A LIVING GRAVE
Katrina Williams Book 1
by Robert E. Dunn
Genre: Thriller,
Crime Mystery
The
first in a gritty new series featuring sheriff’s detective Katrina
Williams, as she investigates moonshine, murder, and the ghosts of
her own past…
BODY
OF PROOF
Katrina
Williams left the Army ten years ago disillusioned and damaged. Now a
sheriff’s detective at home in the Missouri Ozarks, Katrina is
living her life one case at a time—between mandated therapy
sessions—until she learns that she’s a suspect in a military
investigation with ties to her painful past.
The
disappearance of a local girl is far from the routine distraction,
however. Brutally murdered, the girl’s corpse is found by a
bottlegger whose information leads Katrina into a tangled web of
teenagers, moonshiners, motorcycle clubs, and a fellow veteran
battling illness and his own personal demons. Unraveling each thread
will take time Katrina might not have as the Army investigator
turns his searchlight on the devastating incident that ended her
military career. Now Katrina will need to dig deep for the
truth—before she’s found buried…
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I felt like it was the end of summer. Not that
there was a hint of green or the creeping red-oranges of leaves turning. In
Iraq, everything was brownish. Not even a good, earthy brown. Instead,
everything within my view was a uniform, wasted, dun color. It was easy to
imagine the creator ending up here on the seventh day, out of energy and out of
ideas after spending his palate in the joy of painting the rest of the world.
This spit of earth, the dirty asshole of creation we called the Triangle of
Death, didn’t even rate a decent brown.
I had been in country for eight months. I had
been First Lieutenant Katrina Williams, Military Police, attached to the 502nd
Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division for a little over a year. Pride and
love had brought me here. Proud to be American and just as proud to have come
from a military family, I was in love with what the ROTC at Southwest Missouri
State University had shown me about my country’s military. I fell in love with
the thought of the woman I would become serving my nation. I wanted to echo the
men my father and my uncle were and add my own tone to the family history. Iraq
bled that all out of me. Just like it was bleeding my color out into the dust.
Bright red draining into shit brown.
It was the impending weight of change that
made me feel like the end of summer. As a girl, back home in the Ozarks, the
summers seemed to last forever. It wasn’t until the final days, carried over
even into a new school year, when the air cooled and the oaks rusted, that I could
feel them ending. Their endings were like the descent of ice ages, the shifting
of epochs. That was exactly how I felt bleeding into the dirt. The difference
was that I felt an impending death rather than transition. The terminus of an
epoch. In Iraq though, nothing was as clear as that. It was death; but it
wasn’t.
Lying on my back, I wished I could see blue
sky, but not here. The air was hazed with dust so used up it became a part of
the atmosphere. There was no more of the earth in it. Grit, like bad memories
and regret, hanging over an entire nation. I coughed hard and it hurt. A bubbly
thickness slithered up my throat. Using my tongue and what breath I had, I got
the slimy mass up to my lips. I just didn’t have it in me to spit. Instead, I
turned my head to the side and let the bloody phlegm slide down my cheek.
Dying is hard.
Wind, hot and cradling the homeland sand so
many factions were willing to kill for, ran over the wall I was hidden behind.
It eddied there, slowing and swirling and then dumping the dirt on my naked
skin. A slow-motion burial. Even the land here hated naked women.
I stayed there without moving, but slipping in
and out of consciousness for a long time. It seemed long, anyway. I dreamed.
Dreamed or remembered so well they seemed like perfect dreams of—everything.
Green.
We played baseball. Just like in old movies
with kids turning a lot into a diamond. No one does that anymore, but we did.
My grandfather played minor league ball years ago and I had a cousin who was a
Cardinals fan. Everyone was a Cardinals fan, so I loved the Royals. When the
games were over and it was hotter than the batter’s box when I was pitching—I
had a wild arm—my father would take me to the river. Later when we had cars, I
was drawn there every summer to swim and swing from the ropes. We floated on
old, patched inner tubes and teased boys. That was where I learned to drink
beer. My father would take me fishing on the river. My grandfather would take
me on the lakes. I used the same cane pole my father had when Granddad taught
him about fishing. Both of the men used to say to the girl who complained about
not catching anything, “It’s not about the catching, it’s about the fishing.” I
don’t think I ever understood until a good portion of my blood was spilled on the
dirt of a world that hated me.
My head spun back to the moment and back to
Iraq. If I was going to die, I would have done it already, I figured. At least
my body. That physical part of me would live on. That other part of me, the
girl who loved summer… I think she was already dead. Death and transition.
A
PARTICULAR DARKNESS
Katrina
Williams Book 2
Pub
Date: 9/12/2017
From
the author of A Living Grave comes a gripping police procedural
featuring sheriff's detective Katrina Williams as she exposes the
dark underbelly of Appalachia . . .
Dredging
up the Truth
Still
recovering from tragedy and grieving a devastating loss, Iraq war
veteran and sheriff's detective Katrina Williams copes the only way
she knows how—by immersing herself in work. A body's just been
pulled from the lake with a fish haul, but what seems like a
straight-forward murder case over the poaching of paddlefish for
domestic caviar quickly becomes murkier than the depths of the lake.
Soon
a second body is found—an illegal Peruvian refugee woman linked to
a charismatic tent revival preacher. But as Katrina tries to
investigate the enigmatic evangelist, she is blocked by antagonistic
FBI agents and Army CID personnel. When more young female refu-gees
disappear, she must partner with deputy Billy Blevins, who stirs
mixed feelings in her, to connect the lake murder to the refugees.
Katrina is no stranger to darkness, but cold-blooded conspirators
plan to make sure she'll never again see the light of day . . .
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We had lights on our helmets and a flashlight
each, but our progress was really because of Billy’s familiarity with the path.
Three turns and one crawl-through and we came out into a chamber. At one end
water dripped and trickled, seeming to bleed right out of the stone and filled
a small basin. At the other end, the basin emptied into a silent steam that
disappeared into a fissure the size of my fist. In between was a flat space on
which we sat. Billy pointed out shapes and features in the walls and ceiling.
“Are there bats?” I asked.
“Not all caves have bats,” he answered without
laughing or making me feel bad for asking. “But this one has something better.
Something special.”
He slipped down to his knees and put his face
low. For a second I thought he was going to put his head under the pool of
water. Instead, he shined his flashlight around until he found what he wanted.
“Come look at this.” His voice had become a
whisper.
I joined him staring into the light beam
within the water. What, at first, I thought were reflections, moved away from
the light. Fish. They were tiny, like minnows, but the color of bleached bone.
Their eyes were small and dead looking. It was as if I was looking into a ghost
world.
“Down here.” Billy pointed with the flashlight
then poked a finger into the beam.
There, along the line of his finger was a
white rock.
“A pebble?” I asked.
“Wait.”
The rock moved and the strange shape resolved
into what appeared to be a tiny lobster.
“Crayfish,” I said excited. It was so
colorless it was practically transparent at the edges. “So pale.”
“They don’t need color in the darkness. They
don’t need eyes either.”
I sat up, stunned and elated by the place I
was in. “Thank you,” I said looking around. “For sharing this with me.”
“This isn’t what I wanted to share,” Billy
said.
He reached to the lamp on my hard hat and
killed the light. After a moment, he turned off my flashlight. Again he waited
a few seconds to turn off his flashlight. Finally, after a longer pause, he
turned off his own headlamp.
We were in the kind of complete darkness I
don’t think I’d ever experienced. It was thrilling and jarring at the same
time. I reached and took his hand without even thinking. The black we were in
was like distance and I wanted to be close.
“Why?” I asked.
“Look around,” he answered, softly.
“It’s dark,” I said. “Nothing but black.”
“There’s no light. But absence isn’t exactly
black.”
“I don’t understand.” I shook my head then
wondered why.
“Some of the guys I know . . .” Billy said
then stopped.
I knew he was talking about something
different then, but still the same. A change in subject not in meaning. I
waited, like waiting for a suspect. He had to be the one to fill the silence.
“Veterans,” he continued. “Guys who were over
there. We talk sometimes. They talk a lot about the things they see when they
close their eyes. It’s always personal. No one ever has the same experience or
the same . . . vision on events. Look around. Do you still see nothing?”
I did as he asked and noticed for the first
time that blackness wasn’t exactly, only blackness. There were patterns of
light, vague shimmers, not entirely seen, but not simply imagined, I was sure.
“Something . . .” I admitted.
“Our eyes don’t like complete darkness. When
there’s no light to be seen, the optic nerves still fire, populating the void
with specters. The thing is, your eyes won’t see what mine do and I won’t see
what you experience. Darkness is singular. What you see, is your particular
darkness, no one else’s. No matter how well you describe it, no one will see it
the way you do.”
“You’re not talking about darkness.” I
actually thought I heard fear in my voice.
“You’re holding my hand.”
“Yes,” I answered, squeezing.
“Is it real?”
“What do you mean?”
“My hand. Me. Am I real”
“Of course,” I said. “Why would you not be?”
“That’s what I tell the other guys. We all
have our own darkness within us and sometimes it gets out, it shadows our
lives, the entire world we see. Those times we get so wrapped up in seeing our
own thing, our own darkness, we forget the real out there beyond it.”
He let go of my hand and I was suddenly
untethered. I was adrift in my own darkness. It was a familiar feeling. In a
way, comforting. The same way what is familiar and expected is always somehow a
comfort. But I didn’t want the darkness anymore. I realized I wanted his hand.
“Billy . . .”
He touched my face. Then the touch became a
hold as he placed his hands to each side with his fingers in my hair. His thumb
rested on the scar that framed my eye and I didn’t mind.
“I don’t want to live in the dark anymore,” I
confessed.
Then Billy Blevins kissed me.
When we walked out of the crevasse and entered
the cave’s mouth, the world was a circle of light to be walked into. It spread
and opened as we approached. When I stepped through, I understood what Billy
had said about breathing sunshine.
I
wasn't born in a log cabin but the station wagon did have wood on the
side. It was broken down on the approach road into Ft. Rucker,
Alabama in the kind of rain that would have made a Biblical author
jealous. You never saw a tornado in the Old Testament did you? As
omens of a coming life go, mine was full of portent if not exactly
glad tidings.
From there things got interesting. Life on a
series of Army bases encouraged my retreat into a fantasy world. Life
in a series of public school environments provided ample nourishment
to my developing love of violence. Often heard in my home was the
singular phrase, "I blame the schools." We all blamed the
schools.
Both my fantasy and my academic worlds left marks and
the amalgam proved useful the three times in my life I had guns
pointed in my face. Despite those loving encounters the only real
scars left on my body were inflicted by a six foot, seven inch tall
drag queen. She didn't like the way I was admiring the play of three
a.m. Waffle House fluorescent light over the high spandex sheen of
her stockings.
After a series of low paying jobs that took me
places no one dreams of going. I learned one thing. Nothing vomits
quite so brutally as jail food. That's not the one thing I learned;
it's an important thing to know, though. The one thing I learned is a
secret. My secret. A terrible and dark thing I nurture in my
nightmares. You learn your own lessons.
Eventually I began
writing stories. Mostly I was just spilling out the, basically, true
narratives of the creatures that lounge about my brain, laughing and
whispering sweet, sweet things to say to women. Women see through me
but enjoy the monsters in my head. They say, sometimes, that the
things I say and write are lies or, "damn, filthy lies, slander
of the worst kind, and the demented, perverted, wishful stories of a
wasted mind." To which I always answer, I tell only the truth. I
just tell a livelier truth than most people.
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1 comments:
Thanks for sharing! -Janet @ Silver Dagger Book Tours
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