If you own a Kindle (any generation) and are a member of Amazon Prime you can now “borrow” either Down With the Thickness: Viewing the World From a Fat Guy’s Perspective or You Only Die Twice for free through the Kindle Lending Library program. You can read all about the program here. If you have a Kindle and Prime and haven’t already purchased a copy of either book I highly suggest you try this out.
Author Archives: J.R.
Estimated Page Count…
Amazon’s estimated page count is killing me for the digital versions of the books. It’s showing 138 pages for You Only Die Twice. I promise you, it is a full-length novel. The paperback length is 238 pages. It’s on the shorter end, I know, but the idea was to do a quick, fun read, and I didn’t want to pad it out with crap just to get the page count up. When I write I try not to be concerned with page or word count, but just telling the best version of the story. As another example The Chosen Chronicles: Rebirthing is going to clock in over 600 pages in print, which is why I’m probably going to have to break it up into two parts. That’s just the length it ended up being to tell that first story.
Filed under Clay Colt, Novels, The Chosen: Rebirthing
Thank You
Thank you to everyone who picked up a digital copy of You Only Die Twice this week. We appreciate your support. If you haven’t yet, please take a few moments to pick up a copy. It’s only $2.99, and it’s more filling than a Happy Meal (and it won’t take as long to digest.) Don’t let the “Kindle” label fool you. You don’t have to own a Kindle to read the book. There’s a Kindle app for every computer, phone, or electronic device known to man at this point. For those of you who prefer to rock it old school we have paperback versions on the way. We’re hoping to have those available by the end of the week. I’m going to do my best to make the price as affordable as possible. If you would like to “try before you buy” you can check out the first chapter for free here or on our Goodreads page. If you’ve already read it, please remember to take a few moments to give it a short review on both Amazon and Goodreads (if you have an account). We’re trying to do this indie-style, so that means word of mouth is essential. Thank you very much for your continued support.
You Only Die Twice is now Available on Amazon
The digital version of my first fiction novel, You Only Die Twice, is now available on Amazon. The paperback should be available later this week. Here’s the description:
Clay Colt and his partner Evelyn Wood are private investigators that sometimes have to do less-than-legal things to make ends meet. All that changes the day they see Clay’s dead Kharta’an friend tearing apart downtown Buenos Aries on the news. That dead friend was the son of the Executor of the Kharta’an Empire, and to the Kharta’an desecration of the dead is considered an act of war. Someone is using technology to reanimate the dead and Clay, as the the Kharta’an’s chosen agent, has just 48 hours to uncover the truth and find those responsible in order to prevent an intergalactic war where Earth will be ground zero.
“With Mark Ruelius”
Mark and I were co-writers and best friends for over a decade before he was taken from us way too soon due to complications with diabetes. When we first started writing I was a freshman in college and Mark was still in high school. Our first novel was going to be a huge sci-fi epic. We mapped out all these alien races, governments, space travel ideas, and other fun concepts…all of which we abandoned a year later when we realized just how amateur the story was. It was a learning experience, and a valuable one, and it helped us to make our first professional novel, The Chosen Chronicles: Rebirthing, what it is. When I started working on this novel I decided that it was a real shame to let all the hard work that we did go to waste. Why make up an entirely new universe when I already had one mapped out? Mark agreed and gave me his blessing. So, in the novel you’re about to read the ITC, every alien race, and even the names of the hero and some of the supporting cast were all products of Mark and I sitting up until 5 A.M. bouncing ideas off of each other. I felt it would be criminal if I didn’t honor Mark for the contributions he made, since without him this novel would have been a very different animal. So Shawn and I thought adding a “with” credit on the cover was a fitting tribute for a man who inspired not only this novel, but every project we’re working on in some way.
So please, check out the novel. It’s only $2.99. Let me know what you think.
Click here to check out the first chapter.
Click here for the digital copy.
Paperback edition coming soon.
October Update
Shawn is hard at work on the cover for our first Clay Colt novel You Only Die Twice. I’ve seen the rough drafts and they are looking great. I can’t wait to see the final product. Our goal is to have the book ready for purchase next week both in digital and paperback. We do hope you’ll pick up a copy and check it out. The digital copy will be set for $2.99. We’re not entirely sure on the paperback price yet as we can’t get a quote until everything is finished. It’s determined on the price of production, which itself is determined by how long the book is, and I can’t get that quote until the cover is done and submitted. So yeah, there’s that fun little look into our process. I will tell you that I will keep it as close to the $5.50 price point (the same we charged for the last book) as I can. The digital price will always be cheaper simply because I find it ridiculous to charge you full retail price for something that you can’t physically hold in your hands and I wish more authors and publishers would do the same. *cough*DC & Marvel*cough*
Following Colt comes the first Part of The Chosen Chronicles: Rebirthing, hopefully before Thanksgiving. This is a special book for us for many reasons, the largest of which because it was the first and only book co-written by our best friend Mark Ruelius before he died. Mark and I worked on Chosen for close to a decade, and he passed literally weeks before the final draft was finished. “Why did it take you so long?” you may ask. Well, first because when we started I was in college and Mark was still in High School. Second, because I lived in Tennessee and Mark lived in PA. Third, because the entire book was written through e-mail, instant messaging, texts, and phone calls. Yes, that’s correct, Mark and I never met in person, to my lasting regret. We were planning on getting together just before he died. Fourth, because we mapped out not just the storyline for one book, but for an entire universe which consisted of three full novels, several short stories, and a potential comic series- all of which you’ll, hopefully, be seeing in the upcoming few years. Rebirthing will be broken up into three parts because the final draft of the novel, in print, is over 600 pages long. Breaking it up makes it more cost effective, so we can sell it at an affordable price. Who want’s to pay $20 for a paperback? The goal is to release part 1 before Thanksgiving, followed by parts 2 and 3 by Christmas and New Year, respectively.
Early next year we hope to release Just Super, a novel about a young man who discovers that he has super powers but that they’re slowly killing him. He decides to hire a journalist to document his final 6 months as he tries to be the world’s first superhero and help people before he dies. I’m finishing up the last few chapters now.
We’re also hoping that we’ll have our first comic available sometime next year. It’ll be set in the same universe as The Chosen Chronicles and it’s a story Shawn and I are really excited about. I’ll talk more about that when we have some stuff we can show you.
Well, I’ve ranted long enough. Please keep your eye out for the release of You Only Die Twice this week, and as always feedback is most appreciated.
Filed under Clay Colt, Just Super, Novels, The Chosen: Rebirthing
Down With the Thickness Sample Chapter
Chapter 1: No Friend to the Fat Man
Threat Assessment
I’m fat. Sumo fat. Kool-Aid Guy fat.
Oh yeah!
I’ve always been a big guy. Even as a little kid I was “thick” and that’s just been a constant (and at times more of an expansion) as I’ve gotten older. We’ll talk about diets and all that fun stuff a bit later but let’s just say I’ve tried just about everything under the sun and I still look like a serial buffet molester. I’m reasonably lucky in that I’ve also always been tall, about 6’4, and that my weight has been reasonably well distributed across my body. I’ve known people who hadn’t been dealt as good a hand and it’s caused them endless physical, not to mention psychological, problems as a result. That’s not to say I’ve gotten off scot-free in that regard, but I’m well aware of how much worse I could have had it.
Being a big person you automatically have a fairly unique perspective on things. For instance, I think that the military should start recruiting fat people to be strategic advisors. Why? Fat people are experts with a lifetime of experience at evaluating situations and coming up with rapid solutions to problems. We do this every time we walk into a crowded room or a new environment with untested furniture. Immediately your fat-sense starts to tingle and you’re taking in the room at a glance to decide on the best path to take to meet the least amount of resistance, or evaluating which chair might be safe for you to sit in without reducing it to toothpicks and firewood.
I’ve had more chairs break on me than a professional wrestler.
There’s nothing as panic-inducing as being in a crowded room or in someone else’s home, sitting in a chair, feeling it start to creak, and then realizing that you’ve made a tactical error in furniture selection. There’s also nothing as impactful on your self-esteem. If it happens once, it’s embarrassing and you can usually laugh it off. When it happens often enough that your friends have “special” chairs for you to use when you come over, it really starts to make an impact…no pun intended.
This kind of highly-honed threat assessment is developed at an early age as a survival mechanism in the vast jungles of adolescence. I can remember, as a kid, dreading the bus rides to school. Now, no kid likes to ride the cheese, but for big people it was a daily source of dread and humiliation. For me it was extra special, because not only was I taller than just about everyone else and big enough that I took up most of the bus seat as it was, but I was also a nerd. Not just any kind of nerd either- I was a band nerd. That meant that not only was I carrying a seventy-five pound backpack filled to capacity with school books, but also a trumpet case the size of a small trunk. I looked like a mutant hobo ready for life on the road.
Being as how I grew up in the south, every morning the bus ride to school was like a re-enactment of scenes from Forrest Gump, with me looking forlorn as I slowly hauled my crap down the bus aisle looking for a place to sit as little redneck kids would shake their heads and reply in a slow southern drawl “Seat’s taken.” As a result, I made it my mission in life to be the first in line to get on the bus after school so I’d be able to snag the Mecca of school bus seats before anyone else- the half seat at the very back of the bus next to the emergency door. It was the perfect size for me and had enough room on the floor next to it so that I could stow my luggage and not have to sit with it constantly digging into my legs. Plus, it meant I didn’t have to worry about sharing the seat with someone else while they complained that I took up all the room.
Survival of the Wittiest
The school bus was also the place where I could develop another useful tool in the arsenal of fat people- being a smart mouth. See, when you’re big you really only have a few options for self-defense against the other kids: One, you can be the introverted fat kid that hardly ever talks and prays that the other kids just won’t notice you or care enough to mess with you. Two, you can become a bully and use your size to your advantage, coming from the school of thought that if they’re afraid of you they won’t mess with you. Three, you can become a smart aleck, because if you can make them laugh at something (or someone) else, then they’re not laughing at you.
I’ve tried the first option, and I have to admit that it really doesn’t work all that well. For one, when you’re as big as I am you never really “blend.” When you walk into a room you’re going to draw attention regardless of what you say or do. Plus, when you act introverted and keep to yourself, it’s like wearing a bullseye on your back for all the less-intelligent social predators looking for easy prey.
The second option is very tempting to someone who’s been picked on all their life. The idea of not only fighting back, but having people be afraid of you is great, in an ideological sort of way. Every guy fantasizes about being the Clint Eastwood of the schoolyard where everyone shows you “respect” and all the girls swoon. Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t live up to the hype. When you’re a bully, no one really likes you. They may act like they respect you, but it’s really only fear, and your so-called friends won’t hesitate to turn on you as soon as the opportunity presents itself and they think they can get away with it. Any kind of relationship built on fear is only an empty illusion, and a life devoid of true friendship, loyalty or respect can be worse than living with getting picked on all the time.
Plus, being a bully means you have to hurt people and the reality of seeing someone truly in pain and knowing that you caused it is far different than the romanticized version that we’ve grown so used to seeing in various types of media. The fact of the matter is when you’re a big person you have to be that much more aware of the kind of damage you can unwittingly cause. What is normal roughhousing for most kids becomes something that could be decidedly more dangerous when you add someone twice their size into the mix. This is a lesson I learned the hard way one summer when I was ten years old.
My cousin and I grew up together in Granite City, Illinois. Granite is a small steel mill city just across the bridge from St. Louis, and both sides of my family are from there. I lived there until I was seven and my dad, who worked for the Kroger Bakery as a supervisor, was transferred to Houston, TX. While my cousin and I were always close, he grew up on the bad side of town and tended to have a street mentality about things. By that I mean that if he gets mad he lashes out. If he feels you’ve insulted him he lashes out. Sometimes it means he just decides he’s going to be a jerk for no other reason than he felt like it at the time. I don’t mean to trivialize his issues, because he did have a lot of them. He didn’t have a great childhood or home life to begin with, and once my family and I moved, he really didn’t have many positive outlets left to him.
That summer, my parents had him sent down to stay with us for a while and most of the time he and I got along fine. The rest of the time our “fights” consisted of little more than calling each other names and going off to our respective corners of the house to sulk for a bit. However, one night things escalated into something physical.
The fight started over something pretty stupid, as most fights at that age do. My little sister, who was not yet six at the time, had fallen asleep on the couch while we were all watching T.V. and I wanted to carry her into her bedroom and put her to bed. My dad worked nights and mom was in another room at the time, so I asked my cousin to go in and pull back the covers so I could lay her down. For whatever reason, he decided he wanted to make an issue out of it and refused. We went back and forth a few times until I finally gave up and just put my sister in her bed on top of the blankets.
When I came back out he and I got into an argument about it. He pushed me. I pushed him back. He pushed me back harder and before I knew it we were in my bedroom doing our best to kill one another. Now, because my bed was fairly small my parents had taken the mattress off of the box spring and put it in the floor so we’d have more room and no one would fall and hurt themselves if they happened to roll off of the bed. This also conveniently gave him a frame to use like the ropes on a wrestling ring to jump on my back and choke me. Without thinking, I grabbed at his arm, which at this time was wrapped around my throat and doing a boa constrictor impression, and threw him over my shoulder to land rather spectacularly onto the mattress on the floor. His body bounced a few times before finally coming to a rest, at which point my mom, having heard all the noise, stormed into the room and separated us.
Now, this all sounds like a pretty silly fight like most boys that age have. The problem, as my father pointed out to me later, was that it could have ended up being something much more serious. My cousin was a year older than me, but I was still several inches taller and more than twice his size. Had that mattress not been there to break his fall I could have very easily hurt him. In fact, looking back on it, considering how forcefully he hit I’m surprised that he didn’t end up hurting his neck or back anyway. My dad really made sure to hit that point home with me that night when he got back from work. He wasn’t mad that I defended myself, but he did want me to realize that someone my size had to be extra careful in everything physical that I did, especially with other people. That night I learned that with great weight comes great responsibility to not crush people, and I’ve never been in a fight since.
So, if being the quiet kid just got you picked on, and being a bully wasn’t an option, then that left being a smart aleck. Now, it took me years to really come out of my shell and fully embrace my destiny as the outgoing geek I am today, but by the time I was a junior in high school I realized that when you can make people laugh and are generally a nice guy, they tend to like having you around. Liking you to be around doesn’t really correlate to true friendship or wanting to date you, but we’ll address that a bit later.
So, as a result, I’ve come to rely on my wit and sense of humor when it comes to dealing with people. I don’t do it just as a defense mechanism anymore, though it can certainly become one when I’m nervous or scared. Over the years I’ve genuinely enjoyed having the ability to make someone laugh, especially when you’re trying to help and need to get the other person to open up a bit.
I had a professor at Lee University, Dr. Bill Effler, who used to teach Personal Evangelism. It was basically a class that was meant to prepare wannabe ministers to be evangelists. During that class Dr. Effler said something that really had an impact on me. In fact, it was something that became a personal mantra of mine that I’ve since gone on to teach to my own students: in order to reach anyone, you have to first earn the right to be heard. It’s easy for people, especially ministers, to assume that just because you have something to say, the other person has some kind of responsibility to listen. That’s not true. Why should anyone listen to what you have to say? Why should they believe a word that comes out of your mouth? If respect is earned, then so is the right to be heard by other people. Using humor to relate to people, to make them laugh and feel good, is one way to earn the right to be heard. Besides that, it can also be a lot of fun.
Alternatives
Now while furniture and public transportation can be problems for big people, public restrooms are definitely no friend to the fat man. I’ve seen some restroom stalls so small that I was literally afraid that I’d get stuck if I tried to use them. One of the most horrific experiences of my life was moving into the dorms at Lee University and finding out that we had community bathrooms and all of the stalls were of the average “holy crap I hope I don’t die” variety. I was only in those particular dorms for a semester, and believe me one of the best things about moving out and into the apartment dorms was having a normal bathroom again.
Because stalls are such a pain in the rear (often literally) that means that I generally have to wait until the handicap stall is available. Ahh, the handicap stall- the fat man’s home away from home: large toilets, plenty of room to maneuver, and sometimes even a private sink. While the half-seat at the back of the bus was the Mecca of bus seats, the handicap stall is the Mecca of bathrooms. My bathroom at home isn’t as nice as some of the handicap stalls I’ve been blessed enough to frequent. In fact, on the trip between Memphis, where my parents currently live, and Chattanooga, where I went to college and worked for several years, I have specific places I always stop to fill up and use the restroom just because I know they have four star handicap stalls. Sounds ridiculous? Ask any fat person you know. If they’re brave enough to admit it, they’ll tell you they have their favorite bathroom alternatives as well.
That’s what you have to do to really get by as a big person. You have to think ahead, use strategy, assess and respond. If the zombie apocalypse ever happens, don’t save the cute chick with the big breasts. Save the fat people. They may not be as much fun to look at, but they’ll be able to use their tactical genius to keep you alive until the government comes with flamethrowers and shotguns. Just be sure to stock up on beef jerky. We don’t think as well on an empty stomach.
Clothes Make the Big Man
Another source of dread growing up was clothes shopping. I can remember saying a silent prayer every time I tried something on, hoping to God that it’d fit and I wouldn’t have to shamefully exit the dressing room and shake my head as my frustrated parents went off to search for something else. I never got to wear the fun clothes that the other kids did, with pictures of the Simpsons, Homey the Clown, or superheroes on the front. Instead every day I looked like a pre-teen dressing up as a middle aged accountant for Halloween due to the fact that most of my shirts and pants, at the time, were bought in the adult section where my father shopped.
As I got older, and bigger, clothes became even harder for me to find. Now they have big and tall shops where it makes it a bit easier for people like me to find decent clothes, but up until a few years ago it used to mean ordering special clothes using a catalogue and paying easily twice as much for them as normal people do. For that reason, even now, my wardrobe is woefully limited and being able to wear the same pair of jeans that you wore a year ago is a point of pride- like athletes presenting their trophies. “See this pair of jeans? I’ve had these for three years! I haven’t ripped the butt out of them or anything!”
Shopping for underwear is even more fun. Tighty-whiteys really live up to the name when you’re my size. I wore them for years and can remember the excruciating pain that could occur when you shift the wrong way and the edges ride up as far on the crotch highway as is physically possible. That was especially fun when driving, leaving me desperately shifting and squirming to try and pick them out of the dark crevices of my lower half while doing my best not to crash my car. Often, I’d just rip the things out of desperate frustration and be left with nothing but just dangling cloth covering what was left of my modesty like something God might have fashioned for Adam out of animal skins.
Eventually, I gave up on conventional underwear all together and am currently employing pairs of shorts in the position usually occupied by boxers. They’re more durable, comfortable, and they have pockets. Why I’d need pockets for my underwear I’m not sure, but they’re there just the same, so at least I’ve got options. I guess if I’m ever visiting a foreign country, I could keep my wallet in those pockets as opposed to trying to fashion a sumo-sized fanny pack. Even the best pick pocket in the world wouldn’t be able to get his/her hands down my pants and take my wallet…at least not without dinner and a movie first. After all, I do have standards.
If you liked this sample chapter and would like to read more, please purchase the paperback or the digital version for Kindle.
Copyright © J.R. Broadwater 2009-2012
All rights reserved
Filed under Down With The Thickness, Novels
Publishing Update
You Only Die Twice has been edited and is ready for publishing as soon as the cover is finished. The goal is to have both the digital and paperback versions available by October 1st. The Chosen Chronicles: Rebirthing, a project 10 years in the making, is finally at the finish line as well. The book was so long we had to break it up into three parts to keep costs down (and to make sure the paperback version wouldn’t fall apart in your hands.) The goal is to have part one out before Thanksgiving.
For those of you new to these parts, Chosen has been a project that Mark Ruelius and I started writing almost a decade ago. Unfortunately Mark lost his fight with diabetes and died at the age of 25 on January 7, 2010- two weeks before the final draft was complete. I struggled with the decision on how to move forward with it for a few years. Chosen is a difficult story to market. It doesn’t fall neatly into any one genre. The best way Mark and I knew to describe it is if Star Wars and Hellblazer had a baby, Chosen would be it.
It’s the story of the war between Heaven and Hell, and the balance of power on Earth that has to be maintained in order to prevent Armageddon from happening before it’s supposed to. The Chosen are a group of humans who were specifically designed by God to help maintain this balance, with the help of an intelligence network called the Faithful. The Chosen and Faithful have been working together since the Dark Ages, helping to keep the forces of Hell in check. At the beginning of Rebirthing the Chosen have been in disarray for a decade, and the forces of Hell have discovered something that, if they succeed in their plot, could tip the balance in their favor. Jude, the absentee leader of the Chosen, is tasked with protecting and training his replacement, reuniting the Chosen, and stopping this new threat if the forces of Heaven, and all of humanity, have any hope of surviving.
We thought about taking the traditional publishing rout with Chosen, but after Mark died I decided that self publishing would be the best way to go. I wanted to preserve the work Mark put into the book as much as possible, and that meant having complete control in how the final draft turned out without any outside influence from editors or publishers. Hopefully you will all enjoy the result.
Filed under Clay Colt, Novels, The Chosen: Rebirthing
You Only Die Twice Preview
The following is a sneak preview of my sci-fi noir novel You Only Die Twice, which is available now on Amazon and in paperback.
Chapter 1
My name is Clay Colt and I’m a private investigator… well, usually. Right then I was being paid a nice chunk of money to pull a B & E in some rich bastard’s penthouse and crack open his ridiculously complex safe. Some would call it robbery; I like to call it “professional retrieval”.
What can I say? I’m diversified.
Richard Wellington III is old money that comes from a long line of old money dating back to the early nineteenth century. Back then his family owned several plantations complete with an army of slave labor, and they were damn proud of it. These days he maintains his position of power and wealth by driving smaller businesses out of business, buying up the real estate, and then selling it off to larger corporations. More often than not the beings that are displaced by such douchebaggery happen to be members of the immigrant alien community. It’s safe to say that the apple certainly didn’t fall far from the tree. While relations between humans and the various other aliens species we’ve made contact with over the past few centuries have grown by leaps and bounds, old habits die hard and there are still a lot of humans out there, like Dick the Third, that dislike anyone or anything that’s different.
That’s where I come in.
Once upon a time I was a detective with the United Earth Defense Force, Western Division, and stationed in Buenos Aries. In my time in the service I’d gained something of a reputation for being an alien lover, much to the chagrin of many powers-that-be. While I admit I find aliens, particularly of the female variety, exotic, I mostly just got tired of seeing good beings, E.T. or not, treated like dirt and forced into a life of servitude or desperation; so I tried to help them out whenever I could. Since my rather spectacular falling out with the peace keepers of our fair planet, I took the only job available to me where I could do some good for those that need it while still making out pretty decently in the finance department. Sometimes that means occasionally taking on jobs that are less than legal.
This brings us back to the safe, and why I was risking my finely sculpted posterior breaking into it. An ex-con named Smitty I’ve maintained contact with over the years hired me to check out Wellington’s shenanigans and see if I could dig up any dirt that could be used to knock the jackass off his high horse. After trailing him for the better part of a week and using some of the marginally legal surveillance gear I have at my disposal, I found out that Wellington keeps a lot of his more important, and I was willing to bet incriminating, information in his own private safe. So, I was kneeling on the floor, fiddling with the highly illegal code breaker I had stuck to the front of the safe and trying to get the damn open combination before one of Wellington’s private security goons packing really big guns found me snooping around.
Of course, that exact scenario happened just seconds later.
“Step away from the safe and put your hands in the air!” There was a high pitched whine that let me know he’d just flicked his gun safety to the “off” position. “Did you hear me scumbag? I said step away from the sa-“
He was on the floor and convulsing with a shock dart protruding from his chest before he could finish his rather cliché badass-security-guard routine. Shock darts are (usually) non-lethal rounds that deliver a jolt of electricity through a target’s nervous system every second, incapacitating them. It’s pretty effective on most species, and for the bigger ones…well that’s why you carry more than one round. Each dart only has a two minute charge, which meant that I had just under that before a very pissed security guard was able to sound the alarm and do his best to punch holes through my body with the impressively large gun that I mentioned earlier. I hoped to be long gone before that.
I retracted the holdout gun back under the sleeve of my left arm and brought my left index finger up to my lips without bothering to take my eyes off of what I was doing. “Shhhhh, I’m trying to concentrate and this isn’t as easy as it looks.”
The reason that Smirth & Besson safes were so popular among the super-rich was their notorious reputation for being almost impossible to crack. The safe had a double combination lock- one digital, one manual, and each of the three sequences to the combinations had to be entered into both locks within a half-second of each other. In other words, if you were like me and were using a digital code breaker to get the actual sequence numbers, you’d have less than a second to match up the digital number with the corresponding Terz numbershape on the manual dial. If you already know the combination sequence this is relatively easy with a little practice. If you don’t, failure to enter in the right code combination at the right time results in the safe going into complete lockdown, the alarm sounding, and a room full of big thugs with guns like The Great Convulsionist that was jerking spasmodically on the floor five feet away from me. These types of safes were referred to as “virgins” in the criminal set, because, as the aphorism went, they were the toughest boxes to get into.
Luckily, I was a master at getting into virgin boxes. I heard a double click and with a smirk I swung the safe door open. “That’s right baby. It’s prom night and I brought wine coolers.”
I quickly grabbed my prize and shoved it, along with the code breaker, into the fanny pack I was wearing at my hip. I stood up and clicked on my communication earwig. “My date’s unconscious and lying spread eagle on the bed; I’m ready for pick up.”
Evelyn’s sultry voice was only slightly muddled by comm distortion. “You’re a real pig, you know that?”
“Oink, oink, baby. I’ll be out in one.”
I sauntered over to the still-convulsing guard and knelt down. The shock dart still had a good minute or so of charge left, but it wouldn’t do to leave behind any evidence that could somehow point back to me. A vast majority of the cops in this sector already had it in for me as it was. No sense in giving them any rope to hang me by.
The guard was grunting in pain between spasms and his eyes locked onto me like a pissed off bull as I approached. As I expected, as soon as I yanked the dart from his chest he did his best to lunge, but after my patented left hook he was back on the floor and bleeding out of the side of his mouth. I patted him lightly on the chest, “Nighty-night, big guy.”
Of course, that was when three of his friends decided to storm through the bedroom door and see why he wasn’t answering his comm line. Figures. The job had been going way too smoothly and my luck is never that good.
Back in the twenty-first century diamonds were once highly regarded as expensive gemstones on Earth. Many a man, foolishly in love, would drop far more money than he could afford on rings adorned with the things just so his significant other would swoon and be persuaded that he wasn’t a complete loser. By the twenty-second century, when interstellar travel and trade with alien races from various worlds became a matter of course, diamonds lost their economic luster, so to speak. After all, carbon, aside from stupidity, is one of the most common elements found in any number of galaxies, and therefore diamonds are nothing more than really shiny rocks to most educated races.
Leave it to humans to turn lemons into lemonade.
We may not be the most creative species in the cosmos, but when it comes to inventing new and effective ways to kill stuff, we’re second to none. By the beginning of the twenty-third century, diamonds had moved from adorning jewelry to adorning ammunition. They may be pretty little rocks, but they’re also incredibly hard, and when sculpted right, can cut through all but the strongest of substances with the right amount of force applied behind them. Therefore, when I saw three large caliber handguns armed with diamond-tipped ammunition swinging in my direction I did what any sane individual would do; I leapt through a window that was roughly a vertical mile up from the nearest flat surface.
Over the sound of glass shattering all around me I heard the three guns bark in my wake, but luckily the three stooges were as bad at shooting as they were ugly and none of the deadly rounds struck their mark. Of course, that still left me with the immediate problem of falling helplessly to my death.
When it rains, it pours.
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Copyright © J.R. Broadwater 2010-2012
All rights reserved
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Filed under Rant Alert
Flip Side Prologue
I wanted to give you all a sneak peek at the current novel I’m working on that should be out before the end of the year, Flip Side.
Prologue
My story starts out pretty much like most, I guess. I was nobody special- a beat cop, walked the straight and narrow. Had a wife I didn’t cheat on. Had a kid I played ball with in the back yard on Sundays after church. You know, a typical nine ta five schmoe.
Then my kid got sick. Something was eating him up on the inside. Docs said there was nothing they could do, not on a flatfoot’s salary. My kid dies. My wife, she can’t handle it, so she takes the easy way out by putting my service revolver in her mouth.
Prohibition passes, the market crashes, and what they’re now calling the “Great Depression” hits like a wrecking ball.
The Families get organized and kick things into high gear. The law scrambles to keep up, and it’s a prime opportunity for cops that don’t have whatcha’d call moral hang-ups. All my life I walked the straight and narrow, and I think to myself, what has it gotten me? A dead kid. A dead wife. A crummy salary with a weak pension that barely covers what I need to get by. So I start to thinking that maybe the crooked path might be worth a shot.
I tell myself it’s not a question of morality, it’s a question of pragmatism.
So I make detective and start playing as an inside man for the other team. I hook up with a family and make good dough. I run with fast women and drive fast cars. Every once in a while I get to rough up some wise guy that don’t know how to pay on time or who don’t toe the “family line”. I like it. I like it a lot. I start wondering why I didn’t take this path sooner. I start wondering why I ever bothered trying to be a good man. I think: being bad is so much more fun; being bad makes so much more sense.
Then the demon comes calling one night, and my story gets a whole lot more interesting…
Coming Soon
Copyright © J.R. Broadwater 2012
All rights reserved
All the characters are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Filed under Novels
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