T.R. Pearson's Blog, page 5
October 29, 2015
Comedy With Carnage
Ray is going electronic. And soon.
The decision wasn't much of a struggle. Better to get this novel to you now than wait the year it would take for a publisher to spit the thing out. I rarely feel this way about my books, but I like this one quite a lot. So the sooner it's in the world, the better.
Ray is in good form and funny, and the desolation of the North Carolina outer banks in winter (the setting for this novel) seems to suit him right down to the ground.
This was an interesting book to write. I kept shoving in new details as I ran across them, and I did more trimming and rewriting and reconsidering than I think I've ever done. I blame Ray. His sensibility is a particular sort of thing, and it takes a fair bit of shimming and jiggering to get it right.
The story is complicated and a bit bloody. The locals are thin on the ground. The wind is frequently high and biting. The beach boxes are drafty eyesores, and the winter surf chews the shore to bits. That's Ray's new world, and (like always) he makes himself at home.
For those of you keen on physical books(I know who you are), you're out of luck. The trouble and expense of producing even a print-on-demand paperback hardly seem worth it anymore. Since I sell exponentially more ebooks than physical books, I'll probably go strictly electronic from here on out.
That does mean this novel will be available almost immediately. In about a week. I'll offer it at the usual TRP price of $2.99 exclusively at Amazon. Expect it to be discounted to 99 cents for the first few days it's available.
Since I'd prefer to write novels, I'd like to find a way to justify focusing on fiction over scripts. I suppose I could charge more for my books, but that would probably just choke off sales. A few of you promised Kickstarter funds if I were to go that route again. I thank you, but I doubt I will.
Instead, I've set up a Patreon page as a kind of experiment, so if you feel like throwing some coin in the direction of your favorite writer, please do. Then if you'd like to give me a little something as well, that would be great.
Better still, proselytize. I know many of you do already, and I'm grateful for it. The more readers the better. And please do leave reviews at Amazon, no matter what you think of the book. Those are the only reviews these Barking Mad titles get, so they do matter, and they do help.
I'll be back with a publication date in the next few days.
(I just noticed that the S&S electronic edition of Glad News of the Natural World is priced at $15.99(!). And publishers wonder why they can't sell books.)
The decision wasn't much of a struggle. Better to get this novel to you now than wait the year it would take for a publisher to spit the thing out. I rarely feel this way about my books, but I like this one quite a lot. So the sooner it's in the world, the better.
Ray is in good form and funny, and the desolation of the North Carolina outer banks in winter (the setting for this novel) seems to suit him right down to the ground.
This was an interesting book to write. I kept shoving in new details as I ran across them, and I did more trimming and rewriting and reconsidering than I think I've ever done. I blame Ray. His sensibility is a particular sort of thing, and it takes a fair bit of shimming and jiggering to get it right.
The story is complicated and a bit bloody. The locals are thin on the ground. The wind is frequently high and biting. The beach boxes are drafty eyesores, and the winter surf chews the shore to bits. That's Ray's new world, and (like always) he makes himself at home.
For those of you keen on physical books(I know who you are), you're out of luck. The trouble and expense of producing even a print-on-demand paperback hardly seem worth it anymore. Since I sell exponentially more ebooks than physical books, I'll probably go strictly electronic from here on out.
That does mean this novel will be available almost immediately. In about a week. I'll offer it at the usual TRP price of $2.99 exclusively at Amazon. Expect it to be discounted to 99 cents for the first few days it's available.
Since I'd prefer to write novels, I'd like to find a way to justify focusing on fiction over scripts. I suppose I could charge more for my books, but that would probably just choke off sales. A few of you promised Kickstarter funds if I were to go that route again. I thank you, but I doubt I will.
Instead, I've set up a Patreon page as a kind of experiment, so if you feel like throwing some coin in the direction of your favorite writer, please do. Then if you'd like to give me a little something as well, that would be great.
Better still, proselytize. I know many of you do already, and I'm grateful for it. The more readers the better. And please do leave reviews at Amazon, no matter what you think of the book. Those are the only reviews these Barking Mad titles get, so they do matter, and they do help.
I'll be back with a publication date in the next few days.
(I just noticed that the S&S electronic edition of Glad News of the Natural World is priced at $15.99(!). And publishers wonder why they can't sell books.)
October 23, 2015
Ray Tatum by the Sea (get your free sample here)
The new Ray Tatum novel is finished. I'm currently working to buff it to a high sheen and figure out what to do with it. The YA novel I completed ages ago has been in the hands of an interested editor since July (I'd hate to try to outlive an uninterested editor). Not a peep out of him. I'm not sure I want Ray Tatum to go through that.
So I'm trying to figure out what to do with Ray's book. All suggestions are welcome.
In the meantime, the opening chapter is pasted in below (please ignore the lousy formatting). The novel is called First In Flight. Here's a taste of OBX in November.
1
I blame my dog. The dead one. Monroe. We’d gone to the ocean one time and she’d been so taken with it that I’d promised to scatter her ashes in the surf at Kill Devil Hills. I was drunk, of course, but I’ve always considered my promises to animals more binding than the ones I make to people. So there I was eight years later on the outer banks of North Carolina with Monroe’s ashes in a pickle jar.
It was November and looked it. Low clouds. Rough surf. I’d parked in the driveway of a vacant beach box and walked over the dunes to the shore. A woman in yellow boots and a parka was scouring a shell bed for sea glass (I guess), and there was a guy down towards the Avalon pier working a patch with his metal detector. Pelicans out beyond the beakers. Sandpipers littering the beach. Sea foam on the tide line. The odd scrap of day-glo trash. And me and my jar half full of ashes and gravel-sized chunks of bone.
She’d been a hell of a dog. Grumpy, vaporish, willful, unaffectionate. Immune to instruction. Indifferent to punishment. Wouldn’t eat kibble on a bet. She wasn’t permitted to live into cranky, canine decrepitude. A neighbor of mine shot her, a fool up in Virginia. The sort with bullets and opinions and a sofa on his porch.
He liked dogs even less than Mexicans. That was the one thing he got out before I knocked him over and kicked him half to pieces. There was no point talking to him. He’d already made up his mind about everything the way people like him do.
He found his lawyer on a billboard and sued me fourteen ways from Sunday. Monroe would have gotten a hoot out that — making trouble even dead.
I buried her in the yard of my rental house before I remembered the promise I’d made her. So I dug her up and got her reduced to mottled ashes and clatter. I had a tough time reaching the ocean because I was having to scratch and scramble.
No force would hire me after the lawsuit. I worked guard jobs instead. Nights mostly in industrial parks and a gig at a Richmond high rise. I was down to my truck. Some clothes. A few books in a box. A room by the week.
I finally ended up on the outer banks by way of disappointing a girlfriend. A coworker I’d had a roll with. Drunk again, don’t you know. I kept telling her I wasn’t up for anything stable and steady.
“Oh, Ray,” she’d say and fling her hair, like it was cute I had boundaries and all.
When she started making Thanksgiving plans — the turkey she’d fry, the friends she’d have over — I loaded my king cab and left her a Post-it. I cleared town while she was on shift. The trip wasn’t thought through or anything. I headed east for no good reason and was buying coffee at a Sheetz near Norfolk when I remembered Monroe and the beach.
That dog wouldn’t have insisted on much from me. She wasn’t sentimental, which is the way with the sorts of creatures that can eat what they throw up. I hadn’t decided on just how to send her off until I was ankle-deep in the surf. I unscrewed the jar lid, had the breeze at my back. I tilted and shook. She flew.
“Go on now,” I told her as the wind shot her into the face of a breaking wave.
I’d been planning on feeling nothing. After all, it was eight years later, but I’m a bad one for putting that sort of stuff on hold. With my pickle jar empty and my best dog gone, I just wanted to drop and weep.
The woman in the yellow boots gave me a wave. She looked primed for a spot of a chat, so I rolled down my pant legs, put my shoes back on, and kept moving. I headed south in the direction of the pier and the guy with the metal detector. He had a steel scoop shot full of holes that he could shove in the sand with his foot. As I passed, he sifted up a bottle cap and what looked like a rusty door key. He flung them both into the foamy surf and spat.
The kid was a quarter mile beyond him on the far side of the pier. At first, I thought he was a pelican. He was knee-high and in gray pajamas. He was up near the dunes, and he kept sitting down and standing right back up.
Once I’d drawn even with him, I looked around for a grown up. Even I knew enough about toddlers not to leave one alone on a beach. He had a hand in his mouth and was holding something stringy in the other.
I stepped his way. “Hey, sport,” I said.
He slobbered past his fingers.
“Where’s your mom?”
A gust made him wobble. He sat down. He stood back up.
I pointed at the house behind him. An old cottage, unpainted and shabby. “That yours?”
He shoved my way the stringy thing he was holding. It looked like a clump seaweed at first. I eased in and was hard beside him before I recognized it for a plug of human hair. Strawberry blonde and yanked out with violence. There was bloody scalp attached.
“Where’d you find that?” I asked him.
He told me something on the order of “ngharln.”
“Want to show me?”
He didn’t at first, but I waited. He finally led me through the dunes in the direction of the shabby cottage. Then he turned south towards the slightly finer place next door.
We stopped at the back deck stairs. The sliding door was standing open.
“Is your mom in there?”
By way of response, he glanced at the hair he was holding. I heard a thump from inside the house and told the kid, “Stay here.”
I gave him Monroe’s pickle jar. He laid the hair plug aside, plopped right down, and started filling the jar with sand.
I eased up the stairs towards the open slider, paused to arm myself with a greasy grill brush.
“Anybody here?” I shouted.
Nothing. I stepped into the kitchen of the place. Tidy. Unused. Naked counter. Empty drainer.
“Hello.”
Nothing.
The furniture in the main room was beach-rental ugly. Bulletproof upholstery in ungodly plaids. There was a Bible-school-worthy picture of Jesus perched on a donkey beside the front door. A yellowed newspaper clipping that was mostly a photo of a guy standing next to a fish. A stack of jigsaw puzzles in battered boxes on top of a chest against the far wall, which was directly under a massive TV fixed to a swivel mount. Knotty pine bead board everywhere — walls and ceiling both.
Another thump from deep in the house. Something soft and flailing about it. I eased along the back hall. The doors were all half shut. I pushed the closest one open and peeked inside. A cedar dresser. Two stripped beds. A sea gull hunkered on a mattress. It tilted its head to have a look at me. Flew into the far wall and bounced off.
When I backed out, it came along and followed me down the hallway. The thing slipped up once to peck my ankle but fell back when I gave it a look.
“Don’t ever,” I informed that bird, “promise shit to a dog.”
The second bedroom was empty and stripped as well. The bathroom looked untouched. I saw blood on the floor near the end of the hall. Smelled it a little too. The floor covering was some kind of rolled tile with machined pits and imperfections. The gore had collected in the fake mortar joints where it had skinned and crusted over. I knew well enough from years of policing somebody had been emptied out.
I pushed the last door open and saw, first thing, a bloody smear on one of the windows. There was splatter on the ceiling, more spilled blood on the floor. The blade of a hatchet was sunk into the top of a chifforobe against the side wall. The best I could stomach was a glance at the bed where a human lay hacked and dead. I caught a glimpse of entrails. Lacquered toenails. Freckled flesh and exposed bone.
That was enough for me. I retreated, driving that seagull before me. It veered back into its bedroom. I tried the phone in the kitchen, but it was dead.
I found junior where I’d left him. Monroe’s pickle jar was entirely full of sand. My cell phone was in my truck cupholder. It lacked the juice anymore to be mobile, so I snatched up junior and headed around the house, figured I could reach my king cab in six or eight minutes at a trot. But we got lucky, I guess I’ll call it. I’d gone hardly thirty yards when a steel gray Charger pulled off a side street. Light bar. Decals. KDH PD.
I waved and got a yip on the siren. That Dodge eased to a stop alongside us as the driver’s window came down.
The cop under the wheel was a woman with her hair pulled back tight and pinned like they do. Her wrap arounds were parked on the top of her head. She reached over and turned down her squawker.
“Problem?”
I nodded and pointed. “There’s a woman dead in there. Murdered.”
The cop shifted into park and threw open her door. “Hands on the car. Do it. Now.”
I set junior on the trunk and pressed my palms against the fender. That’s the way with cops anymore. The only good civilian is wearing cuffs.
Officer Meekins on the black, plastic tag on her shirt flap. She seemed rattled. Twitchy. I went slack for her every way I could.
“Who’s dead?” She ratcheted the cuffs down tight.
“I don’t know. His mother maybe. Found him on the beach.”
My fingers were tingling. She fished out my wallet and put me and junior in the backseat of her cruiser while she stood on the side of the road and read my details into her mic. Then she drove us the few yards back down to the driveway and unloaded us
.
“Around back,” I said. “The sliding door’s standing open.”
A thump from inside, and Meekins drew her gun.
“Seagull,” I told her.
She gave me that cop look like she’d heard enough out of me. Meekins shoved me towards the back of the house. She picked up junior and brought him along. We got planted on a deck bench and told to stay put. Meekins sucked a breath and stepped inside the house. She soon blundered back out and vomited over the rail. I got a glare.
“I just found her. That’s all.”
Meekins didn’t seem persuaded. She keyed her shoulder mic and raised a colleague. Dennis. She managed to tell him the milepost, but that was about it. We listened to his siren as he worked his way over to us. Meekins passed most of her down time throwing up. The sound of her heaving made junior cry. He held onto one of my belt loops.
Dennis soon came huffing up the back stairs and gave me a slack once over. I’d worked with plenty of his sort before. High school lineman gone to seed.
“Back bedroom,” Meekins told him. She only remembered to say, “Gull,” once Dennis was inside and out of earshot.
Dennis turned out to have a thing about birds and squeezed off a couple of rounds. He missed the gull, but the bullets passed through the wall and hit his cruiser. That bird had known quite enough of beach box living by then. He stalked out over the threshold and joined us on the deck.
Dennis showed up shortly thereafter to vomit onto the grill. I was beginning to wonder if KDH PD ever met with a homicide. Dennis decided he was finished before he actually was and so spewed a second time between his fingers.
The boss showed up shortly thereafter. He climbed the deck stairs trailing a pair of doughy patrolmen who might have been clones. The both had institutional crew cuts, unflattering glasses, and receding chins. I could only tell them apart because one of those boys had a wine-stained ear.
Cutler on the boss’ tag. He was fit and sixty. Ex-gyrene — no doubt about it. Ironed shirt. Creased trousers. A salt and pepper flat top all Butch Waxed up just so.
“DB,” Dennis told him and jabbed a thumb towards the open door.
Cutler glanced my way before he went in. The boys he’d brought stayed outside with Dennis. They all three treated me to the brand of study you usually get from cows.
“We like him?” one of the chinless boys asked.
“Maybe. Yeah,” Dennis said. “Don’t know.”
“Whose kid?” the other one asked.
Dennis glanced at junior like he’d not noticed him before. He appeared to think as highly of toddlers as he did of birds.
Cutler came back out and failed to spew. He stepped straight over to Meekins and quizzed her. They both kept glancing my way as she filled him in.
“Check these others,” Cutler instructed the boys, indicating the nearby houses.
Then he pointed my way and told Meekins, “Unhook him.”
She did, and I shook my hands until the blood was flowing again.
“So you were on the job in Virginia, North Carolina, and . . .”
“Georgia.” That from Meekins.
I nodded.
“What brings you here?”
“Dead dog.”
He waited.
“Came to spread her ashes,” I told him. “The ocean’s the only thing she ever liked.”
“And the kid?” He wiggled a finger at junior who eyed Cutler like he was daft.
I gave him the entire story. “Plug of hair around here somewhere.”
“You know the deceased?”
“Doubt it. Didn’t really look that close.”
“Let’s fix that.”
He made for the back sliding door and waited on the sill for me to follow.
“Door was standing open?”
“Yep.”
We stopped in the tidy kitchen.
“Don’t think I touched anything. Might have dropped a grill brush somewhere.”
I followed Cutler into the front room.
“Candy says you’re mall copping or something.”
I didn’t know any Candys.
“Meekins,” he told me and glanced towards the back sliding door.
“Something like that.”
“Why?”
“Hit a guy. Judgment went against me.”
“Need hitting?”
I nodded. “He made my dead dog dead.”
Even though we’d come inside for a good look at the victim, we both lacked the stomach to do much more than loiter close to her and glance. A strawberry blonde in panties and a bra, laid into with a hatchet. She was sprawled atop the bedspread on her back with her left leg bent at the knee and the other stretched out straight.
Ragged scraps of underwear were mixed in with gore and entrails. Lung. Intestine. Stomach, I guess. Liver or something as well. Blood all over. Looked like cast off. Offal stink mixed with cigarette. One bloody blue shower shoe on the floor.
We both fixed on the hatchet plunged into the chifforobe to keep from looking at her. It had a fresh edge, shiny ground bevels everywhere the blood hadn’t stuck.
Their part-time forensic guy was a pediatric surgeon from Tennessee. He’d come out a few years back on a fishing trip and had stuck and stayed. His name was Orby, but they all called him Doc-O. He was blunt and insulting as a matter of course and unduly pleased about it. His assistant, Janice, carried his gear and served as a reliable disappointment to him.
When Doc-O said anything to her, it was usually some version of, “Christ!”
Doc-O mounted the deck and blew smoke in my face by way of “Hello, nice to meet you.” Then he barked, “You coming?” and Janice climbed the stairs with a pair of oversized tackle boxes.
“Tatum here found her,” Cutler told Doc-O.
Doc-O shot his butt into the dunes as he gave me a sneering once over. Then he strolled inside and left Janice to trudge along behind him with the cargo.
“He seems nice,” I said.
“Where’s junior?” Cutler asked Meekins.
Candy made apologies to him. She’d been off in the driveway or somewhere doing something. Seeing to stuff.
She and Cutler decided he was under the deck and went squatting low to find him. I had a better idea and followed the path through the dunes to the house one down and then turned towards the beach, and there he was sitting just about where I’d first seen him.
He had Monroe’s jar lid in one hand. The other was shoved in his mouth. He stood up. A gust of wind hit him, and he sat right back down.
“Hey, sport,” I said. I dropped beside him.
He offered me the jar lid, and I took it. That freed a hand for my belt loop. We gazed out over the gloomy Atlantic. Rolling swell. Floating birds. Beach trash. A foamy tide line.
“Some day, huh?” I said to junior.
In time, he told me, “Ngharln.”
So I'm trying to figure out what to do with Ray's book. All suggestions are welcome.
In the meantime, the opening chapter is pasted in below (please ignore the lousy formatting). The novel is called First In Flight. Here's a taste of OBX in November.
1
I blame my dog. The dead one. Monroe. We’d gone to the ocean one time and she’d been so taken with it that I’d promised to scatter her ashes in the surf at Kill Devil Hills. I was drunk, of course, but I’ve always considered my promises to animals more binding than the ones I make to people. So there I was eight years later on the outer banks of North Carolina with Monroe’s ashes in a pickle jar.
It was November and looked it. Low clouds. Rough surf. I’d parked in the driveway of a vacant beach box and walked over the dunes to the shore. A woman in yellow boots and a parka was scouring a shell bed for sea glass (I guess), and there was a guy down towards the Avalon pier working a patch with his metal detector. Pelicans out beyond the beakers. Sandpipers littering the beach. Sea foam on the tide line. The odd scrap of day-glo trash. And me and my jar half full of ashes and gravel-sized chunks of bone.
She’d been a hell of a dog. Grumpy, vaporish, willful, unaffectionate. Immune to instruction. Indifferent to punishment. Wouldn’t eat kibble on a bet. She wasn’t permitted to live into cranky, canine decrepitude. A neighbor of mine shot her, a fool up in Virginia. The sort with bullets and opinions and a sofa on his porch.
He liked dogs even less than Mexicans. That was the one thing he got out before I knocked him over and kicked him half to pieces. There was no point talking to him. He’d already made up his mind about everything the way people like him do.
He found his lawyer on a billboard and sued me fourteen ways from Sunday. Monroe would have gotten a hoot out that — making trouble even dead.
I buried her in the yard of my rental house before I remembered the promise I’d made her. So I dug her up and got her reduced to mottled ashes and clatter. I had a tough time reaching the ocean because I was having to scratch and scramble.
No force would hire me after the lawsuit. I worked guard jobs instead. Nights mostly in industrial parks and a gig at a Richmond high rise. I was down to my truck. Some clothes. A few books in a box. A room by the week.
I finally ended up on the outer banks by way of disappointing a girlfriend. A coworker I’d had a roll with. Drunk again, don’t you know. I kept telling her I wasn’t up for anything stable and steady.
“Oh, Ray,” she’d say and fling her hair, like it was cute I had boundaries and all.
When she started making Thanksgiving plans — the turkey she’d fry, the friends she’d have over — I loaded my king cab and left her a Post-it. I cleared town while she was on shift. The trip wasn’t thought through or anything. I headed east for no good reason and was buying coffee at a Sheetz near Norfolk when I remembered Monroe and the beach.
That dog wouldn’t have insisted on much from me. She wasn’t sentimental, which is the way with the sorts of creatures that can eat what they throw up. I hadn’t decided on just how to send her off until I was ankle-deep in the surf. I unscrewed the jar lid, had the breeze at my back. I tilted and shook. She flew.
“Go on now,” I told her as the wind shot her into the face of a breaking wave.
I’d been planning on feeling nothing. After all, it was eight years later, but I’m a bad one for putting that sort of stuff on hold. With my pickle jar empty and my best dog gone, I just wanted to drop and weep.
The woman in the yellow boots gave me a wave. She looked primed for a spot of a chat, so I rolled down my pant legs, put my shoes back on, and kept moving. I headed south in the direction of the pier and the guy with the metal detector. He had a steel scoop shot full of holes that he could shove in the sand with his foot. As I passed, he sifted up a bottle cap and what looked like a rusty door key. He flung them both into the foamy surf and spat.
The kid was a quarter mile beyond him on the far side of the pier. At first, I thought he was a pelican. He was knee-high and in gray pajamas. He was up near the dunes, and he kept sitting down and standing right back up.
Once I’d drawn even with him, I looked around for a grown up. Even I knew enough about toddlers not to leave one alone on a beach. He had a hand in his mouth and was holding something stringy in the other.
I stepped his way. “Hey, sport,” I said.
He slobbered past his fingers.
“Where’s your mom?”
A gust made him wobble. He sat down. He stood back up.
I pointed at the house behind him. An old cottage, unpainted and shabby. “That yours?”
He shoved my way the stringy thing he was holding. It looked like a clump seaweed at first. I eased in and was hard beside him before I recognized it for a plug of human hair. Strawberry blonde and yanked out with violence. There was bloody scalp attached.
“Where’d you find that?” I asked him.
He told me something on the order of “ngharln.”
“Want to show me?”
He didn’t at first, but I waited. He finally led me through the dunes in the direction of the shabby cottage. Then he turned south towards the slightly finer place next door.
We stopped at the back deck stairs. The sliding door was standing open.
“Is your mom in there?”
By way of response, he glanced at the hair he was holding. I heard a thump from inside the house and told the kid, “Stay here.”
I gave him Monroe’s pickle jar. He laid the hair plug aside, plopped right down, and started filling the jar with sand.
I eased up the stairs towards the open slider, paused to arm myself with a greasy grill brush.
“Anybody here?” I shouted.
Nothing. I stepped into the kitchen of the place. Tidy. Unused. Naked counter. Empty drainer.
“Hello.”
Nothing.
The furniture in the main room was beach-rental ugly. Bulletproof upholstery in ungodly plaids. There was a Bible-school-worthy picture of Jesus perched on a donkey beside the front door. A yellowed newspaper clipping that was mostly a photo of a guy standing next to a fish. A stack of jigsaw puzzles in battered boxes on top of a chest against the far wall, which was directly under a massive TV fixed to a swivel mount. Knotty pine bead board everywhere — walls and ceiling both.
Another thump from deep in the house. Something soft and flailing about it. I eased along the back hall. The doors were all half shut. I pushed the closest one open and peeked inside. A cedar dresser. Two stripped beds. A sea gull hunkered on a mattress. It tilted its head to have a look at me. Flew into the far wall and bounced off.
When I backed out, it came along and followed me down the hallway. The thing slipped up once to peck my ankle but fell back when I gave it a look.
“Don’t ever,” I informed that bird, “promise shit to a dog.”
The second bedroom was empty and stripped as well. The bathroom looked untouched. I saw blood on the floor near the end of the hall. Smelled it a little too. The floor covering was some kind of rolled tile with machined pits and imperfections. The gore had collected in the fake mortar joints where it had skinned and crusted over. I knew well enough from years of policing somebody had been emptied out.
I pushed the last door open and saw, first thing, a bloody smear on one of the windows. There was splatter on the ceiling, more spilled blood on the floor. The blade of a hatchet was sunk into the top of a chifforobe against the side wall. The best I could stomach was a glance at the bed where a human lay hacked and dead. I caught a glimpse of entrails. Lacquered toenails. Freckled flesh and exposed bone.
That was enough for me. I retreated, driving that seagull before me. It veered back into its bedroom. I tried the phone in the kitchen, but it was dead.
I found junior where I’d left him. Monroe’s pickle jar was entirely full of sand. My cell phone was in my truck cupholder. It lacked the juice anymore to be mobile, so I snatched up junior and headed around the house, figured I could reach my king cab in six or eight minutes at a trot. But we got lucky, I guess I’ll call it. I’d gone hardly thirty yards when a steel gray Charger pulled off a side street. Light bar. Decals. KDH PD.
I waved and got a yip on the siren. That Dodge eased to a stop alongside us as the driver’s window came down.
The cop under the wheel was a woman with her hair pulled back tight and pinned like they do. Her wrap arounds were parked on the top of her head. She reached over and turned down her squawker.
“Problem?”
I nodded and pointed. “There’s a woman dead in there. Murdered.”
The cop shifted into park and threw open her door. “Hands on the car. Do it. Now.”
I set junior on the trunk and pressed my palms against the fender. That’s the way with cops anymore. The only good civilian is wearing cuffs.
Officer Meekins on the black, plastic tag on her shirt flap. She seemed rattled. Twitchy. I went slack for her every way I could.
“Who’s dead?” She ratcheted the cuffs down tight.
“I don’t know. His mother maybe. Found him on the beach.”
My fingers were tingling. She fished out my wallet and put me and junior in the backseat of her cruiser while she stood on the side of the road and read my details into her mic. Then she drove us the few yards back down to the driveway and unloaded us
.
“Around back,” I said. “The sliding door’s standing open.”
A thump from inside, and Meekins drew her gun.
“Seagull,” I told her.
She gave me that cop look like she’d heard enough out of me. Meekins shoved me towards the back of the house. She picked up junior and brought him along. We got planted on a deck bench and told to stay put. Meekins sucked a breath and stepped inside the house. She soon blundered back out and vomited over the rail. I got a glare.
“I just found her. That’s all.”
Meekins didn’t seem persuaded. She keyed her shoulder mic and raised a colleague. Dennis. She managed to tell him the milepost, but that was about it. We listened to his siren as he worked his way over to us. Meekins passed most of her down time throwing up. The sound of her heaving made junior cry. He held onto one of my belt loops.
Dennis soon came huffing up the back stairs and gave me a slack once over. I’d worked with plenty of his sort before. High school lineman gone to seed.
“Back bedroom,” Meekins told him. She only remembered to say, “Gull,” once Dennis was inside and out of earshot.
Dennis turned out to have a thing about birds and squeezed off a couple of rounds. He missed the gull, but the bullets passed through the wall and hit his cruiser. That bird had known quite enough of beach box living by then. He stalked out over the threshold and joined us on the deck.
Dennis showed up shortly thereafter to vomit onto the grill. I was beginning to wonder if KDH PD ever met with a homicide. Dennis decided he was finished before he actually was and so spewed a second time between his fingers.
The boss showed up shortly thereafter. He climbed the deck stairs trailing a pair of doughy patrolmen who might have been clones. The both had institutional crew cuts, unflattering glasses, and receding chins. I could only tell them apart because one of those boys had a wine-stained ear.
Cutler on the boss’ tag. He was fit and sixty. Ex-gyrene — no doubt about it. Ironed shirt. Creased trousers. A salt and pepper flat top all Butch Waxed up just so.
“DB,” Dennis told him and jabbed a thumb towards the open door.
Cutler glanced my way before he went in. The boys he’d brought stayed outside with Dennis. They all three treated me to the brand of study you usually get from cows.
“We like him?” one of the chinless boys asked.
“Maybe. Yeah,” Dennis said. “Don’t know.”
“Whose kid?” the other one asked.
Dennis glanced at junior like he’d not noticed him before. He appeared to think as highly of toddlers as he did of birds.
Cutler came back out and failed to spew. He stepped straight over to Meekins and quizzed her. They both kept glancing my way as she filled him in.
“Check these others,” Cutler instructed the boys, indicating the nearby houses.
Then he pointed my way and told Meekins, “Unhook him.”
She did, and I shook my hands until the blood was flowing again.
“So you were on the job in Virginia, North Carolina, and . . .”
“Georgia.” That from Meekins.
I nodded.
“What brings you here?”
“Dead dog.”
He waited.
“Came to spread her ashes,” I told him. “The ocean’s the only thing she ever liked.”
“And the kid?” He wiggled a finger at junior who eyed Cutler like he was daft.
I gave him the entire story. “Plug of hair around here somewhere.”
“You know the deceased?”
“Doubt it. Didn’t really look that close.”
“Let’s fix that.”
He made for the back sliding door and waited on the sill for me to follow.
“Door was standing open?”
“Yep.”
We stopped in the tidy kitchen.
“Don’t think I touched anything. Might have dropped a grill brush somewhere.”
I followed Cutler into the front room.
“Candy says you’re mall copping or something.”
I didn’t know any Candys.
“Meekins,” he told me and glanced towards the back sliding door.
“Something like that.”
“Why?”
“Hit a guy. Judgment went against me.”
“Need hitting?”
I nodded. “He made my dead dog dead.”
Even though we’d come inside for a good look at the victim, we both lacked the stomach to do much more than loiter close to her and glance. A strawberry blonde in panties and a bra, laid into with a hatchet. She was sprawled atop the bedspread on her back with her left leg bent at the knee and the other stretched out straight.
Ragged scraps of underwear were mixed in with gore and entrails. Lung. Intestine. Stomach, I guess. Liver or something as well. Blood all over. Looked like cast off. Offal stink mixed with cigarette. One bloody blue shower shoe on the floor.
We both fixed on the hatchet plunged into the chifforobe to keep from looking at her. It had a fresh edge, shiny ground bevels everywhere the blood hadn’t stuck.
Their part-time forensic guy was a pediatric surgeon from Tennessee. He’d come out a few years back on a fishing trip and had stuck and stayed. His name was Orby, but they all called him Doc-O. He was blunt and insulting as a matter of course and unduly pleased about it. His assistant, Janice, carried his gear and served as a reliable disappointment to him.
When Doc-O said anything to her, it was usually some version of, “Christ!”
Doc-O mounted the deck and blew smoke in my face by way of “Hello, nice to meet you.” Then he barked, “You coming?” and Janice climbed the stairs with a pair of oversized tackle boxes.
“Tatum here found her,” Cutler told Doc-O.
Doc-O shot his butt into the dunes as he gave me a sneering once over. Then he strolled inside and left Janice to trudge along behind him with the cargo.
“He seems nice,” I said.
“Where’s junior?” Cutler asked Meekins.
Candy made apologies to him. She’d been off in the driveway or somewhere doing something. Seeing to stuff.
She and Cutler decided he was under the deck and went squatting low to find him. I had a better idea and followed the path through the dunes to the house one down and then turned towards the beach, and there he was sitting just about where I’d first seen him.
He had Monroe’s jar lid in one hand. The other was shoved in his mouth. He stood up. A gust of wind hit him, and he sat right back down.
“Hey, sport,” I said. I dropped beside him.
He offered me the jar lid, and I took it. That freed a hand for my belt loop. We gazed out over the gloomy Atlantic. Rolling swell. Floating birds. Beach trash. A foamy tide line.
“Some day, huh?” I said to junior.
In time, he told me, “Ngharln.”
October 1, 2015
One More
The last of the free books for a while. The electronic edition of True Cross will be available for free on Amazon from Saturday (10/3) to Tuesday (10/6).
Here's what I've learned so far: the best price is always free. Last weekend I gave away about 1,200 copies of Warwolf. During that time the discounted ebook of Cry Me A River, marked down from $2.99 to $0.99, sold 3 copies. That's right -- 3.
I like free stuff as much as the next guy, but . . . really? It's hard to see how this book thing is a business anymore unless you're Nora Roberts.
So there . . . enjoy your free books, but not too damn much. Dog's still got to eat.
(If you got a free book and you read it, write an Amazon review. Say whatever you like, but please do review it.)
Here's what I've learned so far: the best price is always free. Last weekend I gave away about 1,200 copies of Warwolf. During that time the discounted ebook of Cry Me A River, marked down from $2.99 to $0.99, sold 3 copies. That's right -- 3.
I like free stuff as much as the next guy, but . . . really? It's hard to see how this book thing is a business anymore unless you're Nora Roberts.
So there . . . enjoy your free books, but not too damn much. Dog's still got to eat.
(If you got a free book and you read it, write an Amazon review. Say whatever you like, but please do review it.)
September 24, 2015
Yet Another FREEBIE
From the day after tomorrow (Saturday, 9/26) until Tuesday the 29th, the electronic edition of Warwolf will be free for the taking on Amazon (I hear it's hilarious) and the electronic edition of Cry Me A River will be only 99 cents.
So one free and one cheap. The dog's got to eat.
So one free and one cheap. The dog's got to eat.
September 18, 2015
Freebie -- Return of the Jedi
The electronic edition of Polar will be available for free on Amazon from tomorrow (Saturday) through Tuesday. Grab a copy.
And about the new author photo -- Goodreads hiccuped and my others got lost somehow. So yippee-io-ki-yay, melon farmers.
And about the new author photo -- Goodreads hiccuped and my others got lost somehow. So yippee-io-ki-yay, melon farmers.
September 12, 2015
Freebie -- the sequel
The electronic edition of Blue Ridge is free for the taking on Amazon until Tuesday.
September 6, 2015
Freebie
The electronic version of East Jesus South is available for free on Amazon through Tuesday 9/8. If you don't have a copy, go grab one.
August 22, 2015
OBX Again
After a summer of wandering, I'm back at the shore. The beach is still a bit crowded for my taste, but Stella the wonder dog couldn't be happier. I'd post a photo of her elbow-deep in the ocean, but I've no html skills and the instructions are giving me a headache. Imagine a wet dog in among a bunch of doughy white people with ill-considered ink. Surf's up, ya'll.
It's been a strange year professionally. The TV show I wrote last summer, an eight-episode thing called Tarnation, was optioned by a studio, and the producers are still trying to cast it. For various reasons, they're only able to submit a script to one actor at a time, which makes things very slow. Then the given actor will leave the script unread for many weeks. It's kind of maddening but pretty standard, I'm told.
Out of nowhere, a producer asked for permission to pitch a show based on the Rick Gavin novels. He works for the company that made The Lego Movie and has brought in a writer/showrunner for the pitch. All Rick had to do was give his permission. He's up to that. So it may turn into something (or nothing).
I rejiggered the strange YA novel I wrote under a pseudonym a year and a half ago. Revised it to the specifications of a couple of editors. They've both had it for a while. Maybe one of them will bite. Trade publishing has clearly not gotten any speedier in the past few years. It might even be a touch slower since publishing folk seem scared to take a chance on much of anything.
If this drags on too long, I'll release the book myself. It's kind of a hoot. I had to read it again to rewrite it and was very pleased not to hate it.
The new Ray Tatum novel is about a month away from completion. It'll get out there one way or another. I don't quite know what the plans are yet.
And there you have it. Nothing definitive. That's the phrase I'm getting tattooed on my calf. In Chinese.
It's been a strange year professionally. The TV show I wrote last summer, an eight-episode thing called Tarnation, was optioned by a studio, and the producers are still trying to cast it. For various reasons, they're only able to submit a script to one actor at a time, which makes things very slow. Then the given actor will leave the script unread for many weeks. It's kind of maddening but pretty standard, I'm told.
Out of nowhere, a producer asked for permission to pitch a show based on the Rick Gavin novels. He works for the company that made The Lego Movie and has brought in a writer/showrunner for the pitch. All Rick had to do was give his permission. He's up to that. So it may turn into something (or nothing).
I rejiggered the strange YA novel I wrote under a pseudonym a year and a half ago. Revised it to the specifications of a couple of editors. They've both had it for a while. Maybe one of them will bite. Trade publishing has clearly not gotten any speedier in the past few years. It might even be a touch slower since publishing folk seem scared to take a chance on much of anything.
If this drags on too long, I'll release the book myself. It's kind of a hoot. I had to read it again to rewrite it and was very pleased not to hate it.
The new Ray Tatum novel is about a month away from completion. It'll get out there one way or another. I don't quite know what the plans are yet.
And there you have it. Nothing definitive. That's the phrase I'm getting tattooed on my calf. In Chinese.
July 14, 2015
More to Come (honest)
I'm sorry to have been so long between entries here, but I've been moving around for the past couple of months, often without much of an internet connection.
I'll soon have news about TV and upcoming fiction, but everything is in the slog stage at the moment. I'm told it's better if I say nothing (I'm told that quite a lot).
More to come soonish.
I'll soon have news about TV and upcoming fiction, but everything is in the slog stage at the moment. I'm told it's better if I say nothing (I'm told that quite a lot).
More to come soonish.
March 16, 2015
Spring(ish)
Which means I had to reset my microwave clock.
Here's a brief TV update and a response to those of you who have been asking, "When are you going to publish another novel, deadbeat?"
TV first: A network (nameless for now) has sent the eight scripts I wrote through the executive food chain. That's a lot of reading for a lot of people (on both coasts), so it has taken a few weeks. Now the producers are negotiating with the network execs over casting. It's an elaborate dance, and I'm staying out of it entirely. The prospects of a show on the air, though hardly certain, are still very good.
Now to things bookish: I wrote what I consider a YA novel that was submitted a while ago to various editors. A couple are interested, provided I rejigger a few bits of plot. I conceived the book as the first in a three-part series. The editors want one stand-alone novel. I haven't quite figured out how to make that work. More thinking required.
I've also finished a chunk of a Ray Tatum novel that is in the hands of my agent. She's only had it a few days, and she'll decide what, if anything, to do with it.
Since I write for a living, I'm obliged to move in the direction of what pays. Just now, books don't. Scripts do. They're worth exponentially more than novels, so my primary focus has to be on TV writing.
I dearly love writing novels, but for me that's effectively a hobby at the moment. I say all of this by way of telling you that my output may be puny for a bit. There's stuff coming, but it could be a while.
Sorry. Dog's got to eat.
Here's a brief TV update and a response to those of you who have been asking, "When are you going to publish another novel, deadbeat?"
TV first: A network (nameless for now) has sent the eight scripts I wrote through the executive food chain. That's a lot of reading for a lot of people (on both coasts), so it has taken a few weeks. Now the producers are negotiating with the network execs over casting. It's an elaborate dance, and I'm staying out of it entirely. The prospects of a show on the air, though hardly certain, are still very good.
Now to things bookish: I wrote what I consider a YA novel that was submitted a while ago to various editors. A couple are interested, provided I rejigger a few bits of plot. I conceived the book as the first in a three-part series. The editors want one stand-alone novel. I haven't quite figured out how to make that work. More thinking required.
I've also finished a chunk of a Ray Tatum novel that is in the hands of my agent. She's only had it a few days, and she'll decide what, if anything, to do with it.
Since I write for a living, I'm obliged to move in the direction of what pays. Just now, books don't. Scripts do. They're worth exponentially more than novels, so my primary focus has to be on TV writing.
I dearly love writing novels, but for me that's effectively a hobby at the moment. I say all of this by way of telling you that my output may be puny for a bit. There's stuff coming, but it could be a while.
Sorry. Dog's got to eat.
