Sunday Scenes - Gut-Check Green (Sonoma Knight #3) - Peter Prasad

Summary: 

Enjoy a controversial, fast-paced climate fiction thriller set in California wine country.   Gut-Check Green dances with diabolic characters and an action-packed plot to explore the future of veterans’ services and our food supply.  It raises disturbing questions about the drift toward over-dependence on fertilizers and GMOs.  Here is a conspiracy so plausible it will rattle your dinner plate and change the way you sip chardonnay.  PI Jake Knight goes undercover to chase environmental terrorists. 

GUT-CHECK GREEN: Chapter 2
Just over the vineyard-clad Mayacamas Mountains, twilight descended on wet meadows.  Roving coyotes lurked beyond the murk and gloom.  They crept closer and sniffed the wind, hackles alert, fixated on the scent of new birth. 


Jake Knight, an Afghan vet, former US Army Ranger, and licensed P.I. with a sheep cheese operation, watched for their bright yellow eyes and slinking shadows.  He worried about his new crop of baby lambs. If he dozed, a bold coyote might snatch a new kid for dinner and tear its throat out with one snap of its jaw.  Well-oiled and close, a sawed-off shotgun rested at the ready, loaded with rock salt.   


The broken-down brown rocking chair Jake sat in tortured his rest.  No matter how he did it, rocking hard, rocking easy, one leg over the elbow rest or bent like a yogi, nothing worked.  He was exhausted.  His eyes begged to sleep and his haggard brain refused, buggered if he knew why.


 He twisted in the junk-pile reject rocker at the entry to the feed barn, doors swung wide to clear the odors of alcohol, blood, fluids, iodine and manure.  The rain-wet breeze curled up the hill pasture and brushed at his dank hair.  A lone compact bulb dangled overhead, keeping the damp dark out, too weak to damage his eyes stuck on night vision. 


The diabolical rocker mocked him.  He swore its woven-cane seat was shrinking, the legs too short, seat too low, arm rests splintered and squeezing in.  He cursed the blind man who built it for an extremely short idiot.  Further confounding him, the goddess of sleep beckoned just beyond the pale arc of light on the wet earth.  She taunted him with her diaphanous dance no matter how he pleaded, refusing to cradle his head, instead torturing his brain with fatigue.       


Exasperated, Jake grinned at himself, then at it everything in his universe, then he chuckled, gone giddy and flooded by the absurdity.  He knew sensory deprivation can trigger dream quests; sleep deprivation worked too.  He wrenched his thick shoulders, double-cracked his neck and filled his lungs. Flummoxed, a groan escaped his lips and gusted over his itching, unshaved chin.  His grin tipped sideways, fell from his face and raced away chasing a yellow beam back to join the crescent moon.


Hell bent for relief, he ripped lose with full-throated laughter to echo off the warped redwood planks above.  His brains wanted to tumble out his ears as bland infant pabulum.    His laughter helped wick away his exhaustion.  He was miles past the last threads of his tether.  A man wasn’t meant to birth one hundred baby lambs, even when they cleaned up pure-cuddly and snow-white soft.


Behind him, his brother Wally raked a spot where a mother ewe had delivered twins.  He carried the bloody straw to an industrial composter.  He wore headphones, mouthing vocabulary from a Farm Journal CD, How to Assist at Sheep Births.  Jake had memorized every word and added a few of his own.  Then Wally called out in a fever, “Holy shit, Jake!  Come quick.  This birth is going way wrong and I don’t know what to do.” 

Where To Find Gut-Check Green About Peter Prasad

Peter Prasad is pen name for a San Francisco writer for 40 years.  Prasad means ‘divine food’ and he intends his stories to be fun, entertaining fiction.  With a degree in journalism from University of Florida ’72, he spent ten years as an advertising and travel writer in Johannesburg and Tokyo.  Stateside, he managed a retreat center for a Buddhist group, helped launch a dozen high-tech companies and became a green energy expert.  He earned an EPA Energy Star in ’04. A father with two daughters, Prasad is a Florida native, a diver, kayaker, trekker and traveler; solar champion, workshop leader and speaker; husband and Boy Scout in recovery.  Now he writes crime thrillers full-time, and is working on his next novel set in Florida, VOTE VEDA – The Tea & Crackers Campaign. 






Prasad enjoys dialog with pro-active readers and emerging writers. 

Email: PeterPrasad.SF@gmail.com