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 9
Saturday, six hours after Sean Miller had called 911, the search began. Twenty-eight officers from an assortment of local law enforcement personnel, including Boaz, Albertville, and Guntersville police officers, Etowah and Marshall County Sheriff deputies, and FBI, and ABI (Alabama Bureau of Investigation) agents fanned out and walked south from the Brewer’s backyard, across the open pasture, and towards the tree-line a quarter of a mile away. Information from the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences conducting Kip Brewer’s autopsy indicated he had died of a gunshot wound from a long distance. To Marshall County Detective Darden Clarke, an average-ability shooter could have made the shot from within the front half of the pasture, the half closest to the Brewer’s back deck. A highly-skilled shooter would have chosen the cover from within the tree line. For two reasons. It was a comfortable shot, and for cover. Given Kip Brewer was a public figure with obvious enemies as well as friends, Detective Clarke concluded the shooter would more likely be a professional, therefore opting to concentrate along the entire 700-yard tree line south of the Brewer resident. Clarke knew the shooter had to have taken his shot somewhere along this line since the contour, slope, and elevation of the pasture prevented a straight-line shot from both the east and west sides of the nearly one hundred-fifty acre pasture.
Thursday afternoon, a Marshall County Sheriff’s deputy found one shell casing. It was a 30-06 cartridge. It was found in clear sight but tucked slightly under the edge of a decaying oak tree 644 yards from Kip Brewer’s back deck. The location was accessible only by foot, four-wheeler, or horseback. It was three-quarters of a mile from the dead-end of an old logging trail that began at Highway 179 just beyond Clear Creek Snacks & Spirits. An expert at Forensics confirmed a 30-06 cartridge could not be excluded as the bullet that killed Representative Brewer.
Other than the shell casing, the crime scene offered little else. Just over the fence from the pasture there was a man-size depression in the grass. At the southern end of the depression the ground was semi plowed. Likely, the shooter’s boots, while he was laying down scoping his rifle, created two, inch deep and three-inch-wide indentations. After the depression was photographed, videotaped, and evaluated for DNA material, an FBI marksman arrived to attempt to simulate the shooting. After less than five minutes laying with a 30-06 Springfield rifle equipped with a Leupold VX-2 3-9x40mm Rifle Scope with Duplex Reticle, Agent Tedder declared, “easy shot for an expert, assuming he could see Mr.
Brewer standing on his back deck. Must have turned on the porch light.”
Detective Clarke was thankful for the cartridge discovery, but knew it was frighteningly little to mount an extensive investigation. The shooter’s motive would hold the key. Frankie Olinger appeared centerstage in Clarke’s mind. “Damn, Olinger had declared Brewer an enemy at the Bevill Center Town Hall. Frankie, Frankie, you are one fucking dumbass.”
Halfway during Clarke’s return trip to his office in Guntersville, sitting, waiting for a train to pass in Albertville, he said to himself.
“Maybe I’m the dumbass here. How could Frankie Olinger have made such a shot? The word professional and Frankie seemed to go together about as well as oil and water. There was no doubt the shooter was an expert marksman. As the last train car rumbled by, Clarke asked himself, “why would a professional marksman, in this case, a professional assassin, leave the one and only cartridge he had fired?”
The Pencil Driven Life 