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 Safecracker, written in 2019, is my seventh novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
Fred Martin, a 1972 graduate of Boaz High School, returns to his hometown after practicing law and living in Huntsville for over thirty-five years with two goals in mind. First, to distance himself from the loss of Susan, his wife of thirty-seven years who died in 2013 of cancer. And second, to partner with his lifelong friend, Noah Waters, to crack the safes of Elton Rawlins and Doug Barber, two men who got under their skin as high school football players.
Little did Fred and Noah realize the secrets the two old Mosler safes protected. Who murdered three Boaz High School seniors in the fall of 1973? Is a near-half-century-old plan to destroy Fred’s sister and steal the inheritance from a set of 44-year-old illegitimate twins still alive and well? How far would Fred’s mother go to protect her family?
What starts out as an almost innocent prank turns life-threateningly serious the more Fred learns and the more safes he cracks. All the while, he falls in love with Connie Stewart, his one-date high school classmate who may conceal a secret or two herself.
Chapter 67
Harrison dropped me off at the Hospital’s main entrance and drove away like he was late for a faculty meeting.
I rode the elevator to the third floor and just as I stepped out into the hallway and turned left toward the ICU, I saw Connie.
With her raised voice I could hear her clearly even though she was at least thirty feet away: “Tyler finally woke up. Ate nearly a dozen scrambled eggs. He’s with Luke now, thanks to Ed.” She kept walking towards me, looking over my shoulder like she was expecting somebody.
“I need to see Dad for a few minutes. How was he when you checked on him?” I figured it was a reasonable assumption that she was here to see Dad, and me.
“The nurses wouldn’t let me inside his room. They said he was resting and didn’t need any visitors. Why don’t you come home with me until we, you can see him again?” Connie looked directly into my eyes. At first, I glimpsed that little twinkle vibrating across both blue eyes. She had developed a habit of doing that, when she wanted to play. Then, almost in a heartbeat, a wave of dark gray plowed away the light.
I started to call her ‘Baby’ but that would be dishonest. That human wall of protection had raised itself after Harrison and I had viewed that last cartridge. I had experienced it before. When someone breaks the solid cable of trust between you and them, it’s like you’ve stepped out into thin air. “Maybe I can come later. I really need to stay with Dad.”
“Okay, if that’s how you feel.” And, she was gone. I turned to look at her walking away and toward the wall of elevators. Her shapely rear end didn’t generate a single lust.
I don’t know why Connie lied. After I sneaked inside Dad’s room during the nurse’s shift-change, he revealed the two of them had talked. He wouldn’t disclose the subject matter.
“Pull the chair up beside me. I’m going to die prematurely if I don’t get this off my chest.” Dad’s giggle sounded like Harrison’s back at the high school.
I started to resist but before I could get out a word, Dad had that look and his head had that right-leaning cock I had seen so many times. He meant business and expected no argument. I complied without a word.
“Son know that one bad decision can change your life forever. My one bad one, a series of bad ones, was when I jumped in bed with Pastor Walter and Club Eden. I mean figuratively you know.” Dad tried to sit-up a little straighter in his bed. I reached over and pressed the up-arrow bed control.
“I may have made a bad one myself. I’m not sure yet.”
“That bad decision points you in a new direction. The night of the Boaz-Albertville football game in 1973 was supposed to sever my relationship with the Club forever. Things didn’t work out quite that way.” Dad said. I could tell he was taking deeper breaths between phrases.
“I wish you would just let this be. But, if you are hellbent on confessing this story, then give it to me directly, good, bad, and ugly.” I wanted this over with. For Dad’s sake.
“All I had to do was tail Deidre and Johnny after the game. I knew they would be together, even over strict orders from your mother. It was around 11:00 p.m., and they wound up beside the city dump down King Street. Johnny’s old Bonneville pulled into a grove of trees just beyond the gate.”
“How did that help the Club? You were tailing them?” I asked.
“I’m not exactly sure but from what Harrison had told me and what seemed obvious, was that Allan Floyd and Tommy Jones were targeted separately.” I raised my left hand, slightly confused. Dad stopped talking.
“Targeted? Why were those two, three I guess, such a threat and needed to be targeted?”
“Son, you were in Auburn. All hell had broken loose here in Boaz. These three teenage boys, along with their peers, Rebecca Aldridge and Angela Ericson, were the core of a group of young people who were rebelling against tradition, you know, community norms.”
“You mean Christian fundamentalism?” I asked.
“I’m not sure if that’s the right term, but Pastor Walter and his gang had had enough. They, again according to Harrison, believed their entire kingdom would collapse if the Aliens, I think that’s what they were called, were able to continue to spread their anti-Christian message. The bottom line is Club Eden chose the Boaz-Albertville football game, afterwards really, to shock the kids back into allegiance.”
“So, Floyd and Jones were killed on the backside of the stadium, across the team’s practice field just inside the woods. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Seems true.”
“Who shot them?” I asked.
“Not sure, but most likely it was Doug Barber and Elton Rawlins. The Club was too smart to actually pull any triggers.”
“But, Johnny Stewart wasn’t there, at least not at first?”
“Just as soon as Johnny dropped Deidre at home, I made the call I will forever regret. The two of them had not seen me at the city dump, but I waited in my own grove of trees across the road until about 1:00 a.m. I saw two cars carrying the five Club members sitting at the convenience store when I crossed Highway 431. I called the store when I got home and told Raymond Radford that Johnny had just left.”
“They were able to apprehend Johnny, beat him to a pulp, and then transport him to his two teammates behind the stadium. Do you know who shot him. Four times? I asked.”
“Son, how the heck did you know these details?” Dad asked, cocking his head now to the left. That was his, ‘I have a question’ pose.
“That’s a long story. Let’s finish yours.”
“I don’t know who shot him but speculation, mine and Harrison’s, was it wasn’t Doug or Elton. Rumor is there was another pistol, another Smith & Wesson. The Chief’s Special they were called. Some guy had passed through town, holding a gun show, back around 1969 or 1970. Sold a ton of the little darlings, bitches, whatever.”
“So, that’s where yours came from? That gun show?” I had to be open. I too was ready to get some things off my chest. I had violated Dad’s trust by breaking into his old Mosler. Now was a good time to join Dad at the confessional alter.
“Is this related to your bad decision?” Dad asked, surprising me a little. He was listening.
“Maybe. Sort of.” We took another ten minutes or so for me to describe how I knew that his pistol, his 38 caliber Smith & Wesson, was the Ricky Miller murder weapon. At first, Dad was reluctant to admit it but then the floodgates opened. He ultimately confirmed what I had already unjustifiably concluded: that mother was involved with my Biology teacher and friend’s death.
“The Club, I’m not sure which member, caught your mother and Bill Stewart breaking into the Safe House. This became the beginning of another dark cloud that hung-over Martin Mansion. Son, your mother loved you and Deidre more than life itself. She would have killed God, God forgive me, if she had to to protect her two darlings.” Dad’s breathing was noticeable worse now.
“Dad, I’m going for a nurse. No, I’ll signal for them.” I reached for the emergency call pad on the bed alongside dad’s right side.
“No, not yet. Let me finish.”
“Harriet and Bill did the deed. Of course, that was after the three boys were murdered, but before the bonfire Bible burning fiasco. That hot and bright night was the final straw that steeled your mother’s determination to eliminate the key threat to your sister’s eternal destiny. She was sure she had already lost you, hell no, she wasn’t going to lose Deidre too.”
“Mother thought Ricky Miller was leading Deidre to hell.” I said, intending my statement to also be a question.
“Dad gasped for breath and before I could stand or say a word, three nurses invaded his room. Not a one of them acknowledged I was present. As I pushed my chair back from Dad’s bed, another nurse or technician wheeled in a defibrillator. Then, almost in unison, three blue-smocked women ordered me outside ICU.
Thursday at noon, Deidre and I, as health-care proxies, gave permission to Dr. Calhoun to remove the respirator that was keeping our dear dad alive. We had spent the past twenty-two hours contemplating this decision. It would have been what Dad wanted. It was the hardest choice of our lives.
The Pencil Driven Life 