Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 109

Amazon’s new policy

Writers who publish their digital books on Amazon’s platform have long had to make a choice on whether or not to enroll in Kindle Select. If the author chooses to enroll, the book becomes available for borrowing by Kindle customers who are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited (KU) or Kindle Prime, which accesses the Kindle Online Lending Library (KOLL). KU customers paid about $10 a month for unlimited borrowing. Amazon Prime members pay less and are limited to one borrow per month, plus other benefits like free shipping on other items. It’s a very similar arrangement to Netflix DVD rentals with its different levels. Up until now, authors whose books were enrolled were paid on a per borrow basis. The concept is simple enough. Amazon would add up all the money garnered from the KU and Prime customers, maybe add some extra money to sweeten the pot, take out their cost plus profit share and split up the remaining pool among all authors based on how many borrows of their books occurred. It is much like pari-mutuel betting. An author would not make as much money from a borrow as from a sale, but he or she may get more readers by making book(s) available on a lending basis. Whether or not to enroll was a strategic decision; some authors chose to use Kindle Select, while others did not.

As Kindle authors now know, the formula recently changed. This has caused great consternation and discussion among authors, especially self-published ones. Everything remains the same except for the method of dividing the final pool of money. Now it is divided on a per page read basis. Yes, that’s right, on the number of pages the borrowers actually read, not just downloaded. Kindle readers and apps have a way of determining whether the borrowers have actually read (or at least paged through) a book, and communicating that back to Amazon HQ.

There are many issues raised by this change. First off, what is a “page” in a Kindle book? Amazon has created something called a Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count or KENPC. I don’t know the details of the algorithm, but for authors of purely text-based books, like me, the formula seems generous. My books’ KENPC have all turned out to be more than twice what the print edition page count is. I upload my books as a Microsoft Word document and the size of a KENPC page is probably based pretty strictly on the number of words. Authors with heavily graphic books, like art books, children’s books, graphic novels, etc., on the other hand, typically upload their books as pdf format. They have found that one print page equals one KENPC page. Other authors whose print books use small page size or a larger font or wider margins than my books have their normalized page counts somewhere in between. So under the old formula, a children’s book author with a 20-page (print) book containing graphics on every page who had one borrow would make exactly what I make from one borrow of my 423-page novel Cached Out. That novel now has a KENPC of over 800 pages, so assuming all the pages are read of both books, now I would get 40 times as much for a single borrow. Then again, the child may download and read 40 such picture books a month, while my novel may take a month to read. Fair or unfair? That depends on your view of the work involved in writing the two books, the value to the reader (e.g. hours of entertainment), the profit to Amazon, etc. Someone who spent three years traveling the world to produce a book of spectacular photographs isn’t going to look at it the same way I do.

What about those who download but don’t read? Remember, these books are free to the KU and Prime members. KU members especially can just download everything. I know for a fact that some people are “hoarders” whose only goal is to download as many as they can. They typically have tens of thousands of unread books in their collections. Even normal people might download a book, read the first five pages, and if it didn’t catch their interest, move on to the next one. Others might accidentally borrow one book thinking it’s something else, return it unread when they realize it, and download the one they actually wanted. Amazon had a policy to deal with all those people in the past. A book had to be read at least ten pages before it was counted as a borrow. Now, however, a page read is a page read. If someone opens up the book to verify it downloaded okay, but sees nothing beyond the title page, that is still one page read for an author. It also means that a book that holds the readers’ interest all the way to the end gets more compensation than one that readers don’t finish. This strikes me as fundamentally fair.

This new formula took effect July 1. The royalties for July won’t be paid until the end of August, so we really don’t know how this will play out until then. I suspect there will be a number of authors who leave the Select program. Amazon has a neat tool that shows an author on a day-by-day basis how many pages have been read. The first week I had a low of 1 page one day and a high of 709 pages on another. In fact, it updates hour by hour. There is a certain Pavlovian addictive quality to that tool. I find myself checking it several times a day and it is gratifying to see more pages have been read each time. Still, in terms of royalties, it is probably not going to make much difference. Borrowing has always been the smaller slice of the pie and will probably remain so. I’m pretty sure after the first couple of months, I won’t pay it any attention at all.

So will we find authors gaming the system? Will there be entrepreneurs who form KU downloading companies that for a fee will have its legion of employees download your books and page through every one? Time will tell. In the meantime, do me a favor will you? If you’re a KU member, please download all of my books and page through them to the end.

The Family Feud Effect (FFE)

I generally avoid opinion pieces in this blog, but I feel compelled to at least mention a phenomenon I’ve noticed for quite some time. Since 1976, in fact, when the TV show Family Feud debuted. I’m quite sure the general idea has existed for much longer, but it was with that show that I fully realized what was happening. In short, all public enterprise is dumbing down. This is most noticeable in forms of entertainment, but it exists in all forms of commerce and even government and educational institutions.

Why do I call it the Family Feud Effect? Because that show perfected the concept in a way that was sheer genius. Before that time, quiz shows were popular, but appealed mostly to people who were good at quizzes, i.e. smart people. Shows like The $64,000 Question, Concentration, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune all required considerable intelligence or a good memory, or both. The A students had an advantage over C students as contestants. Many viewers liked to compete with them in their own living rooms, and I’m pretty sure the demographic of fans was generally of higher IQ than the overall TV-watching public. Of course there were exceptions: The Price is Right, for example. I doubt being an A student had much advantage there. It appealed mainly to the acquisitive, although the prizes were a big appeal for everyone on all quiz shows, I’m sure.

But the creators of Family Feud found a way to make it a disadvantage to have a high IQ. In case you’re not familiar with how the show works, it’s quite simple. The producers first quiz the audience members about categories that have multiple valid answers, such as “Things that are delicious” or “Brad Pitt Movies”. The most popular answers are tabulated and stored. The contestants, with no prior knowledge of those questions, are then given those same categories on the air. They earn points by matching the answers previously given by the audience. The more popular the answer was with the audience, the more points that are awarded. Thus the people with the biggest advantage are those that are the most average. A low IQ is not an advantage either.

This was driven home to me when one of the categories was “People named Alfred.” I think Schweitzer and Neuman were among the top answers given by the audience. But I was stunned to discover that one of the top answers was Einstein. As I’m sure you, my intelligent reader, know, Einstein’s first name was Albert, not Alfred. That is why you would have done poorly on that question. Another example is when the moon was one of the answers for “Planets.” These wrong answers simply wouldn’t occur to the intelligent, well-educated individual. This what I mean by the FFE.

The reason this is so important is that in a wealthy society like ours, money is to be made and power is to be held by appealing to the most people, especially those who are most easily influenced. Advertisers want eyeballs. Politicians want voters. That pesky bell curve tells us that means go for the person of average intelligence or even a little below. When TV was relatively new and relatively expensive, the demographic was also relatively intelligent and well-educated. It made sense to create programming that appealed to that demographic. But when TV’s became present in 99% of American households, that ceased to be true. The same phenomenon occurred with books and newspapers years earlier, and is happening with the computer and smart phone now, among other forms of media. As an author and book reviewer I notice it  with sadness in best sellers of today. There’s probably nothing to be done about it, but if you see the acronym FFE in any future blog posts of mine, at least you know what I’m talking about.

GUT SHOT – Episode 4

Below you will find Episode 4 of Gut Shot, but it’s a bit different this time, so read this first. The episode is in audio form, not print. I did this partly for anti-piracy, but mainly because it seemed like it might be a fun thing to do here and there. Putting the whole book in audio form is too much work. So like it or not, you have to listen to me read my own book. I don’t like my voice, at least not for this purpose. I think it doesn’t fit Cliff’s voice as I imagine it in my own head.

Here’s the second thing: I will be taking down episode 1 before posting episode 5. This is the last time you can start reading the whole story on my blog from the beginning. If you’ve been meaning to start on it, do it now. From now on I plan to have only the four most recent episodes available here.  You should be able to get the first few pages online by reading the sample on Amazon.com, but eventually you’re going to hit a gap you can’t fill. Of course, you can always buy the book. Just click Cliff Knowles Mysteries above on the top menu to get to my Cliff Knowles Mysteries page with links to buy all the books, both paperback and e-book. By the way, in case you didn’t know it, three of the books, including Gut Shot, are available in other e-book formats besides Kindle. The link to Smashwords.com is there, too, which is where you can get it in epub (used by Kobo, Nook, Kindle, Adobe Digital Editions and many other readers), and LRF (used by Sony ) formats.

Now, here’s the mp3 file of Episode 4: Gut Shot – Episode 4

Anagrams on the News

SHARK’S BITES HARM US = SHRIEKS: “ARM HAS STUB!”

Sharks Attack Beachgoers

I’m Jaws sayin’

Cibola Burn by James A. Corey

Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cibola Burn is the fourth book in The Expanse, a science fiction saga that will be made into a television series on the SyFy channel starting December 2015. Set in the distant future, it features a universe where the solar system is still racially divided, but the races are no longer black, white, Asian, or Hispanic. They’re Earthers, Martians, and Belters, those inhabitants of the asteroid belt. I read and greatly enjoyed the first book in this series, Leviathan Wakes. There the archenemy of the entire solar system is a mysterious protomolecule (whatever that is). Here, in book four, humans have overcome the attack by the protomolecule and used the knowledge gained from that alien race to migrate through a gateway to distant planets, or at least one distant earth-like planet, New Terra.

The United Nations, the governing body of the solar system, has granted exploration rights to this new planet to a company called RCE. The problem for them is that Belters have already migrated there and set up a colony. They’ve also renamed the planet Ilus. When the first RCE ship arrives, it is met with a violent explosion. RCE sees the inhabitants as squatters and terrorists, while those inhabitants see themselves as pioneering settlers and rightful owners. I’d give you a little lesson on the principle of adverse possession here, but you aren’t interested.

The ensuing conflict between the settlers and RCE results in the UN sending James Holden and his intrepid crew of the Rocinante to mediate. It helped a lot to have read Leviathan Wakes. I pretty much remembered the characters. Of course our heroic leader and his crew are larger than life. Amos is the massive mechanic and all-around invincible lethal protector of the entire Roci crew, especially Holden. Alex is the best pilot in the universe. Belter Naomi, Holden’s main squeeze, is the best engineer in the universe. James Holden, of course, is the charismatic, brilliant, and hunky infallible leader.

The RCE expedition leader is killed early on and his place is taken by the security head Murtry, who is evil incarnate. Okay, so the characters are rather like comic book superheroes and villains without the superpowers. Batman, maybe. Still, the character development is surprisingly dominant in this space opera, especially among the peripheral characters such as certain settlers and RCE people. Action is kept to a reasonable level, enough to sustain the adrenaline flow, without deteriorating into an endless battle scene. The good guys are trying to keep peace, not fight, and everyone is fighting to stay alive on a planet that seems to be hostile to them all. The dialog is often witty or at least lighthearted. Expect a lot of sentences without the subject spoken. I’ve wondered why the entire Roci crew talks that way. “Pretty sure that’s not gonna happen.” “Not a problem.” “Couldn’t imagine why.” Got the drift?

The final action scene is about as hokey as it gets. I think it must have been written more as a storyboard for some awesome CGI special effects scene than as a denouement of the drama. Such attributes as scientific plausibility and logical consistency go by the wayside, but you rather expect that.

For a 581-page book, it’s a surprisingly fast read. In the end it kept me eager to get to the next chapter throughout, and that’s the best I can expect from any book. You should really start from the beginning of the series or wait for the SyFy series, although I am not optimistic about the treatment it will get there.





View all my reviews

GUT SHOT – Episode 3

Gut Shot – episode 3

© copyright Russell Atkinson 2015

Anyone who tells you fatherhood is the greatest thing that can happen to you,

they are understating it.

Mike Myers

Chapter 2

Bert hadn’t returned the call by the time I got home. I was late, too, because I was so worked up over this call, I’d forgotten to get the groceries out of the office fridge when I left. I turned around when I was halfway home, picked them up, and went home again.

Ellen was cross, not so much at me for being late, but at being cooped up with Tommy all day. I think she was ready to chew nails over just about anything. She was exhausted, too. Like most first-time dads I was clueless about how much childbirth can take out of a woman. Yeah, yeah, I’d been to the classes with her, read the articles, and heard the lectures from the OB-Gyn, but you don’t really know it until you live through it. The lack of sleep, especially. Ellen insisted on breast-feeding, a decision I totally supported, and not just because it meant she’s the one who had to get up in the middle of the night. Of course, I was happy enough it wasn’t me, but then I learned I wasn’t escaping unscathed. Even when she was nursing, it was my job to get Tommy out of the crib and bring him to her. I never quite saw the logic of this. I still had to go to work every day. Why did we both have to lose so much sleep? Her mother had stayed with us for six weeks, but she’d been gone for a month now so it all fell to me. I’m over fifty and have no shame in admitting I don’t bounce back like I used to. Ellen’s in her late thirties and a natural athlete. She was in great shape throughout the pregnancy, but even she is no vernal pullet, if you get my drift. And Tommy weighed ten pounds at birth. In short, she’s been cranky lately, and with good reason.

As I put the groceries away I asked her if she’d heard anything about an agent being killed. I told her about Bert’s call. This stopped her whining – I mean her totally justified complaints. She hadn’t heard. She used to watch the five o’clock news every day when she first took leave, those last few weeks before the birth, but since her mom left, any moment that she didn’t have to take care of Tommy she was either napping or doing some necessary chore around the house. We turned on the TV news, but it was already into prime time, so there was no local news going; we’d be better off checking online.

“I’m sure someone would have texted me if an agent had been killed,” she insisted. I tended to agree and said so. But after a couple of minutes, Tommy began to fuss and she “requested” that I take care of him this time. I complied, and as I began to change the diaper in the nursery I heard her on her phone calling Matt Nguyen, one of her fellow agents. I was Matt’s training agent once upon a time, and now he worked in the Palo Alto office with Ellen.

“My god, Matt,” I heard her saying, “Why didn’t someone call me?” Pause. Then, “Yes, he did get the call. That’s how I found out. He’s right here. Do you want to talk to him?” Longer pause. “I don’t know. He hasn’t even talked to the lawyer. He doesn’t know anything about it. You sure you don’t want to talk to him yourself? Okay, have her call him.”

She hung up and waited for me to walk back into the kitchen before telling me what Matt had said. When I emerged from the nursery, I had Tommy in my arms. It was worth the poop smell despite what some of those wimpy men say. I enjoyed holding him while I could, but he began to fuss again and Ellen was almost bursting, waiting for me to give her my attention, so I put him down in his playpen.

“What did Matt say?” I asked. No sooner had the words left my lips when the house phone rang. I assumed it would be Bert and reached for it.

“That’ll be Gina,” Ellen said, and she was right. Gina Nguyen was Matt’s wife and another agent on my squad years ago. She was Gina Torres then; she’s now the supervisor of that same violent crimes squad in San Jose. Matt and Gina are the ones who introduced Ellen and me. The four of us still meet for lunch once a month when we can, but we haven’t been able to since the baby came along.

“Cliff, you’ve got to help him,” Gina blurted out without so much as a “hello.”

“Help who?” I replied huffily, miffed that no one had yet told me what happened.

“Woody Braswell. He’s been arrested. He shot Jermaine Logan out at firearms. I told him to get Bert Breen to represent him. Matt just called me and said Ellen told him that Bert called you to investigate.”

“He did, but I missed the call and there were no details in the message. I’m waiting for him to call me. This is the first I’ve heard. What happened?”

“That’s all I know. Woody shot Jermaine and got arrested. There’s been a lot of talk, but it’s second- and third-hand. We’ve all been told not to talk about it, either inside or outside the office. It hasn’t even hit the news, I don’t think, but that won’t last long. At least now I know Bert is representing him. Thank God for that. I just hope Logan pulls through and it turns out to be an accident. The SAC called me when it first happened and said not to expect Woody back until this is all over.” Woody was on Gina’s squad. She’d have to reassign all his cases.

I was about to tell her about the word “murder” on the note, which meant Logan had died, unless there was a mistake somewhere in the chain of communication, but I realized that could turn out to be attorney-client information. Of course, if true, it would soon be public, but still, I’d better not say anything.

My brain was still trying to process this information. I’d been sure there was no way I would ever work for a defense lawyer helping a murderer, but then I would never have believed Woody Braswell would be the defendant. Woody and I go way back. He was on my squad in San Jose when I first took over the white collar desk. He was a hard worker and a nice guy, too, but really didn’t have the right skills for my squad. His paperwork wasn’t great and his heart wasn’t in it.

Woody’s a big guy, taller than me but built a lot better. I’m narrow in the shoulders and thick in the waist. He’s the exact opposite. I could actually outlift him back then when we did the heavy weights, but not by much, and he was a much faster runner and better shot than I was. He was on the SWAT team for a while, but that turned out to be too much of a time drag for him, so after the novelty wore off, he quit. He stayed on as a part-time firearms instructor, though. The last I heard, he was still doing that during agent qualifying, but he didn’t train police and other law enforcement the way the regular training unit did. He mostly worked fugitive cases under Gina now.

I’d bumped into Woody several times since I retired and still considered him a friend, although we didn’t hang out together or anything. He was shot a couple of years ago on a case I was involved in. Ellen worked on that case, too. Ellen pretty much saved Woody’s life and mine, too, although it’s more complicated than that.

I thanked Gina for telling me what had happened and told her I had to get off the line in case Bert called. We hung up. Ellen immediately began peppering me with questions, but I didn’t know any more than what Matt had already told her. We thought about going online to search local news sites or turning the stereo onto an AM news station, but quickly decided not to bother. The news would have it wrong anyway. Bert would no doubt be calling soon with the real story, and in any event we were both hungry and wanted our dinner.

I knew we were supposed to be having pork chops and mashed potatoes that evening, one of our standard meals, but I didn’t see any evidence of potato peels or anything else in the kitchen suggesting cooking. My stomach was growling, but I wanted to be careful about how I phrased my question. “Are we still having pork chops?” I asked in as casual a voice as I could muster, trying to convey that it didn’t really matter to me, like stale bread crusts and coffee grounds would be just as good.

“Pizza.”

“Mmm, I love pizza,” I replied truthfully, but I left out the part about “Again? We just had pizza four days ago.” Oh well, at least it would give me an excuse to drink beer. I’d refrained from alcohol in solidarity with Ellen while she was pregnant, and I must say I’ve enjoyed my beer since Tommy was born. Of course, if we keep having pizza and beer for dinner, I’ll put back those ten pounds I lost. “You want me to pick it up?”

“No way, Jose. I’ve already ordered it. It’ll be in my name at Jake’s. In fact, I need to leave now. It should be ready in ten minutes.” With that, she went into the bedroom and came out with her purse. Jake’s in Sunnyvale was a bit farther than the Round Table, but their pizza was better. I suspected, though, that she chose Jake’s because its distance gave her a longer time to be out of the house and free of the tyranny of an infant. I didn’t mind, though. I was still in the deliriously proud new papa stage with Tommy and relished the chance to be alone with him. As long as it wasn’t at three in the morning, of course.

GUT SHOT – Episode 2

Gut Shot – episode 2

© copyright Russell Atkinson 2015

I’m a pretty big guy, and I work out, but I have to tell you, that was one of the scariest moments I’d had in the FBI. I was armed and that was a mistake. My gun was holstered out of sight under my sport coat, and I made sure to keep my arm pressed tightly against my side so that none of the patients could grab it or even see the bulge. I realized as soon as I walked in that the inmates were likely to do anything, rational or not. One of the little guys was the most dangerous. He was tiny and non-verbal. He ran around crying out from time to time and, despite being “on his meds,” moved awfully fast. He reminded me of those monkeys you see on travel shows, Gibraltar or Thailand or wherever, that scamper around with blinding speed and steal the food from your hands and will scratch or bite if you try to resist.

I saw the son of the woman who complained, too. He was about six-five, two fifty, a shapeless hulk and, to my relief, docile. He was called Bobby. He sat staring at a television screen mounted near the ceiling. He was “non-verbal” too, but I think it was just because of the drugs he was on. He was mumbling something. I immediately gave up any thought of interviewing him. I observed the bruises on his arms and made a mental note to write that up, but that pretty much completed my crime scene investigation.

I interviewed Bruno, of course, and he explained that Bobby was a pica patient. Pica is that syndrome I mentioned where people eat things they shouldn’t, and Bobby is one of those who’ll eat anything. Bruno explained that he was doing the laundry and got distracted by a patient. There’s a washing machine right there in the ward because these patients are constantly fouling themselves, smearing food all over, and whatnot. Part of his job is to keep them in clean clothes. He does the laundry multiple times a day, which makes it difficult to keep the laundry room door locked as it’s supposed to be. He said he’d loaded the washing machine with the clothes and was measuring out the detergent when a fight broke out on the other side of the room. Bobby was quiet, watching TV, so Bruno ran over to break up the fight. That took a minute or so. When he got back to the washing, Bobby was there eating the detergent from the metal measuring cup. Bruno knocked the cup from Bobby’s hand and tried to get him to spit out the soap, but wasn’t very successful. He had to wrestle Bobby away from the laundry area, secure the soap and the laundry door, and call for orderlies to haul Bobby to the medical ward for attention.

There was no way to disprove the story. Bruno didn’t seem evasive and the story seemed plausible. He looked like he’d taken a few knocks himself and his eyes had deep dark circles underneath them. I asked him if he was a drug user and he said he had a prescription, but got all vague after that. I knew he was taking something and I doubted it was all prescribed. More like proscribed, but what the hell. I wasn’t there to nab someone on rinky-dink drug charges. The killings were the real concern here.

After weeks of investigation, mostly collecting medical examiner’s records on the deaths and related paperwork, including a lot of Romero’s work, I wrote up my report. I presented the case to Bert for a prosecutorial opinion, but there was no doubt in my mind that he was going to decline to prosecute. FBI agents aren’t allowed to recommend for or against prosecution in civil rights cases. That’s a policy Bobby Kennedy put in decades back. He didn’t trust the FBI. The ACLU types in the DOJ Civil Rights Unit ultimately make the decision, but rely heavily on the AUSA in the field, as long as the AUSA has been trained in that unit.

To my surprise, Bert said he was going to pitch for prosecution with DOJ. He liked the paperwork I gave him on the deaths, which pointed to negligence on the part of the management there at Agnews that arguably led to the deaths, decisions about understaffing, about failing to do proper background investigations, and so on. He asked me my opinion, even though he wasn’t supposed to ask and I wasn’t supposed to give it. I told him that the institution was badly run and a crying shame that the patients had to suffer the way they did, but I didn’t see how a case of criminal intent could be made. Murder charges required intent. Violence was a constant part of the environment.

He ended up getting permission to continue the investigation and notify the state officials there that he would be presenting the case to a grand jury. It was a bluff I realized later, but I was floored when his threat made something happen. The state came up with the money to break the place up and house the patients in small, less-institutional settings with better staffing. Some personnel were transferred or let go. Things got better and no more violent deaths occurred. The Agnews management announced the changes and took credit for it all. Neither Santa Clara P.D. or the FBI was ever mentioned as having anything to do with it. Eventually the whole parcel was cut up and sold to Sun Microsystems, which then got bought by Oracle and Silicon Valley now has yet one more corporate tech campus. There was no arrest or conviction to make the headlines and no stats for me, but I didn’t mind. It was one of those invisible rewards I got as an agent that I was able to improve people’s lives. The public never has known what we really did.

I developed a healthy respect for Bert from that case. I was disappointed but not surprised when a year later he left to join a civil litigation firm in Oakland. Most of the AUSAs who were any good took that same route. They had mucho trial experience in the federal courts and could make many times the money on the outside. Mostly they did corporate civil trial work, but some did criminal defense, usually white collar stuff. I used to resent those who made that choice, seeing them go over to the “dark side,” but, now, who am I to judge? I’m helping rich people get richer and making a bundle at it.

Which brings me to the point. I’d just returned from running errands for Ellen and was carrying two bags of groceries to put in the small office fridge. Ellen had to give up her Bureau car while she was on maternity leave, so we were down to just the SUV, which I was using today. That meant she was trapped all day with Tommy and I got to fetch the groceries. I was putting the perishables in the office fridge when Maeva walked into my office and said I’d had this call from a lawyer who wanted me to be his investigator on a murder case in the East Bay. She was holding a note out to me, but I didn’t see it because I was bent over putting away the groceries and had my back to her.

“I hope you told him I don’t do criminal work,” I said. I was wondering what kind of numbskull would call me for something like that. If he’d done any checking he’d see that I don’t do that kind of work. I have a website. Plus there are plenty of P.I.’s who work over there in Oakland. It’s got one of the highest murder rates in the country per capita. I’m sure the defense bar there has its own set of competent investigators, ex-homicide cops who know a lot more about that stuff than I do.

“I did, but he said you’d want to do this one. He said you knew him, too.”

That piqued my interest, of course, and I stood up quickly, clonking my head on the shelf over the fridge. “What’s his name?” I asked, snatching the note from her hand, rubbing my head with the other hand.

“Bert Breen,” she said snippily. “Don’t take my finger off there, big guy.” I had yanked the note pretty hard.

But I barely heard her. I was in a state of shock staring at the last three words of the note: “Victim – FBI agent.” My brain circuits exploded somewhere deep inside at the very idea that Bert would think I would ever help the killer of an FBI agent. More to the point, I hadn’t heard of any murder of an agent in years and never around here.

I called the number on the note before I even sat down and cursed silently at the phone when it took seven rings before a secretary answered. The call had forwarded over to the main receptionist of Bert’s firm when he didn’t answer. I guess his personal assistant was out or inundated with calls. I asked for Bert, making a point that I was returning his call, but was told he was out of the office meeting with a client. If he was working a murder case, I knew that meant he was at the jail and couldn’t take any calls. I’d just have to wait. I left my name and number and added my cell number, too, since I’d want to get the call at home. I usually didn’t give that out to new clients, not that I considered Bert a new client. Obviously, I wasn’t going to take the case.

to be continued …

The Anagram Times

I’m famous! … sort of. My earlier anagram of the GOP presidential field is now on the cover of The Anagram Times.

The GOP Presidential Candidates

In case you’re anagram impaired, the letters in the left column can be rearranged into the right column.

Jeb Bush

Ben Carson

Ted Cruz

Carly Fiorina

Lindsey Graham

Mike Huckabee

George Pataki

Rand PauL

Rick Perry

Marco Rubio

Rick Santorum

Donald Trump

Bobby Jindal

Chris Christie

John Kasich

Scott Walker
=
The Sr. Prince

Black Doc

Tea Partier

Girly Token

Mr. Zip

Lacks Sugar Daddy

Ho Hum NYCer

Wacko Man

Frail Babbler

Cuban Crush

Senator Prude

Hungrier Joke

India Ink

Car Jam Chubby

Ohio Job Crisis

Milktoaster

Gut Shot – Dedication and Acknowledgments

Yesterday I posted the first episode of Gut Shot on this blog. Although the Dedication and Acknowledgments page appears at the end of the book, I thought it appropriate to include it here before proceeding with the rest of the book.

You can now order paperback copies of Gut Shot direct from my Cliff Knowles Mysteries website at a lower price than anywhere else ($12 outside of California, $13.05 in California including sales tax). PayPal and credit cards accepted.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is the finest law enforcement organization in the world. I’m proud to have served as a Special Agent of the FBI for twenty-five years and will always cherish the opportunity I had to serve my country in that way. Agents put their lives on the line every day to protect the public. The support personnel work every bit as hard as the agents and do an incredible job for ridiculously small salaries. We all owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude.

When reading works of fiction involving the FBI, it is easy to forget the reality and assume a cynical or inaccurate attitude toward the agency. The same is true for police and other public safety professionals. This book is fiction. The characters are not real. Any resemblance or similarity to real people is coincidence. The views expressed herein are not those of the FBI. The story and characters are created solely for entertainment and do not reflect the more mundane reality of protecting the public day in and day out. Enjoy the story, but do not let it detract from your appreciation of the people who allow you to live a safe and comfortable life in this country.

Acknowledgments

            I want to thank all those who made this book possible. First and foremost among them are my FBI coworkers who have inadvertently provided inspiration for the stories I have to tell simply by living them. My cover artist Doug Heatherly of Lighthouse24.com has contributed enormously to all my books’ successes. My beta readers and proofreaders have made many corrections and excellent suggestions that have greatly improved the books. These generous souls include Glenn Stewart, Becky Allen, and my daughter Cori Atkinson. Any inaccuracies or mistakes are my responsibility alone. Taking my cue from Silicon Valley culture: “They aren’t bugs; they’re features.” This book will be serialized on my blog: blog.ackgame.com. For that idea I thank my son Lincoln Atkinson.

GUT SHOT – Episode 1

It’s here! Gut Shot, the 5th Cliff Knowles Mystery, is now available as a Kindle book at Amazon.com. The paperback version is available here now and should be available at Amazon and in bookstores within a few days. I will also be selling it at a discount from my own Cliff Knowles Mysteries site soon. I will be serializing the entire book on this blog, so you can read it for free if you have enough patience. Be warned, however, that I will probably be posting episodes only once or twice a week and they will not all stay up until the end of the serialization. To prevent piracy, I expect to keep only the most recent three or four episodes, so if you don’t stay current, you may not be able to read the entire book here. I will probably take some other security efforts, such as posting some episodes as images, instead of text, from time to time.

Gut Shot, episode 1:

© Copyright 2015 Russell Atkinson

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.

Charles Dickens

Chapter 1

My name is Cliff Knowles and I’m a private eye. I’ve always wanted to say that. It sounds so cool. It’s true, too. But I’m not what you think. I’m not that kind of private eye and I never wanted to be. Those guys make for great books and movies, but they don’t make much money and the job is too sleazy and dangerous.

I’m a lawyer and licensed private investigator. I used to be an FBI agent but took early retirement after my wife was killed in a car crash. A rich asshole drove drunk and slammed into her at seventy-five. There was a big lawsuit and a big settlement. The episode made me rich but left me heartbroken and bitter. At work I tangled with the front office one time too many. The Special Agent in Charge, or SAC, didn’t like me and the feeling was mutual. That’s another story, though. I said sayonara to the Bureau among some more unprintable things.

After I left the FBI, I got bored sitting around counting my money and feeling sorry for myself so I paid my bar dues up to active status and took the private investigator exam. Now I do investigations for big law firms and tech companies. Mostly due diligence investigations for mergers and acquisitions, but other things, too, like sensitive background investigations or support for civil litigation. I make a lot of money. Probably more than you if you live in any sane part of the country. I don’t. I live in Silicon Valley where real estate prices are unreal and so are the salaries, but it’s the stock option millionaires who cash out that are knocking down the old tract houses and building McMansions all around me. Kids, or so they seem to me.

Working again turned me back into a human being. I was pretty obnoxious there for a while during the lawsuit and when I got transferred up to San Francisco to do admin work. I admit it now, although I didn’t see it then. So I left. I began filling my time with hobbies and fitness routines – running, gym workouts, geocaching – but I didn’t have any friends. Not any non-FBI friends, I mean. I met some great people, but fellow hobbyists aren’t the same as a fellow agent you worked with for years. My old squadmates were still great, but they were still working. What you hear about the FBI being a big family, that’s true. I’ve stayed in touch with the agents I worked with and I plan to do that till the day I die. But my best buddies, the ones my age who’ve only now started to reach retirement age, have all moved away to where they can afford to live well on a government pension. Silicon Valley isn’t that place.

As they say, time wounds all heels, and I got wounded pretty good. I was suspected of being a serial killer at one point and had to save my own neck by finding the real killer, but that’s another story too. The more conventional form of that aphorism eventually came true, too, and in time I healed. My Bureau friends introduced me to a woman with execrable taste in men and incredible generosity, a combination that somehow permitted her to see something in me worth having. She’s now my wife and the mother of my son Tommy. He’s named after our favorite president, although in my case that’s only because I went to Thomas Jefferson Junior High School. Go Jaguars! Ellen is still on maternity leave and hasn’t decided whether to go back to the Bureau. She’s an agent, too, and loves the job, but she’s always wanted to be a full-time mom. I will leave it entirely to her choice. Happy wife, happy life and all that. Besides, she can take me in two falls out of three, which can be fun at times, but what I’m saying is she’s no shrinking violet.

Anyway, my business started booming and I couldn’t be happier. I’m my own boss and I don’t really need the clients. I can tell them no without worrying about it, but the fact is I enjoy the work and the people are usually decent to work with. My secretary Maeva is a sweetie and whip smart, so I can pretty much go along on cruise control. If I want time off to go geocaching or do anything else, I take the time. Maeva can handle things. So I never expected to be involved in another murder investigation. Like I said, I’m not that kind of private eye.

It started with a call from Bert Breen. Talk about your bolt from the blue. I hadn’t heard from or about Bert in years. Back when I was in the Bu he was an AUSA. That’s an Assistant United States Attorney, a federal prosecutor. We’re talking fifteen, eighteen years ago when I was still a brick agent. I became a white-collar supervisor later, but back then I worked on a general criminal squad in San Jose. We handled violent crimes like bank robbery and fugitive investigations, and a lot of miscellaneous stuff, too, like civil rights and applicant background investigations. The other squads specialized in drugs, gangs, white-collar, or terrorism.

Bert handled pretty much the same kind of cases we worked, so he was our regular go-to guy there for a time. What he really liked best, though, were the civil rights cases. He was a hard-ass prosecutor all right and did a good job on the regular crimes, but he had a broad streak of left-coast liberal running through him, too. An idealist, you could call him, although some agents called him some less charitable things. After all, prosecuting civil rights cases meant trying to throw cops in jail. Whose side was he on, anyway? You know how it is.

I got to know him when I got assigned a civil rights case. It wasn’t the first one I’d ever had, but it was the first big one. There used to be an insane asylum in Santa Clara. I know that’s not the politically correct term, but get used to it. I’m not a politically correct guy. It was a goddamn nuthouse known as Agnews. It was enormous and housed every type of mental patient you could imagine. Most of the people were under treatment for mild forms of impairment, the harmless patients. But one wing was dedicated to the ones no one wants to talk about, or even think about. That’s where the violent wackos went: the crazies who’d jump on your back and bite your ear off if you weren’t careful; the ones who screamed like a banshee day and night; the ones who tore their hair out, shredded their skin, and ate anything that wasn’t nailed down – rubber gloves, thumb tacks, anything. They drooled and spat and fought and shit their pants unless they were doped up on enough drugs to knock out the entire Manson Family. The most powerful psychoactive drugs known to man were consumed like M & M’s there and probably not just by the patients.

We received a complaint, an allegation from the mother of one of those poor bastards, that her son was being beaten and abused there. She claimed that a lot of the patients were, too, and that some had died from the abuse. We pretty much have to open a case on every civil rights complaint so that one got handed to me. I checked with Santa Clara police and met up with a savvy detective there named Romero. Romero was a street-wise detective with a Mexican accent and twenty years in. Short, thick, and all muscle, I’d say he was built like a fireplug if it weren’t such a cliché. I’ll say it anyway. He was built like a fireplug.

It turned out he’d investigated several deaths there over the last four years, and agreed that there was a problem. All of them were in that wing, the one I thought of as wackoland, but different staff members were involved in the different cases. All of the victims had bruises or wounds consistent with beatings, but the story was always the same. The staff members in charge said the marks came from patients pounding on each other, or from falls, or even occasionally from the staff having to defend themselves, not from abuse. The witnesses were all staff members who dealt with these patients and they weren’t about to say anything bad about their co-workers, much like the blue wall cops have. The other patients may have been eyewitnesses, but they were useless since you couldn’t even interview them. They were drugged-up psychotic zombies ninety-nine percent of the time and heard voices or had hallucinations the other one percent, if they could talk at all. Of course, they may also have been the murderers, assuming there were murders. Can you imagine one of them on a witness stand?

Romero’s investigation focused on one staff member in particular, a brute named Bruno. Bruno had some sort of bullshit professional license with the word “therapist” in it, but basically he was a plus-size babysitter for the worst, most violent unit. Bruno had a record of a couple of DUI’s and one drug arrest that went away. I set up an interview with him.

I didn’t realize until I got there that the interview was going to be right in that ward. They told me they didn’t have enough staff to have someone else look after the inmates there – that’s how I thought of them when I saw the place, inmates – so I was ushered into the ward for the interview while Bruno watched these patients. I think that was intentional. I know they have a conference room there they could have used. The brass knew why I was there and they were daring me to see how long I could take that environment before knocking someone upside the head or worse.

I’m a pretty big guy, and I work out, but I have to tell you, that was one of the scariest moments I’d had in the FBI.

To be continued