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 80
The timing was shear genius or morbidly stupid. I was having trouble figuring out which. For almost a month Regina and I had contemplated what we were going to do with Sergei Ivankov. Our minds and words traveled in a dozen different directions, but one thing was for certain, we had to get rid of him.
It was the hardest decision of my life. I had allowed my life to be put in the perfect dilemma or life had conspired against me to put me there. I was both fully in love with Regina and in a moral standard of conduct that excluded violating the principles that, to me, held a safe and secure civilization together. In a sense, my decision to conspire with Regina was easy. The world, peace, calm, security, was too abstract right now to exercise sufficient power to overcome the sound of Regina’s voice, the look in her deep blue eyes, and most importantly, the feel of her body next to mine.
It was Sunday, two days after my national appearance during the Presidential debate where I had the honor and discomfort of questioning the President of the United States, and the only man who stood in the way of what I knew could be the beginning of the end for America. After Eric Salers’ surprising words to the world about his disbelief in the existence of God, and his succinct but powerful argument supporting his position, my phone had not ceased ringing. It seemed every news agency in America, and several from around the world, were trying to interview me on the spot or arrange for a formal interview today. I had declined to be drawn into a conversation that would certainly rile Thaddeus Colburn to the heights of anger he had rarely, if ever, known. But, I had agreed to appear on 60 Minutes tonight via a new satellite technology the program was introducing for the first time. This would take place with me sitting either in my lounge chair or at the kitchen bar.
I couldn’t worry about that now. That was over twelve hours away. Now, Regina and I were taking Sergei on a little road trip. As the saying goes, I was ‘all in.’ There was no turning back. Sergei was handcuffed and lying prone in the back of my truck. It was still dark because of a low-lying fog and unrelenting rain. So far, things had gone as planned. Since Regina had Sergei’s confidence and I had never met him, she had gone out to the barn at 5:00 a.m. awakening him to their alert signal, ‘come on Sandi girl.’ Within a couple of minutes Sergei was descending the wooden ladder that lead to the barn’s loft. It helped that he was groggy from sleep. It also helped that Regina was adept at hiding and quickly revealing the Glock 9 mm pistol she was carrying in her belt inside her coat. Sergei had not presented any opposition or resistance, simply squatting down on his knees and cuffing one of his hands to a set that were hanging from a chain behind the ladder. After Regina fully secured him, she called me to back down to the hallway of the barn. I was waiting in the truck.
A week ago, Regina and I had spotted the old well, the hand dug type. We had driven the main roads, Highways 168 and 68, early that Saturday morning to Collinsville’s Trade Day. On the return trip, we had decided to take, what all true Southerners called, the scenic route. Turn left after passing under the I-59 overpass at the Collinsville exit and travel up the mountain along a paved but winding road that was lightly traveled, especially the section near Rodentown. We barely saw the well as we passed. It sat behind an old abandoned house at least a hundred yards from the road. If Regina’s eyes hadn’t been looking at the two-story farmhouse with crumbling chimney at just the right moment she would have missed it. As I passed by, she turned and looked back and said, “Walt, there it is. Pull up to the intersection ahead and turn around.”
I hate to admit but our talks had included the idea of a secure hiding spot for Sergei’s body. I still cringe to think about what I have done. I drove us back to the house and along the driveway filled with broken and decaying tree limbs and rocks that seemed to have fallen out of the sky. It was clear the road was not being used regularly at all. The well was just what we thought. It was the type common in the late 1800’s around North Alabama. My own grandfather had worked as a young man hand-digging these type wells. I was reminded of him sharing stories of being sometimes a hundred or more feet down in a hole that was usually less than six feet wide. I vividly remembered the story of granddad nearly drowning when his pick struck an underground spring and water rushed into the well before he was rescued by the two men up on the surface who seemingly were taking a nap.
The well’s depth was 88 feet down to the water. And, it was owned by Derrick Rickles and Karen Eubanks. The Monday after our discovery, Regina had investigated the ownership of the abandoned home and well. They were a brother and a sister who had inherited their parents’ property in 2005. Derrick lived in Nashville and Karen lived in Atlanta. Their parents, Tom and Betty Rickles, had died in a car accident in 2005. Regina found the estate had been probated and an executor’s deed prepared in late 2006 to Derrick and Karen as tenant’s in common. From all we could gather, the one-hundred-acre farm was no more important to its current owners than the five-gallon buckets that were lined up on the back porch of the empty house.
During the past week we had exhausted every other possibility for the disposal of Sergei Ivankov. There was none that remotely satisfied us. It was daylight when we pulled behind the Rickles’ old home. We had rehearsed a hundred times. I backed up to the old well. Regina, with her silencer-equipped Glock, exited the truck and opened the camper shell’s back door and let down the tailgate. She asked Sergei to sit up and scoot out onto the tailgate. He refused, so I had to pull him out by his boots. He fell off the truck’s edge and onto the blue tarp that we had spread onto the ground.
“Walk away.” Regina instructed me.
“I was nearly halfway around the old house headed to the front porch when I heard her yell, “alright, I need you.”
When I reappeared at the back of the truck, I saw Sergei’s head, or what was left of it, pouring blood onto the tarp. I walked to the truck’s cab and removed two protective white coveralls that we had purchased online. We quickly slipped them on. It took all the strength we could muster to pick up and hoist Sergei’s body over the four-foot high concrete cylinder that served as a barrier to anyone who might wander around and fall into the deep well. It took longer than I expected for Sergei’s body to fall the 88 feet. Later, I thought about this time, which couldn’t have been more than two or three seconds, as a crossroads. The time was meant to reveal to me my passing from my old world, one of faithful commitment to law and order, and into my new world that would never be free from quite desperation over being discovered as a murderer.
Regina and I quickly removed our coveralls, and placed them, along with the folded-up tarp, into the back of the truck, closed the door and tailgate, and drove back to Shepherd’s Cove. Once there, we burned everything we had used in our crime, along with Sergei’s sleeping bag, pillow, a garbage bag full of paper plates, cups, and utensils, and an overnight bag full of underwear, pants, and shirts in the 55-gallon steel barrel I used to dispose of all my own burnable garbage.
Hopefully, the only link connecting Regina to any criminal activity had been eliminated.
The Pencil Driven Life 