Tag: Thriller

Oh, how exciting! A brand new never-before-seen chapter!

Enjoy.

Tom stood in his room in his sister’s farmhouse. The drive from Naval Station New York to Acra gave him much to think about and none of it made any sense. Stacey even admitted none of it made any sense. She told him every inch of her legal training and years on the Bar told her to get herself checked into a psychiatric hospital.

“Just so I’ll know, Sis, what’s stopped you?”

She didn’t answer and started in on her story. He listened and started a regimental inspection checklist in his head..

She’s disillusioned with the clients Osborne, Nash, and Vogel are getting – check.

Hank Ingram pulls her aside one day and confides he’s had moments in his fifty-five year history with the firm, too – check.

He tells her to take a sabbatical, go on vacation, go on a cruise, he even says, “May Jesus forgive me, go fall in love for a weekend,” and that was one of the few times he ever mentioned his faith in the office, so Stacey knew he was concerned – okay, and check.

She went on a sabbatical – check.

To Rio.

“Rio? You’ve never shown any interest in anything south of Trenton before. What prompted Rio?”

“You going to let me tell my story?”

He shrugged and rubbed Frank Sinatra’s ears. They left I-278 long behind and were on a straight shot up 87 towards Albany.

She has no idea why Rio, and she’s doing the tourist thing, and there’s a little hidey-hole stall like a newspaper dealer’s in the middle of town between two skyscrapers that’d do The City proud, and there’s this little old brown-skinned, wizened-face woman with this beautiful long black hair with flares of gray in a thick braid all the way down her back wearing a black bowler hat and a verdant billowy blouse and skirt that feels like a deep Amazonian forest –

Tom mentally threw the checklist out the window. “Verdant? Verdant? I never heard you use that word before. You take vocabulary classes or something?”

“Can I finish?”

“And feels like the Amazon? Not reminds you of or makes you think of?”

Stacey ignored her brother and continued. “Over all this she’s wearing the most beautifully multi-colored coat, like Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors. It looks like a patchwork but it’s not, more like a Pollack painting than anything else, and she’s sitting in the stall behind a table smoking a pipe.”

“The table’s smoking a pipe?”

Stacey rolled her eyes. “People are walking past like she’s not even there. There’s a sign arcing above her written in lush rainbow colors: Profesora Anna. She smiles at me and waves me over. I feel sad for her because everybody’s ignoring her.”

Tom gently scratched under Frank Sinatra’s chin. “And she pulls out a deck of cards and starts a Three-Card-Monty hustle on you, right?”

“Shh! There’s a chair on the other side of the table from her. I sit and she pulls out this ancient looking pack of the most bizarre looking cards each with six sides and all sorts of pictures. I thought it’s some kind of jigsaw puzzle but each hexagonal piece has stars and moons and planets and animals and all sorts of other symbols.”

“Russian Tarot. I’ve seen a set before. They’re passed down through families, though. I don’t know if you can buy them anymore. Was she selling them?”

“No, she hands me the cards face down and tells me to pick as many cards as I’d like from anywhere in the pack, so I took a couple here and a couple there and three or four from the middle and two or three from near the end.

Tom kept his eyes on Frank Sinatra. “She spoke English?”

“No, not a word.”

“When did you learn Brazilian Portuguese?”

Stacey looked out her window. “I didn’t.”

Tom rubbed Frank’s ears. “But you understood her?”

Stacey turned back to face traffic. “I notice you’ve lost that “let’s tease the kid sister” tone in your voice, big brother.” She reached over and tugged on Tom’s seatbelt.

“What are you doing?”

“Making sure you’re buckled in. You think what I’m telling you has holes in it so far?”

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

 
Rhonda Gilbert lost her Company tail in a fifteenth-floor custodian’s closet at Trump Tower. The custodian’s closet contained one of her many New York City caches, one of thousands across the globe. Wherever she posted, she used a mathematical formula based on the host city’s name to determine which buildings to use, which floors to use, and what to cache there. LiquidKey – a sweet little Special Services gadget – provided access to any mechanical lock. A Special Services app provided access to electronic locks.

Each cache contained a complete makeover. In this case, the athletically thin, black suited, middle-aged woman with thick, hip length blonde hair went in and an older, matronly woman with thick glasses, a slight lisp, ruddy complexion, and dark, Mediterranean features came out.

Rhonda enjoyed playing both sides. She enjoyed having her own island which nobody knew about. She enjoyed the Russians paying her while they figured out how they could resurrect their empire, what shape it would take and who would run it. She enjoyed going to them, not waiting for them to come to her, with bona fides of a high-level US intelligence/security weapons research group they knew nothing about.

She offered them some comfort. “Don’t beat yourselves up too much. Most of the people who should know about it don’t know about it.”

Irregular meetings were set up at various hotels – dives to five-star – at odd intervals and wherever her missions took her.

Lots of the stuff she told her handlers returned a nod, a “good job,” a “just continue what you’re doing.”

But everything changed when she mentioned Shaman to them, the US’ latest and greatest attempt to determine if ESP and now labeled PSI abilities existed, and if so, how to screen for them, how to foster them, how to develop them for strategic and tactical purposes.

One or two or her handlers completely lost their composure when she originally brought it to their attention. Many sat forward. Most reached across the table for the files like greedy children seeing handfuls of candy for the taking. A few knocked phones off their cradles to make sure they got their candy first.

She, of course, remained calm, cool, and composed, something she learned to do in high school; reveal only what you want revealed, or reveal something completely opposite to your true thoughts and feelings; lessons learned thanks to the repeated, ongoing, incessant, never ending insults, the emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, and let’s not forget the soul-scarring embarrassment she suffered at the hands of students, teachers, administration, neighbors, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles.

The lessons were locked in place by the middle of sophomore year; she no longer showed what she thought or felt, and remembered telling her worthless priest-father-confessor, “Getting no response is no fun. Even they get it’s no fun besting an idiot, and if that’s my safest game, I’ll play my safest game.”

In the middle of her junior year she saw a matchbook with BIG MONEY and INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL on the cover. Beneath them was “look inside for details.” There she read “Draw a camel and answer these three questions Yes or No” with a postal address at the bottom.

She drew a horse and answered each question with “It depends.”

Three weeks later a limo pulled into her parents’ driveway. A nicely tanned gentleman in a tailored three piece suit got out of the back, smiled at her, walked up her parents’ steps, and offered his hand. “Ms. Gilbert? Ms. Rhonda Gilbert?”

The driver kept the limo at a quiet idle while the nicely tanned gentleman held his hand out and smiled.

“Who’s asking?”

He handed her a card. She read

 
She laughed and handed the card back. “Got it.”

He explained who he was, the organization he recruited for, and explained a few mysteries she’d wondered about most of her short life. “Remember that matchbook test you responded to?”

She cited color, print, number of matches in the book, the address, the stale cigarette smell of the book in her hand, the feel of the roughened cardboard in her hand, even the direction matches had been struck based on the marks on the striker.

“Just what I hoped you’d tell me. Remember anything else?”

She shrugged and recited the day she found it, the weather, what she wore, who she talked to, who talked to her, counting out her change to pay for the envelope and stamp, … She stopped her recitation, cocked her head, and frowned at him. “How much detail do you want?”

“That’s quite enough, thank you. You have a talent, Ms. Gilbert. You’re hyphethymesic.”

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

Yes, rewrite #4.

And no, I still don’t want to talk about it.

Except to offer what’s happening is probably going to end up in An Experiment in Writing about getting the voice correct (which I’ve done before in experiments 15–18), so perhaps not so much about getting the voice correct as letting the characters do the work.

Yeah, that’s it. Let the characters do the work. Or Arguing With Your Characters. Or Arguable Characters.

Whatever I decide to call it, it’ll be up sometime this month.

Vincent Quarrals watched Monique Modine exit Martin’s store from deep in the shadows of the Kristoffersen’s barn. Stacey Knox headed south a few minutes earlier.

He considered walking over when he saw Knox pull in, decided no. She seemed okay enough. He read up on her at the state capital using what little Monique knew as a starting point, and felt there was more, something beyond her litigation histories, but had no idea what.

She bought the Campbell’s farm. He never noticed her in town before. What, did she come into town on a lark, saw a broken down farm badly in need of repair with a for-sale sign on it, and decided hot damn, that’s for me? One of the top lawyers in New York City decides to go country?

Bullshit. Only a flake would do that and she didn’t seem the flake type.

Did she even know the Campbell farm’s history?

Sad place if ever there was one.

The Stocktons owned the farm since dirt was young. A Stockton niece, Maddy, married big, strapping Al Campbell, whom she met while she nursed and he MPed in Korea. They moved back to his hometown, Manchester, NH, and he joined the police force there.

The Campbells had two children, twins, Al Junior and Blanche, and the whole family’d come out for two weeks each year when Al Senior took his vacation. Once school started, Al Junior and Blanche came out for entire summers and loved it.

That’s when tragedy struck. The first of many. ‘Nam claimed whole lines of the Stockton family, accident and disease claimed most of the other. The Stockton’s entered their golden years with only Al Junior and Blanche to help them, and even then only in the summers.

Tragedy struck again. One hot August night Maddy called long distance. Al Senior’d been shot. He wasn’t expected to last the week. Al Junior and Blanche had to come home immediately.

But they hesitated, said they didn’t want to go home. It wasn’t until the Stocktons threw them out that they got on a bus.

And when Blanche got off the bus, Maddy Campbell saw why she didn’t want to come home.

Vince had no idea who got Blanche pregnant. He wasn’t even sure if it was somebody in Acra or somebody back home. She didn’t come here that way, but Vince was young at the time and probably wouldn’t have noticed if she was.

Maddy took a second-shift job in one of the mills to keep the family going.

Five months later Blanche delivered a still-born babe and never told her mother who the father was.

End of her sophomore year she started to swell again, and Maddy Campbell wants to know what she did to raise such a harlot. People she’d known for years stopped talking to her, Al Junior and Blanche stopped going to high school games and gatherings. One night Al Junior steals a car, and he and Blanche are apprehended coming out of a New York City abortion clinic.

Then one night Maddy Campbell comes home early, walks into her house, and starts screaming. She gets her husband’s revolver and starts shooting up the house. She almost hits Blanche, wings Al Junior, and turns the last shell on herself.

Mrs. Stockton got a call, got on a bus, and did what had to be done. Stayed with them until they graduated – Vince couldn’t imagine what those last years of high school must’ve been like for them – got the house in order, put it on the market, and had Mr. Stockton come out with the pickup to bring them home.

The Stocktons were never the same after that. Mrs Stockton turned bitter and snappy, and Mr. Stockton looked like he was hoping for the grave, which he was granted just a few months later.

Al and Blanche bought the farm with their inheritance. Turned out Al had quite the head for business. He stayed for two years, grew the farm, hired two hands, left Blanche to care for Mrs. Stockton and went off to U of Wisconsin Racine on a scholarship. Got his MBA in Finance in three with honors, came back, converted one of the backrooms into an office, and put a sign out front, Brunswick Investments.

He’d go up to RPI, SUNY-Albany, down to Marist, listen to students give their dissertations, and always picked which dissertations could turn into profitable businesses. He mortgaged the farm, financed winners, used that to buy back the farm, finance more winners, and bought up more and more land surrounding his farm.

Things went well until Mrs. Stockton wandered off one day and where to nobody knew. No body, no clothes, it was like she left the planet.

It only got worse when kids went out drinking in the Campbell’s woods and said they could hear some old woman calling them.

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters