This will be available SOON (hopefully by October 10-14) through Amazon.  I’m working on the final pieces right now to get it published.  This was a lot of years in the making.  I started writing it about ten years ago.  About 8 years ago, it was literally on the cusp on getting an actual book deal with one of the big publishers.  I had a literary agent in NYC and she invited me to the Mystery Writer’s Conference in Baltimore to meet with her and she read it twice with extensive feedback between the two readings, but ultimately her ability to sell it faltered because of what she considered a pretty major flaw.

I think the flaw is fixed after seeing it with fresh eyes all these years later, but trying to go through the process of getting an agent at this point in my life just seems pretty dreadful, especially with another baby on the way.  If somebody sees this out there in the Amazon world and wants to offer me a deal, that would be gnarly, but I’m okay if that never happens.  I write for myself these days mostly anyway.  And with publishing it myself through Amazon, I get ALL creative control.  Which is why this (or something very, very close to this) is going to be my book cover:

After I ran about 150 different book cover ideas by my wife, she finally said, “Yeah, I’d click on that one.”  Done!!  Here’s chapter 1:

 

Chapter 1

The hamster died instantly.  Napoleon was his name.

Little Alex Finn Jr. let him out the back door to pee.  He’d sponged the idea by watching me let my dog Mattie out.  When he finally squeezed, the hamster bought it.

It was four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in July, and I was sitting at my best friend Kimmie Finn’s breakfast table in her apathetically messy kitchen upon completion of my weekly Saturday morning babysitting post.  Three single moms with a toddler each entrusted me to their precious little lives to break away for a few hours every weekend to shop and gossip and eat an entire meal without saving seats for imaginary friends.  The first Saturday I agreed to this feminine getaway, I got it.  They didn’t just need the break, they deserved it.  I tended to enjoy these mornings with the three hellions, but the task was difficult enough without having to plan a funeral.

I murdered a hamster that day, but at least Napoleon got a good laugh on his way out.  I’d recently become quite fond of completely inappropriate, inaccurate, or just plain stupid t-shirts.  The last t-shirt Napoleon saw was purple and showed a nerdy cartoon pubescent with the caption “That’s not sweat.  I’m just leaking awesome.”  I don’t think I succeeded in actually leaking awesome, but I like to think I came close.

Little Alex sat across from me, digging holes in his bucket of cookie dough ice cream, showing no signs of the traumatic morning.  I was enjoying watching most of his face eat ice cream when Kimmie came home.  She’d barely stepped foot in the house when Little Alex announced, “Whipple killed Polyun.”

Kimmie froze.  “Ripple Johnson, you did what!?!”

“I sliced him in half with a shovel,” I answered.  I was a bit ho-hum about the tragedy.

Little Alex cried at first, but this had quickly turned into the coolest thing ever.  He even helped me bury it.  He dug one hole, I dug the other.

Little Alex was now laughing between spoonfuls.

Kimmie wouldn’t look at me.  She kissed Alex on top of his head and said, “Sweetie, tell me what happened.”

Huge bite.  Swallow.  Ice cream running down chin.  “Whipple yhet Mattie go pee pee. Polyun need to go pee pee too.”  The kid should be available wherever adorable is sold.

Kimmie finally dropped a giant Nordstroms bag on the counter.  “But Napoleon just pee pees in his cage, sweetie. We’ve never let him out before, right?”

“Kimmie,” I said, “he’s three.  I’m the one you should yell at.”  I started chuckling. It couldn’t be helped.

Kimmie stared at me viciously as she sat at the table with us.  “It’s not funny, Ripple.”

“It kinda is.”

“Make me laugh then.  You just killed my kid’s hamster.”

I proceeded to lay out the details of the mayhem that cost a hamster its life, and by the end, Kimmie couldn’t stay mad at either of us.  I was deliberately vague, however, with certain trivial aspects of the story.

It began as I was shifting the freshly washed clothes to the dryer after letting my mutt Mattie out back to do her business.  I was a full-service babysitter, but this kind gesture meant I didn’t always have my eyes on the tots.  Little Alex took Napoleon from his cage in the living room and placed him in the grass near the back porch.  That’s when I heard the barking.

When you watch three kids, all boys, maddening is a qualified term.  I heard crying just after barking, so I went in search of crying first.  I found two year old Hogan Wall crawling down from Alex’s big boy bed, sans diaper.  The poop pellets were everywhere.

And thank goodness.  If it had been runny, I would have had to clean it up immediately.  To keep young Hogan from playing with these innovative new toys, I shooed him towards the back porch bare-assed, where the treated wood could handle an involuntary soaking.

Before finding a squealing Alex and a barking Mattie in the back yard, I stumbled across a small jaundiced child who’d been healthy only moments earlier.  Seems three-year-old Joseph Platt had learned to open the fridge.  The mustard had been limited to the linoleum – and a toddler – but the bottle had been full when I squirted it on my sausage that morning.  I tossed the empty bottle in the trash as mustard boy bolted to the back door.

The three toddlers were laughing riotously as Mattie hunted the rodent through the porch lattice.  I distracted the mutt with a Slim Jim, picked her up like a sheep, and took her inside.  I grabbed a bag of hamster treats on my way out the door.  It was quieter, but my chocolate, lineage buffet mutt was going ballistic inside.

I gave Alex the bag of hamster treats to dangle through the lattice while I ran to the storage room behind the garage.  I had hoped to find a hammer or crowbar to remove the plastic lattice, but I only found a shovel.

The lattice was destroyed, but I’d smashed enough of it to crawl through.  And eventually, Napoleon did indeed go pee pee.  He pissed on any plans I had to retrieve the little vermin from beneath the porch.  There was a crack in the poorly-lain foundation of the house, which he found and squeezed through.  I was amazed.  It was like watching a cat captivate the heart of someone who’d owned a dog first.  Impossible.

My hopes were meager at best of catching Napoleon, but I found a flashlight in Kimmie’s kitchen and crawled under the house.  The three vivacious tykes didn’t need to be invited into the crawlspace with me.  I would have needed Mickey Mouse and his clubhouse to materialize in the backyard to keep them out.  Dry, flour-like dirt was soon magnetized by the face of mustard boy and diaper rash cream would need to be slathered abundantly on young Hogan, but still we plodded on.

As crawlspace darkness surrounded us, I crawled with the shovel in one hand and the flashlight between my teeth, the squad of hamster repellants following close behind.  There was an air duct lying a little too close to the ground, so I shined the flashlight underneath and saw Napoleon huddled near the plumbing pipes under Kimmie’s bathroom.

Rather than ruin my nice shirt by shimmying under the air duct, I recruited Alex for the job.  It was pitch black behind me, and when I turned the flashlight around, half a house worth of insulation was lying in the dirt, pulled from its position between the floor beams.  I saw Alex ripping down more insulation, but I had to pan to the right to find Hogan and Joseph swinging from PVC pipes under the kitchen.  After calling for all of them to stop, which they did, they sat in the dirt and started crying.  I feared I would need some kind of anal gauze, Neosporin, and a pipe cleaner for Hogan’s already raw ass.  The boy’s poop rarely smelled, meaning he often carried it around with him for hours.  It would make anyone’s ass raw.

It happened quickly after that.  Alex crawled under the air duct and scared the varmint along the edge of the foundation.  I lay frozen, waiting for my chance.  I missed that chance, but my reflexes told me to stab at the wall in front of Napoleon with the blade of the shovel to stop him.

And I did.  I stopped him dead in his tracks.  Pun sadly intended.

July in North Carolina means heat.  Sticky heat.  Stickier sometimes than poop, pee, or mustard.  My little band of misfits were dressed to horrify Social Services.  Alex with pink insulation in his hair and stuck to every exposed inch of skin; Hogan with no diaper, dirt clinging to his bare ass with minute specks of poop stirred in; Joseph and his magnetic yellow glue, having turned as black as a coal miner.

I gave them a bath with the hose, dressed them, and locked them in Little Alex’s room while I found two boxes for the dead hamster and cleaned the mustard from the kitchen floor.  I already knew Alex would want to help me bury him.  The insulation and porch lattice, on the other hand, would have to wait.  When I opened the door to let the kids out, they were throwing poop pellets at each other.

Kimmie was fighting a smile as she said, “You know you can stop doing this whenever you want to.”

“You firing me?”

“No, but if you destroy any more of my house, I might have to.  Or better yet, we’ll just make you watch them at your house.  But seriously, Ripple, if it’s too much, just let me know.  We know it’s not easy.”

I shrugged.  I’d been getting bored lately, anyway.  Having resigned from my lowest paying gig as assistant principal of Austin High School only a month earlier, babysitting those kids broke up the monotony a little.  I was arrested and charged with assault after paralyzing the father of Kimmie’s oldest son Jacob.  I will forever contend, however, that the bastard deserved it.  When he left eleven years earlier, Kimmie was six months pregnant with Jacob, and that’s pretty much how long she’d been getting beaten by the man.  And then when he suddenly came back, he threatened to do the same.  So, yeah, he deserved it.

His name was Charlie Armstead, and after our little altercation, the sorry bastard threatened to sue the school system.  Those words tend to pass the lips of a man who’d been assaulted on school grounds.  As a preemptive measure, the school board required me to attend anger management, which I did, but I resigned anyway.

I didn’t really need the money I was earning as an assistant principal.  I was already a millionaire at twenty-nine because a nice old lady gave me a million bucks, Wal-Mart bought some land my parents left me, and I had a completely embarrassing part-time job that paid me three times what I made at school.  Two afternoons a week, I donned a chef’s hat, an apron, and a lapel mike and called myself Wick Mitchell.  Of all the hobbies I could pick from, and I chose late-night infomercial host.  Nevertheless, Kimmie did not know about Wick Mitchell, nor would she ever know.  Aside from the embarrassment of being a damn infomercial host, a man simply needs to have secrets to survive.  Anyone with the gall to attempt to disprove that will be lied to compulsively.

But the babysitting thing?  I actually liked it.  I didn’t like much this life had given me, but I liked my television gig and I liked kids, especially Kimmie’s two boys.  Besides, it was only a few hours every Saturday, and a dead hamster, broken lattice, and displaced insulation were somehow easier to deal with than the remnants of a peeing contest on Kimmie’s bed the previous Saturday.  A hair dryer and a bottle of Febreze later, Kimmie was none the wiser.  I’d done the honorable thing and flipped the mattress.

Anyway, I took a bite of Alex’s ice cream and said, “I can handle it.  I don’t think I’m very good at it, but I can handle it.”

“You eating dinner with us tonight?” Kimmie asked.

“I might come back,” I said.  “I’ve got a few errands to run.”

“Such as?”

Nag, nag.  You’d think we were married.  I stood and called for Mattie.  “Just stuff. Mattie needs food, I need some stuff at Lowes, stuff like that.  If you can push dinner to seven, I’ll be back.”

She opened the cabinet and pulled down a box of Hamburger Helper Beef Pasta. “Seven it is.  Can you pick up some hamburger while you’re out?”

I almost made a joke about a hamster.  Almost.

Kimmie Finn had fifteen years on me, but if height and cute were an indication of age, she would have been younger than me.  She came to about my neck and might have carried a few extra pounds, but extra pounds are only extra pounds if they bother you or if the doctor says so.  They don’t bother me.  They don’t bother her.  Consider us unbothered.  They actually looked good on her, probably because she was always bubbly and bouncy and sweet in a Mary Lou Retton sort of way.  

Kimmie had a round face, with a small nose and shadowy green bedroom eyes.  She kept her thick brown hair short and layered, and it tended to bounce with her. She called it a blow-and-go cut, which sounded sexual, but I never said anything to her about calling it that.  At forty-four, I kept expecting her to start panicking about age spots or lines or wrinkles or grays or something men look at and say “Whatever,” but she seemingly hadn’t aged in the eleven years I’d known her.

Kimmie didn’t dress like a teenager, but she was a single mom with a little more cleavage than most, so who could blame her if she wanted to flaunt it a little.  Take her day out with the girls for example.  She wore khaki pants that hugged her ass just enough and a brown and green striped dress shirt that probably could have been buttoned a couple more times at the top, but I guess that was the point.

The phone rang as I went to hook Mattie to her leash near the front door.  Upon hearing the fateful call of “Oh my God,” I unhooked the leash and retreated to the kitchen.  Kimmie looked either pissed or scared.  I couldn’t tell and I couldn’t look at her because I knew it was one of the other moms, and I knew the call was about me.

Kimmie was leaning against the counter, her hand cupping her mouth.  She asked, “Why was it in Hogan’s diaper bag?” She waited for the answer as my sphincter pinched.  “I know….Thank you for calling….I’ll keep you posted….What?” Kimmie rolled her suddenly snake-bit eyes and shot me an accusing glance.  She covered the mouthpiece of the phone and asked me, “Hogan just threw up everywhere. Did you feed them cotton candy today?”

“I’m not here.”

She redirected her eyes to the floor and said, “I’ll find out.  Let me deal with this news first.” She hung up the phone and kicked the base of a kitchen chair so hard it toppled over.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, not even wanting to know the answer.

She stared at the floor, her eyes unable to focus.  “That was Hogan’s mom. Did anybody come here today?”

“No, but I was under the house for a while and then I buried a hamster.  Why?”

“I’m being blackmailed.”

Okay, so it wasn’t about me.  “What? Why?”

She threw her arms up and looked at me, her eyes focusing again, but the look of contempt wasn’t intended for me any longer.  “The note doesn’t say. It says it’s my job to figure out why.  It also says I might be going to jail.  Whoever it is put the note in Hogan’s diaper bag.”

“That’s all it says?  No money demands, no reasoning?”

Kimmie opened the fridge and grabbed a beer.  She only did that when she was really pissed or really stressed.  She was a white wine kind of lady. “It says, Kimmie, right now you have two problems.  First, you might be going to jail. Second, you’re being blackmailed and it’s your job to figure out why.  Then it says to check my box at church because they might feel philanthropic and give clues.”

I frowned.  “Philanthropic?  Who the heck uses a word like philanthropic in a blackmail letter.  It‘s like writing a grocery list in calligraphy.”

She rolled her eyes at me, but I probably deserved it.  She asked, “What does it mean? How am I supposed to know why I’m being blackmailed?  And I haven’t done anything illegal.”

“Seems to me that somebody thinks you got a secret.”

“What secret?” she asked in exasperation.  “I don’t have any secrets.”

“We all have secrets.”

Kimmie opened her arms wide.  “I’m an open book, Ripple. I’m a single mom who works hard, takes damn good care of my family, and wouldn’t hurt a fly even if he hurt me first.”

“I know that and you know that.”  I pointed to the phone as if a small man lived inside.  “This person apparently thinks otherwise.  Why else would they blackmail you without telling you why or how much they wanted?  They probably know you have money and they think you have a secret.  Now we gotta figure out what they think your secret is.”

Kimmie sat at the kitchen table and covered her face with her hands.  Alex had run off in search of Mattie. “What do we do, Ripple?  The only people on Earth that know about the money are you and Charlie.”

“Well, for starters, we must readdress how Charlie found out about the money.”  I pulled out my phone and dialed Kimmie’s twin sister Kelly, who agreed to watch Alex for a bit.  I turned towards the front door and said, “Let’s go see Charlie.”

He wouldn’t be hard to find.