Sample Sunday: Excerpt from My Grave is Deep: A Noah Green Mystery by E. E. Williams

Please welcome back E. E. Williams with an excerpt from his latest novel, My Grave is Deep: A Noah Green Mystery. This third book in the series is available in print and eBook formats at Amazon.

 

PROLOGUE

 

The missing don’t always find their way home.

 

Sometimes, those who are lost want to remain that way and will do anything to stay invisible. Sometimes, they’re held captive by circumstances beyond their control. Sometimes, though, they just vanish like mist in the morning sun.

 

I was there once. Missing. Ran away from all that was dear to me. Disappeared.

 

Now, my job, if you want to call it that, is to reunite the missing with those left behind, the ones who wait and wonder and grieve.

 

The favors I do for others have brought peace to some, pain to others. Regardless of the outcome, they have come with a terrible, heavy cost, a cost I thought I was no longer willing to bear.

 

Yet here I am at the bottom of a yawning pit of ragged, razor-edged stone, trapped with a primordial presence that has wrapped me in a deadly embrace. This is my grave, dug in a cemetery of rusting steel, worn rubber and crushed plastic, out on the edge of the Everglades, under a dome of ink-black sky.

 

There is only one escape, only one way out – up – but the opening is small and well beyond my reach.

 

Time is running out. Soon, this thing that men have feared since the dawn of time will feast on my flesh and bones.

 

My friend, Charlie Hall, told me once that I couldn’t save them all – the ones I loved, those I’d sworn to help, the missing. You can only save yourself, he said.

 

He was wrong. I can’t even do that. The beast flexes and a fuse of pain ignites up my spine. I’m going to die here, in a fetid hole.

 

Fear swims through my brain. Fear and regret.

 

Especially regret.

 

The things I did and the things I didn’t; the love I crushed and wasted; the love I will never know; the life I lived; the life I sacrificed; and the life that led me to this abyss.

 

My grave.

 

ONE

 

As the gator clamped its powerful jaws around Jeffrey Flaum’s neck, crushing his C2 vertebra and thrusting splinters of bone into his brain stem, he had a final fleeting thought in that nanosecond between life and death: I deserve this.

 

Had he a choice, he would have preferred a less horrific end. One on the battlefield, perhaps, where he might have redeemed his tattered reputation. Or in his own bed, where peace could find him at last.

 

But the decision on where and how he would breathe his last wasn’t his to make. It belonged instead to a man who had chosen Jeffrey Flaum as the first of the six to die. And in that last instant, when the gator mercifully ended his guilt and pain, Jeffrey Flaum knew it was fitting.

 

Just a few hours earlier, his ample rump had been planted against the wooden fence that separated his home’s ample property from the less-than-ample, par-three 12th green of the exclusive South Miami Country Club. A thread of smoke from the cigar he held in his stubby fingers coiled upward and dissipated into the darkness. He enjoyed a good cigar – and this was a very good one, indeed, a hand-rolled La Gloria Cubana from the Little Havana El Credito Cigar Factory. The smell of it was intoxicating, nearly sexual, in fact, and it infuriated him that every time he tried lighting up inside the lavish house he shared with his wife and their two dogs, he was banished outdoors. His filthy habit, she said, “stinks up the place.”

 

Stinks up the place? Filthy habit? He was a cigar smoker before he met her and never hid it while they dated. Back then, he smoked in the house, the car, even the few restaurants that still allowed such God-given American freedoms, for which he fought and risked his life. She knew who he was and what his “filthy” habits were.

 

So why, once they were married, had she decreed that lit cigars in the house were off limits? Was it because that after hooking him and landing him she no longer had to pretend that the smoke and whatever other filthy habits – plural, apparently – he had didn’t bother her?

 

The cigar tip glowed bright as a ruby in the blackness. He took a deep draw and blew the smoke out slowly through his pursed lips. Yes, a fine cigar.

 

The evening was hot and cloying, and a line of sweat snaked down the back of his neck, staining the collar line of his $150 Nat Nast shirt. If a La Gloria Cubana now and then was the worst of his filthy habits, his wife was a lucky woman. He didn’t cat around, didn’t play poker with the guys every Thursday night, didn’t go to the track and gamble away their savings. He did go to church every Sunday morning and faithfully, if stoically, attended all the family outings with minimal protest; even the ones hosted by his wife’s sister, the one with the slob of a husband and all the screaming kids.

 

Jeffrey Flaum knew he wasn’t the sexiest man on the planet. Since leaving the Marines, he had developed a potbelly from too much beer and too little exercise. His hairline was in full retreat and he had the flatiron face – what was that old joke? – yeah, the flatiron face of a guy who kissed an 18-wheeler in Boston and hung on ‘til Denver.

 

But he compensated his wife in other ways. With cash. Lots and lots of cash. Cash that bought cars, and jewelry, and clothes, and two frou-frou pedigree poodles – Romulus and Remus – that stubbornly refused to be housebroken (talk about your filthy habits), and three humongous homes, one in Aspen, another in Hawaii, and, of course, here, where homes went for … well, a fucking lot.

 

Aspen and Hawaii? Neither of them skied and they got to Hawaii maybe once every two or three years, the trip being such a long slog – thirteen hours – from Miami. So, most of the time, the homes sat empty, burning cash to keep the lights on, the water running, and the grounds groomed.

 

There wasn’t much he could do about his face, but the money … as long as that kept flowing why couldn’t he smoke a good cigar in his own home whenever he damn well felt like it?

 

Filthy habits, he thought. Haven’t I paid for the privilege to have a filthy habit, even if that’s what it was, which it wasn’t? Wasn’t that what I was doing in Afghanistan? Defending the nation? Didn’t that earn me some stinking rights?

 

Don’t go there, he quickly warned himself. Don’t.

 

But it was too late, and the memories of his time in-country flooded through the leaky dam he’d tried to erect to keep them in check. It was like that now. A stray word here, an unguarded thought there, and it all came rushing back.

 

It had ended badly, his time in the Marines. He wasn’t one for introspection, but he knew he wasn’t an exemplary leader. Knew that his unit believed that nobody would ever confuse him with George Patton. Knew that behind his back they called him Major Creep.

 

But, he told himself, he’d at least been effective … right up until he gave the orders that would forever change the lives of those he commanded. He’d had the opportunity to maybe make it right, if that were possible, which he knew deep down that it wasn’t, but in the end, his foolish pride had only made things worse.

 

You will all die screaming.

 

The words leapt into his mind unbidden and unwelcome, tunneling deep into his brain like an earworm.

 

You will all die screaming.

 

It had been, what, three years since he’d heard the threat spoken out loud, and though he didn’t believe it then, it still had the power to quicken his breathing, and turn his hands clammy.

 

After all, the person who’d said it was a dangerous man. Is a dangerous man.

 

Jesus, he wished he could just erase that entire period of his life, forget all the responsibility and the pressure and especially what had happened that blistering night out in the desert. But he knew that wasn’t possible and forgiveness was a ghost that would haunt him until his last days on earth.

 

What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t at that moment fathom, was that his last days on earth were about to come sooner than he expected.

 

Much, much sooner.

 

E. E. Williams ©2021

E.E. Williams is a former journalist who worked at some of the country's best and biggest newspapers. A 1971 graduate of Kent State University, he published in 2002 his first Noah Greene novel, Tears In The Rain. His second novel, Tears of God, was published in 2014. The third Noah Greene thriller, My Grave Is Deep, was published last year.

Guest Post: The Mystery of Writing by E. E. Williams

 Please welcome mystery author E. E. Williams to the blog today… 

 

The Mystery of Writing

 

It took me 25 years to write my first mystery novel, “Tears in the Rain,” so titled after the famous line uttered in the movie Blade Runner. It took another 17 years to write the second book, “Tears of God,” and another five to complete the third, “My Grave Is Deep,” which was published on Amazon.com last year. All three feature amateur detective, Noah Greene, who sacrifices everything dear to him to follow a dream of becoming a private investigator.

Why it took that long to write that first book is a mystery in and of itself because from the time my father handed me a book – a thick tome about a black stallion in the Arabian desert, the name of which has vanished on the winds of time – and told me to read it, it was my life’s goal to be an AUTHOR. I put that word in caps because I didn’t just want to write books. I wanted to be famous, and rich, and so successful John Grisham would call me for tips.

I had this vision in my head that I would live in an A-frame house in the Colorado mountains during winter, where I would hunker down over my typewriter (yeah, that should tell you just how old I am), pecking out my next bestseller, and then in spring, take the manuscript to my publisher, drop it off, pick up a fat paycheck and catch a plane for Europe where my wife and I would travel to ancient cities, and eat at the world’s best restaurants, and where I’d be recognized and asked to sign autographs for my adoring fans. I’d return to the states just as the latest book hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and do a book tour that would take me from the East Coast to the West, and sell the movie rights to Ben Affleck or George Clooney, before returning to Colorado and another winter of writing.

Oh, I was going to be a star, baby. Excuse me. A STAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then, life happened.

I got married my senior year in college at Kent State. I graduated with a degree in journalism and got my first job at the Dayton Journal Herald, now defunct. From there I went to the Miami News, now defunct. And then the Dallas Times Herald, now defunct. (Yes, I was a serial newspaper killer.)

It was when I worked at the Miami News that I decided to get serious about writing the book I always wanted to write – a mystery. A surprise, that. After reading the book my father gave me, I started a strict regimen of Sci-Fi novels. I devoured everything written by Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and Ursula K. Le Guin. (Now, of course, I devour everything written by John Scalzi, James S.A. Corey and Richard K. Morgan.) I thought if my dream were to ever come true it would be writing Sci-Fi. But … before I hit the shift key for the first time, I read an Esquire Magazine piece that stated some of the best writing being done by novelists was in the mystery genre. They recommended Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald and John. D. MacDonald.  

It was John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series that I first picked up. Travis lived on a houseboat, The Busted Flush, and did investigative jobs for hire. There was a color in each of the book titles. “The Deep Blue Good-by.” “The Girl In the Plain Brown Wrapper.” “Nightmare in Pink.” “The Dreadful Lemon Sky.” I was hooked. I devoured all 21 McGee novels like a starving man. Then chomped down Chandler, followed by Hammett, the other Macdonald, Robert Parker and James Lee Burke. I was fascinated by the stories of world-weary detectives overcoming long odds to turn back evil. That was the kind of book I wanted to write.

And so, I started a book that didn’t even have a title because Blade Runner was still off in the future. I wanted a McGee-like amateur hero, someone who loved movies with the same sort of passion as I did, and who lived in Miami because, well, that’s where I lived.

I dove into the book with gusto, determined to make it a bestseller. The gusto didn’t last long. I had a family – a wife and young son. Could I afford to take a risk on writing books, I asked myself. I was good at newspapering. What if I failed as a novelist? What if I failed my family?

So, I put my energy and focus on writing about sports stars, and actors, and yes, other novelists. I did it well enough to keep getting promoted, a velvet fist if there ever was one. I bounced from one paper to another, – 14 in 42 years – working at some of the country’s biggest and best, including the New York Daily News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Fresno Bee.

Oh, it wasn’t as if I didn’t work on the book. I’d write for a day or two, sometimes three, and put it in a drawer and go months before starting again. By which time, the thread of the plot was lost, requiring a do-over. I did a lot of do-overs. Then I lost the manuscript in one of those 14 moves (remember, everything was on paper, not in a computer). Began again. Moved and lost it again. My wife once threw it out in the trash, something I prefer to chalk up to as a tragic mistake rather than a comment on the book’s quality.

The years stacked atop one another and when I looked up, 25 of them had passed. I told myself it was because I had that day job. And yet, so many of my friends and colleagues were successful novelists – John Scalzi, one of the Sci-Fi genre’s biggest names, Sheryl Woods, whose romance novels have been turned into a series on the Hallmark Channel, and John Katzenbach, who wrote “The Mean Season,” the movie adaptation of which starred Kurt Russell, and “Hart’s War,” which was turned into a film with Bruce Willis, and “Just Cause,” which starred Sean Connery – and they all had day jobs just like me. I was embarrassed by my own inability to do what they’d done. I decided it was either do what I always dreamed of or stop dreaming.

Eventually, I found the will and discipline to drag “Tears in the Rain” over the finish line and get it published by a small independent press … which is now defunct. (I’m sensing a pattern here, do you?)

Stardom, fame, and fortune did not follow.

Still, I loved the characters I’d created and gave it another go with “Tears of God.” It’s a better book and only took me 17 years to write.

Stardom, fame, and fortune did not follow.

Nevertheless, I continued to enjoy writing and seeing my characters grow, so out poured (can something that takes five years really be described as pouring out?) “My Grave Is Deep.” It is, I think, the best of the three.

Yes, stardom, fame and fortune did not follow.

Why? It’s something I’ve wondered about. Still wonder if I’m being honest. Were my friends just lucky, or were they, are they, better than me? Are all those mystery authors I see – and read – at Barnes & Noble superior writers? Some are, but in my mind, some aren’t. So, why are their books lining the shelves and mine aren’t?

It’s something for which I have no answer. I have mostly accepted that unless Stephen Spielberg is a regular reader of Kevin’s blog, stardom, fame, and fortune aren’t likely to happen. Ever.

Still, realizing this, I’ve started to write a fourth Noah Greene mystery. I have but one hope.

That it doesn’t take 25 years to write. Because, you know, death.

E. E. Williams ©2021

E.E. Williams is a former journalist who worked at some of the country's best and biggest newspapers. A 1971 graduate of Kent State University, he published in 2002 his first Noah Greene novel, Tears In The Rain. His second novel, Tears of God, was published in 2014. The third Noah Greene thriller, My Grave Is Deep, was published last year.