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Book Review: Not Gonna Die in the Dark

I read and reviewed Not Gonna Die in the Dark by Adam Archer, and I recommend it to you very highly!

The main character really pulls you into this story. Suspenseful scenes keep you turning pages. It’s very well written too. Make sure to read the excerpt from the next book at the end, it gives you some info about Maggie’s situation that you, if you’re anything like me, have probably been hoping for.

It’s the story of a girl in high school who’s in the process of emancipating herself from a disinterested father when she’s attacked by a mysterious stranger. Scary things start happening to Maggie, and there’s a whole series after this free series starter for you to learn about them.

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Sneak Peek at Iron 3

This is the unedited, raw manuscript of the opening scene of the third Sherman Iron mystery. I’ve been stuck on this for a long time, and I hope by letting my friends and readers have a look at it, I can mobilize myself to finish the story.  Remember: Unedited! Have mercy about the typos, they’ll get cleaned up long before it’s published. The cover and the “Forging Iron” title are also tentative.

***

The County Clerk and Recorder had a service dog, and it was a real struggle for me not to pet it. He was a golden retriever with a sleek, freshly-brushed coat, giving every impression of being asleep right next to me. If I could just scratch between those ears and whisper “who’s a good boy,” everything would be right with the world. I could feel it all the way to my bones. 

Alas, it’s kind of a faux pas to distract a blind person’s guide animal, so I used my hands for taking notes instead. It was, after all, my job.

I’m Sherman Iron, I’m a reporter for the Hunter Post.

Tall, skinny, and entirely-too-light-haired for my own liking, I wore my jeans and hiking boots almost everywhere, including to the County Commission’s public hearing on zoning issues that evening. But in a change from my old addiction to T-shirts, I wore an oversize red and black flannel shirt, untucked, hanging loose and far past my belt.

The reason for that was riding in an inside-the-waistband holster on my right hip. The loose plaid lumberjack shirt concealed a revolver.

I covered the crime beat. Murders, burglaries, casino robberies — these were my stock in trade. With the tide of illegal drugs rising higher every day, the job got more dangerous all the time. Last summer I’d had to use an ancient over-under hunting shotgun as my only weapon against thugs carrying 9mm submachine guns, and I had vowed to change that. So a new acquisition nestled secure and invisible under my big wool shirt.

I liked my job. I liked cops. I particularly liked the prosecuting attorney. I liked writing about crime.

Politics? That I did not like. But tonight I had no choice. My colleague whose job it was had called in sick.

The Hunter Post had a guy who wrote government and election stories. He covered the Congressman and the Senators every time they came through town. He wrote up local races. He had all the big deal connections in both parties, and could get his call answered if he dialed the Governor’s cellphone.

He also had pneumonia. So my new city editor told me it was now my job, at least for the next week. My ill colleague dropped into my lap a brand new story about money in politics, a tip about the first question to ask, and a wish for good luck before he exhausted his energy and fell back asleep. 

Thus, cell phone in hand, voice recording app launched, I left behind Rhonda Comings the Clerk and Recorder and her eminently huggable golden, and made my way to the front of the room as soon as the meeting ended.

With Halloween coming up and an election not long after, autumn had seized firm control of the local weather. The forced air heating of the county courthouse dried things out so thoroughly I was afraid if I blinked, my eyelids would stick to my eyes. Outside, yellow leaves reflected the streetlights back into the fourth-floor windows.

A gently curved head table dominated the front of the room. Rows of cheap audience seats stretched from it to the back wall. A podium and microphone stand poked up in the middle of the table’s arch, like a baby tree in the middle of a freshly-mown lawn. Members of the public and county employees who came to report to the commissioners were supposed to speak from there.

An unassuming, stain resistant berber carpet impressed no one but didn’t distract. Behind that curved table were three leather executive chairs that looked like each of them cost more than everything I owned, including that brand new handgun, which was not cheap. It seemed to me like someone spent the entire facilities budget on their chairs, and forgot about the people who’d have to attend meetings.

One of those chair-lovers scurried for the back door as I approached, but I caught him before he could get away. The classic monk’s fringe of silvery hair made a kind of halo of seniority around his head, while deep furrows crisscrossed his face like the famous canals of Mars. Spectacles slid down almost to the edge of his nose and distorted the sides of his eyes through their coke bottle lenses. A smartwatch poked out from under the sleeve of his jacket; the sportcoat and khaki slacks came from Wal-Mart; I knew because I had passed by the same choices when I went to buy my new flannel button-downs.

My disease-ridden colleague had told me what question to ask first, so I popped it out right up front.

“Commissioner, is it true you spent a hundred thousand dollars of your own money on your re-election campaign?”

His eyes widened a bit, and he eased backward, crossing his arms over his chest as he did, making the cheap jacket bunch up a bit. The corners of his mouth settled down like the foundation of a cheap house.

“That’s entirely legal under the campaign finance laws.” 

Ole the political reporter had been right. Springing that on him out of nowhere caught him off guard.

“I know, Commissioner, it’s just a lot of dead presidents. I’m curious why.”

Commissioner Ambrose Pryor had recovered his verbal balance. When I asked him about the money, I apparently caught him off guard, and his defensive response about campaign finance rules reflected it. Now, he threw me some spin to try to recover.

“You can’t put a value on serving the people of Hunter County. I’ve invited Montanans to invest in my campaign, and they have. It wouldn’t be right for me to ask others to chip in if I wasn’t willing to bear as much of the burden as possible myself.”

I dutifully made a note of his answer, then, “What are you planning to do with the money?”

“I’m running for re-election because I have a vision for our community. Communicating that vision to the people is the heart of running for office.”

“So, TV ads then?”

“Our campaign plan calls for a diverse spectrum of markets.”

I nodded, noted it down, and thought, TV, in other words.My sometime-semi-friend Gil Farshaw’s job was safe at least. He had been promoted from “weather guy with occasional news duties” to a full time real reporter. A hundred thousand bucks to his station ought to keep him paid for at least a little while. Heck, with what they paid local reporters these days, Commissioner Pryor’s hundred grand might just be paying Gil’s salary for years.

That could have been enough for a story. This wasn’t my beat, I was just filling in for a colleague. And I didn’t care about politics, except for my girlfriend’s re-election campaign. 

But something was bothering me.

Commissioner Pryor bought his clothes at the big box discount store same as me. As one of three elected Commissioners for Hunter County, he drew an annual salary of $65,000 per year. Not bad… way better than a reporter makes. But how could he afford to part with more than a year’s salary?

Investment-wise, it penciled out. Six years as county commissioner multiplied by 65K was almost 400 grand. For him to spend one hundred grand to win four hundred grand definitely worked in terms of profit and loss.

But did he really have it to spare? And if he did, why was he buying “George” brand made-in-China sportcoats?

Curious, I made a small wager with myself.

The county courthouse had a parking garage right next door, and I was willing to bet that the Commissioners had reserved spots there. I left the commission’s public hearing on zoning behind, rode the elevator down to the first floor, resisted the temptation to stop in at the County Attorney’s office, and walked through the bitter October air to the parking garage. The open cement half-walls offered almost no protection from the wind. Cold I may have been, but I also won my bet. The first 10 spaces in the garage were all marked reserved, and the third one in particular bore a sign that said, “Commissioner Ambrose Pryor.”

Parked in it was a no-longer-white 1999 Ford pickup, rust all over the bumper, front fender painted in gray body primer rather than the same color as the rest of the vehicle. I looked through the window. Striped fabric seat covers failed to hide massive rips in the seat. Fast food wrappers littered the floor.

A faded, green hardbound book with no title, that looked a bit like an accountant’s ledger occupied the passenger seat. While there was no title, someone had scratched a word on the front cover with a knife. I couldn’t read it through the glass in the dimly lit garage, though.

But I didn’t need to know about his reading material to answer my own question: Pryor wore cheap clothes and drove a broken down ancient clunker. If he had a hundred thousand bucks to spend, why not spend some of it fixing this junkheap up.

I had one last item to check, but I needed a computer to do it. I headed out on the windy fall streets of my home town, watching golden leaves drift to the sidewalk in streetlamp haloes. The moon over the Rockies lit my path back to the Hunter Post.

My paper lived in a white and brown pebbled concrete building downtown bought and, fortunately, paid for back in the days when local dailies used to get fat on ads, literally and figuratively. Corporate was always talking about selling this building and making us rent space in a minimall, but thank goodness so far the rents on minimall space were too high to fit the budget.

At this hour, the front doors were closed. Entering through the employees-only entrance on the side, I left behind the chilly almost-winter evening, strolled across the newsroom to my desk and sat down to turn on the computer. Moments later, I was looking at the county treasurer’s property tax records, where I found the residence address for one Pryor, Ambrose.

Armed with the address, Maps Street View gave me a look at the house. Paint peeled off the faded wood, helped along by the winter air. A rain gutter had pulled away from the roof. The chain link fence to the back yard sagged and was pulling away from its frame in places.

It didn’t take an ace investigative reporter to reach the obvious conclusion. Ambrose Pryor couldn’t spare a hundred thousand bucks.

So where did it come from?

That question could wait. I had a story to file before deadline, and we can’t just randomly speculate about people’s financial health in the paper. I would need proof before I could do that, and it wasn’t going to come in before the morning edition.

I led with the “That’s perfectly legal” quote because it sounded defensive and gave the impression he had something to hide. His smoother lines, I tucked in at the back. Political talking points aren’t news, but sometimes honesty is. I clicked submit on the content management system, and my 600 words went winging off to the editor to prove that I had done as I’d been told.

Then, my job technically done, I put my feet up on the desk, put my hands behind my head, and let my mind go back to the question I’d been asking since I talked to him. How could Ambrose Pryor afford a hundred thousand bucks?

The picture of his house on Street View wasn’t necessarily 100 percent reliable. I’d have to go out there in person at some point, if I decided I cared enough about this story to work harder. But his truck? That I’d seen with my own eyes, and it was a piece of junk. You didn’t need a green accountant’s ledger on the seat to know that…

My train of thought stopped in its tracks.

All the hair on my arms stood up, followed by goosebumps. A profanity tumbled out of my lips, gravel out the back of an overfull dump truck.

The ledger!

At once I was out of my seat, pushing the employee door open and heading for the county courthouse. The night wind nipped at my cheeks, and I knew Montana weather well enough to know snow lay in our future, but at that moment I didn’t care. I walked as briskly as I could back to the parking garage next door to the Hunter County courthouse, but I was too late.

Pryor’s pickup was gone.

With it went my chance to take a look at that hardbound green volume with no printed title but a word carved into the cover with a knife.

Which was too bad, because I was pretty sure I knew what the word was.

I had seen that green book before, but not for almost fifteen years.

It belonged to my father.

And the word on the front was “Sherman.”

***

Like it? You can get the audiobook of Irons in the Fire, the first Sherman Iron mystery here on Amazon, here on Audible, and here on Apple.

You can get the e-book version of Irons in the Fire here, and the e-book version of Iron Law here.

Do you have any thoughts at all? Hit that contact form!

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Christian and fantasy poetry

Like many a writer, I occasionally dabble in poetry. Alas that my efforts generally earn the famous “negative score on the Pritchard scale.” (80’s trivia points if you got that).

Today I had the opportunity to review the work of a poet who scores much higher in both how important her poems are, and how artfully they have been rendered.

Across the Miles by Annie Douglass Lima is worthy of your time if you like poetry, like Fantasy (especially Tolkien) or love Jesus. It starts imperfectly, but “Minaret” and “God’s Metronome” soon show you there’s a poet at work. The last stanza of “Hsi Tou” is impressive. Some powerful emotions are evoked in many of the poems. Even imperfect poems usually have a stanza or two that work very well. There’s quite a bit of direct Tolkien inspiration, which is fun for any lover of Fantasy. Sometimes even the poems that aren’t supposed to, still make you feel like you’re in Middle Earth.

Check it out here.

Connect with the author on Facebook.

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Work in Progress

I wanted to give my friends and readers a look at my current work in progress. Just pulling a number out of my ear, I’d say it’s about 25% finished right now. Tentatively, I’m thinking about “Iron’s in the Fire” as a title, with the idea that it could be the first in a series with titles based on common sayings about Iron (Cold as Iron, Ironclad, Iron Maiden, etc.)  The hero, as you may have guessed, is named Sherman Iron…

***

“We’ve been out here for an hour. Nobody’s home. Let’s do this.”

I sat in the van, with its tinted windows and uncomfortable bench seats, peering at the house across the street. The woman of the house had left about 74 minutes ago, climbing into her Toyota Camry and motoring away. The lights had been off ever since. The couple’s children had gone away to college years ago. 

The husband’s car was gone.

“Are you sure about this? It’s breaking and entering.”

“I know. And no, Sherman, I’m not any more sure than you are. But we talked about this. If it’s true he’s got actual documentation in there, we’ve got the story of the decade. And we’ll be busting a corrupt judge and helping get a drug dealer off the streets. And we might find out who killed my little girl. Any one of those is worth it on its own. Together? Let’s go. Or let’s drive away. If we’re not going to do this, staying here is a waste of time. But either way, we’ve waited long enough.”

The speaker was Everett Talbot, my fellow reporter at the Hunter Post. His shaggy mane of gray hair and his craggy, wrinkled face made him look like an ancient lion who’d lain too long in the Savannah sun. He spit a sunflower seed shell out the window and pressed the resealable bag back together.

And the ‘Sherman’ to whom he referred? That’s me, Sherman Iron. Like Ev, I was a reporter at the Post. Unlike Ev, my hair was blond and short around the sides in a businesslike style. I had a long way to go before I picked up laugh lines and crows’ feet, let alone Ev’s collection of deep furrows. If he was the lion then I, as the ancient reporter terminology went, was the cub.

Fresh out of J school, I took a night shift job at the Hunter post, the daily newspaper in my state’s second-largest city. But the second largest city in Montana would barely qualify for hamlet status compared to the coastal metroplexes, so the town newspaper wasn’t exactly swimming in cash or overflowing at the news desk. 

Ev popped open the passenger-side door of the van.

“Coming?”

With a sigh and a silent farewell to my once promising career, I followed my mentor into the black hours of the winter night, questioning my sanity the whole way.

I had wanted to dress in all black, since we were committing our erstwhile crime in the black of night. But Ev said wearing black was actually not that good for nighttime concealment. He proposed a different plan.

We’d ordered a magnet car door sign from a printing company that said “Mitchell Plumbing.” We both wore coveralls with the same logo on them, and bulky tool belts with wrenches and pliers hanging from them. A foreign world to me, but Ev made a good point: 

When the toilet backs up, people don’t wait for business hours to call a plumber.

So dressed like we were prepared to wade through a flooding bathroom, the two of us strolled calmly across the street, right up to Judge Harris Whalen’s front door.

Or at least, Ev strolled calmly. My head twitched back and forth like a smellhound on the trail of twenty different deer. I felt like eyes must be watching us from every direction on the street. I kept thinking that, if only I could look quickly enough, I might catch the neighbor’s curtain pulled slightly back, and eyes peeping out from within.

No such luck. Or rather, all the luck. No one looking seemed by far the luckier outcome, and I never saw a single eye on us. That didn’t keep the sweat from popping out of my forehead, or my heart from trying to climb into my throat. But it did keep us from getting arrested.

For now.

Ev had taken a wild, insane chance while we were covering the trial last week. When the court was in recess, Ev happened to see the Judge’s phone sitting on his bench right before we, along with the rest of the crowd, cleared the room. He had time to tap the judge’s birthday into the unlock screen, and it worked! Which was almost as miraculous as the fact that no one caught him doing it.

Armed with that knowledge, we tried putting the Judge’s birthday into his smart car door, and that worked too.

Based on that, we deduced that Judge Whalen, 68, was the kind of man who used the same password for every web site, and the same pin for every device. So as we — “calmly” — walked up to his front door, we were betting that his birthday would open the smart lock, and we’d be able to stroll in just like any plumbers called in for  midnight sewage emergency.

“This is an awful big gamble, Ev,” I whispered.

Instead of replying, the older reporter simply knocked on the door. To my ears, each rap of his knuckles sounded like claps of thunder.

“Are you crazy? What if a neighbor hears?”

“Then we just made ourselves look more legitimate. It’s good if someone hears that we knocked.”

“But what if someone answers the knock?”

“Even better. Then we definitely don’t want to break in.”

But after a minute, no one had answered. From within the darkened house, a cloud of silence billowed out, stifling my breath.

Ev reached for the smart lock’s keypad.

“We can still back out,” I whispered, with more than a little hope in my voice.

Instead of replying, he tapped in the Judge’s birthday — 090952.

An electronic click, a heavy series of sliding and thunking noises, and the door was open. Ev turned the handle. Two steps for him, two steps for me, and we were criminals.

I stood inside Judge Whalen’s house, knowing that simply drawing breath there could put me in his courtroom.

“This is insane,” I hissed. I felt like the fact of having committed a felony was clouding out all the rest of my mind. I couldn’t think about anything else except being led away in handcuffs.

“So is staying here any longer than we have to,” the older man replied. “Come on, Sherm! Let’s finish this.”

“Serious, Ev, I’m not sure I can go through with this. This is breaking and entering.”

“Sherman, you know he let Lawson off the hook. You know it was entirely his ruling that kept that evidence inadmissible. You know he was bribed. You know Lawson is going to keep selling meth as long as no one stops him. And you know as long as Judge Harris Whalen is trying all the drug cases in this district, no one is going to stop him.”

We’d been through all that in the newsroom, back when we were still law-abiding citizens. The logic made perfect sense. The cops wouldn’t gamble on accusing a judge unless they had rock solid evidence, because if they ticked him off it could mess up every single prosecution they had moving through the system. We had a reliable source who said that very rock solid evidence could be found in the judge’s home.

We had a plan to get it.

It’s just that now, as the plan reached the stage that we had always known was the most dangerous, Ev Talbot had more courage than me.

Reluctantly, I followed him into the house.

“You take the master bedroom on the second floor. I’ll start in one of the kids rooms. Don’t trash the place like in the movies. But look for hiding places.”

I followed him up the stairs, and over his shoulder my mentor reminded me, “Don’t just skim, Iron. Don’t rush it. If we do a half-assed job, we’re risking our careers and our freedom for nothing. Search hard.”

I walked into the Judge’s master bedroom and just stood there staring for a moment. What was I supposed to do? Search thoroughly but don’t trash the place? The two were not compatible.

A few paintings hung on the walls. I didn’t recognize any of the artists. One by one I eased them away from the wall to check for hidden safes behind them, or whatever a hiding place might look like. I found a briefcase in the closet. I put the same birthday into the combination lock, and it opened. Nothing that looked like evidence of accepting bribes.

Behind the bed’s headboard. Behind the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. In the toilet tank. Nothing.

I emerged from the master, and Everett had already started on the second bedroom. So I went down the stairs and applied the same techniques to the living room. I shifted furniture to look under it, then carefully shifted it back. I checked behind framed artwork and behind the TV. 

I froze when I heard a car engine start down the block, and didn’t move again until my heart rate came back down to a manageable level.

While I was standing there envisioning myself being arrested, Ev came down the stairs and started on the kitchen.

“This is futile, Ev. I’m finding nothing except dirty underwear.”

“If it’s here we have to find it, Sherm. Come on. Let’s go check the basement together.” Ev spoke, then held the door open, allowing me the dubious honor of going first.

The Judge and his wife lived in a modest two story home with a door in the kitchen leading down to the basement. As soon as we opened the door and started down the steps, I knew it wasn’t a place they used. The bare wood, uncarpeted staircase signaled an unfinished basement, and at the bottom I heard the distinctive sound of my rubber-soled boot on bare concrete.

I couldn’t find a light switch.

I stumbled into the dark room, feeling along the wall for a switch. Some light came down from the kitchen, but it wasn’t enough, and I experienced that unique kind of straining against nothing that one gets when trying to see in the dark. My hands kept slapping the wall, looking for a way to turn the lights on.

It wasn’t my hands that found something. It was my feet.

My boot kicked something hard, heavy and metallic. With a scraping sound it skidded across the concrete floor. Following the sound, I tiptoed carefully up to it, not wanting to kick it away again, and when my toe barely touched it, I bent over to see if I could identify it.

Hard, pebbled grip. Hard steel. And a warm barrel.

I had found a gun. And one that had recently been fired.

***

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Or check out The Prophet Conspiracy for something to read while you wait.

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The Prophet Conspiracy – Audiobook Free Sample

The Prophet Conspiracy:

Buried beneath the streets in the holy city of Jerusalem, American tourist Siobhan McLane discovers an ancient inscription hidden for a thousand years. But the past will not give up its secrets easily. Before translation can even begin, terrorists want her dead and she finds herself framed for murder. With a disgraced former government agent as her only ally, Siobhan will have to confront her own past and discover the truth about the history of the Middle East. Peace in the most volatile region on earth hinges on a thousand-year-old lie, but she’ll need all her knowledge and all her courage to survive and warn the world.

Check out what the critics say:

“A taut and captivating story with religious and political overtones, one that matches a feisty heroine with an ancient secret … Tightly woven and compelling, moving the action forward at a brisk pace … The dialogue here is particularly solid, sounding realistic and still readable … scenes come alive.” — Judge,  5th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published eBook Awards.

 

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Listen to a free sample of the upcoming audiobook below:

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Hand of the Union: Excerpt

Check out this free excerpt of my upcoming sci-fi, space opera novel Hand of the Union.

***

The big singularity cruisers never came down to the surface. They could be as much as 30 kilometers across. The energy required to get them down to a planet’s surface, then back up, was just too great. The science of wormhole drives demanded ships that huge, even if it meant few humans ever saw one up close. Most people only ever beheld the giant open circles as they perched in high orbit, serenely surveying their port of call.

Tia Dynn gazed up at one now. It stung to be looking at someone else’s singularity ship, rather than her own. But that was the purpose of today’s meeting. It wouldn’t help anything to get emotional about it before the negotiations even started.

Trying to calm herself down, she whistled a centuries-old tune from Earth as she waited for the elevator to bring a passenger down from it. Said passenger wasn’t the only cargo that would be coming down from the ship, of course. No one would send an FTL ship just to deliver one person. The cost in exotic matter and antimatter was far too high for that.

Not the only cargo, but definitely the most important.

The elevator was making a single trip for him, and only later would it begin the heavy work of shuttling down the main freight.

“I don’t like the fact that they’re sending a Hand,” said a voice to her left. “They would normally just send an Agent. The Union smells something about this that we don’t.”

“I’m rather excited to meet him,” Tia replied. “Most people go their whole lives and never meet a Hand.”

“Most people aren’t the executive of a planet,” her companion replied.

Tia acknowledged the fact with a half nod and an arched eyebrow. Her companion — a member of Felicitas’s Board of Directors — had the right of it. She needed to keep her mind on the planetary corporation’s financial situation, rather than being starstruck.

A slender woman, she stood with perfect posture and a face composed like artwork. Her blonde hair piled atop her head in an elaborate style almost like a golden crown or headdress. She wore a navy blue business suit in the classical style, with a skirt and blazer. The fashion wags might snark about her conservative clothing choices, but Tia adopted the look deliberately for the usually incompatible properties of being distinctive and inoffensive.

Above her, the elevator cable stretched seemingly into infinity. Scintillating in the morning sun, it looked like a line of diamond heading straight for the singularity cruiser. But it faded into the distance before it reached it. All around her, the fabled emerald green of Felicitas’s equatorial vegetation spread out like an ocean. The warm sun of dawn filled her with energy.

Her companion was older and male, and with a much more cutting-edge sense of style. His suit was black, single-piece, snug and form-fitting, leavened only by a bright red swath of fabric hanging from his neck that took the place of a tie.

“I don’t suppose you’ll come right out and tell me why you invited me, will you?”

Tia flashed the famous smile that looked so good on VR. She turned slightly, the sun glinting off her hair. “Ardo, it’s just the right thing to do. The Union paying us back is the biggest business before the board right now. The opposition deserves to be as fully informed as my own people.”

He harrumphed. “I thought not. Well, once again history gets to see Tia Dynn being fair and aboveboard.”

She rolled her eyes, shook her head, and turned away, going back to her whistling. Ardo, though, wasn’t ready to let it rest yet.

“You’ve made such a show out of your quest for exactly the perfect spouse, the VR is going to go there if you don’t have a better explanation than that. The famously-single corporate executive, turning her courtship into a political triumph by wooing a leader of her opposition on the board.”

“Oh drop it Ardo. I am not making a publicity stunt out of my personal life. I barely even have a personal life.”

This was the price of living with 24/7 VR news coverage and a political system with too much superficiality. Every tiny detail of her life found its way into a stream. Ardo was being a jerk about it though. Usually Tia didn’t mind his sarcasm that much, but he was a bit more bitter than usual today.

And besides, the so-called courtship was too flimsy to make a good PR stunt. One disastrous ex, two one-off dates, and that was that. Hardly the stuff of campaign theater. He was right, though. The media lapped it all up, regardless how fruitless.

A ring of bodyguards and functionaries surrounded them. Some chattered among themselves, some looked up at the singularity ship in orbit, a reminder of what their world had so recently lost. Most — especially the security personnel — looked either at Tia and Director Ardo Khalif or out for possible threats.

Many decades of terraforming gave their world a comfortable, stable climate. The elevator station was, of course, sited in the most comfortable, stable part of it. It nestled in the greenery of the equator, far from the oceans that could have sent severe weather at it. The warm temperatures would have made standing outside in their business attire uncomfortable, except that the climate systems were supplying cool mountain breezes for the day. The western hemisphere’s main range rose in the distance to their west, rocky peaks higher than any on Earth, but far enough away that the elevator faced no serious seismic threat from the fault line the mountains marked.

“What are you going to do if they don’t pay?” her companion now asked.

“They have to. It’s in our contract. The Union always pays legitimate claims, that’s why people join.”

“But they’re sending a Hand instead of an Agent. Maybe they don’t think it’s a legitimate claim.”

“It is a legitimate claim. I don’t know any more about the Gentle Hand than you, but supposedly they can read minds. If so, he’ll know what’s in both of our heads. He’ll know we didn’t fake it. Is it even possible to fake the loss of an entire singularity ship?”

“It’s a big galaxy, and FTL cruisers’ entire reason for being is that they can go anywhere they want within it. When you can go anywhere, it can’t be impossible to hide.”

“Ardo,” the Executive replied, “they need antimatter and exotic matter to move. Those aren’t just lying around. You have to get them from a refinery, and refineries are the Union’s most heavily regulated facilities. That means they can’t keep a pirated singularity ship flying. Sooner or later they’d have to show up on grid. Whoever ‘they’ are in this hypothetical conspiracy of yours. There’s no mystery about this, and no reason for the Union not to pay. It’s the same thing that happened to Primus II and Fealtana. We invested a century’s worth of income into the Blue Nebula, and it was lost in the vagaries of wormhole travel. That’s why people buy insurance. It’s why the Union exists. And if the Gentle Hand is everything people say, then this fellow will know that no one in the planetary government could have stolen it or pirated it, because we didn’t. He will know the truth.”

“All of that makes sense to me. But you can’t deny they’re sending a Hand, not an Agent. Agents are who the Union sends to transact routine business. Hands are who they send to solve the problems that are too big for agents. You’ve never seen a Hand, I’ve never seen a Hand. Most people go their whole life and never meet so much as a single one. The Union isn’t sending him here for nothing.”

Their argument ended when the elevator door opened. Out walked not one but six people. Every last one of them wore the uniform of the Gentle Hand.

For a moment, the two Felicitans simply stared in shock. Six Hands? Had anyone anywhere ever seen six Hands at once? None of the VR dramas about them ever showed six in one place, Tia and the Director traded nervous glances. Finally they bowed before the new arrivals. Tia spoke only after taking a second or two to catch her breath.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Felicitas.”

***

The uniform of a Hand of the Union drew its fame almost exclusively from VR. Every time a major criminal enterprise fell apart, there was often virtual reality news coverage that featured a member of the Gentle Hand at the center of solving the problem.

Where there was no news, the entertainment industry took over, producing crime dramas and action stories with Gentle Hands as the heroes. But as far as the real world? As far as real humans wearing the uniform? Tia had never seen one before. Nor had Ardo Khalif. Nor had 99% of the population of Human Space.

The uniform jacket stretched from the highest of collars down to mid thigh, a dark tan unrelieved by any change of color. A tightly-fastened seam divided the shirt down the middle. Each one wore a name badge affixed to his or her chest, and a tiny gold pin at the collar: an open hand, upside down, palm out.

Each of the six Hands wore pants of the same color as their tunics. But where smooth, starched plain fabric covered their upper bodies, the trousers billowed out and bulged with a veritable explosion of pockets, loops, and fasteners. They wore rough two-tone boots mostly of black, but accentuated with the same flat dark earth color as the rest of the uniform.

All were excellent examples of physical fitness, as might be expected from officers of the Union’s most prestigious law enforcement arm. All wore the khaki uniform easily and proudly, knowing that the clothing by itself said everything that needed saying about their abilities. Even their facial expressions were the same, for the most part. Smiles, eyes wide and inviting, head angled ever so slightly down as if right on the edge of bowing all the time. They must have practiced it.

Only hair and height set them apart. Two women were among them, one wore her hair long and braided, a deep red Tia admired. A clumsy bun held the other’s brown hair atop her head. Among the men, brown hair predominated, with a leaven of black and gray. The gray haired one, bearded and short, led with barely noticeable gestures and angling of his head. The others looked where he looked, smiled when he smiled, and bowed when he bowed. Somehow Tia thought she recognized him.

But before she could figure out how she could possibly have seen him before, the man next to him pulled her gaze over like a magnet.

He was the youngest — a few years younger than Tia. He was also the tallest, the most attractive, and the only one not wearing the trained, deliberate expression of friendliness and openness. Instead, he gazed at her as if everything around them were a barren wasteland, and she the only flower in it. His eyes met hers, and all at once the cool breeze of the climate systems abandoned her, and Tia felt a bit warmer.

His pitch black hair gave him a countenance of shadows, as if without speaking his face could promise hiding places and secret retreats. His smooth complexion and easy smile reflected his youth. He was probably about two and a half decades old.

Of them all, only he looked anywhere but where the bearded leader looked. Whereas their chief took in the security guards, the surroundings, the elevator itself, and Ardo; the young one never looked anywhere but Tia.

She found herself a little bit shocked by how quickly her thoughts fell down this unproductive path. While she daydreamed about a handsome young hero, the Hands were in the process of returning the Felicitans’ bows in perfect unison.

Their leader, the gray-haired, bearded man, spoke. “My name is Ven Tremmer. And this,” he waved at the younger man, “is Langston Wheeler. We’re from the Union of Human Space. We’re here to serve you.”

Only then did the executive realize who the bearded Hand was. Ven Tremmer was a legend. Of those news VR stories and fictionalized accounts, he was personally the subject of several. Ven Tremmer broke up the only successful exotic matter theft in human history. Ven Tremmer was the most decorated Hand in the Union. Ven Tremmer was supposed to have retired to become a professor for young Hands long ago, an honor richly deserved after the most celebrated career in the organization’s history.

And the Union had called him out of retirement and sent him here? To Felicitas? To a quiet colony world that — until their first FTL ship disappeared — had never made any news? The great paragon with not just one assistant but five more Gentle Hands?

What exactly was going on here?

And yet, even that was not enough. When he named himself, he also named his young companion. Even with glaring evidence that her planet was in crisis, even with a bona fide hero of the Union before her, still her gaze went back to the younger, as ifcaught in a gravity well.

What had Tremmer said his name was again? Wheeler. Langston Wheeler. All the Hands were physically fit, but there was something different about this one. It wasn’t just the way his uniform clung to the powerful muscles of his chest and arms. Well,maybe a little bit.

His probing eyes communicated some sadness in him, but also some kind of fire too deep to make out clearly. His whole bearing exuded a level of confidence she’d never seen. It seemed like Ven was the teacher and Langston the student. Somehow, though, it was Langston Tia thought she’d want by her side in a crisis. Or in a social setting. Or with a fun, lively musician playing dance music. Or, actually, in any situation. She almost let her whistling habit slip out in front of them.

Somehow, she felt more aware of herself physically. Now she regretted her professional instinct to dress conservatively, and wished for something fashionable and eye-catching, like the one-piece suit Ardo had worn.

At last, the obvious question hit her. Was it all in her mind? The mental powers of the Gentle Hand were a thing of legend. Their telepathy was what made them anything more than intensely-trained martial artists. Maybe he simply wanted her to think he was attractive, and so she did?

It was a wasted thought anyway. They were Hands. That meant they had a genetic trait that must be strictly controlled. Young Mr. Langston Wheeler could be as mysterious and intriguing with his face as he liked, but he would never be allowed to consort with anyone other than another Gentle Hand.

Her fellow Felicitan fixed an impatient stare on her, and Tia remembered she was supposed to be introducing the two of them. “My name is Tia Dynn, Executive of Felicitas. With me is Ardo Khalif, a member of our board of directors. It’s an honor to meet you.”

Ven Tremmer’s baritone voice resonated with assurance and confidence. He made no sign at all that he even noticed her long pause when she was fantasizing instead of paying attention. For a moment she could imagine that voice alone being what made him famous. “I don’t think any of us have ever been personally greeted by a planetary Executive before. You do us too much honor.”

He held eye contact with her, and his wrinkles multiplied as a kindly smile bloomed amid his beard. For a moment, she saw her grandfather in front of her.

“Why… why thank you. But surely it’s you who are showing us excessive honor. Never mind Ardo and I, I’m not sure anyone in all of human space has ever seen six members of the Gentle Hand in one place before.”

His warm laugh felt like an invitation to laugh with him, though Tia didn’t quite get what was funny. She smiled, and he cleared up her confusion.

“There are a few people in human space who have seen six Hands at once,” he replied, still laughing with his eyes, if not his mouth. “But none so respectable as you. Or so charming. It’s an honor usually reserved for criminals and terrorists.”

Ardo interrupted with the obvious question: “Then why are we so lucky?”

“Ah. To business then. You are correct, Director Khalif. I am old — I should be too old to be in the field anymore — and easily distracted. Forgive me for the delay. Shall we start the meeting?”  

They went inside, where the elevator station’s personnel had prepared their most formal conference room. Tia and Ardo’s brigade of bodyguards and bureaucrats followed. Once inside, even the planetary executive had to catch her breath as she took in the opulent decor. Real wood flown in from Earth lined the walls. Luxurious chairs of the finest synthetics enveloped a long, rectangular table. Like the walls, it was made out of Earth wood, then inlaid with a particular shiny metal found only on Felicitas. Each piece of the conference room was costly beyond measure. It existed to greet off-world visitors, who were usually worth impressing.

Tia and Ardo took seats in the middle of one side of the table, all but necessitating that the six Hands sit across from them. Tia started the conversation, conscious as always of how the words would sound when someone read them later.

“You have our gratitude for coming so quickly. I’m sure you can imagine that the loss of the Blue Nebula is a grievous financial blow to Felicitas. We’re eager to begin the noble task of rising from the setback and overcoming it. The settlement of our claim with the Union will make a real difference to our people.”

All five of the lower-ranked Hands fixed their full attention on her as she spoke, leaning forward. They moved almost as one, giving her the distinct impression that their deliberate expression of attentive and respectful body language was a trained and chosen action. The eldest Hand spoke, as usual. As he did, all the other Hands very delicately shifted their gaze to a point midway between the two of them, to show they were listening to him but still acutely concerned with Tia. All except the youngest, whose eyes hinted at a daydream going on behind them when he forgot to look away from her.

Tia wanted to smile — it had been a long time since she’d had a handsome, attractive man mooning over her — but she finally managed to keep herself to business. She trained her eyes on Tremmer. Try as she might, though, even forcing herself not to look at him, Langston Wheeler’s presence pressed in on her mind as if there were some physical contact. She wondered again if it was just something about being a Hand. They were supposed to read minds, be telekinetic, to know the future… Maybe something about those supposed mental powers caused her to feel this way.

She missed a few of the elder Hand’s words while lost in her musings, but his conclusion grabbed hold of her attention tightly and drew it right back in.

“…until we can be sure whether a financial settlement is the appropriate adjudication of your claim.”

Fortunately, since she had missed the context of those last words, Ardo didn’t wait for her to reply.

“Excuse me? You’re not going to pay? And why not? What have we paid our premiums for all these years?”

“Please bear with us, Director Khalif. Your shareholders have endured a major loss, and you want to be made whole, and to make them whole. That speaks highly of you as a leader. Our job is to determine the facts of the case. We don’t yet know what the situation is, so the Union can’t know what’s the best way to return you to that wholeness you rightly seek. We will honor your policy with us. We need to know what happened so we can make the act of honoring the policy also an act of mutual respect.”

All of Ven Tremmer’s carefully chosen soothing words were wasted on her. Tia felt the blood drain out of her face. If the Union didn’t pay, Felicitas would be ruined— ruined under her stewardship. Half the planetary product had gone into the Blue Nebula for a century —  for far more decades than she had been alive. The people of the colony world started work on it almost as soon as the first permanent structure was built on their new home.

Shareholders owned the Blue Nebula instead of investments, instead of savings, and instead of retirement accounts. The income of flying cargo between worlds on a singularity cruiser was supposed to support the entire living population of Felicitas, and those yet to come. If the ship was lost and no compensation was forthcoming, it wouldn’t quite mean starvation. But it would mean centuries of backbreaking labor for every person — every shareholder, she reminded herself with some trepidation — who lived here.

And, most likely, it would mean those shareholders would vote new directors onto the board, and those new directors would install a new Executive. And the textbooks would record Tia Dynn as the most disastrous leader in Felicitan history.On the great moral scale, that couldn’t compare to her people’s financial devastation. But it still scared her.

Now she spoke instead of Ardo. “The Blue Nebula went into a wormhole and never came out. It is lost somewhere in whatever transdimensional reality exists there. That sometimes happens with singularity cruisers. Not often enough to make FTL travel too unsafe, but often enough that people need insurance for the cost. We all know these facts — they’re the whole reason the Union of Human Space exists. If you will not pay when an event occurs for which your organization was founded, then why should anyone pay premiums to you?”

She concluded with words she at once wished she could have back. “If you’re not going to pay our legitimate claim, we will ensure that your other policyholders know that your guarantees are not reliable.”

That would be on VR if anyone here leaked. “Dynn threatens Union” was just too juicy of a headline. She regretted her carefully planned invitation to Ardo. Having the opposition at the meeting once seemed like a great way to share the blame if something went wrong and buttress her own reputation as an even-handed leader. But after she said an idiot thing like that, she no longer really wanted her main political adversary in the room.

Ardo’s head twitched toward her — he recognized the faux pas as quickly as she did — but it was Ven Tremmer, the gray-bearded elder Hand who spoke. All of his colleagues adjusted their gaze for the center of the axis between him and Tia.

“Please, Executive. Please bear with us. Our goal is the same as yours — that shareholders of Felicitas emerge from this situation financially whole and prosperous. We simply need to take some time about doing it. We know your board does its diligence, we know you know the history of the Union. We exist to deliver many forms of security to those worlds that choose to join, not just insurance against loss. Even so, in your diligence you must surely have observed that over the centuries we’ve paid nearly a dozen claims for the loss of FTL cruisers, and never denied one. We are not here to swindle you. We simply want to make sure that the right thing is done. We’ve taken note of a possibility here of which you may not yet be aware—”

Part of Tia’s mind wondered about that last sentence. What possibility weren’t they seeing? But the rest of her had slipped into panic mode about the risk of not being reimbursed for the Blue Nebula. “The only possibility I need to be—”

But even as she spoke, all six Hands leapt up out of their chairs, trading alarmed glances.

“I can’t get a sense of which door—” the younger one, Langston, blurted out. He looked from side to side.

“It’s bigger than that,” one of the female Hands replied. Unlike the junior, she didn’t glance anxiously from side to side, or let her voice rise. She simply spread her feet wider, adopting a ready posture, lifting her hands up to a fighting stance.

As the younger one looked wildly about and the other Hands simply prepared themselves for whatever they sensed, the eldest said to his young pupil, “Protect the Exec—”

And then the world collapsed.

Something like a beam of light sliced through the conference room, bisecting it ceiling to floor. Screams and shrieks of agony rang out at once when it chopped through people as well as surroundings. One half of the room began to pull away from the other, and the ceiling and walls collapsed from the loss of structural integrity. A corner of the wood table fell into Tia’s lap, sliced by the light as it whipped through a second time.

Beside her, Ardo screamed. He’d been caught by the light. Her head glanced toward the noise, then jerked instinctively away when she saw what remained of him. Whatever the line of light was that had destroyed the conference room, it had cut him in half. From his chest up he was still alive to scream, but Tia knew at once that couldn’t last long. She thought she could see the legs of one or two of the Hands in the chaotic pile of construction materials that used to be the other side of the table. They kicked briefly then went still.

Then a chunk of the ceiling fell down on top of the table that was already in her lap, pinning her there. The weight hurt, but compared to what Ardo’s last moments were like she felt ashamed to cry out in pain. She was torn between her revulsion at the gory mess he had become, and her desire to help him. Decency won out and she tried to turn to him, but the chunk of ceiling pinned her.  She couldn’t even roll over.

Tia could only reach to the side and take his hand, squeezing it hard as he screamed. She couldn’t do anything about it. He was going to die. But at least she could do better than turning away from him in disgust.

Around her, dust and debris made it impossible to see much more than her immediate area. Where she had been looking at the six Hands, now there was nothing but a wall that used to be the entire elevator station’s floors above her, decorated with some bloodstains.

Then it hit her. The line of light that cut the room in half. Had it been the… could it be…

The space elevator was a marvel of engineering, but in concept very simple. A cable of carbon nanotube microfilament stretched from the planet’s surface up to a counterweight in the highest of orbits, well beyond geosynchronous. Elevator cars ran up and down the microfilament to the docking station where singularity ships and sublight ships docked to send people and cargo down to the planet.

If the cable broke loose…

It would whip wildly around as the orbital counterweight carried it loose from its anchor. In the end, the elevator was little more than a super high tech string with a weight on the end. If the string broke, the broken end would swing  back and forth as the counterweight pulled it away. The high tech composite filaments that made up the cable possessed reflective properties. Braided into one unit as they were, they might indeed scintillate like a beam of light.

If the elevator cable actually did break, it could easily cause the kind of destruction she had just witnessed.  But that was only the beginning.

If that was indeed what had happened, Felicitas’s ability to receive supplies from the rest of Human Space was gone. Space elevators existed because they were orders of magnitude more energy efficient than rockets. They cut the cost of moving weight up and down from orbit by vast amounts.

If Felicitas lost its space elevator, they’d need rockets to get back up. Ships would be dropping re-entry capsules into the oceans to get things down. It would destroy their economic efficiency. If the elevator had truly just been destroyed, Felicitas had lost its highway to the stars, and would have to rebuild in the most inefficient way possible.

As what remained of Ardo ceased screaming, she realized that the others in the room had already gone silent too. Was she the only survivor?

She tried to plan. Could she save herself? The debris pinning her down was much too heavy to move. Could she cry out for help? Yes, but were there other survivors in the building? Had the microfilament destroyed the entire station? Would anyone hear her plea for help?

“Is anyone there? Hello?” Her shouts, at first, drew no response at all. Perhaps they weren’t audible over the grinding and shifting of cement and metal.

And then the shard of concrete pinning her down began to move.

Slowly it simply lifted off of her, floating into the dust and smoke-filled air above her. In its place, she saw the younger Hand, Langston Wheeler. Coated from head to foot in dust, bleeding from a cut to the left side of his face near his eye, he simply stood there with his eyes closed and a hand held out in front of him, open, palm up, as if pushing something up from underneath.

The concrete must have weighed tons. It had hurt to have all that weight pinning her down, even protected by the table as she had been. However much it weighed, Tia remembered well that she couldn’t even budge it when trapped under it. Now, it floated above her like a particularly sharp-edged cloud.

She had seen it in VR often enough. She had watched such things in fictional streams like “Not So Gentle” and “The Hand And The Fist.” Now, seeing the reality of it hanging in front of her, Tia’s fear of dying alone here vanished at once, replaced with a confidence that everything would be alright.

“Oh thank God,” Tia said, but Wheeler didn’t reply. She was about to say something else to prompt him to speak when she noticed that more debris was floating through the air. Rubble and ruined building material drifted away until a path led from where she lay to the outside of the building.

Even when he’d cleared a way out, he didn’t immediately reach out to her. Instead, he knelt beside Ardo’s remains. He closed the man’s eyes. Under his breath, she barely heard him whisper something.

Then he stood, at last extended his hand to her, and said, “Let’s get you to safety.”

***

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Win a Kindle!

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This contest ended at midnight, June 3, 2017. Subscribe to my emails to learn when the next contest is!

Here’s your chance to win a free Kindle Paperwhite!

My novel, The Prophet Conspiracy, used to be exclusive to Amazon Kindle. But I decided to launch it on Barnes and Noble Nook, Apple iBooks, and Kobo as well. But now, it’s brand new on those retailer sites, and it needs some reviews. That’s where you come in!

Each honest review of The Prophet Conspiracy earns one chance to win the Kindle Paperwhite.

So here are the rules:

  1. You must have read The Prophet Conspiracy to enter.
  2. No purchase is necessary to win. If you don’t have a copy of The Prophet Conspiracy, I’ll get you a free review copy. Just click here and let me know you need one.
  3. Entries will be tracked by e-mail address, so you will need to provide it, but subscribing to my e-mail list is optional.
  4. After the close of the contest, the winner will need to give me a working snail mail address in order to receive the prize.
  5. Post a review at Amazon.com, Kobo.com, Barnes & Noble, and/or Apple iBooks.
  6. Submit a screenshot of the review using the form below.
  7. Fill out the form completely to enter.
  8. If you review The Prophet Conspiracy at more than one e-book retailer, you may fill the form out again with a new screenshot of each review. Every screenshot of your posted reviews gets you one entry, up to a maximum of four.
  9. The deadline to enter is midnight, U.S. mountain time, June 3, 2017.
  10. On June 4 2017, the winning entry will be selected by random number generator and notified by e-mail.
  11. If, after three days, the winner has not replied and provided a postal address, another winner will be selected. This process will be repeated until a winner receives the Kindle.
  12. Reviews must represent your honest opinion. Star rating and positivity or negativity of the review do not matter. Good or bad, each review gets a chance to win.
  13. Provided it’s on one of the four retailers included in the contest, the retailer website on which the review is posted does not matter. No matter where the review is posted, it gets a chance to win.
  14. Contest is void where prohibited by law.
  15. Must be over 18 to enter.

Good luck! Check out the bowengreenwood.com privacy policy by clicking here.

Learn more about the Kindle Paperwhite by clicking here.

Oh, and one last thing: This will not affect your chance to win at all, but if you want to do me a favor, the retailers where I most need new reviews, in order from most-needed to least-needed, are as follows: Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble Nook, Amazon.com, Kobo.com. So if you pick the good ones, it’ll be better for your humble narrator. But it makes no difference for you. The chance to win is the same.

 

Contest ends June 3, 2017!

The submission form has been removed because the contest is over.

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4 people in Deeper Secrets

The cover of Deeper Secrets
The cover of Deeper Secrets
The cover of Deeper Secrets

For long-time fans of the series, some of these might be a reunion, but for new readers, let’s take a look at the four main people caught up in the events of my new political thriller Deeper Secrets!

Ben Wiles: A young Congressional aide bucking to advance. With an ambitious Congressman and a Chief of Staff who might be more than he appears, Ben’s road to the top in politics looks long and rocky. But when he interrupts a murder in a grimy back alley in Washington D.C., his career and his very life are in danger.

Colleen Cristina: a cyber security consultant wide-eyed at her first inside look at politics. Once she worked on the cutting edge of artificially intelligent software, but walked away when she developed ethical concerns about the system’s power. Now she’s an independent consultant hired to deal with a computer virus no one else can stop. Risking her life wasn’t in the job description.

Senator Mike Vincent: rising political star trying to change the system for the better. He wants to be President, but the insiders just want him gone. When the cyber attack on his campaign turns all too real, Vincent must decide whether his cause is worth his life, and that of the people around him.

Alyssa Barr: last heir of one of America’s great political families, and the real fundraising power behind Vincent’s campaign. She glides easily down the halls of power, never giving a hint of the secrets she’s seen and kept. But Alyssa has her own dark past, and leaving it behind won’t be easy.

Interested? You can sign up here to get an e-mail when Deeper Secrets is released. You even get the prequel novel for free just for signing up!

Or, you can follow Bowen Greenwood on BookBub to get an alert when Deeper Secrets comes out.

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Deeper Secrets: Cover Blurb

The cover of Deeper Secrets
The cover of Deeper Secrets
The cover of Deeper Secrets

A string of terrorist bombings rocks the nation’s capital. A young congressional aide interrupts a murder in a grimy Washington alley. A mysterious, unstoppable computer virus upends the race for the White House. The response: a powerful new computer system that reads everyone’s posts, emails, tweets, and more, then decides who’s a threat. But this technology has power beyond anyone’s nightmares, and democracy itself is caught in the crossfire.

To be the first to hear when Deeper Secrets is released, sign up here! You even get a free prequel novel for subscribing.

Or follow me on BookBub, and you’ll get an alert when Deeper Secrets is released.

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Deeper Secrets: Free excerpt

The cover of Deeper Secrets
The cover of Deeper Secrets
The cover of Deeper Secrets

Deeper Secrets is my new novel, coming on Amazon, iBooks, Nook and more this month. In the following excerpt, we meet protagonist Ben Wiles as he accidentally interrupts a murder.

###

He scanned the crowd for danger. In his mind, he rehearsed the techniques he might need: how to break a one-handed grab, how to break a two-handed grab, how to counter a right punch, how to counter a left. From the first day he tied on a belt and tried the martial arts, his old teacher told him that if he ever used the skills to always take it seriously. Bouncing at the Neon might be just a night job to earn extra income, but Ben never stopped following that advice.

Around him, the dancers swirled like dandelion seeds on the breeze. The music sounded more like gale force winds, though. Hard, loud, with bass that rattled his teeth, and more beats per minute than he expected to have dollars in his paycheck, the DJ’s current selection drove a frenzy.

The back door to his right slammed hard in its frame. Hard. This wasn’t caused by some drunk stumbling down the alley and bumping it. The metal door clanged as if someone had driven a battering ram into it.

Ben eased out of his leaning position on the wall, standing up straight. Brows furrowed, neck craning forward slightly, he peered at the door, then eyed it warily. Whatever made that noise was big enough and strong enough to rattle a steel door in a brick wall. It wasn’t something he felt any great eagerness to face.

Then he heard a cry. Not even one word, just most of one:

“Hel—”

Help. Someone out there was shouting for help. Or at least they had been. Something cut it off.

Praying he’d find nothing more than a delivery truck that had missed the loading dock, Ben flipped the hidden switch that would stop the fire alarm from sounding when he cracked the door open. He eased it open.

It didn’t want to move.

Surprised, Ben stared at the door for a moment, wondering whether he really wanted to look outside.

He pressed down the handle and gave a firmer shove. This time it yielded.

As he opened the door and stepped out, a heavy thump barely made itself heard over the music from inside. Poking his head around the door, Ben saw the cause of the sound.

Bloody, messy, dead, a man sprawled in the alley. He had, apparently, been leaning up against the door before Ben opened it and knocked him down. Possibly, him collapsing up against the door in the first place had been the cause of the sound that had drawn Ben outside.

Snow covered the grime of the alley, now stained with blood. A biting wind hurried between the buildings. Ben’s T-shirt felt woefully insufficient even before he finished opening the door, let alone once he stepped outside.

A very definitely live man stood next to the dead one. Ben stared at him for half a second, taking in close-cropped hair shorter than his own and an unshaven jawline in the glare of the club’s exterior lighting. He wore a baseball cap and a leather jacket.

Then the man lunged at him.

Ben’s right arm delivered a downward block, but it wasn’t enough. The stranger hit him hard in the gut. He grabbed Ben’s black T-shirt and pulled him out into the alley. All of Ben’s techniques for breaking a one-handed grab started from a standing position. Halfway laying on the ground, being held up by the scruff of his shirt, wasn’t an ideal way to execute them.

He curled his fingers into a claw-shape and raked them as hard as he could over his attacker’s shin. The man cried out and dropped Ben, who scrambled to his feet.

When he did, he saw a pistol aimed right at his nose.

Where before Ben had picked out many details of the man’s face, now he could see nothing but the weapon. He felt his skin tingle as a tide of adrenaline rose in his system. He found that his limbs would not respond to mental commands to move. The barrel of the gun looked wider than the gates of Hell. He realized, at that moment, that he had never before known the meaning of terror. Now, as he saw a gun pointed right between his eyes, he learned what fear really was.

Yet, from somewhere deep in the depths of his psyche, a lesson from his college self-defense classes bubbled to the surface. He swore he was hearing the instructor’s voice right in his ear.

“The chances of this working are fifty-fifty at best. Never do this. Never, never, never try this. Unless your life really is on the line. If you’re about to die, only then should you try this.”

Well, his life really was on the line.

Ben put his hands up in the universal surrender position but down a little bit closer to his head rather than fully extended into the air. The difference might have been attributed to an understandable fear of moving with a gun pointed at his head.

“I surrender,” he said. “Please don’t kill me.”

“Sorry,” the man with the gun said. “Nothing personal. It’s just that you can identify m–”

Before he finished speaking, Ben slapped both his hands inward and across in front of his face, as fast and as hard as he could.

His left hand hit the barrel of the gun, shoving it away from his head and off to his right.

His right hand slapped the inside wrist of his attacker, intended to sting the nerves in his hand and make it almost impossible for him to keep a firm grip.

Between the two, the gun pointed wide of his right ear when it went off.

The gunshot sledgehammered Ben’s hearing into powder. Nothing went through his ears to his brain except a painful ringing. It scared him so badly that he failed to follow through on the rest of the technique. He should have grabbed the grip of the pistol, stripped it out of his attacker’s weakened hand, broken his finger in the process, and shot the man, according to his old teacher. But even if Ben had the nerve to shoot someone, he had lost all voluntary control of his muscles in the panic from the gunshot. The gun fell to the ground, fortunately not going off again.

Behind him, the door to the club opened.

“What’s going on out here?”

The baritone voice of one of the other bouncers was a lifeline thrown to Ben. It was a whiff of bright clean hope to nostrils awash in the scent of the grave.

The man with the gun moved only his eyes. He glanced at the newcomer, then back at Ben, then back at the newcomer. Confronted by yet another witness, he scooped up his gun, turned, and sprinted down the alley. The attacker disappeared into the night.

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