Sneak preview from upcoming book, FALSE GODS

[Bullet Caster]

Didn't realize JD was back in the hospital. My prayers and thoughts are going out to him this very minute. Get well, JD, and get that book finished. BC

[dudits]

waiting for a release date patiently.

[fishhawk]

waiting for a release date patiently.

Well I'm not being patient it can't get released soon enough!

[Echo]

Anxiously awaiting publication, JD.

[Recluse]

waiting for a release date patiently.

Anxiously awaiting publication, JD.

Met with the cover artist yesterday, should have some proofs to look at in the next couple of weeks. Still on target for a November release.

I sent Bad Water Bill a sample of the first 100 pages, completely raw and unedited, a week or two ago.

[Recluse]

Here are a few more chapters, again. . . very raw, very unedited. I'm just getting words and thoughts on paper and going along the outline for the story.

Sorry about any profanity that doesn't get filtered by the "word blocker" here.






Chapter 2





THE OBVIOUS BULGE OF A gun underneath the jacket of the man in front of him didn’t intimidate the pharmacist one bit. Neither did the size of the man’s companion, which was considerable—although much of it was due to blubber born of too much time spent at the dinner table and too little time spent exercising. Carter Goode grew up in west Texas where guns were as common as ball-point pens. He himself had a Kimber .45ACP concealed in a holster under his white lab coat. Being a registered pharmacist he knew it made sense to be armed what with all the drug-crazed loonies running around. This was Gainesville, Texas, a small town about sixty-five miles north of Dallas. But it was on the interstate and the big superhighway transported human trash as easily as it did everything else and some of that trash unfortunately stuck around Gainesville.

The two men’s business cards read “arbitration and negotiation” but Goode was having none of it. He knew exactly who they were being paid by and for what. “For the last time, gentlemen,” he explained. “My pharmacy is not for sale. Not now, and not anytime in the foreseeable future.”

“You’re getting old,” the man with the concealed gun pointed out, a plastic smile stuck on his face. “Don’t you want to retire?”

“Sure,” Goode replied. “And both my son and daughter-in-law are registered pharmacists and they’ll take over the business. I have zero intention of ever selling it to your cookie-cutter employer.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” the larger man said. “We can open up a store here and then run you out of business, then you’ll have wished you had sold to us.”

“You really think that?” Goode asked. “My dad opened this pharmacy up when he came back from Korea. We’ve had this drugstore since before both of you boys were even born. I’ve got third and fourth generation customers and patients here that sure as hell aren’t going to hop ship over to some national chain that imports everything from communist China and treats their employees like garbage. In case you neanderthals haven’t figured it out, this is small town Texas and we don’t particularly care too much for your kind of business.”

Behind the men, the bells above the door jingled as a couple of customers came in. Looking up, Goode saw two familiar faces approaching his counter—and he couldn’t help but smile. “Something funny?” the smaller goon asked, the annoyance in his voice evident. This was the third time they’d come down to this hick town in northern Texas trying to buy this particular pharmacy. It was a gold mine that their employer desperately wanted. A perfect location, generations of pharmacy patients and exactly zero debt owed. They’d offered some serious money to this idiot and for the life of everyone involved, they couldn’t figure out why the stupid son of a bitch was being so damned stubborn. Didn’t matter. Their orders on this third visit were to get their point across unmistakably and by whatever means necessary. Almost by whatever means necessary.

“If you’ll excuse me, I have some customers to take care of, and—”

“We’ll decide when we’re through talking,” the larger man said, not even bothering to turn around and acknowledge the newly arrived customers. “This pharmacy is closed,” he said loudly, still facing Goode.

“That is odd. It looks open to me,” an accented man’s voice said. “Are you still open for business, Señor Carter?”

“Absolutely, Ramon,” the pharmacist replied with a grin. “These gentlemen were just leaving, weren’t you boys?”

“No,” the other man said. “We were actually getting ready to lock the doors so we could complete the sale of your drugstore.”

“You are selling your drugstore?” Ramon Alvarez said. “That is news to me.” Turning to the man he’d walked in with, he asked, “Have you heard anything about Señor Carter selling his drugstore.”

“Not a thing. News to me,” the man said. “I think maybe these two gentlemen have their wires crossed, you suppose?”

“I think you are right,” the Mexican agreed, walking up to the two men. “Why don’t you two let our amigo be and leave now.”

“Listen friend, I don’t think you’re in a position to be asking us to do anything and—”

“I am not asking,” the Mexican said easily. “I am insisting or otherwise you are going to need some of the pain medications Señor Carter sells here. Probably even some that require a doctor to prescribe them for you—because if you insist on being a pendejo, you both will end up seeing a doctor before the hour is up.”

The smaller man who had the gun was looking at the Mexican’s companion. He had a very unsettling air about him. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, stood about five foot ten inches tall, looked to weigh around one-hundred eighty-five or so pounds, was extremely fit and radiated pure confidence. He was like a lion outside his cage—keenly aware of his surroundings, and completely without fear. He’d seen this man somewhere before... As he shifted to make his gun bulge more obvious, the man in front of him smiled slightly—knowingly, even—and shifted his sport coat back a few inches on his right side. Sitting in a high-rise, quick draw holster was a Colt 1911 45ACP. The Chicago thug’s brain began processing even more rapidly until it finally clicked. Oh ****.

“Carter, do you want these two big city boys to leave your drugstore?” the man in the sports coat asked.

“Well, Dillon, if you and Ramon would show them to their car, I would certainly be grateful,” the pharmacist said, still keeping his hand on the handle of the short-barreled shotgun he’d bolted underneath the counter. He’d seen the man’s gun-bulge the minute he’d walked in the door.

“You heard Señor Carter,” Ram said moving up to the big man and looking directly into his eyes. “Leave. Now.”

Dillon Cole had locked eyes with the shorter man and as he looked up, the Chicago man could see just under his Stetson. It was then that he got his first good look at Dillon’s eyes and the promise they held. Moving deliberately slow, he tried plastering a smile back on his face but it came off more as a grimace. “We’re leaving. We just wanted to make Mr. Goode here the best possible offer we could, and—”

“Save it, ********, and get your asses out of here. If you come back, it’s going to get ugly.”

“Are you threatening us?” the larger man sneered.

“No,” Dillon answered. “I’m promising you. And by the way, we’ve got your rental car’s tag numbers and I’ll be calling them in to both the sheriff here and our local Texas Ranger. As soon as we get home, I’ll be faxing them to a senior inspector with the FBI as well as the local Special Agent in Charge in Dallas. So the best thing you two *******s can do is get out of here and don’t come back.”

The larger of the two Chicago men opened his mouth but his companion quietly shushed him. “We’re leaving. Like I said, it was just a misunderstanding.” The two men walked out the door without so much as a glance back.

After the bells quit jingling as the door shut, Dillon sighed and relaxed a bit. “OK, Carter. So what the hell was that all about?”



* * *



The man with the gun was quiet as he concentrated on traffic. It was a tricky entrance onto Interstate 35 from the U.S. Highway 82 northbound access road between the eighteen-wheelers and the Friday afternoon northbound traffic to the casinos just on the other side of the Red River. “I can’t believe you backed down like that,” the man’s companion continued to bitch. “One wetback and two old guys. We could’ve roughed them up a little, put some fear in their hearts and they’d be begging to sell that place before the weekend was over!”

“You didn’t recognize him did you?” the driver asked as he accelerated on the entrance ramp.

“Recognize who?”

“The guy in the cowboy hat. You didn’t recognize him?”

“Hey, I’m not a cop like you. I don’t have this police-trained memory. The guy didn’t look like anything special and I had him by at least four inches and a hundred pounds.”

“He would’ve handled you like a five-year-old.”

“********! I could’ve—”

“Shut up just a ****ing minute, would you?” the driver snapped at his partner. “Do you remember a year or so ago when all those mass shootings were happening around the country? The muslims had put all these sleeper cells of shooters around the country and then started unleashing them in shopping malls and restaurants and public parks and stuff. In the first couple of weeks alone, over a thousand people were shot and over half of them died.”

“Yeah, I remember that. Who doesn’t?” the big man replied, glaring out his window. I could’ve taken all three of those guys and never broke a sweat.

“Do you remember what happened at the shooting on the campus of Tulsa University?”

“Remind me.” Truth was, the big guy’s memory was often a steroid-induced fog until someone spelled things out for him.

“There were four muslims with fully-automatic AK-47s spraying the place down. This one guy in there was armed. All he had was a Colt .45 auto but he blew three of those towel-heads away lickety-split. He got shot up in the process but survived.”

“Big deal. I’m not carrying a gun. He wasn’t going to shoot an unarmed guy, and if he tried, you were there—”

“Listen to me, *******!” the driver said angrily. “I did some digging on this guy after that shooting up in Tulsa. He and his wife adopted a teenage girl after he got out of the hospital. She was an orphan. Some guy at the children’s home she was staying at tried to rape her. He was a big guy like you—but even bigger, stronger and meaner. All-American offensive lineman until he flunked out of college. Our guy finds out his about-to-be daughter was assaulted by this guy and he travels out to east Texas, walks into a country beer joint and proceeds to dismantle the big man. I mean, totally ****ing destroy him. The guy’s left knee will never work again and the bone damage around it is so bad it can’t even be replaced. He will always walk with a cane, but he’ll have a hard time holding it because he also got both hands so badly crippled and broken that they are all but useless. His right elbow was dislocated at the socket with some sort of karate move. The guy did even more damage and he did it so fast and easy that the undercover DEA guy who was in there told me he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.”

Finally the man’s companion had shut up and was now looking at him, waiting on him to finish his tale. “What really blew the fed away was that the guy hung this kind of an ***-kicking on someone six inches and over a hundred pounds bigger than him, and he did it less than ten days after taking three AK-47 rounds in Tulsa. So you think you would’ve kicked his ***? My friend, I’d still be picking pieces of you up off the floor if you’d tried.”

The big man was looking through the windshield at the state line sign coming up welcoming them into Oklahoma. “You have your gun,” he pointed out.

A snort. “Yeah, and you have chemicals where your gray matter should be. Do you not remember me just saying this is the guy who popped three AK-47-wielding terrorists with his handgun and nailed three of them? When I patted the side of my jacket where my gun is, the son of a bitch just smiled and did the same and that’s when I saw his Colt holstered up. And if by some miracle I’d managed to get him first, that Mexican would’ve taken both of us down before we could’ve blinked.”

This was beginning to be too much for the big man. He’d always been the meanest and toughest guy on the block in Chicago and if he needed more muscle, he just went a grabbed some cop—like the one he was riding with—that was already on the company’s payroll. This was his first venture into territory this far south, and he was finding the people of the South, and especially Texas, downright unfriendly.

“The Mexican’s name is Ramon Alvarez. He used to be a freelance pistolero in Mexico when he was in his teens and twenties. He organized protection groups for the criminals and crooked politicians. But then he married, got religion and jumped to the other side. He started training the Mexican federales and their shooters and running deep cover missions into the new heroin cartels that were springing up in Mexico. Now he lives on a ranch with the other guy we just met. His name is Dillon Cole. I know he’s a former U.S. Marshal and was a legendary manhunter. But he is also former military, but nobody can find out with which service or exactly what he did. He sure as hell didn’t learn those fighting or shooting skills being a Navy accountant.”

The big man was now finally paying attention. “So you’re saying if these two guys are standing in Carter Goode’s corner, we might have problems?”

The cop took out a cigarette and lit it. As he cracked the window and exhaled a stream of smoke, he looked over at the big man. “You know? Maybe you aren’t as dumb as you look.”



* * *



Carter Goode walked over to his wall cooler and pulled out a couple of Cokes. Handing one each to Ram and Dillon, he motioned over to the waiting area by his pharmacy counter. “The big pharmacy retailers are trying to buy all us independents up,” he explained. “They’re gobbling up small mom and pop pharmacies all over the U.S.”

“What if you do not wish to sell?” Ram asked, twisting the top off his Coke and taking a long drink. “They can not make you.”

“They threaten to come in here, build across the street from you and lowball you on price until you give in, right?” Dillon tossed out, already knowing the answer.

“You got it,” Goode nodded. “But it’s been different here.”

“How so?”

“I know for a fact that the big companies have been looking for land around here—the local realtors tell me every time one of them comes down to look for a place to build.”

“And?”

The older pharmacist smiled. “Nobody will even give the realtors the time of day. They just smile and nod and then tell them their land isn’t for sale. So now the Chicago folks want my patient list and corner lot here. They’ll tear down this building and build a new one. I’m just not crazy about that idea and neither is anyone else in town. Let them build out on the interstate with all the other national businesses. This is Gainesville. We like our home-owned businesses staying right here downtown.”

“I agree,” Dillon said. “I saw enough of that **** when Vicki and I were living in the big cities. Dallas was bad enough, but those other cities were nuts. There’s a damn good reason why we bought land several hours outside of the city. Besides, I used to have to deal with these giant corporations back during my ad agency days. Because of those experiences, I make it a point to shop with as many locally owned businesses as I can.”

“I agree,” Ram chimed in. “I like keeping my money here at home with people I know.”

“Well, speaking of money,” Dillon said, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “Let’s get the girls’ prescriptions and get you paid so Ram and I can get back to the ranch. Three sick women is more than two healthy men should ever have to manage.” The two men had driven into Gainesville to pick up antibiotic “z-packs” for their wives and the Cole’s teenage daughter. All three women had come down with a nasty head cold a few days earlier. Felicia Alvarez, Ramon’s wife, was a registered nurse but now the tables were switched and it was her husband who was waiting on her hand and foot, as was Dillon with his wife Vicki and their daughter Brittany. “I appreciate you getting these things filled as fast as you did, along with the other things on the doctor’s list.”

“That’s what we’re here for, Dillon,” Carter Goode reminded the two men. “Let’s see these big-city pharmacies try and give that kind of service. Doesn’t happen.”

As the two men gathered up the prescriptions and other items they had purchased, Dillon turned around at the front door. “Carter, if those two boys come back you give me or Ram a call.”

“You still have that shotgun under the counter?” Ram asked.

“It’s still where you strapped it in, Ram,” the pharmacist nodded. “I appreciate you doing that. And I still have my own 45ACP right here,” he said, pulling back his white pharmacist’s jacket and revealing the holstered pistol.

Dillon nodded. “Like I said, if they come back or anyone else from that company gives you trouble, let us know.”

“I’ll do that. Now you boys get on out of here and go take care of those sick girls you have at home.”

E/C

[Recluse]

Chapter 3



CAM CARTER AWOKE TO A low growl. Rolling over in bed, his eyes focused on a mixture of fur and fangs. Before he could react, the animal leaped on the bed and the one-hundred and fifteen-pound Akita had a paw on each side of Cam’s face. Grumbling, Cam reached over to check the alarm clock. Noting that he was the only one in bed, he pushed away the big Japanese dog and sat up, bemoaning the snaps and crackles and pops his bones made in protest. Padding over to the walk-in closet, he pulled on a windsuit and a pair of New Balance jogging shoes that he now used mainly for fast-walking. Seeing the shoes come on, the Akita began barking excitedly. Shaking his head, Cam couldn’t help but grin at his big furry buddy. “We do this every morning, rain, snow or shine and you still get fired up,” he pointed out to excited dog.

Making his way into the kitchen, Cam’s wife Barbara was on her second cup of coffee and perusing the morning news via her Apple MacBook Air—a birthday present from Dillon, Vicki and Brittany Cole a year ago. Leaning over for a peck on the cheek, Cam glanced at the screen. Instead of the usual Drudge Report his wife scanned in the morning, he saw several financial pages pulled up. Grabbing a mug and pouring himself his own cup of coffee, he pointed at the screen. “What’s up?”

Cam and Barbara Carter were financial gurus. Barb was a gifted investment and portfolio planner who started her professional life as a simple bank teller until a bank VP overheard her discussing an investment strategy one day in the bank’s lower-level cafeteria. Intrigued, he made arrangements to have her begin splitting time between her teller duties and shadowing the bank’s top investment manager. A month later, the teller duties were forgotten and she became the investment manager’s executive assistant. A year later Barbara Carter had her own office, her own executive assistant and a rapidly growing client roster. Over the next two decades, a lot of the bank’s customers found their net worth growing exponentially due to Barb’s savvy and instincts. Dillon and Vicki had entrusted a large part or their own portfolio to Barb and it was her skill and knowledge in the world of financial investments that allowed the Coles to easily retire—and to do so very comfortably—in their early forties.

“I’m looking at the AHS stocks,” Barb said, sipping at her coffee and reaching over to give the big Akita an ear rub. As she did so, she worked the laptop’s trackpad and pulled up another screen.

“Who?” her husband asked absently, himself glancing at the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

“America’s Health Store, the huge pharmacy retailer who’s CEO was killed in Chicago a week ago.”

“No sympathy for that prick,” Cam noted, adding a dash more sugar to his coffee and flipping the Journal’s front page open to finish scanning the lead story, which happened to be on AHS’s chief rival, another giant pharmaceutical chain headquartered out of Boston.

“Did you ever meet him?” his wife asked.

“Several times. The first was after that family in Arizona sued them for a wrongful death when one of their pharmacists screwed up the dosage on a fentanyl prescription. He was a complete *** about the whole deal and kept demanding that we fight the family and keep putting them off until they ran out of money and no attorney would touch them. The company’s attorney’s wanted to lay the blame on the patient for not looking at the medication closer and realizing the dosing error.”

“I remember that,” Barb frowned, setting down her coffee mug. “The family were recent immigrants and had trouble reading everything on the label—and the woman was over seventy-years-old as well.”

“They print those things out in about forty different languages, you know,” Cam pointed out. “But the whole issue stemmed from just how big of a sweatshop the AHS pharmacies have turned into and that’s what I advised Sterns to strongly consider. Told him if this went to a jury, get ready to hand over a blank check. I then told him if that happened, we’d drop the entire company as a client which would in turn cause them to go into a high-risk pool—which meant Lloyd’s would be the only company big enough, besides us, to insure them. And Lloyd’s will cost you out the ***. Throw in the high risk pool and Sterns was looking at seeing his liability premiums quadruple at minimum. He had a **** fit on the spot. The woman that died meant absolutely nothing to him except a loss of dollars. What a sorry assed **********. The company and the world both are better off with him permanently gone.”

“Well, the AHS board of directors is replacing him with someone just as bad—maybe even worse. It’s his number two guy.”

“Aris? Roger ****ing Aris is getting the driver’s seat?” Cam asked incredulously. “Son of a bitch.”

“Yep,” Barb said, shaking her head in disgust.

“What’ll the Street say about it,” her husband asked, referring to Wall Street. Barb was still close to a number of brokerage houses on Wall Street, all of which had standing open-door offers for her to come work for them at any time in which she might decide that her early retirement was getting boring.

“They’ll love it. Another hard-liner who’s been advocating more slash and burn cuts at the middle and lower ranks while pushing overseas expansion.”

“****. That means at some point in the near future, I’ll end up having to deal with this ******. Wonderful.”

“You can always retire, like me,” his wife pointed out. “You don’t owe The Richmond anything, you’re vested, we have no debt and we’re in great shape financially. How much longer are you going to put up with this? It’s starting to cost you your hair.”

“I’ve got one more crusade left in me,” Cam said, reaching up to grab the Akita’s leash. “I just don’t know what it is yet. But when I find out and get it done, then yeah, I think I’m calling it quits.”

“Good,” his wife said. “Then maybe you could shave your head and take up scuba diving.”





* * *



The president exhaled disgustingly through his nostrils, the acrid smoke of the just-lit Marlboro swirling around him. Putting his feet up on the desk in the Oval Office, he looked over at his chief of staff. “The numbers suck.”

Roderick Grisham stared back. “Yes, they do.”

“And I’ve got a goddamn election in just a few weeks.”

“Yes, you do.”

The Marlboro suffered another mighty inhale as the president angrily waved his hand. “What are you, a ****ing parrot? I need some answers!”

Grisham looked at the man sitting in front of him and not for the first time silently wished he’d never been corralled into taking this job. He had come to fame and the attention of the Democratic party by getting an unknown governor from Arkansas and his ugly, bitchy wife into the White House. He briefly served as their chief of staff during the mid-term elections—he’d done so because unlike this arrogant fraud in front of him, his previous bosses would actually listen to him. They might not always follow his advice or recommendation, but at least they’d listen. And it was always “they” because while the president was the one who’d taken the oath of office, his wife wore the steel jockstrap and had balls that clanged. Her husband’s balls were rumored to be occupied elsewhere with any of the female staffers or interns and afterwards were too worn out to even clack, let alone clang. Grisham shook his head and looked down at his notes. “Unemployment is in double-digits—”

“********. We fixed those numbers to reflect just under nine percent.”

“That’s the U3 figure,” the president’s chief of staff pointed out. “You know as well as I do, and certainly as well as the rest of the economists and analysts, that the U6 figure compiled by computing jobs lost, those who are not drawing any sort of paycheck including unemployment benefits, and the jobs creation forecast from the Department of Labor places real unemployment at almost sixteen percent.”

The president simply studied his cigarette in way of reply.

“And then there’s the price of gasoline—it’s doubled, and almost tripled since you took office.”

“Too many ****ing hurricanes and other natural disasters, not to mention that goddamn BP spill in the Gulf,” the president retorted.

“********.”

“********? Did you just say ******** to me?”

Grisham was sick of this clown, sick of the endless heat he took from the press, sick of the hate mail, and most of all, sick of having to look at himself in the mirror every morning while getting ready to come to work. He had money—lots of it—stashed away in the Caymans and in Chile. His ex-wife was paid off, the kids were grown and he had zero debts. He didn’t need this ****. “That’s exactly what I said.”

“Mister—”

“Don’t go there,” Grisham warned. “I have the facts. You’ve killed every drilling proposal and request that has come across your desk since the day you were inaugurated. You had one hell of an opportunity to create over ten thousand jobs and cut the price of a gallon in gasoline in half, but you ****ed that up too when you killed the pipeline project from Canada. Your incessant and constant ***-kissing to OPEC has made the United States the doormat when it comes to our energy policies and any global power or influence we had when it came to energy is gone.”

The president angrily stubbed out his cigarette. “There’s more to this mess than simply jobs and energy—”

“You really are a complete dumb****,” Grisham snapped, reaching into his portfolio for a document he’d prepared the night before. “When trucks, trains, ships and airplanes can’t afford fuel or have to pay twice as much for it, that raises the price of goods—all goods ranging from groceries to clothes to cars to appliances. But when consumers can’t afford the increase in price, businesses have to eat that increased cost and that means cutting your other big expense which is labor. So, Mister President, people get laid off so that businesses can continue to sell goods without an overly harsh markup of purchase price. Carter didn’t understand that either, and during his term he saw businesses in so much trouble that they were both laying off their workers and having to raise the price of goods. The result was run-away inflation and then the creation of the Misery Index, of which you are now the crowned prince of misery so far as the majority of the American people are concerned.”

Outside the Oval Office, it was all the Secret Service agents could do to not stand up and cheer. Supposedly neutral in their political leanings, most USSS agents detested politics. But being civil servants, they were not the highest paid people in Washington, and like everyone else in America, they were watching their spending power become drastically reduced. Most agents in the protective details had degrees in psychology or sociology, as well as in criminal justice, but they talked with their brethren in the counterfeiting units who did understand economics and how money works, and they learned that this president and his cabinet were a literal train wreck when it came to safeguarding the prosperity of the average American citizen. Roddy Grisham was a slick, smart operator and to a person, they respected Grisham and despised their principle. The older veterans were counting the days until they could retire while hoping their pensions would still be there given how this president racked up a deficit that made the previous occupant of this office look more miserly than Ebenezer Scrooge. The younger detail members were simply counting the day until the November elections and praying for a new administration and Congress.

“My poll numbers are still decent!” the president shouted.

“Your poll numbers—your actual poll numbers—are dog ****,” Grisham shot back, flipping through a deck of printouts. You’re the first president since these things have been tracked to have his approval rating fall below thirty-five percent. Congratulations,” the chief of staff said with obvious sarcasm in his voice. “You and Congress finally have something in common.”



* * *



At the Keeling House, a large brokerage firm on Wall Street, a senior broker hung up his phone and turned to the other person in his office. With an unmistakable smugness in his voice, he announced, “Well, it’s a done deal. Our two people on the board of directors for AHS will push the vote to the majority we need to get Roger Aris in the CEO’s seat.”

“How much did that cost us?” the other senior broker in the office asked.

“Five million each.”

“Jesus Christ! Are you out of your mind?”

“Relax,” the man said, reaching in his humidor and pulling out a contraband Cuban cigar, then gesturing to his partner to pick one out for himself. “I’ve already spoken to Roger. A few weeks after he’s in Sterns’ old chair, we’ll coordinate a press release about new acquisitions and then we’ll lead the stock rally. Before the week is over, we’ll initiate a split in the stock and use that to pay our two board members. Our commission alone on the sale will be over forty-million, and that, my friend, is just for starters.”

“Howard, what if the SEC gets wind?” the other man warned. “I hope you’ve got an exit strategy.”

“Won’t need one, trust me,” Howard Keeling assured his partner. “There are only five of us in on this deal. The only way the boys and girls at the Exchange Commission will get anything is if one of us breaks down and talks. And that,” he said, lighting his cigar and taking a victory puff, “isn’t going to happen.”

“We’ve got to be damned careful.”

“Agreed. But don’t spend your time worrying. Nothing is going to go wrong.”

The partner was reflective for a moment, then lit his own cigar. “Yeah? Well that’s what the guys at Enron thought, too.”

E/C

[redneckdan]

I like it! Written kind of like old school Tom Clancy with a hint of Texas twang and a healthy helping of accurate technical jargon.

[Goatwhiskers]

Not gonna read that last chapter. Saving it to enjoy in the book. I'll be standing in line for two copies like last time when it comes out. Great work! GW

[Recluse]

I like it! Written kind of like old school Tom Clancy with a hint of Texas twang and a healthy helping of accurate technical jargon.

Heh heh. The editor will take out a bunch of the "twang" and casual-tone.

Not gonna read that last chapter. Saving it to enjoy in the book. I'll be standing in line for two copies like last time when it comes out. Great work! GW

Mike, plenty of chapters after the few I posted here so no worries. Again, it's one-hundred percent raw, unedited and unaltered and there are things (many) needing to be edited, fixed, altered, etc. But I just like to get the words on paper first, then go back and clean up, tweak, adjust, polish and publish.

Am going to try and get back to Natchitoches for a weekend in Nov/Dec after it comes out. I missed the Christmas river festivities last year and absolutely want to try and make them this year.

[fishhawk]

well put me down as a proof reader again!

[Goatwhiskers]

The Natchitoches decorations are well worth the trip. Maybe I can get up there if I continue to progress as I have so far. GW

[waksupi]

This is cruel and unusual punishment. I'll proof again if you wish.