PARADOX FALLS--Chapter 3

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

PARADOX FALLS--Chapter 2

I'm posting the first several chapters, possibly the first half of the book, of my new thriller. Check the archive out for past chapters.

CHAPTER TWO

         BRENDA KISSED JAKE and started the engine.  They said nothing more as they rolled out of the picnic area and turned onto the main road, continuing up the winding canyon beneath the reproving eyes of the mansions of Boulder’s nouveau riche and trust fund babes teetering atop variegated outcroppings.

         Jake felt his heart start beating faster as they closed to within a mile of Dave and Kristen’s driveway.  After all these years, the girl could still get his blood pressure up.  Why was that, anyway?  It was as though there were some sort of electrical field around her that, the closer he got to her physically, caused his neurons to dance.  It belied his complete conviction that they could not have ended up together even had Dave not entered the playing field. 

         Even as teenagers, while they’d shared some similar interests, a gulf had stretched between them personality-wise.  Despite her love of movies and comics and late-at-night intellectual discussions, Kristen had had a practical core.  She’d wanted material comforts in her life, and a family and fulfilling job, and had planned accordingly.  She’d probably been the best-read business and economics major at CU. 

         In contrast, Jake had been a dreamer.  It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to be comfortable, too, it was just that he hadn’t been practical enough to think about those things.  He’d been on the run from the pain of a wretched childhood.  He’d wanted to be a writer and to garner acclaim as the next great American novelist, though he’d had no idea how much luck and timing played into such a success, nor how fairly common was his level of writing talent.  He’d been and still was competing against the minions just like him--gifted, to be sure, and armed with a wry, self-deprecating wit and penchant for sarcasm. 

         But, really, in the end, nothing really all that special. 

         His lack of uniqueness was the hard, cold realization that had always been the worst hit to his pride of any.

         So, here they were.  Jake was hammering out a meager living writing porno westerns in a rented town house with a King’s Soopers manager and part-time personal trainer, and Kristen and Dave were hosting pool parties and Halloween costume balls for Boulder’s moneyed elite and artsy-fartsy class up at their villa in Four-Mile Canyon.  As Brenda turned into the driveway between seven-foot brick pylons outfitted with LED globes, Jake wondered for how much longer he’d be doomed to fantasize about how it might have been--going to bed with Kristen every night, waking up with Kristen every morning in the perfect world of his infantile conjuring...  

         The tires of Brenda’s Subaru crunched gravel along the driveway that curved gently through pines, cedars, and aspens.  Birds and squirrels played amongst the mid-summer leaves, apparently not minding the occasional squawks of Brenda’s worn-out shocks and struts as the ten-year-old car bounced through shallow potholes.  The steel beast thumped across a redwood bridge spanning Four Mile Creek, rolled past a small, open shed that served as a fisherman’s shelter on the right side of the trail and a stone Buddha squatting under a fragrant spruce on the trail’s left side.  They turned sharply into the yard fronting the two-story brick-and-cedar house that blended well with the sandstone cliff enfolding it on three sides.

         The house had been built back in the seventies, and after two or three renovations it was only a little over two thousand square feet, but Jake didn’t want to think about how much each of those precious feet was worth here within fifty yards of Four Mile Creek, twenty miles from Pearl Street.  And, having been inside to see the cool, contemporary, mountain-style plushness of the digs with its vaulted ceilings, exposed beams, polished walnut floors, and gourmet chef’s kitchen complete with stainless steel appliances and wine fridge, he didn’t need to.  There was no doubt that the place was worth far more dinero than Jake would ever see if he lived to be as old as one of the ancient bristlecone pines twisting out of the cliffs that towered over the place.

         Brenda maneuvered the Subaru onto the paved driveway and stopped the car behind Dave and Kristen’s motorhome--a big, shiny, 30-foot class-C with tinted windows and both slides out.  The rear hitch rack cradling two mountain bikes appeared waiting for a third.  Kristen was walking along the side of the motorhome from the direction of the front, holding an ungainly stack of bedding in both arms, obscuring her upper body but not her long, beautiful, bare legs.  She gave a one-handed wave and an exaggerated grin as she stepped up through the class-C’s open door, disappearing for a moment before rushing back out the door, minus the bedding, and into Jake’s open arms.

         “Squirrel!” she screeched, giving him a peck on the cheek.  “Oh, gosh, it’s so good to see you!”

         “Squirrel” was the pet name she’d given Jake twenty years ago.  He had no idea where it had come from, or what it meant, but he’d never minded the moniker though of course if anyone else ever called him that the smart-assed bastard would be sporting a gap-toothed grin until his next trip to the dentist.  Jake had to admit that even Kristen saying it--especially around Dave and Brenda--made him a little uncomfortable, given the intimacy of his and Kristen’s history and all, but not uncomfortable enough that he’d ever ask her to stop using it.

         “Hey, girl,” Jake said, giving her a friendly squeeze and trying not to overly admire the red knit tube halter and extremely short khaki shorts she was wearing.  “How you been?” 

         He glanced briefly toward Brenda, who was standing on the other side of the Subaru looking a little awkward and embarrassed but giving a quick, off-hand smile that told him it was all right, she understood.

         “I’ve been just great.  How’ve you been?”

         “Can’t complain.  Damn, you’re all...tan and fit, rough and ready!”

         Jake couldn’t help looking her up and down, from the girlish short braids she’d wound some of her gold-blond hair into and which dangled down the sides of her cheeks, to her long, tan legs and mint-green running shoes.  She was educated-hip-Boulder-upper-middle-class through and through, though, unlike some, she didn’t take the outlandish retro hippie stuff--zany individualism run amok--to ridiculous extremes.  Kristin Whitefield was most definitely a very attractive thirty-five year old woman who could pass for thirty any day of the week, and she enjoyed dressing in ways that put a bounce in a feller’s step.

         Jake wasn’t complaining.

         “Tan, maybe,” she said.  “I need to wear more sunblock when I’m biking and gardening, but what I really need to do is add more strength-training to my workouts.”  Kristen turned and headed for Brenda.  “Maybe your beautiful better half could help me with that.”  She and Brenda embraced like old friends.  “Hey, Bren--so wonderful to see you!”

         “Hi, Kristen.”

         “I was wondering if you could help me with that.”

         “With what?” Brenda asked. 

         “I don’t know--I don’t want to get flabby in my old age.  Maybe sometime you could show me how I could tighten up here”--Kristen grabbed the back of her left arm above the elbow and then lifted her left leg to indicate the back of that thigh--“and here.  Listen, if you could drive out one day a week, you and I could spend the whole day together...here in the weight room, and then we could have lunch and take a swim.” 

         She glanced at Jake then winked and leaned confidentially toward Brenda.  “Maybe some wine and sushi later?  Could we do that?  Just us ladies.  I mean, I could really use a little professional assistance here, Bren.”

         As if the gods were getting as squirrely as Jake at the overly earnest, self-conscious turn of Kristen’s soliloquy, thunder peeled out of a clear blue sky.  The ground lurched.  Jake jerked with a start.  But then he realized that the noise hadn’t been thunder at all, but the report of a gun of some kind.

         “David!” Kristen yelled, stomping one of her mint green running shoes.  “Goddamnit, how many times do I have to ask you not to do that?”

         Jake followed Kristen’s gaze to the second-floor deck of the house, where a thick, stocky, blond man in black T-shirt, knee-length khaki shorts, and red flip flops stood, holding a shotgun across his shoulder.  A thick cigar jutted from one side of his mouth.  David Whitfield waved and grinned, showing large, white teeth against the healthy ruddiness of his face.  Stylish white sunglasses were pushed back off his forehead, all but lost in his rumpled, sun-bleached hair.

         “Hey, all,” he called.  “Sorry about the racket.”  He ejected the spent plastic shotgun shell, which clattered to the deck around his flip-flops, and pumped a fresh round into the chamber.  “Just settlin’ a few scores with some miscreants on the other side of the house.  Nothin’ to worry about, though, pilgrims.”  It was a very poor John Wayne imitation.

         David laughed heartily as he strode over to the top of the stairs.

         “Can’t let them owlhoots get a toe-hold, now, can ya?” David said as he reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped to aim the shotgun at the sky. 

         He ejected the shell he’d seated in the chamber, and then returned the shotgun to his shoulder.  Puffing the cigar between his teeth, he mimicked the Duke’s pigeon-toed walk as he strode over to where Jake was now standing with the women near the front of Brenda’s car.  The imitation was made all the more ridiculous by David’s camo shorts and red flip-flops. 

         He tried to maintain a gunfighter’s chin-down, steely-eyed expression, but then his face crumpled, and he loosed a chuff of embarrassed laughter, blowing smoke out his mouth and nose as he removed the cigar from between his impossibly large, white teeth.  “Hey, there, my man.  What’s up?”

         “What the hell’s all that about?” Jake asked, absently shaking his friend’s hand and scowling at the shotgun.  Dave had always been a showoff but the shotgun seemed a little extreme, even for him.  He’d hunted when he was a kid, but Jake didn’t think he’d hunted since moving to politically correct Boulder and getting into tea.

         “Deer,” David said.  “I use the popper to scare ‘em away from the willows I planted on the other side of the house.  Hey, Bren, welcome to Robbers Roost,” he said, giving Brenda a brotherly hug.

         She was regarding the shotgun with the same skepticism as Jake, while Kristen shook her head and pursed her lips.  “That’s my Davey,” she said, rising up onto the toes of her running shoes to pinch David’s ruddy cheeks and give his chin a playful peck.  “Always showing off.”

         “Hey, let’s get this show on the road,” David said, turning to walk around the back of the motorhome.  “I’m just gonna toss this into the rig, and then I’ll help you with your bike.”

         Jake scowled at him.  “What--you mean, you’re bringing the gun?”

         “Yeah, didn’t you hear?”

         “Hear what?” Brenda asked.

         David glanced from the women to Jake, obviously hesitating.

         “Hear what?” Jake echoed Brenda.

         David hiked a shoulder.  “There were...uh...three hikers killed along the trail to Paradox last week.”

         Brenda gasped.  “That was the Paradox trail?”

         “Sure as tootin’,” David said, puffing the cigar. “All three were shot with a bow and arrow and one was even de-fucking-capitated.”

         “David!” Kristen scolded.

         “Ah, shit--I’m sorry,” David said to Brenda. “I shouldn’t have told you. I didn’t know you hadn’t heard. It’s been on the news for several days. Hey, there’s nothing to worry about, Bren. You see this here?”

         He held up the shotgun, which was painted all black. So menacingly black that it looked like a deadly snake of some sort. A black cobra.

         David patted it proudly. “The Mossberg Five-Thirty-Five Twelve-Gauge is one of the best shotguns on the market today. One of the baddest-assest cannons on the market for the past forty-five years. Easy to load and shoot, with an ambidextrous safety”—he flicked a little steel switch on the breech—“you can fire three quick rounds—Ka-Boom! Boom! Boom!—“faster’n you can name your favorite Chuck Norris flick. Not to worry, little honey.” He winked at Brenda. “I’ll bring the Great American Writer home to you safe and sound...though maybe a little winded and sunburned.”

         David laughed through his large, perfect, white teeth.

PARADOX FALLS--Chapter 1

Over the next week or so, I'm going to publish the first several chapters of my horror novel. This is my first novel-length yarn that is not a western, and I'm very happy about how it's turning out…so far. I hope to have the book up and running sometime in June, definitely by July 1…along with my next western, THE DEVIL'S SEVEN, a new Lou Prophet tale.

CHAPTER ONE

         BRENDA HELD HER THUMB and index finger an inch apart above the table in Denny’s.  “I’m about that much jealous.”

         “That’s too much,” Jake said.

         Brenda slid her thumb and index finger a little closer together.  “How ‘bout that much?”

         Jake reached out and closed his hand over Brenda’s.  “Still too much.  You have absolutely no reason to be jealous of Kristen Whitfield.”

         “Oh, please.”

         “How many times do I have to ask you to join us?”

         “How ‘bout once more?”

         Jake smiled, brought Brenda’s hand to his mouth, and pressed his lips to her knuckles.  “Join us.  Please join us.  Please, please, please--oh, Brenda, won’t you please join us?  The trip won’t be complete without you!”

         An elderly couple sitting at a table to the left of Jake’s and Brenda’s booth gave him the stink-eye. 

         Jake smiled at them.  “Sorry if I was being overly ebullient.  It’s just that I really want my wife to join myself and my friends on our trek to Paradox Falls.”

         The old lady looked quickly away.  The old man looked at Brenda.  A lusty gleam sparkled in his watery blue eyes behind his glasses, and he turned back to Jake and said, “How could you leave one like her behind?”

         Jake felt his ears warm.  Abashed, he glanced down at his coffee and the heavy, oblong platter containing the remains of his Grand Slam breakfast, and said, “Touche.”

         “Three’s company, four’s a crowd,” Brenda told the old man, who looked dubious.

         “That’s not true and you know it,” Jake told her.

         Brenda slid out of her booth across from Jake.  “Excuse me,” she told the old couple, and then slid into Jake’s booth, wrapping an arm around his neck.  The old man lifted a corner of his mouth as he appraised Brenda’s ass, and the old woman snarled at him. 

         “I’m three-quarters joking,” Brenda said.  “You three are old friends.  I mean, you went to high school together, for God sakes!  You’ve known me how long?  Two years?”

         “And your point is...?”

         “My point is that whenever the four of us are together--Kristen, me, you, and David--I feel like one too many hands on deck.”  Brenda shook her head to cut off Jake’s objection.  “And that’s perfectly natural, honey!  It’s not a whole lot of fun for me, but it’s only natural.  And that’s why I will not under any circumstances join you three on your hike to the Falls.  I know it’s a yearly tradition for you guys, and traditions are important.”

         “It’s a bi-yearly tradition,” Jake corrected her. 

         Over the last few years, Jake and his childhood friends, Kristen and Dave, hadn’t been able to squeeze their traditional hiking and camping trip--a trip they’d started making together when they were all just sixteen years old--into every summer but only into every other summer.  Jake was too busy with his writing schedule to take much time off these days, and Kristen had been taking summer school classes at the University of Colorado so she could move up the alumni relations ladder, and rake in a larger income. 

         Dave was kept hustling for his wholesale tea business.  It took a lot of scrambling, Jake suspected, for his old pal Dave--now known as David--to keep him and Kristen and their two girls and matching black labs in their fancy digs up Boulder’s exclusive Four Mile Canyon.  They shipped one girl off to a prestigious ballerina school every summer while the other one was bussed up to an equestrian camp somewhere in the wilds of Montana.

         “Okay, bi-yearly,” Brenda said.  “All the more reason I shouldn’t intrude.  You three don’t get as much time together as you used to.  Besides, I used up all my vacation time last winter.”  She’d spent January in Pennsylvania, helping her sisters and brother move their dad into a nursing home.

         “Now I feel guilty.”

         “No reason to feel guilty.”  Brenda kissed Jake’s cheek.  “As long as you’re not still in love with her.”

         “With who?”

         “With who?”  Brenda leaned away from him.  “Now, I am worried!”

         “Come on,” Jake said, feeling uncomfortable.  “That was a long, long time ago.”

         “Yes, but she was your first one.  There’s no getting over your first.  I know that as well as anyone.”

         “Oh, you do, do you?” 

         The old couple looked at Jake again.  He smiled and waved and turned back to Brenda, lowering his voice a notch.  “Roy What’s-His-Name?  You still got a thing goin’ on for ole Roy, do you?”

         “Sure, I do.  Just like you got a thing for Kristen.  But you know what makes me happy?”

         “What?”

         Brenda kissed Jake’s cheek again.  “It makes me happy that David is feelthy steenking reech!”

         Jake was incredulous.  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

         Brenda laughed.  “It means I doubt very much that Kristen would be willing to give up her mansion and pool up Four Mile Canyon to live on your income in the Breezy Hills Townhome Estates.”

         “Hey, I’m not that poor!”

         “Your wonderfully poor.  But don’t be offended.”  Brenda brushed her nose against Jake’s chin.  Her dark-brown Czechoslovakian eyes crossed slightly as she gazed up at him.  “I’m madly in love with everything about you, including your poorness.  I just hope you’re in as much love with me as I am with you.  If not, I’m gonna put the hurt on you, pal!”

         She tightened her fingers over his thigh.  She had strong hands.

         Jake held her close against him.  “More.”  Ignoring the old lady’s reproving glare, Jake nibbled Brenda’s ear.

         “Stop,” she said, giggling and squirming.  “You’re making me horny.  Come on--let’s you get up Four Mile so I can get back to work.”

         As Jake and Brenda made their way to the cashier, Jake glanced back to see the old man craning his neck to stare at Brenda’s ass.  The old lady snapped him with her napkin.

***

         Jake was sore.

         He didn’t want to be sore, but he was sore about Brenda’s comment regarding his income.  Or lack thereof. 

         He was a writer.  A damn good one.  Only, the reading public was slow to catch on.  Five years ago, when he was thirty, he’d published the novel he’d started his sophomore year in college--a long, meandering comic tome about growing up in a dysfunctional home in a Denver suburb headed up by a mother with borderline personality disorder and a truck-driver father who’d died in a Wichita motel throwing the wood to a fifty-dollar-an-hour, underage hooker.  The book had garnered rave reviews, and it had even sold a few thousand copies in its first month on the literal and virtual bookshelves. 

         Better yet, a couple of movie producers had bought an option for fifty grand.

         But then sales had petered out.  Supposedly, the producers had a finished script but with the economy tanking, acquiring funding for a dark comedy by a first-time writer with only modest book sales was an uphill battle.  No major star was able to warm up to the script’s “depressing” gallows humor. 

         The last time Jake had heard from the producers, they were still fighting the good fight.  That had been two years ago.  In the mean time, Jake had started another book, but no editor he’d sent the first three chapters to had been able to sell it to the monkeys in business suits now running every major publishing company in America. 

         One editor, however, had liked Jake’s style enough to offer him a work-for-hire job penning adult western novels.  Figuring that writing pornographic oaters while trying to throw together another comic masterpiece was better than driving a beer truck, which he’d done for too many years already, he’d jumped on the offer.  So now he was writing four, short, formulaic novels teeming with sex and violence a year and working every other weekend bartending at a small neighborhood saloon called The One-Eyed Jack.

         He was making enough for rent, but that was about all.

         Brenda, his second wife whom he’d met at a gym that he couldn’t afford, was hauling in enough managing a King Soopers delicatessen and moonlighting as a personal trainer to keep them fed and clothed.  In fact, Brenda was making nearly twice as much as Jake was.  That was hard on Jake.  While he liked to see himself as a progressive male who did not base success on income, in reality he knew that deep down he was not all that far from the old hunting and gathering days when the Cro-Magnon men hunted and gathered while the Cro-Magnon women cooked and sewed what was hunted and gathered and took breaks only to squat and grunt out more barbarians.

         Driving up Four-Mile canyon with palatial, multi-million-dollar mansions sprouting from granite outcroppings every couple of hundred yards above the curving blacktop, Brenda suddenly pulled her old Subaru into a picnic area amongst the pines along Four Mile Creek.

         “Hey, where you goin’, babe?” Jake asked.

         Brenda smiled and kept driving, following the narrow blacktop around a small park area with grass and swings and monkey bars for the kids and up to a picnic table and an iron grill overlooking the creek.  Sunlight winked off Four Mile’s impossibly clear snowmelt rippling over shallow rocks.

         Jake frowned at Brenda.  “We’re gonna be late.”

         Brenda cut the engine.  “The bitch can wait.  You’re gettin’ a blowjob.”

         “What?” Jake laughed.  “Now?  Why?”

         Brenda hiked a shoulder.  “My way of apologizing for bringing up the income thing again.  You’d think I’d learn.  And then I do it just when I’m about to throw you to her, and...I want us to part on a positive note.”  She smacked her lips.   “Come on.  Lead the hog out of the barn.  Show me the snake, Jake!”

         “Ah, shit.”  Jake unbuckled his belt.  “We’re gonna be late.”

         “She can wait for my man.”

         Jake looked around.  It was a weekday and the park appeared empty.  The only other person he could see was a fly fisherman in waders fishing the creek about a quarter mile away.

         Jake hunkered low and pulled his pants and underwear down to his knees.  “Christ, we’re gonna get arrested...”

         “Nah.”  Brenda tossed her long, chestnut hair back behind one shoulder and went to work.

         Jake sighed.

         “You’re wrong about how I feel about her, you know,” he said.

         Brenda shook her head and made a gargling, grunting “Nuh-uh” sound.

         “Oh, yeah...” Jake said, running a hand through her hair.

         He leaned farther back in the seat, relaxing, feeling the tension drain out of him.  But then Brenda’s mouth became Kristen’s mouth--back when they were sixteen and dating before Kristen had started dating Jake’s best friend, Dave Whitfield, who’d lived just three houses down from Jake--and a weird sort of tension returned. 

         The tension of guilt over the way his thoughts were swinging.  And the tension of regret over how things had turned out though he’d tried to tell himself over and over that she couldn’t have been his. 

         Both he and Kristen were better off now that Dave had her.

         And it wasn’t like Dave had taken her from Jake. 

         Jake and Kristen had broken up just after they’d graduated from high school, and she and Dave hadn’t gotten together until their sophomore year in college at CU in Boulder.  Jake had gone to the University of Denver so he could be closer to home and his mother whose health was failing because of the quart of vodka and six-pack of beer she’d consumed daily while reading, of all things, comic books out on the breezeway, a Virginia Slim forever smoldering in her bony, age-stained hand.

         She’d loved Batman and Wonder Woman and, later, after Jake had turned her on to the indie comics, the Nexus series about the tortured superhero Horatio Hellpop who wore a lightning bolt on his chest.

         Meanwhile, Jake and the girl he’d met in study hall, a shy, raspy-voiced, tawny haired beauty with a lush body and the brain of a geek, who also read comics, were experimenting with the witchery of sex in all its mesmerizing, frightening, thrilling, and beguiling shapes and forms.

         “Ohh...ahhhh...Christ!” Jake screamed, thrusting his hips up and exploding.

         “All better now?” she asked when she’d caught her breath, reaching into the glove box for some tissues.

         “Yeah,” Jake said, sagging back in the seat, knees spread, heartbeat gradually slowing.  “All...better.  Damn, you’re good at that.”

         “Just remember that, buddy--when you’re ogling Kristen’s ass on the trail to Paradox Falls.”

Adult Westerns

Here are some of my adult westerns just now up at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The first exciting novel in a series of erotic westerns featuring two undercover agents, Bear Haskell and his sometimes sidekick, Raven York.

Bear Haskell is a rough and tumble Texan and veteran of the Civil War who fought on the side of the Union. Raven York is a proud Yankee from a wealthy eastern family with aristocratic ties to Scotland. Dissatisfied with her life as a rich, well-traveled, and educated heiress, Raven headed West against her family’s wishes and went to work for Allan Pinkerton as an undercover agent.

As Pinkerton’s top agents, Bear Haskell and Raven York get all the toughest assignments: tracking down killers, kidnappers, con artists, bank robbers, and train bandits of every stripe throughout the West. But the two couldn’t be more different and are constantly at odds with each other. While they do not care for each other personally, they respect each other’s work. And, they hunger for each other in the bedroom.

Conflicted by their professional and ravenously sexual relationship, Bear and Raven do not confine their sexual adventures to each other. In fact, Pinkerton strictly forbids his agents from becoming personally or sexually involved with each other. Still, their paths are clearly intertwined, and the two must find a way to work together as they navigate—and trip over—the often humorous muddle of sexual temptation against the backdrop of the late-nineteenth-century West.

An ADULT WESTERN! THE HOTTEST, SEXIEST AND MOST VIOLENT ADULT WESTERN SERIES EVER PUBLISHED.. 

Saddle up and ride the hot and wild trails of the old frontier with the Revenger, Mike Sartain, as he rights wrongs for people who can’t right the wrongs themselves… 

All Available at the Ebook Outlet of Your Choice

Including

AMAZON

&

BARNES & NOBLE

Mean Pete's Wild-Ass Horror Novel Coming Soon

COMING IN A MONTH (OR SO) FROM THE SO-UNDERGROUND-IT'S-DAMN-NEAR-IN-AUSTRALIA MEAN PETE PRESS!