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 Stenographer, written in 2018, is my fourth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Walt Shepherd, a 35 year veteran of the White House’s stenographic team, is fired by President Andrew Kane for refusing to lie.
Walt returns to his hometown of Boaz, Alabama and renews his relationship with Regina Gillan, his high school sweetheart, who he had ditched right before graduation to marry the daughter of a prominent local businessman. Regina has recently moved back to Boaz after forty years in Chicago working at the Tribune. She is now editor of the Sand Mountain Reporter, a local newspaper.
Walt and Regina’s relationship transforms into a once in life love at the same time they are being immersed in a growing local and national divide between Democrats and traditional Republicans, and extremist Republicans (known as Kanites) who are becoming more dogmatic about the revolution that began during President Kanes campaign.
Walt accepts two part-time jobs. One as a stenography instructor at Snead State Community College in Boaz, and one as an itinerant stenographer with Rains & Associates out of Birmingham.
Walt later learns the owner of Rains & Associates is also one of five men who created the Constitution Foundation and is involved in a sinister plot to destroy President Kane, but is using an unorthodox method to achieve its objective. The Foundation is doing everything it can to prevent President Kane from being reelected in 2020, and is scheming to initiate a civil war that will hopefully restore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution.
While Walt is writing a book, The Coming Civil War, he is, unwittingly, gathering key information for the Constitution Foundation.
Will Walt discover a connection between the Foundation and the deaths of three U.S. Congressmen in time to save his relationship with Regina, prevent President Kane from being reelected as the defacto head of a Christian theocracy, and the eruption of a civil war that could destroy the Nation ?
Chapter 7
Kip Brewer was the U.S. Congressman from Alabama’s Forth Congressional District. This district covered Dekalb, Etowah, and Marshall Counties, and ten other counties stretching westward to the Mississippi line. Kip lived with his wife of twenty-seven years in Boaz, west of town in the Red Apple Community. When he was not in Washington, D.C., or traveling in other parts of his district one would find him mending fences or remodeling the one-hundred-year-old barn his great-grandfather had built in 1919 after returning from World War I six months earlier.
Kip was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996 filling the seat of 15-term Tom Bevill. Kip had served ever since. He was a member of the Republican Party, a non-active member of the nonactive Tea Party Caucus, and one of only a handful of Republicans outspoken against President Andrew Kane. Kip’s opposition wasn’t so much against Kane’s policy ideas, but against his manners and methods. Kip believed the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, should conduct himself always with honor, humility, and respect. To Kip, there was never a time the President is justified in calling names like a drunken sailor. The full truth be known, in the center of his rationality, Kip believed Kane was wholly incompetent to serve as President.
Four hours earlier Kip and his wife Darla returned from a Town Hall meeting at the Bevill Center at Snead State Community College. It was their last stop from a thirteen-county tour that began two weeks ago on Valentine’s Day in the northwest Alabama city of Tuscumbia. The Bevill Center meeting had gone well, at first, with difficult but respectful questions from a well-mannered audience including thirty members of the Etowah County Democratic Party who grilled Representative Brewer on whether the Republican Party had any plans of confronting President Kane on his conduct and his involvement with the Russian attack on the 2016 Presidential election.
The meeting got ugly when Kip wholeheartedly agreed with the Democratic group. Shouting started in the back rows on the far-right side under the balcony. Frankie Olinger stood up and without microphone, thundered above everyone, “you Rino, don’t you know Kane is God’s man to drain the swamp. I elected him, we elected him, to get rid of all you talk and no action puppets. You better get on board the Kane wagon or get run over. The Revolution has started. You’re the enemy and enemies get killed.”
It seemed every member of Frankie’s gang was present and spoke out. He was the outspoken leader of the local chapter of Kane Tribe, a grassroots organization that sprung-up in early 2016 after Kane’s train began gaining steam. The shouting for and against got louder and louder. The opposition was mainly from the Etowah County
Democratic Party. The other 600 attendees joined in as Frankie’s group approached the front and attempted to mount the stage. It took fifteen Boaz police officers and thirty cans of pepper spray to squelch the uprising. In the middle of the storm, Kip’s secret service team pulled him out the back exit and transported him home.
At 2:30 a.m. Kip eased out of bed, frustrated over the outburst at the Town Hall and frustrated he couldn’t go back to sleep. He tipped toed into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. As it percolated, he recalled meeting Frankie Olinger in 1997 during his first campaign. Kip’s father, a banker, had done business with Frankie and his father, helping them build a new building for Sand Mountain Tire & Battery, their automotive repair business. Frankie had supported Kip’s initial efforts to get elected, even sponsoring a three-month radio campaign at WQSB. Kip poured a large cup of coffee and walked outside on the back deck, flipping on the light as he stepped out into the cold and near-moonless night.
He stood by the railing and looked out towards the old barn. He was beginning to think he would never complete the remodeling he had started in 2002, at the end of his third term in the House. Kip started to sit down but as he turned he caught a glimpse of a light in the distance. It was five or six hundred yards east of and beyond the barn. It was at the edge of the woods that started along the edge of the pasture. His mind convinced him it was some odd reflection of the moon, or possibly the aftereffects of a campfire built by a group of teenagers hanging out at the creek, though it seemed too early and too cold for that.
Kip never heard the shot. Just as he was sitting his coffee cup on the top rail at the back of the deck, the bullet arrived. It’s sound trailing by only milliseconds. The bullet’s impact exploded the mind of one of only a handful of men who stood between a Constitutional crisis, and the most narcissistic man Americans had ever sent to the Oval Office. Kip Brewer, already dead, collapsed into a pool of brains and blood. In less than a minute Sean Miller with the Secret Service was on the deck with Kip calling 911, and radioing his team-mates to, under no circumstances, allow Darla to come outside.
The Pencil-Driven Life 