The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Boaz Scorekeeper, written in 2017, is my second novel. I'll post it a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
I showed Matt my secret hideout. First, the house with its two converted bedrooms. One for teasing short stories from my imagination. The other, for taming runaway and incoherent facts into case stories that would connect defendants to a juror’s heart. After showing Matt an old wood-fired cook stove in the kitchen, we walked outside onto a small patio with two lawn chairs. I asked him to sit down because I had a confession to make.
I told him that Gina was the only other person who had sat here since I bought the place. That’s where I began my story. I went on to share almost every detail. Ever since I had come to know Matt, over 45 years now, he had been a father figure to me. He cared deeply for me and was always eager to share his wisdom. Now, after telling him that I had taken the lives of three men, I regretted not having spent more time with him outside our law practice. I wondered if my life would have turned out differently if I had spent more personal time with Matt.
We walked down to the graveyard and I shared even more details about the two nights I had abducted John Ericson and Randall Radford. Matt asked me why I had changed my mind about Fred. Why I had not brought him here and buried him in one of my pre-dug graves. I told him that I really didn’t know. I admitted that at first, I had wanted to dispose of all the Flaming Five at Aurora Lake but eventually concluded it was simply too dangerous. All members of Club Eden had access and the sons of the Flaming Five, just like they did, used it frequently to camp and just hang out with girls. But, after John and Randall, my reason and caution went to the wind. That day I buried Fred at the bottom of Aurora Lake, I acted carelessly, making mistakes that could still land me in prison.
The grave sites were a mess. The crime scene investigative team had left the graves unfilled after digging up Gina’s body and the two sets of horse bones. Matt couldn’t believe they had stopped three feet short of reaching John and Randall’s bodies buried beneath the dead horses. I told him about how I had researched hiding a body by burying an animal on top of the human body, and how this stood a good chance of tricking both the cadaver dogs and their handlers into believing they had found their target.
We decided we needed a little exercise so we grabbed two shovels that were standing in a pile of dirt and began tossing it back into the grave where investigators had found Gina. After a few minutes, I had Matt follow me back to the house. I gave him a set of work clothes. We changed out of our suits and ties and returned to the graveyard. We spent the next three hours shoveling dirt back into the graves. We even drove to Farmtown to buy some flower bulbs. It was almost dark when we finished setting them out. Matt said he needed to call his wife. He had left his cell phone on the console in my car so he walked back to the front of the house. I used a shovel as a rake and started pulling leaves over the graves.
Bam, Bam, Bam. I heard three shots. Immediately, I ran toward the back door, across the patio, through the kitchen, and into my writing room. In an old mahogany armoire, I had a Glock 9 mm and a Smith & Wesson 45. They were fully loaded. I switched off the safeties and grabbed another clip for each pistol. I went out the back door and ran around the house toward the front yard. Turning the corner, I saw Matt laying on the ground in a pool of blood and a black Suburban with four men standing on either end, two at the back of the vehicle and two on the far side of the hood. I had no doubts. It was Walter, David, Raymond, and Franklin.
Before I reached Matt, they started shooting at me. I was maybe fifty feet from them. I raised my 45 and aimed at Franklin Ericson. I had been taught by my Gramp’s growing up that if you’re going to shoot, you need to be aiming at something. I knew I had to be methodical. It was as though Franklin tossed his pistol onto the top of the Suburban’s hood. My bullet centered his heart and in the fraction of a second before he died, his brain ordered his hand to attempt one final return shot. He died before his action could be completed.
‘Fear no man.’ I could hear Aubrey Kilpatrick tell his son James. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. It was like I was experiencing a movie where I was both actor and a movie-watcher. The reel was rolling at quarter speed. I had never met Aubrey or James but their story, what had been shared with me by my Dad and Gramp’s, and later through newspaper articles and books that had been written about that fateful day in May 1951, had framed a big part of my mind and heart. Maybe as much or more than the life teachings of Brother G at Creek Side Baptist Church.
A bullet ripped through the muscle in my left arm, a couple of inches below the top of my shoulder. I hit the ground and rolled two times to my right and fired two shots just as I stopped. This time I hit Raymond in his left hip and in the middle of his chest as he fell.
I got up and started running toward the Suburban, shooting at David who had been standing beside Raymond. I missed both shots but his last shot hit me in the right side, again, not a wound that would kill me. My next shot centered his forehead. I was close enough to see the terror run through his eyes just before my bullet pierced his skull.
‘Fear no man. Stand tall and deal with trouble head on.’ Walter, by now, had run over behind the old well on the other side of the driveway. I could barely see the top of his head as he scrunched down beside the round concrete cylinder that capped off the hand-dug well. I walked toward him and semi-broke my own rule by emptying my clip six feet above his head. Twenty feet from where he hid, I pulled my Glock from my waistband. As soon as I did, Walter stood up ready to shoot. Before I heard his first shot, I saw his pistol raised. I aimed first for the center of his chest, then for his head. Both my shots hit their target a fraction of a second after his first shot missed me. I heard it hit the Suburban behind me, glass shattering. His second shot ripped flesh from the side of my left chest and the underside of my left arm. The bullet did minimum damage.
I walked over behind the well to verify for sure that Walter was dead knowing without looking that what I had learned about shooting and the handling of a gun growing up had prepared me for this shoot-out far better than these guys.
I pulled my cell phone from my front right pocket but it had taken a bullet for me, sparing me from a fourth injury. I walked toward my car to retrieve Matt’s cell phone, the one he was after when he was gunned down just like Aubrey Kilpatrick. My vehicle was parked forty feet beyond David’s Suburban. I could see that Walter’s last bullet had busted out the Suburban’s rear window. I glanced in as I was about to walk on to my car and noticed two bodies, one almost on top of the other. I opened the rear hatch. Dale Watson’s body fell to the ground leaving Fitz Billingsley laying face up with a two-foot piece of rope around his neck. Watson had a hole in his head. Both were beyond dead.
I walked on to my car and called 911.
The Pencil-Driven Life 