charming” and I think that’s the word that fit best. I think when them moments came where I’d be shooting my mouth off like a wagon wheel in need of grease that, deep down, I was trying to be like Pa.
Another thing about Pa was that he sure never would have gotten himself in a fix like the one I was in. The only trouble I ever knowed Pa to have was with the bankers. Not that he was a robber or sharp of any kind, but he was a farmer, and farming’s a chancy thing in Texas. Maybe it is anywhere, but down there in central Texas, when one year you got nothing but rain, then the next nothing but hail, then the year after that all the dust and dirt Oklahoma can spare, why, it just ain’t a stable business to my thinking. But Pa, he loved it. Sometimes I thought he even liked arguing with the banker, ‘cause he sure did it enough.
I remember one time when he fell behind on some payment or other and the banker sent out a couple of the toughs from town to “attach” Pa’s best mules. I was just a young’un then, and was wondering what they would attach the mules to, but Pa, he stood right up to them. He was holding a shot-gun like he meant business and told them two men that if the banker wanted Pa’s mules he could come get ‘em hisself. They argued a little, but they didn’t want to argue too much with that scatter gun, so they rode off, saying they would be back with the banker. They showed up the next day, banker with ‘em but looking scared, and Pa hands over the reins to them mules just as calm as you please. Next day, he takes me along with him and we head west, away from town, and over to Old Man Possum’s place. I reckon now that I’m grown that that man’s name wasn’t really Possum, but that’s what everybody called him. My pa made a deal with Possum that afternoon. He traded two weeks worth of me for two weeks worth of Possum’s oxen.
It’s hard to say who got the worst deal out of that. I was twelve years old and pretty strong for my age, so I was set to working in Possum’s garden, as he called it. It wasn’t much of one, but it needed weeding and watering—from a can, water drawn from a well that seemed like it must have been halfway to China in depth and as far as possible from the garden and still be on Possum’s place. So I took care of that garden, slept in Possum’s barn, was fed meals that ran mostly to stews with mighty little meat by Possum’s wife (I never had no idea what to call her other than “ma’am”) and did a few other odd jobs around the place.
My father, though, he got stuck trying to finish his plowing and planting with a team of oxen that, he said, was more muley than mules. But he got it done, and we worked that farm without mules that summer—and without much talk, for I was some mad at my pa for trading me off like that—but it was a good, rainy year for that time and that place, so we had the best crop we’d ever had. Pa took the money we made, paid off that banker that took the mules, then went thirty miles away and opened up an account with another banker. Pa fixed up to be a pretty fair farmer and had a good eye for dairy cows, so though we was never rich—while I was to home anyway—he generally ran ahead and rarely behind. That other banker, the one Pa went to after the first one, his bank eventually became quite a going concern and I heard he liked to rub it in on that guy Pa had left.
When I turned fifteen, though, I lit out. I wasn’t mad at Pa, and he didn’t begrudge my leaving, but a cattle drive from way down south came through our area and the drover asked if I or my pa would like to ride along and make a few dollars as one of the men he had started the drive with was sitting back in Leander with a broken leg. I think Pa hated to see me go, but he had done some yonderin’ when he was about my age, and then he had fought in the war, so he knew what it was like to be a young man who feels the need to get out and test hisself against the world. He shook my hand, slipped me a five dollar gold piece (where it come from I always wondered, for I had sure never known him to have any extra money lying about) then told me to write my ma now and again. I said I would and lit out, nothing to my name but a used Colt, a used-er saddle, a middlin’ horse, and not enough of an idea what I was going to do for it to be considered good or bad.
When I rode up on that little farm house, boards old but took care of with white wash next to a barn in similar state, it was fifteen years later and I had a sight of riding behind me, and a lot of years. I was done in and thinking anywhere, no matter how ragged, would be a good place to stop and cool off for a moment. When I saw that it had a pump and a trough, why I thought I was as close to heaven as a body could come on this green earth, which wasn’t much green that year, but that’s not really important to the tale I don’t think.
There was an old army canteen at the base of the pump, the lid screwed on tight. I figured that was left by some good Samaritan and that the water in the canteen was so’s anybody who came along could prime the pump. It was a common practice out there in them dry lands, and every man—even the outlaws and ne’er-do-wells—knowed to refill the canteen before riding on. Why even me, riding ahead of a posse like I was, I was already figuring that my first move after getting that pump a-flowing would be to fill that canteen and set it back where it was for the next guy, even if it was them that was hunting me. So when I picked it up and nothing sloshed, I said a word my church-going parents would not have approved of. I apologized to them and the Lord, then reached for the handle on the pump. I took a good look at the water in the trough, then, and saw that it was pretty and clear, not old and scummy like I had been expecting. Fact was, there wasn’t any green at all on that trough, just a little in the grass around the trough where water had been sloshed.
Sloshed by who? I wondered, as most western people would have heard me coming for a quarter mile—and seen me for twice that—and been out to greet me or shoo me on my way. I’d seen nobody, though, so I cranked that handle a couple times and water gushed out of there like Moses’s rock. I filled up that canteen out of habit and set it by the pump, then drank some myself and splashed some on my face. That horse I was riding, an old fellow with a blaze across his nose and a faded Spectacle brand on his rump, he was already at work on the water in the trough and looked at me as if to say, “I seen this water was fine right off. What was you waiting on?”
It was a dry day, and I drank my fill, but it wasn’t really all that much; I suppose on account of having spent a lot of dry days in my life. So I filled my own canteen, then drank again.
With water in my belly, which suddenly felt like too much water when I started to walk away from that pump, I tried to think of what I should do next. Running from that posse seemed like a bad idea the more I done it. They were going to catch me, sooner or later, and even if they didn’t, someone would. And then even though I still thought I wasn’t guilty of what they said, I was guilty of … what was it a sheriff I once knew called it? Escaping justice? Evading arrest? Yeah, that was it. So even if I got shed of that posse this day, they would put out a wanted poster saying I was wanted for evading arrest and there was no way I could deny the fact.
If I was to ask my ma and pa, I reckoned they would have told me to go back and face the music. Setting a good bit of store by both justice and the Good Lord, they would have told me that the truth would set me free, or something like that. I didn’t want to doubt the Lord, but I knew the carrying out of justice would be done by men, and I had no cause to trust them. Specially not in a bunch like that. One man, I might could talk to him and set him right, but a whole bunch like that, and with me being a man who had run like he was guilty even if he wasn’t? No, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in justice being did.
The short of it was: a local man was dead and I was a stranger. I was pretty sure I hadn’t killed him, but everyone else who might be a suspect was a knowed local, which made it a lot easier to suspect me. Who knows but what I might have thought the same in their place. I told myself then that, if I was ever in such a situation, I’d cool my heels and find out what the facts was before making a decision. Such an idea was fine and dandy, but it still left me out there on the prairie with a posse likely somewhere behind—and not by much.
It was then I noticed there was a bit of a garden beyond the house, and some straggly fence guarding a draw further back. I couldn’t see anything being kept in that fence—or kept out by it—but it didn’t look broken down so I was guessing there were cows beyond those barbs. The barn door was half-closed, so I couldn’t tell if there was anything in there.
So, I up and hollers, “Hello the house!” like a neighborly westerner should. In the city, they tell me a person would walk right up to a stranger’s door and knock, but all my life I had been told that the best thing to do—the friendly thing to do—was announce yourself before even setting foot on the porch, just in case they didn’t want you to come no further. Most folks wouldn’t begrudge anyone some water, but they lived out there in the middle of nowhere because they wanted to stay in the middle of nobody and didn’t want nobody coming round unexpectedly.
And in that country, you could see who was coming. It was flat and there wasn’t hardly a tree in sight, and very little roll to the land except where that draw was. It was the kind of land that made me mindful of a man I worked for during roundup down near what would later be called Sudan. He was a grizzled, grumpy old man who once told me he picked such flat land because when his wife left him, he wanted to watch her go for a week.
Where this little farm sat, it was almost that flat. It was deceiving, though, because I had a hunch that draw was just one of the tentacles of the canyon, which one could ride up on all of a sudden. Even without the canyon, flat lands are rarely as flat as they appear and little dips and hollows can hide a lot more than one would think—just ask them that fought the Indians for them lands.
For all the flatness, it wasn’t a bad spread. The buildings could use some work, but that well was good water and in that country, water was gold. A man could run some cattle, or maybe grow some crops. I couldn’t see any way a man could get rich off that land, but I was thinking a body could make a living, and I’d seen just enough rich people to make me think the man who made a living was probably better off than the man who was rich. Me, I’d been nothing but a drifting saddle-bum, a good hand on a ranch, but I’d started to think that I wouldn’t mind putting my feet under the same table night after night, plowing my own land or cutting my own hay or riding herd on my own cattle. Fourteen or fifteen years before, I’d have said that would never be for me, but a man changes over time, or I had, anyway.
That was sort of why I had been in that town to start with, the one that now wanted me back so badly that they’d sent a posse of men to look for me. I had come there to hunt up a job ‘cause I had heard that the local ranches were hiring for a round-up. It had been in my mind that I could stay in one area for a while and keep my eye out for a likely piece of land that I could buy and develop for myself. My great plan didn’t make it past the first night.
I’ve never been much of a drinker, but I was new to town and there’s not a better place to learn what’s going on than a saloon and that town only had two of them. Looking back, I wished I had tried the other one, but I went into one called “Jeb’s” and there was a fair sized crowd already drinking. A faro game was going, as well as some kind of a wheel you could bet on. (I never liked them wheels ‘cause it seemed likely they were weighted and, even if they wasn’t, the odds of winning seemed awfully low. I played faro a few times, and won a little, but my money had always been too hard to come by for me to throw it away like that.) I ordered a drink, leaned against the bar, and surveyed the room.
Right about then, one of the guys playing faro, a big, hairy fellow with a too-tight shirt and a scar on the back of his head where the hair didn’t grow, he grabs the faro dealer by the collar and jerks him over the table, calling him a cheat. That faro dealer wasn’t much of a man size-wise, but he was quick with a knife and had this thin-bladed job out and driven deep into the big man’s right arm. The big man hollers and fetched that faro dealer upside the head with his left hand but the faro dealer still wasn’t having any of it and drives that knife into the man’s gullet.
From that point on, it was a little hard to say what all happened, but as near as I can remember, one of the big man’s friends took exception to what had transpired and smashes a chair over the faro dealer’s head. The dealer went to his knees, then the man who was spinning that chance wheel comes up with something like an Indian club and brings it down on that friend’s head. Then someone else jumped, then someone else. Before you knew it, everyone in that saloon was throwing punches.
Including me.
Now, with the clear vision of looking back, what I should have done was skedaddle out of there, even if I had to duck under a table and crawl. But I had been in some fights before and usually gave a good account of myself. Not a big man—just right at six foot—I had the muscles of hard work and had learned a little just from being knocked down here and there. So when a fella crashed into me and spilled that drink all over my best shirt, why naturally I straightened him up and give him an upper-cut to the chin. Somebody else took offense at that, or maybe just wanted in on the fight, and jabbed me in the kidneys. It hurt something fierce, so I took to pounding on the man who I thought had done it. He was standing in the right spot, anyway.
From there on, it was just a circus act, with men throwing chairs, punches and each other until the room was a mess and we were, too. Of a sudden, a shotgun blast goes off and we all stop what we’re doing to see the sheriff of that town standing in the doorway, a couple deputies by his side and a scattergun in his hand. Then he tells us we’re going to pay for the damages and anyone who tried to leave the room without putting at least five dollars in the saloon-keeper’s hat was going to jail until such time as he, the sheriff, thought we deserved getting out. Now, I begrudged that five dollars, for I had been planning to send it to my bank, but I figured five dollars was better than a night in jail so I chucked it into the hat and the sheriff let me walk out the door, but not before asking my name. I told him it was Morgan James and he let me go but told me not to leave town right away.
My horse was tied up out front, so I hopped up on it and rode him out to a clump of trees I had seen west of town, figuring to bed down there for the night since the few dollars I had hoped to spend on a room were now in my Cindy Lou Fund, as I sometimes thought of it. They weren’t so much trees as just tall scrub, but after checking for snakes they made for a decent place to bed down, and a little off the road. I ground-hitched the horse and lay down.
It was just a few minutes after I stretched out that I heard a ruckus coming from town. I wasn’t but a couple hundred feet from the back door of the other saloon and sounds can travel pretty well on a prairie night. Once my ears was attuned, which was mostly a matter of waking up, I heard someone shouting that someone named Buster McKeon was dead, and something about his head being stove in. Someone else said something about him being still on the floor of Jeb’s when the fight was over and how they had thought he was just knocked out until someone felt of him and realized he wasn’t just out, but dead. I was listening good, then, for who doesn’t like to hear a good yarn like that?
It was at that moment that I began to wish I had crawled out when that big hairy fella got stabbed in the arm ‘cause my ears caught real clearly someone saying the name, “Morgan James.” Someone else said something about how they all knowed each other so it had to be that stranger who killed this McKeon.
Part of my brain said I ought to walk in right then and clear my name, but that part of the brain was stampeded by the rest of me that said I better get out of there because McKeon was the name of the owner of the biggest ranch around. I didn’t know Alexander McKeon or this Buster by sight, but I told myself there was no chance I was getting a job in that town now and I had best put some distance between me and them good folks.
As the crowd moved off towards where I had seen the sheriff’s office, getting louder and angrier as they went, I hurriedly and quietly rolled up my blanket, saddled my horse (he wasn’t too happy about that!) and slipped off into the night as fast as I could go without making any noise. There’s always noise, though, and with every one I made, I scrunched my shoulders, waiting to hear someone from town holler, “He went that way!” I didn’t hear any such thing, but I still didn’t relax much even as I prodded the horse to a slightly faster gait as we got a couple hundred yards from town.
Most of a day later, after watching over my shoulder and seeing a faint dust cloud that I was sure was a posse on my tail, I arrived at that little, run-down farm. Even though that well water was as good as I had said, I was about to come to the conclusion that no one was home when the front door of that little house opens up and a woman’s voice says, “You’ve had your drink, now move on.”
I looked up in surprise and for the first few moments I couldn’t have told you whether she was tall, short, fat, skinny or pretty, because all I could see was that old Sharps .50 she was holding that would have drove a hole through me bigger than my horse if let loose at that distance.

Posted on

TimeKeeperS: Rectification

An EMP knocks out all the power in North America. As people are scrambling to get generators (or anything else) running, they begin to hear rumors. Nuclear war. Chaos. What about the President? Is she alive or did she die in the disaster?

Mary Orsen discovers that her ability to travel through time was not affected by the EMP. She has the power and the ability to go back in time and prevent the war. But she also knows that she’ll only make things worse if she doesn’t go back and change what really started it. Was it the EMP, or had it actually begun before that?

Mary consults with men who have traveled through time before: Bat Garrett and Garison Fitch. They are old now and can, however, only give advice. If the world is going to be saved, there can only be one TimeKeeper.

And Mary’s pretty sure she’s not it.

Available now on Kindle and in paperback!

To read how the TimeKeeperS got started, make sure you read “TimeKeeperS” (as well as the Garison Fitch & Bat Garrett books!) and the conclusion in TimeKeeperS:Restoration!

…

Sample Chapter

“Thank you, sir,” Marianne said as she handed the uniform to Captain Remmick. “It was an honor to wear them, especially since I haven’t earned them.”

“You may before this is over.” Remmick sat the uniform aside and looked at the attractive woman before him in her “W” T-shirt and cargo pants and thought that if he were thirty years younger—and then made himself focus on the business at hand. In a low voice, he asked, “What’s it like when you zap to other places with that device of yours?”

“Honestly, sir, it’s nothing. I mean, it’s a weird sensation to suddenly be somewhere else, but the actual travel is so quick the brain can’t comprehend it. You’re just here, and then, you’re there. It was a little disorienting at first, but now I’m used to it.” She laughed and added, “Except for jumping into what seemed to this west Texas gal like a monsoon and being grabbed by a Captain so I wouldn’t fall overboard. That one was kind of wild.”

“How is it,” he hesitated, trying to work out his words, then said, “You jumped into the middle of a spray of salt water, right? Does all that salt water get absorbed into your body? What if you zapped to a place where there was a bird, or a cat or something?”

“That’s part of why I send out the sensors,” Marianne explained. “Trying to avoid all that as much as possible. But, in reality, it’s not like I’m beaming somewhere like on ‘Star Trek.’ My atoms aren’t being disassembled or anything. I am moving through space. So I would actually bump the cat out of the way. Actually startled a raccoon once.”

“What if it were something like a desk—or a wall?”

She lifted her pant leg and showed him a bruise on her right shin, saying, “That’s from a coffee table in Amarillo, Texas. Glad it had room to move when I bumped it.”

“Another land-lubber?” Captain Remmick asked, actually smiling slightly and not as belligerent as Marianne had worried he might be.

“Um, yessir,” Marianne replied. “This is Sean Fitch, he’s—“

“One of the greatest minds of our time,” Remmick completed, extending his hand towards Sean. “I have read your papers on astronomy and, I must say, I’m a huge fan. I originally wanted to be an astronaut, but, well, I wound up here.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Sean replied. “Thank you for allowing me aboard.” He put on his round glasses, which made him look more academic and even less like his father, though Marianne knew he was quite athletic, bicycling several times a week through the mountains with his wife, Elaine.

Marianne tried to take control of the situation, though she was astounded by Captain Remmick’s suddenly deferential attitude, by saying, “Sean contacted me that he had seen something in the Kerrigan reports that he wanted me to see. I thought you and the admiral would like to see it as well.”

“Ever been on a carrier, Mister Fitch?” Admiral Pike asked.

“No, ma’am. I was in the Air Force for three years but they barely even let me out of Nevada. Don’t think I even saw a sailor the whole time.”

“So sad for you,” Pike chided.

“What do you have for us?” Marianne asked, afraid they were going to drift away again. Although, she said to herself, we’re going to change history anyway, so what’s a little lost time?

Sean plugged his Screen® into a large table that doubled as a video screen and brought up a map of the world much like the one the meteorologists had displayed previously and said, “There are several places in the world that the fallout hasn’t touched, yet. I decided to overlay what data we had from the Kerrigans with what we’ve found out about the weather patterns to see if there were any places that had corresponding fallout clearance and extra-dimensional activity.”

“Were there?” Pike asked.

Sean, adjusting the screen, replied, “We don’t have a lot of Kerrigan data, but we do have this.” He changed the display to a depiction of the Americas and the Pacific and directed, “So far, we have only detected two time incursions. There’s the one Marianne found in the Pacific, and this one in Brazil—“

“Brazil?” the two officers asked in unison.

Sean adjusted his glasses and continued, “From what I can tell from my maps, it’s an area that would normally be considered the back side of nowhere. In their state of Amazonas.”

“When was it?” Marianne asked.

“As near as I can figure, it was within moments of the nuclear attack. I think it might have been after but we haven’t had a really close pass with a Kerrigan, yet.” Sean brought up another map of South America and said, “Now, check this out. I searched the area by satellite—“

“How?” Pike asked, not accusatory but curious.

“The President gave me access to what was left of the satellite network. And my father figured out how to—ahem—establish a connection.”

“Wow,” Remmick mumbled, to receive an appreciative nod from the admiral. He snapped his fingers and commented, “Your father’s Garison Fitch, right? Nobel Prize winner and science advisor to the President.”

“Yes. Anyway,” Sean said, “Look at this: there’s a giant bulge in the land that’s roughly the size of one of our battle cruisers.”

“Theories?” Pike asked.

It was Marianne who guessed, “You think maybe it was going to take too much power to send whatever ship they used to launch the nukes to the future so they buried it in the Amazon jungle?”

“Sort of, though I wasn’t thinking of the power angle. That might actually be part of the thinking—could be all of it—but, like I was saying, this is one of the areas that has remained completely free of fallout. What if whoever did this knows—from future knowledge—that this spot will stay nuke free so they stuck their ship there in hopes of retrieving it whenever they need it.”

“Or use it as a base,” Marianne injected.

“Hmm?” Sean asked.

“We may be making wild guesses here, but what if what you say is true and this is someone from the future who is trying to destabilize the past in their favor? Aren’t they going to want some sort of base from which to operate? To stay in this time period and either monitor or even change things?”

“Why aren’t they doing anything, then?” Pike asked.

“We don’t know that they aren’t, ma’am,” Marianne told her. “They might be manipulating something, or just monitoring things. Maybe they’re just focused on building a society or a foothold in the Amazon while the rest of the world goes to hell.”

“Or,” Sean interrupted, “They just dumped the ship there because it’s an out of the way place and they didn’t think anyone would notice.”

Captain Remmick snapped his fingers and, looking at Marianne, said excitedly, “The reason the bump shows up in the earth is because the dirt had to go somewhere right? Like what you were saying about shoving the cat out of the way: they could bury the ship but it’s going to push the dirt somewhere.” Marianne nodded in agreement, which made the Captain feel inordinately proud of himself (and embarrassed by the fact).

Sean offered, “If they just hid the ship, that might be good news for us. Or, even if they’re using it as a base, that might portend well for us.” Seeing he had their attention, he explained, “They put the ship—if that’s what it is—under the ground assuming it wouldn’t be seen. And, under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been. You could be building a couple football fields in the Amazon without anyone noticing under normal circumstances. But we noticed because of the Kerrigans. That may indicate that whoever we’re dealing with doesn’t know we have the Kerrigans—“

“Wait a minute,” Remmick objected, “How is that possible. They’re from the future. Don’t they know everything we’re doing because it’s history to them?”

Sean looked at Marianne, who answered, “Not if they’re from pretty far away.”

“What do you mean?”

Marianne answered, “None of what I have done with Edie—or what Mister Garrett did—were government sanctioned and, therefore, may never be written into the history books. We don’t know how much they might know about us. You haven’t been writing down what I’ve done, have you?” The captain and the admiral both shook their heads.

“If this were someone from, say, ten years in the future, you might be right. Our movements might be known. Maybe even a hundred years from now, unless we were to take specific actions to cover our tracks. But what if they’re from thousands of years in the future? Marcus, he was a man I knew who had, um, seen the future—and I believe him. He said there had been more than one war that poisoned the planet. We could be dealing with someone from, say, a thousand years in the future who only know the most basic details of our world—“

Sean snapped his fingers again and said, excitedly, “And they don’t know as much as they thought they did!”

“What?” several voices asked at once.

“Think about it: if these are people from a different future, who changed the past, they might know about the Kerrigans but they might not know their full capabilities because almost no one did. We didn’t. Jason Kerrigan drew up the plans but, as far as anyone knows, never built one. We only built them because you—and a me from another time line—built the ones we have, but almost no one seems to know what they do. We don’t know how the Egyptians built the pyramids and whoever it is from the future that’s causing these problems may not know how the Kerrigans work—or even that we have them. And no one has been traveling through time with Edie since the last time you did—what?—six years ago?”

“Almost seven.”

“Right. And if they hadn’t interfered, you might not have ever traveled through time again. This technology could very well have died with you and me. And I don’t mean that generally, I mean with Marianne and I. The history they have of our day might be fairly detailed, with names of all our leaders and even records of where our naval ships were. But they might not know … “ He was smiling as he paced intently, “We know Roman history, right? We know who was Caesar when and where their troops were placed, right? But we don’t know about Joe Greek over here who did experiments on cattle because he never told anyone. Maybe he invented a cure for hoof in mouth, but his kid ran off to Athens and the knowledge died with Joe. Whoever did this, they may not have had any idea that one fairly obscure astrophysicist and a private eye from Arizona—“

“Who’s even more obscure,” Marianne chuckled.

“Yeah, they have no idea that we would have any way of tracking them. Seriously, they had an almost perfect plan. Start a world war, have everyone at the time blame everyone else, then pick up the pieces—a hundred years later, a thousand.”

“Why would they think they would be there?” Remmick asked.

“Huh?” asked Marianne and the admiral in unison.

“These people from the future are the descendents of someone alive today, right? Whether it’s the people of Mexico or Canada or just some town in Kansas. How would they know that this nuclear war wasn’t going to wipe out their progenitor?”

Sean, after several moments of silence, offered, “Maybe they have a map of the ‘pockets’ as Marianne calls them and they know that the seed of their civilization sprung up in one of those pockets. Maybe they even sprung from some Amazonian tribe and the ship is there now to look after their ancestors.”

It was Pike who said, “What you’re saying makes sense—of a sort. I’m finding it hard to give one hundred percent credibility to a theory that involves time travel, but that’s neither here nor there. Even if this theory makes some logical sense, it’s still an awful lot of conjecture.”

“Then let me go to the Amazon and investigate,” Marianne requested. “It’s what I do.”

“Alone?” Sean asked, hoping to go along.

“No offense, Sean, but I was thinking that if I took anyone with me I’d like for it to be someone who speaks the language.” She smirked slightly as she added, looking at the admiral, “And I sure wouldn’t turn down a U.S. Marine.”

“Bowstring, this is First Sergeant Amelee Fitzwater—“

“Call me Fitz,” the stout, fair-haired woman said cordially if not in a friendly manner as she shook Marianne’s hand. She looked to be of Nordic descent and Marianne could see her being one of those tough women who skied all day with a machine gun on their backs as they patrolled some far northern slope.

Admiral Pike continued, “And this is Gunnery Sergeant Darrin Hollis.” He was a dark-skinned man of medium height but more than average muscles. Marianne guessed that some of his ancestors might have come from the Caribbean. As he shook Marianne’s hand, the Admiral explained, “The gunny here speaks Spanish and Portuguese and can generally make his wishes known in any South American country.

“That’s impressive,” Marianne complimented. “Study a lot or just a natural gift for languages?”

“Some of both, ma’am.”

“Call me Bowstring,” she instructed with a smile. Marianne hadn’t told the admiral—or anyone except Bat and Jody—that she didn’t need a translator, ever. When she had been sent to the future, Marcus had given her the gift of being able to understand and speak any language she would ever encounter. She had thought the gift might only be for the future, but in her years back in the twenty-first century it had never gone away. It was a skill that had served her well as an investigator, especially as so few people knew she had it. It suddenly dawned on her that, with Bat and Jody gone, no one knew she had the ability.

“Bowstring?” he asked with a smile. “What is that? French?”

“Oui,” Marianne responded.

“And this is Lance Corporal Hector Ives, who is also fluent in Portugese,” Admiral Pike said as she introduced a strikingly handsome young man with somewhat dark skin and a shaved head. He shook Marianne’s hand and flashed a winning smile but Marianne got the impression it was more of just his natural personality than any attempt to win her.

“Ives?” she asked.

“Grandfather was Scottish,” he replied. “Married a woman from Portugal and moved to South Carolina,” he told her with just a hint of a southern accent.

Rear Admiral Pike said, “Now, if you’ll be seated, we’ll brief you on the mission. Please be aware that everything you hear in this meeting is top secret.” She added sardonically, “And some if it is going to sound insane.”

She brought up the map of South America Sean had created and said, “You’re going here. It’s a very remote area with very little population, mostly involved in mining or woodcutting. You’re going to be assisting Bowstring in the investigation of this mound here, which we have reason to believe may be tied to the nuclear launches that started the recent conflict.”

“Pardon me, ma’am,” interrupted Fitz, “Is it related to theEMPas well?”

“That remains to be seen, Fitz. That’s one of the things we hope you will find out.”

She then went into a semi-technical description of what the Kerrigans had revealed and the basic principles of extra-dimensional integration. As Pike described Edie and what it did, Marianne couldn’t help but cast sideways glances at her new compatriots. She stifled a chuckle as she saw that all three of them wore expressions mixed of equal parts awe and fear that their commanding officer had slipped a gear. She wondered how they would react if they were told the Edie units could also move through time. When Pike had finished her part, she offered, “Bowstring?”

While Marianne knew far more about Edie than the admiral, it had been decided that news of such a fantastic nature could be more easily swallowed if coming from a fleet-level officer. Now, she doubted whether it had really helped, if the expressions on their faces were any indication. As everyone looked to her, Marianne began, “As Admiral Pike has said, you may call me Bowstring. So far, our satellite recon of the area has shown no human presence. Whether that is because there is none or because the humans are underground we don’t know, yet. These are some of the questions we are going to ask—and hopefully answer. It is our goal to do this as stealthily as possible, which is part of why you three were chosen. However,” Marianne said uncomfortably, “If there are people there and they are the ones who instigated a global nuclear war … well, I wanted people who would not be averse to fighting.”

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Fitz interrupted again, “But what is the chain of command on this mission?”

“Bowstring is the lead,” Pike replied without hesitation.

“CIA?” Ives asked casually.

“No,” Marianne replied, not sure what explanation to give.

Admiral Pike answered, “Let’s just say that Bowstring here is on special assignment.”

“Aye-aye,” said all three Marines, though not exactly in unison.

“Marines, let me say one more thing,” the Admiral began. “I want to remind you that this mission and everything you have heard in this room are top secret. Should you return, any mention of anything you have heard today to anyone other than one of the five of us in the room right now will be grounds for summary court martial and possibly execution. Do you understand?”

All three looked surprised, but each nodded and replied, “Yes ma’am,” in turn as the admiral caught their eyes.

“What you see on this excursion and what you experience, those things, too, must be guarded with the utmost secrecy. For reasons that I cannot get into, you will be debriefed verbally by me after the mission and no record of it will ever—and I do mean ever—be written down. Is that understood?”

“Yes ma’am,” they all agreed again.

“Then may you be granted godspeed and may you all return safely.”

All three had been told what gear to bring when summoned, which had set in the corner during the briefing. At that point, the admiral told them to use the head attached to the briefing room if they needed—each availed themselves of the opportunity—and then were bidden to gear up. As they did so, it was Hollis who asked, “How will we be inserted, Admiral? Osprey?”

“Edie,” Admiral Pike replied, a barely-disguised wink shot Marianne’s way.

The three Marines looked up in surprise, but none of them said anything. As they finished with their gear and she slung her bow over her shoulder, Marianne told them, “We’re going to be ‘landing’ about a quarter mile from the mound in a little clearing just to the north. We’ll do some recon on foot from there. Oh, and let me warn you: your first zap—as we call it—can be a bit disorienting. You won’t feel a thing, but one moment you’ll see this room and the next you’ll see the Amazon basin and there will be nothing in between. Like changing the channel on a TV.”

“Seriously?” Ives asked.

Marianne nodded, then asked, “Everyone ready?” She took Edie in her left hand, held out her right and said, “Put an ungloved hand in. We’ve got to be touching skin.”

“You’re kidding,” Fitz responded, holding her hand back, having been in the process of taking the glove off as it dawned on her what had been stated.

“Oddly, no,” Marianne told her. When all the hands were in, she looked to the admiral and said, “I guess we’ll see you in a few, Admiral. I’ll ping you as soon as we’re there.”

“Go with God,” Admiral Pike told them with a nod.

And suddenly the four of them were standing in a small clearing in the Amazon jungle. To Marianne, it was nothing, but the others gasped words of astonishment that were better left unprinted. Marianne knelt down, motioned for them to do the same, then whispered, “Here’s where the stealth comes in. Everybody got their breath?” When the Marines nodded, Marianne pointed and said, “The mound’s over that way. Watch for people and let’s see if we can find a way inside.”

“Why not just zap in?” Ives asked.

“We probably will,” Marianne told him. “But I’d like to have as much information as we can before we do that.”

“Understood,” said three voices, or variations of the word.

The jungle was light and airy, not like Marianne had pictured it in her mind (owing mostly to movies), though there were as many bugs as she had imagined. All four of them were heavily clothed and had applied bug repellent to their exposed flesh, but there were still plenty of bugs around, many who didn’t seem to have received the memo about being repelled by that concoction.

They reached a small rise and crept quietly to its crest before peeking over. What they saw was a tree-covered mound that didn’t look out of the ordinary at first glance. As they all studied the terrain, Fitz and Ives with no-glare binoculars that—in theory—wouldn’t reflect light on anyone who might happen to look their way—they could see signs that the ground had been pushed up: a revealed root here, a fresh-looking crack in the ground there. Atop the hill, the cracking in the ground was more pronounced.

“Still,” Marianne whispered, “If I didn’t know what to look for I could have walked right past this and, if anything, just thought it was a natural occurrence.” The Marines nodded in agreement. “Recommendations?”

Fitz pointed, “Over there, I’d say about two klicks from our positions, there’s a rise similar to this one. I say we split into pairs and rendezvous over there in about—how long do you think it would take us, Gunny?” she asked Hollis.

“Hard to say. Flat territory, we could be there in fifteen minutes. But we want to take some time, look things over, and this canopy could be hiding ravines and who knows what else.”

“Say two hours?” Fitz asked.

Marianne nodded and replied, “Sounds good. No communication unless we haven’t heard anything in two and a half or if there’s an emergency.” She looked at the Marines and asked, “That work for you?” She knew the wisdom about leaders making decisions and not seeking the approval of underlings, but Marianne knew she was the outsider in this group and—in their minds, anyway—not a military person, anyway. Would they believe her if she told them that, at the age of eighteen, she had led a military force of over ten thousand people? She doubted it and the irony of the thought made her smile.

They all nodded, so Marianne said, “Fitz, you know everyone’s capabilities better than I do, so how do you suggest we pair up?”

“You and Gunny, me and Ives?” Fitz replied, shrugging to indicate that it didn’t really matter.

“Sounds good. See you in two,” she whispered. Even having been around military people before, she was amazed at how quickly and quietly Fitz and Ives disappeared into the underbrush.

As she and Hollis set out, he asked, “Have you ever been in the military, Bowstring?”

She hesitated, then replied, “Yes. But, like so much lately, I can’t talk about it.”

Are you really any good with that bow?”

Marianne hesitated again, then replied, “Yes.”

Sheriff Avilla pounded on the door of the large house that still stood, remarkably close to where the airliner had gone down. “Go away!” came a gruff reply from inside.

“This is Sheriff Avilla,” she called from the front step. “I need to talk to Mister Kiko Abrams.”

There was no sound for a moment, and then the sound of a chain being removed and a bolt thrown. The front door swung open and a shotgun blast caught Julie Avilla full in the chest, knocking her back and off the porch. A second shot was fired in the direction of Deputy Harold Grimes, catching him mostly on the arm. As he screamed and fell away, Deputy Terry Killian used his service piece to fire several shots through the door.

From inside the house, screams could be heard. Killian rushed to drag Sheriff Avilla out of the way, even while calling on his mic, “Officers down at 323 Reynosa. Repeat: officers down at 323 Reynosa. Shots fired.”

He was about to repeat his call again when the muzzle of a gun could be seen coming from the shadow of the doorway. Deputy Killian lifted his service piece and fired twice, gratified to see the gun—a rifle—dropped to the tile floor of the house’s entry way. And then all went black as something hit him on the back of the head.

“What happened?” Judge Hanson asked as he struggled through the crowd to get to Dr. Whitcomb’s side.

Dr. Whitcomb, however, was busy and soon disappeared into the O.R. Judge Hanson looked like he was about to follow the doctor into surgery, but saw a deputy—Killian, he thought the man’s name was—sitting to the side and holding a bloody towel to his forehead. He lunged at the deputy and demanded, “What happened?”

“We went to serve that warrant on Kiko Abrams you gave us,” the deputy grumbled in reply.

“And then?” Hanson wanted to know.

“Well, they responded by shooting Sheriff Avilla and deputy Grimes. Me, I got away with just a knock to the head.”

Suddenly, Hanson was being slammed against the wall by Oscar Melendez, late of the Arizona Highway Patrol and now working for the Flagstaff Police Department. “You son of a b—h! You issue a warrant and then call the perps to let them know cops are coming!”

“I didn’t—“ Hanson tried to object, only to receive a punch in the belly from Melendez that doubled the judge up in pain.

It was Deputy Killian who pulled Melendez off the judge, saying, “What are you talking about, Oscar?”

“Someone had to have tipped off Abrams and his crew. Why else would they have been prepared like that?”

“Because they were thugs and knew we were getting close to them for hanging the Talifero brothers,” Killian replied.

“Or maybe he told them,” Officer Melendez retorted, lunging for the judge.

Hanson backed up a step, then said, “Please, tell me what happened!”

Melendez, still being restrained by an aching Terry Killian, said, “I was a block away when I heard the call, so I came running. I see Jimmy Abrams, Kiko’s boy, club Deputy Killian in the back with a baseball bat—“

“I wondered why I hurt there, too,” Killian injected, trying to add a bit of levity in an attempt to defuse the situation.

“I yelled out, ‘Jimmy! Drop the bat!’ He does, then he lunges for a rifle that’s on the stoop. I told him to drop that, too, but he starts to bring it up. That’s when I shot him. He crumpled and I ran up to the porch to find Sheriff Avilla bleeding from buckshot to the neck and face and Deputy Grimes is quickly going into shock. Gloria Dios we got that one ambulance running or they might have both bled out.” He spat at the judge, “Even if no one tipped them off, you don’t go after a man like Kiko Abrams with just three officers. You call us all in!”

“I wrote the search warrant but I trusted in the Sheriff to know how many people to take,” Judge Hanson defended.

Melendez swore lowly as he shrugged out of Killian’s hold. “You better sit back down, man,” he told the deputy.

“Who was inside the house?”

“I looked and I found Kiko and his boy, Danny, both shot and dead in the front foyer. Looked to me like it had been Danny that fired off the shotgun, then Kiko came up with the rifle.” Changing his tone of belligerence, he added, “You oughta give this deputy a medal, Judge. He did in one afternoon what your courts haven’t been able to do in twenty years.”

They were slumped against the wall when Dr. Whitcomb came out more than an hour later and told them, “Sheriff Avilla should make it. Her vest took most of the blast, but there was on pellet that came this close,” he held his thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart, “From severing her jugular. Still, it’s going to be a few days before she can return to duty, maybe a couple weeks.”

“And Grimes?” Killian asked anxiously.

“He may lose the arm. Doctors Stanislauv and Andrews are working with him and, if we’re lucky, we can keep him alive long enough for the arm to heal—one way or another.”

Killian crossed himself at the news and Melendez muttered a brief prayer. Killian asked, “When can we see them?”

“I can take you back there now, but just for a couple minutes,” Caleb replied. “Both are out of it right now, but I’m a firm believer that patients can hear people who care even when they’re out.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Officer Melendez said as they rose and followed him into post-op.

Caleb looked over his shoulder to see Hanson still slumped against the wall, a vacant expression on his face.

“Anything?” Marianne asked, though she had an idea she knew what the answer was going to be.

“Nothing. Nobody, no door, nothing,” Fitz replied. “I take it, it was the same for you.”

Marianne nodded, as did the Gunny.

Ives injected, “We even used the infra-red scanner. Thought there might be an air shaft letting off vapors or something, but we didn’t see anything.”

“So,” Fitz asked, “We zap in?”

Marianne nodded, but pulled off her backpack so she could get into it and pulled out a small, remote-controlled car with a video camera attached. “Play time?” the Gunny asked.

Marianne shot him a dirty look, then smiled and said, “Friend of mine came up with this.” She loaded one of her sensors into the little car and explained, “We can send this car in first. Remote control’s good up to half a mile. We let this little thing look around for us, first.”

She tapped some buttons on Edie, and the little car disappeared. Handing a Screen® to Fitz and a remote control to the Gunny, she said, “This should give us an idea what we’re going in to. The car even has little headlights, but I can’t guarantee how effective they are.”

“Need a night vision camera on that car,” Ives suggested.

“Version 2.0,” Marianne quipped as they all watched the Screen®. They watched as the picture came up to show what looked like the interior of a naval ship with the lights on low. As Gunny moved the car around, they were able to see more of the room the car had landed in but, as the room had a hatch for a doorway, the little car couldn’t go out into the hallway. Marianne mumbled, “OK, so version 3.0 will be a camera attached to one of those little helicopters.”

She checked the reading from the sensor in the car on her Kerrigan and said, “Well, looks like we can go at least as far as that room. Sensor says there’s air. Everybody game?”

“Beats standing out here,” the Gunny pronounced, the other two Marines nodding.

“OK,” Marianne said, “Hands in.” A moment later, they were in what looked like a billeting room of a metal, naval ship.

Gunny stepped over to the door and peeked out into the hallway, then announced, “All clear.”

“Wait,” Fitz commanded. “Listen. Anybody hear anything?”

They all stopped what they were doing, but could hear only a low rumble—as machinery—from somewhere far off. “Something’s working down here,” Ives commented.

Fitz replied, “Sounds like a generator. Maybe it’s running the lights. There’s air in here, too. But what I’m not hearing are any footsteps.”

“Either it’s empty,” Gunny offered, “Or they know we’re here and they’re running silent.” Everyone nodded in agreement.

Marianne picked up the little car, set it in her backpack, and said, “Well, let’s find out.”

They walked carefully down the hallway until they came to a junction. As the Gunny poked his head around the corner and pronounced the way clear, Ives was looking at lettering on the bulkhead and saying, “I don’t recognize this language. I don’t even recognize the alphabet.”

Marianne glanced at his reference point and almost told him what it said, before deciding to keep her mouth shut. She wasn’t sure why she was keeping it a secret that she could read any language she needed to, but as one accustomed to covers she hated to blow hers over a sign that said, “C Deck. Billeting.” She merely shrugged.

They came, eventually, to a flight of stairs—like U.S. Navy stairs, they were closely akin to a ladder—and ascended. On the next level, B Deck, Marianne found signs for the infirmary, the galley, the laundry, and various other, common, rooms. All showed signs of recent use, but no sign of current occupation. As they came to another set of stairs, she stopped them and asked, “At a guess, how old would any of you say this ship is? I’m no expert, but it doesn’t look brand new to me. It’s also doesn’t look real old to me.”

“Equipment’s fairly current,” the Gunny answered. “Some of it’s unfamiliar to me, though.”

Fitz nodded and agreed, “I’m thinking it’s about a … twenty year old ship. Just a feel I get. I can tell some places have been sanded and repainted—like after years of salt water corrosion.”

Ives merely shrugged and replied, “I’ll defer to them.”

Marianne nodded and started up the stairs. Peeking over the top, she saw no sign of anyone but she did see a sign indicating the way to the bridge. Instructing Fitz and Ives to explore this deck then catch up with them, she motioned for the Gunny to follow her. They made their way to the bridge and both uttered words of amazement.

The bridge looked like the working bridge of a destroyer, except that the windows looked out on solid rock. The lights from the consoles were still working, and dials were still lit up. And a man in an unidentified uniform sat in a chair, slumped over a console. “Fitz,” Marianne said into her communicator, “You and Ives go ahead and come up topside to see this. Just follow the arrows on the walls.”

Soon, Fitz and Ives were stepping onto the bridge with exclamations similar to those uttered earlier. Walking over to where Gunny and Marianne were looking at the slumped figure, Fitz asked, “Who’s this gentleman?” He had a dark complexion, much like the Gunny’s, and he was young and fit—or had been in life.

Ives, looking around, said, “We saw launch tubes below decks, Bowstring. Like the kind you’d use to launch ICBMs.”

Marianne looked at the controls and said, “So, this ship zaps to the Pacific, starts a world war, then zaps here. Maybe their system is different from ours and someone had to remain behind to send the others off and this guy drew the short straw.”

“So he takes cyanide or something?” Fitz asked.

“Something,” Marianne shrugged. She sniffed, then, and asked, “But why doesn’t he smell?”

She was on the far side of the bridge, walking around and studying some schematics that appeared to be of an Edie-like device which were on a screen, and mumbling, “If this guy’s been dead for close to three weeks, shouldn’t this whole room smell to high heaven?” A phrase in the schematics registered on Marianne and she started to snap her fingers in recognition.

“Maybe he hasn’t been dead that long,” Ives commented. He reached over to feel of the man’s skin and said, “Guys, he’s still warm!”

Fitz barely had time to say, “Don’t move him!” before the console the man had been slumped against exploded.

Marianne felt herself slammed against the wall. A moment later, she was trying to raise herself up to find that her left arm was broken, and maybe her left leg as well. She raised her head and could see that Ives was dead. At least, his head was, as it was no longer attached to the rest of him. She could make out the remains of both the Gunny and Fitz. And then she heard a low rumble. It took her brain a moment to figure out what she was hearing.

“The ship is being scuttled,” she mumbled.

With her right hand, she pulled out Edie. Struggling out of her backpack, quiver and bow she pressed the sequence for a pre-programmed trip. She disappeared just before the ship exploded in a fiery, underground inferno.

Three years before the conflagration in the Amazon, almost two years and eleven months before the EMP, a young woman with broken bones, torn clothing and burns was found outside the emergency room of the Rapid City Regional Hospital on a cool September morning. Finding no ID on her—just her clothes and a watch—they began treating her immediately under the name Jane Doe.

Posted on

Ghosts of Families Past

a Bat & Jody novel

Bat Garrett happens to be on hand when the Native Sun Trading Post blows up. Two bodies are found in the rubble, presumed to be the owners of the trading post. But Jody has seen them before. Jody knows that, if there’s anyone in the world with motive to want the two shop-owners dead … it’s her.

Years before, Jody was kidnapped and brainwashed to think she was the child of Robert and Helen Alexander. When Bat discovered her and rescued her, the Alexanders disappeared. Most assumed them dead, but Jody was never sure. Now, to find out that they had been living near her has Jody rattled. She, with Bat’s help, has to find out just why the Alexanders have stayed so close to the one person who had the most reason to hate them.

Available now on Kindle and in paperback!

…

Sample Chapter

I have missing time of my own, but doesn’t everyone? The afternoon that was so boring it might as well have never happened. The time you had the flu that lasted a week and all you can remember of it is one gross blur spent in the bathroom. Some people have holes in their memory thanks to alcohol or drugs. That wasn’t my problem.

I had a whole year missing from my life—a little more in fact. And I mean gone! One moment I was one place and the next I was somewhere else and I haven’t the foggiest what went on in between. If not for people around me telling me that a year disappeared in that short time, I never would have known—or cared.

Bat can’t imagine that I don’t care now, but I swear I don’t. I remember one time when I had to have surgery and they put me under for it. I remember the anesthesiologist saying, “Countdown from one hundred” and I got to ninety-seven. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in another room with my leg all bandaged up. The big difference was that no one around me ever asked, “But don’t you worry about the missing hour?!?!” the way they ask, “Don’t you worry about the missing year?!?!”

Maybe, somewhere, deep down inside, what I feel almost rises to the level of curiosity. But seriously, as soon as I “woke up” I saw a doctor and they confirmed for me that I had not been violated, all my (healed) broken bones had been broken before my missing year and I carried no scars. Even visits to psychiatrists—complete with hypnosis—told me that I had no memories or anything of that missing year. At some point, I don’t remember the exact day, it just seemed like it was better for my future sanity to just go on with my life.

So I got married to the man I loved, we settled into married life, and then we decided to uproot to a whole new state and start a family. To be honest, the prospect of being a mother was far more alarming and intriguing to me than some blank spot in my memory. Doing my best to raise the child in a Christian home, to “give it a hope and a future” seemed way more important than obsessing about the unknowable.

As for the known present, I was in the process of cleaning up the apartment because our church was having a “Missions Weekend” and I had volunteered Bat and I to take in a couple for the weekend who were newly arrived to work at the nearby Hopi and Navajo tribal lands. We didn’t have a large place, but it was a two-bedroom apartment and we hadn’t had anyone use the guest bedroom since we had moved in. Part of the reason I had volunteered for this particular couple was that the husband was a graduate of the same college all of Bat’s siblings had gone to. Bat didn’t recognize the man’s name, but we figured he would probably remember Bat’s sisters or brother or maybe have some other names in common. Not to mention that the church Bat and I had attended while living in Dallas had been on the college campus—maybe even while this couple had been there as students. I thought it might be somewhat cramped quarters to have four adults in that apartment for a weekend, but the up side to the small quarters was that it didn’t take me long to clean.

There were times when I was envious of my sister Carley and her enormous house, but all I had to do was start cleaning and I was quickly reminded that I didn’t want a house I couldn’t clean from top to bottom in less than half an hour. If Bat or I ever made big money at anything, I frequently told people, we were going to give most of it away and spend the rest on vacations. We would not, I would say with emphasis, spend it on a spacious abode!

I was just finishing up the restroom when the phone rang. Waddling as quickly down the hall as my expanding girth would allow and grumbling that I hadn’t brought the phone to the restroom with me, I got there just as the third ring was finishing and answered breathlessly, “Hello?”

“This is Sonya Brockton,” came a voice with a lovely British accent. “Is this Jody Garrett?”

“Yes,” I replied, somewhat uncertainly as I hadn’t been expecting an accent even though the name should have registered on me.

“I understand my husband and I are staying with you this weekend,” she told me politely, still with that incredible voice.

“You are?” I asked, then kicked myself as I remembered and said, “Oh! Sonya Brockton? Yes. Yes you are staying with me. With my husband and I.”

“We are about fifteen minutes out of Flagstaff and I was wondering if you could give me directions to your place?” the voice asked.

“Um, yes. Yes, of course,” I replied, finally getting my brain around an idea that shouldn’t have been that hard to grasp. I gave her directions, then told her I would see her in a few minutes. After hanging up, I called Bat on his cell phone and told him our guests would be arriving soon. He told me he was back at the station and putting up mail for the next day, but that it would probably still be an hour before he got home.

I quickly told him I understood, and I did. The issue—or near-issue in question—was one of his coworkers who seemed to find a reason four days out of five to “slip off early”. There was always a sick kid at home, a Little League game that needed to be coached, or something. According to Bat, the scuttlebutt around the station was that a] the guy was close to getting canned and b] everyone else was making sure to work a few minutes extra every day so as not to appear to be one with the slacker.

A few minutes later, I heard a car pulling up outside and a knock at the door. Taking one more look around the apartment—and realizing my homework was still on the coffee table (how had I missed that?!?!)—I opened the door to a smiling young couple. Somehow, I had had it in my mind that they were a middle-aged couple, but these two looked to be three or four years younger than Bat and I.

The man extended his hand and said, “My name’s Andy Brockton. You must be Jody Garrett.” I shook his hand and assured him I was. He was a couple or three inches shorter than Bat’s six-one, with dark curly hair and a fairly dark complexion. Somewhat stocky of build, but not overweight, he looked like a football player. I prided myself inwardly on the sports reference, thinking Bat would be proud of me.

“I hope we’re not too early,” he apologized. “It didn’t take as long as we were expecting to get here.

“It’s just fine,” I told him. “Won’t you come in?”

Taking his wife’s hand, he introduced, “This is my wife, Sonya. You spoke on the phone.”

I hugged her and she returned the hug as Andy said, “You two look like you ought to be sisters.”

He was being generous and I think he only said that because of our hair color. But where mine was more of an auburn, Sonya’s was a deeper red. A beautiful red. And she had this fine, creamy complexion and tall, lithe build (she was almost as tall as he was even in flat shoes) that it was hard not to be envious of. As for clothes, they were both dressed in blue jeans and T’s, with tennis shoes on their feet, but Sonya looked like one of those women who would be right at home in a ball gown and a tiara. She wore no makeup that I could discern … and needed none!

“Thank you for having us,” Sonya said politely as we let go of the hug.

“You’re welcome. And, I know you probably hear this all the time, but I just love your accent!”

“Thank you. I don’t really think about it,” she said with an airy chuckle. “It’s just the way I talk.” She looked at me and asked, somewhat timidly, “Would it be impolite of me to ask how far along you are?”

“About to start my eight month,” I replied, turning sideways and smoothing my shirt so she could get the full view of my expanding belly. (Which, on some days, felt as if it were expanding right before my eyes!) “Do you have children?”

“Not yet,” she replied, with a wink toward her husband.

“I can’t help but ask what that look meant,” I commented.

Sonya blushed and Andy replied, “We’re trying,” and then blushed himself. I couldn’t help but smile, for we (Bat especially!) had often been fumble-mouthed about the same admission. Personally, I thought it was silly that a married couple would be embarrassed to admit they were having sex … but I still blushed.

I invited the couple to sit down and they joined me in the living room which, for an apartment, was pretty good sized. “So,” I opened the ball, “Where are you two from?”

“I’m from Oklahoma,” he replied.

“London,” she told me.

Most of us find it rather silly to meet someone for the first time and then have them tell us, “You remind me of … “ yet we still say things like that to other people. For myself, I tried to apologize first as I said, “Sonya, you just remind me of … someone. I know that’s silly. I’m sure we’ve never met before. You just remind me of someone, but I can’t think of who.”

Sonya shrugged and, I thought, made a conscious effort not to look over at her husband right then. I was thinking, at the time, that she probably had been told before that she looked like someone famous and it was either a running joke or a running point of exasperation among the two of them. For myself, I had been known to grow tired of short jokes (though I had a few witty rejoinders filed away and ready for use).

“How did you meet?” I asked, then quipped, “Because if I’m not mistaken, the halfway point between London and Oklahoma would be somewhere in the Atlantic.”

They chuckled and it was Sonya who answered, “I was visiting my cousin, who just happened to set me up with her best friend.”

“Oh really? She didn’t want you for herself?” I chided Andy.

He smiled, might have blushed a little, then replied, “Lynette and I had tried dating a couple times but … “ he shook his head and laughed, “We were such good friends, it was kind of like trying to go out with a sister.”

We visited on, then, and I learned that Sonya came from a family with eight children, Andy had only the one brother, and I told her about my sister and Bat’s family of five children. I was eager to hear about their ministry but also knew Bat would want to hear those details as well and didn’t want to jump the gun on him.

We were just about to the subject of favorite family pets when the front door opened, revealing my wonderful hubby in his Post Office uniform. “Who’s car—oh! You’re here,” he said with a smile. There was a brief round of handshakes, then he said, “I hate to be picky, but you’re going to need to move your car. The slots are assigned and, well, you’re in the slot for the guy next door.”

When he had pointed out to Andy where he could park, Bat asked, “Would you mind if I darted away and took a quick shower? I have spent this wonderful Arizona day in a vehicle with no air conditioning and I’m afraid I’m probably a little ripe.” We all agreed that that was acceptable, especially me, who had actually hugged and kissed him.

Bat slipped away and soon I could hear the water running. In relatively short order, he was in the midst of us, washed and dried and wearing an Astros T-shirt and a pair of shorts and holding a cold drink. He smiled widely and, making that motion as if snapping his fingers but producing no noise, suddenly asked, “I have to ask, Sonya, but how does one go from winning an Oscar to working as a missionary on an Indian reservation?”

“What?” I asked before I could fully engage my brain. Then, still disbelieving, I asked, “You—is that where I’ve seen you? On the movie screen?”

Sonya blushed even more than earlier, then replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Wait!” I demanded. “First off, no one over ten years old is allowed to call me ma’am. It’s Jody. But second, is he right?”

It was Bat who answered, though in a somewhat questioning way, “You’re Sonya Kiel, right? ‘Across the Andes, “Napoleon’, ‘American West.’”

“Actually, I’m Sonya Brockton,” she corrected. “But, yes, my maiden name was Kiel and I did act in those movies.” She said it like someone who was embarrassed by the fact, maybe even ashamed.

“Pardon me, but that still sounds like a really interesting story!” Bat told her in his most encouraging voice.

She grimaced slightly, which led Andy to tell us, “It really is, but, well, I don’t necessarily mean to speak for my wife, but she–”

“No, let me, Andy. He’s always trying to protect me. I just … I don’t want what I used to be to overshadow what I am now. It’s just so easy—not only for me but for the people listening—to start telling tales of making movies and red carpets that, um, a couple things start to happen. I kind of get a big head and we get completely sidetracked.”

“She’s being modest,” Andy injected. “Sonya is one of the most humble people I have ever met, but once she tells one story about the movies, soon people want more and pretty soon—“

“It takes the focus off my—our ministry.” She smiled apologetically and added, “In a setting like this, I’ll tell you anything you want to know. My life is an open book. But at the Mission’s Fair tomorrow and Sunday, I really want to put all the focus on what we’re trying to do on the Big Rez.”

She laughed then, a warm, friendly laugh that was somehow also in her accent, and told us, “I went through a period—more than a year, actually—where I wouldn’t go to the movies. And then I wouldn’t watch the telly, even the news. I told myself it was because I was like an alcoholic and didn’t want to get sucked back into the acting thing but, well … maybe that’s how it was when it started. But then, I moved from avoidance to being rather a pain about it to everyone around me—especially Andy.”

“What changed?” Bat asked with interest.

“Nothing big. Andy liked watching his sports, for one thing, and I saw no reason he should be deprived of that. But part of it was when we started doing ministry. We would be over at someone’s house and they would have the telly on. I realized I was starting to be ridiculous about it.” She demonstrated as she said, “Turning my chair so my back was to the set even if it were off. Talking louder in restaurants to drown out the telly in the room. I had to come to terms with the idea—fact, really—that acting is not, in and of itself, evil, nor are the mediums. But I am extremely … protective of what I will allow in my mind. I realized I can debate ideas, and sometimes enjoy picking apart those that are contrary to my faith, but I have a very low tolerance for foul language or gore.”

Bat smiled and said, “You realize turning off the TV is considered a cardinal sin in some households anymore, right?”

“I notice yours isn’t on,” came Sonya’s rejoinder.

“About that,” Bat said uncomfortably. “Would it be rude of me to slip into the bedroom just to watch the opening of the local news?. There was a fire—I actually reported it—a couple days ago and, well, I’m curious if they’re saying anything about it.”

“Please,” Sonya said, gesturing at the TV, “It wouldn’t be my place to tell you not to.”

“But I don’t even want to interrupt the conversation,” Bat told her deferentially.

“Mister Garrett—“

“Bat. Like those things in caves.”

“Bat,” she corrected with a smile, “You’ve got me curious now. Whether they show the story on the news or not, I’d like to know how you came to report a fire. You didn’t start it, did you?” she asked with mock suspicion.

“Go camping with me sometime and you’ll see that I have never been accused of being a fire starter,” he told her. Then, taking up the remote, made certain, “You’re sure?”

She gestured toward the TV, so Bat turned it on. Fortuitously, the newsreader was just saying, “Out of Flagstaff this evening we have the following report on the fire that claimed two lives earlier this week. Let’s go to Courtney Lyons, live in our newsroom.”

A young woman who looked to me like she couldn’t be more than a year out of high school looked nervously into the camera and said in a flat voice, “Thanks Ralph. The Flagstaff Police have released these pictures—taken from the security camera at a Flagstaff convenience store—of the two people they believe were killed in the inferno.” (She pronounced that final word as if sounding it out off a teleprompter.)

“Are you OK?” Bat asked me.

“What? Why do you ask?” I wondered, my mind having gone blank for a moment.

“You gasped when you saw the picture of the Jamesons,” he told me.

“I did?” A moment later, I patted my tummy and said, “Junior kicked just then. I think he’s going to have your feet.”

Bat nodded with a smile, then turned his attention back to the TV screen.

You know how in old cartoons they would show someone having an idea by having a light bulb appear over the character’s head? I finally knew what that felt like.

Except that a one-hundred thousand watt halogen spotlight had exploded in my brain.

I think I was coherent for the rest of the conversation and evening with the Brocktons—can remember some of the details even as they told more of how they met and just what their ministry consisted of—but I can’t be sure. Back in college, I was a cheerleader and—other than some problems with my elbows, which were congenital—I came through it all pretty well. While other cheerleaders occasionally broke a bone, the worst I ever got was a few sprains.

Except for one time, when the people who were supposed to catch me were a little out of line and I somehow managed to knock the back of my head against another girl’s collarbone. She had an enormous bruise for about a week and I had a lump, but we both shook it off and eschewed any medical attention.

The way I felt the rest of the day, I’m pretty sure I had a concussion, though I never mentioned it to anyone. (Hey! My pride is just as stupid as anyone else’s!) While no one had hit me during that evening with the Brocktons, looking back, it was a lot like I had a concussion. I’ll blame my not telling anyone on the fact that, when you’re suffering the effects, you don’t always know you’re suffering the effects.

I made up excuses, blaming it on both the baby and some sort of shake-up at the idea of two people dying in a fire, and the Brocktons might have believed me, but I doubt that Bat did. He knew I was hiding something, but he also knew me and loved me enough not to press it, assuming I would tell him what was going on when the time came. All he knew was that my mind was somewhere far away.

That’s how it felt from the inside, anyway. As I did things like make sandwiches—side by side with Sonya, who had offered to help—and answered questions and asked some of my own, I was just an automaton. My mind was several hundred miles away. I knew where it was, but tried my best to ignore it, to shove it aside, to do anything I could to keep from thinking the thoughts my mind wanted to focus on.

Sonya was a pretty woman and incredibly well-balanced. After leaving an unbelievably promising acting career, she had gone to Bible college in Dallas (at the same college Bat’s brother and sisters had attended), majored in Missions, married Andy, and even when their original plan for missions had fallen through, had stayed with it until they believed God had directed them to Arizona.

Under it all, though, I got the impression that Sonya was really a very shy person who would like nothing more than a life that never focused on her. For one thing, in all of this, the “star” of the story was her husband. She gave him the credit for leading her to Christ and leading their marriage and ministry and—again, this is my impression—she didn’t resent that at all. She seemed grateful to … not be in his shadow, but to have found a partner.

I had always thought Bat and I had the best marriage I knew of, but an evening spent with Sonya and Andy Brockton made me think we might only be in second place. Or, maybe I just told myself that to keep from thinking about the light that had exploded in my head and was still trying to overwhelm me.

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

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

Last at Bat

a Bat Garrett story

A ghost. Bat has to be seeing a ghost. While recuperating in Houston he stumbles across a shopgirl who looks and sounds just like someone he lost a year before. As his friends think he’s going crazy, and even he’s starting to wonder if he watched “Vertigo” one too many times, he tries to piece together the background of the shopgirl. The investigation takes Bat from Houston and Dallas, to Arkansas and Durango (where he meets a young Garison Fitch) and closer to the conclusion that he may not have been the only one set-up by the Home Agency.

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.”

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

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.