Novel Excerpts–The Boaz Stenographer, Chapter 50

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 50

Sandra Donaldson, this is your last day to spew hatred.  Freddie had read her Posts and watched her house for over a week.  She lived in a subdivision off Martin Road.  As he had been doing every day, he parked his truck a mile away and walked through two pastures and some woods that came to the back side of Sandra’s acre-sized lot.  She was a widow, a retired school teacher, and now, as predictable as a clock during the early morning hours.  At 7:00 a.m., at least in the summer, she brought a cup of coffee out onto her patio.  She sat in a swing that had a coffee table of sorts directly in front.  She would sit there reading for at least thirty minutes, sometimes as much as an hour, and then walk back inside her house.  She didn’t have any type security system.  Freddie had learned that last Sunday morning while she was at church.

He tapped on Sandra’s storm door less than a minute after she went inside.  Almost immediately she was looking at him.  Her eyes opened wider, as though surprised to see Freddie, but not shocked and scared.  It wasn’t as though she didn’t know him.  She had been a steady customer of Sand Mountain Tire & Muffler for years.  Sandra opened the inside door leaving only the storm door between the two of them.  Freddie said, “Sandra, I hate to bother you but I’m looking for Frankie’s German Shepherd.”  Sandra knew that Freddie and Frankie’s elderly mother still lived less than a mile away, just through the woods to the west.  “Have you by chance seen her?”  Sandra didn’t immediately reply but she did push open the storm door.  She then said, “Hi Freddie, how are you?  Sorry, but I haven’t.  I assume you are talking about the big dog Frankie keeps at work with him.”  Freddie responded in the affirmative.

“I’ll give you a call if I see her.”  Sandra said.  “I hope you find her.”

Before Sandra could close the storm door, Freddie rushed inside pushing her back.  She fell against a table forcing it back several feet.  He slammed the inside back door shut.  She was laying on the floor trying to get up.  She was screaming.  Freddie kicked her down, rested his foot on her chest, and told her to shut up.  He pulled out two vinyl gloves and put them on his hands.  

“Sandra.  Do you know why I am going to kill you?”

She didn’t respond but looked like a sheep waiting for slaughter, like she knew a knife was about to split open her heart.

“You are a devil.  You spew hatred.  That must stop.  You are causing others to hate.  It’s your last moment to live, your last moment to be a racist.”

“What on earth do you mean?”  She said, continuing to struggle to get up, pushing on Freddie’s foot and leg.

He didn’t respond but kicked her hard along the side of her head.  She fell back wincing in pain, grabbing her head.  Freddie pulled out a garotte, a two-foot piece of 4MM hemp rope he had ordered online.  Sandra tried to use her hands to keep him from putting the rope around her neck.  He finally rolled her over and sat down on her back.  He slipped the rope around her neck, crisscrossing the ends, and tightened with all his strength.  Freddie kept at it for over a minute.  He then released the rope.  Sandra Donaldson lay silent and still.

Freddie got up, pushed the rope into his back pocket and walked out the back door pulling the inner door shut.  He headed to the woods at the back of Sandra’s lot and pulled off his gloves putting them in his front left pocket.  At 8:05 a.m., he drove through Hardee’s drive-through for a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit, and a large coffee.  He pulled into a parking spot at Hardee’s and ate his breakfast.  At 8:20, he was sitting at the ATM at First State Bank of Boaz retrieving $60.00 in cash.  At 8:45, Freddie was at home reading today’s ‘The Boaz Stenographer’ column in the Sand Mountain Reporter.

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 Help a starving artist.