Feeds:
Posts

Posts Tagged ‘ebook’

In late January of 1978, with football season over and hopeful Christmas tree lights throughout the vast northern winter darkness switched off in defeat, full-time cabdriver, sometime card shark Keith Waverly witnesses the violent abduction of a local street hustler. Later, when the man is found with his head ventilated by bullet holes, Waverly is dragged into a world of high-rolling gamblers, crooked politicians, violence and really bad weather, with only his wits and his new girlfriend to pull him out.

CHAPTER 8 Acid Reflux

Excerpt 3

     This time I moved directly to the foot of the stage. Men grabbed and shouted at Princess Mary but she stayed just beyond their reach—thrusting and tantalizing—occasionally coming close enough to touch and then darting backward. The room rose to a fever pitch. The band hit the crescendo then crashed to a halt. Mary bent over at the waist with her back to the audience and pulled down those crimson panties. Shivers shot up and down my spine. The mob roared approval. Something in my head broke.

I was squeezed in between two guys in suits when the next song started up. Mary looked down at me, her body naked, face like a mask. She saw me but I couldn’t read her. Was it love? Disgust? Pain? Embarrassment? Now I was just one of the pack. I wanted so badly to taste her. Then she was close to me, leaning over slightly, saying something I couldn’t quite hear through the noise. I grabbed her ankle and squeezed it—softly at first. It was so warm and smooth. I couldn’t make myself look up. I stared down at the stage and squeezed a little harder. She tried to pull away. “No, Keith, don’t. Please stop.” She barked it at me. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Let go.”

Then a fifty-pound bee stung my right ear and a horse kicked my left kidney. Next thing I knew I was saying hello to everybody’s shoes. I tried to scramble away on my knees and a boot popped out of nowhere and collided with my ribs. Then another stung my mouth. I kissed the ground. Star showers everywhere, man, funny electric shocks in my neck. Then two guys pulled me off the floor and shuffled me away. I was spitting blood, not fighting back.

They dragged me across the room. One bouncer slapped me across the back of the head. I struggled free and made a dash for the door. No bum’s rush for this kid. I burst out the door and hit the sidewalk running and headed for the darkness. Shouts and laughter were soon behind me. I turned into a dark alley, walked down half a block, stopped and listened. It was quiet. Streetlights reflected off the puddles of rainwater. I walked another little bit and listened some more.

Still quiet.

(To be continued)

Dead Low Winter available on ebook at all online bookstores.

Read Full Post »

In late January of 1978, with football season over and hopeful Christmas tree lights throughout the vast northern winter darkness switched off in defeat, full-time cabdriver, sometime card shark Keith Waverly witnesses the violent abduction of a local street hustler. Later, when the man is found with his head ventilated by bullet holes, Waverly is dragged into a world of high-rolling gamblers, crooked politicians, violence and really bad weather, with only his wits and his new girlfriend to pull him out.

CHAPTER 8 Acid Reflux

Excerpt 2

The hounds hooted like it was raccoon season as Mary strutted out on the stage, rocking it in red stiletto heels with sexy little straps around the ankles. The place exploded with applause and whistles and rebel yells.  Red, red roses sparkled on her shiny lavender robe. Little stars glittered in her hair.

My Queen of the May.

The feeling was indescribable—so much mixed together. I was breathing heavily; swaying back and forth and staring like a stage-side lunatic at Altamount as the band jumped crisply into “Season of the Witch.”

Mary undid the robe, slid it off her bare shoulders and tossed it to the floor. She shimmied inside lingerie the color of blood. She danced. She glided. She shook it. She unhooked her bra and freed her delicious round breasts. The junkie singer hissed those familiar words about rabbits in the ditch and hippies trying to make it rich. Mary lip-synched and played the hounds like a ringmaster. My gut wrenched as waving hands with bills clutched tightly in anxious fingers swayed at her feet like a brood of praying mantis. I couldn’t take much more—that I knew right then and there. I was aroused—watching her move—but it felt real weird.

Pushing my way through the crowd toward the stage, I had second thoughts. I sat down in a vacant chair at a table near the stage so I could think. A fat guy was across from me, his huge forearms resting on the table. He looked at me like he was King Shit.

“I’m just taking a little rest,” I said.

“Yeah, well, rest your fucking ass somewhere else, faggot. That’s my buddy’s chair.”

“Fuck you, fat ass.” I jumped up and jostled back into the crowd and started weaving my way toward the alley-side door. I expected the fat man to be hot on my trail but he never moved. Too much cholesterol, I guess.

I went outside and headed for my car but a half block before I got there I turned around and went back the way I came. Back to face the music.

(To be continued)

Dead Low Winter available on ebook at all online bookstores.

Read Full Post »

In late January of 1978, with football season over and hopeful Christmas tree lights throughout the vast northern winter darkness switched off in defeat, full-time cabdriver, sometime card shark Keith Waverly witnesses the violent abduction of a local street hustler. Later, when the man is found with his head ventilated by bullet holes, Waverly is dragged into a world of high-rolling gamblers, crooked politicians, violence and really bad weather, with only his wits and his new girlfriend to pull him out.

CHAPTER 8 Acid Reflux

Excerpt 1

There were cars parked everywhere. I slid the Olds into a spot about two blocks away from the club. Waves of red light pulsed from a giant neon LIQUOR sign behind me, bouncing off the rear view mirror like warning beacons.

     I hit the sidewalk and the damp air filled my lungs. The booze was wearing off too quickly and I was starting to feel the pain. The sounds of traffic whirled in my head as I pulled open the red upholstered door and entered the hazy world of The Boulevard Lounge.

     I paid my two bucks and got my hand stamped and moved slowly through the crowd. An amply endowed black chick was gyrating in a G-string on the stage while baying hounds at her knee level paid money to stick fingers up her snatch. I watched as she squeezed her breasts together and ground her pelvis against the intruding digits. Over to stage right the band did a loud and sloppy version of “Born to be Wild.” I ordered a double Smirnov on the rocks.

     “Bartender,” I asked the young man as he set the squatty glass in front of me, “what time does Princess Mary do her thing?”

     “She comes on around midnight. Last show’s at two.”

     “Well, I guess it’s worth waiting for—L.A. Princess and all.”

     “Yeah,” he said. “Some nights she really puts on a show.”

     Squirming, squirming, squirming. You can’t do anything about it when you got that kind of squirm going. I gritted my teeth and poured down the booze. My head got heavy. Discretion took flight. The baying at the stage front continued. Voices got louder; sweat beaded on my forehead. After what seemed like forever the hands on the clock finally joined together at the twelve. Shortly thereafter the band started up a grinding version of Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.” At the chorus, the thin, pale, sunken-eyed lead singer would rasp: “She sucks, just like a woman. She fucks, just like a woman. But she tastes, just like a little girl.

     Surely the devil was in the building.

(To be continued)

Dead Low Winter available on ebook at all online bookstores.

Read Full Post »

NOW AVAILABLE – $1.89 FOR LIMITED TIME

dead_low_winter COVER

 

www.barnesandnoble.com

(B&N direct link) http://bit.ly/1CwSGkU

www.ebookit.com

(Ebookit direct link)  http://bit.ly/1wIeicm

www.amazon.com

(Amazon direct link) http://amzn.to/1EgOtSM

(Reviews are welcome – free download. Email for code bluestone@duluthm.biz )

DEAD LOW WINTER

T.K. O’Neill

Originally published in somewhat different form as “Social Climbing,” one of four stories published under the pseudonym Thomas Sparrow in his 1999 debut Northwoods Pulp: Four Tales of Crime and Weirdness and later translated into Japanese and published by Fushosha.

It’s the mid-1970’s and, in his search for a way out of the mire that had become his life, sometimes-cab driver Keith Waverly finds himself in deeper than his wildest nightmares. At odds with both conventional life and life outside convention, looking for a way to break free without giving in, Keith tries to control his fate, but ends up a pawn in someone else’s bigger game.  The vast darkness of the north woods provides a chilling backdrop and powerful force to Dead Low Winter.

Read Full Post »

dead_low_winter COVER

 

Originally published in somewhat different form as “Social Climbing,” one of four stories published under the pseudonym Thomas Sparrow in his 1999 debut Northwoods Pulp: Four Tales of Crime and Weirdness and later translated into Japanese and published by Fushosha.

https://bluestonesblog.com/category/dead-low-winter-excerpts/

 

In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do. — Marquis de Sade, 1788

ONE:  Social Climbing

The high rollers had me surrounded. They were all staring at me, waiting.

“Three, please,” said the Mayor of Bay City. He was polite, as usual.

I thumbed the cards off the top of the deck and slid them across the smooth brown surface of the round wooden table. Mayor John McKay took them and settled back against his straight-backed chair, spreading his cards out like a fan as he always did. Then he took a white-tipped filter cigarette from the pocket of his tailored white shirt and lit it with a silver Zippo and a flourish of his long-fingered almost feminine hands, blowing out the smoke in a slow upward moving cloud.

I figured he must have hit on his pair.

“I’ll take two,” said large-headed and balding Nicholas Cross on McKay’s immediate left. Cross squinted and tugged on the bridge of his previously-broken-but-nicely-set nose as if a fly was up there. “Make it two of the same kind if you please.” He grinned strangely at the rest of the players, pulling at the loose skin around his Adam’s apple like the fly had found its way down there. After seeing his cards he made a quick swipe across his forehead with a hairy forearm and sat back.

I looked over to my left at the ever-grinning mug of Sam Cross, Nick’s younger brother. His index finger was jammed in his ear, the rest of his stubby hand wiggling with gusto, his other hand resting comfortably against his slight paunch. A good-sized pile of chips and several empty beer bottles formed a barrier around his neatly stacked cards. He’d opened right off the get-go and drawn two.

The Cross brothers were cheating and I knew it. But it only seemed to be working for Sam. Nick had been losing big all night long and was down to writing IOUs. And the jing wasn’t only going to his sibling; he was spreading it around.

Tom Geno, the slick-haired mayor of Zenith City, had a few of those IOUs and also a gigantic collection of chips stacked up in odd-sized piles like rice cakes at a vegetarian picnic. And him the compulsive degenerate gambler that everyone loved to play against. The big fish from the bright side of the bay where the streets are a little cleaner and the sun shines a little brighter. The boys from Bay City always enjoyed cleaning this fish, but tonight the finner was having the last laugh. Yes sir, the Mayor of Zenith City was showing the Bay City boys a thing or two about poker, letting them know he wasn’t the sucker they thought he was.

Geno took one card and slid it in his hand and mixed them up slowly, one at a time, without looking. Having the last laugh on these assholes would definitely be frosting on the Mayor’s cake.

Myself, I was laughing on the inside, where it counts. Imagine—me hanging with the rich and influential. Just a punk nobody finally old enough to grow a decent mustache and here I was, in on the “fleecing of the elite,” as Sam Cross called it.

But the brothers were fucking up their scam right in front of me.

The show was going to be better than I thought.

(To be continued)

Read Full Post »

AUTHOR T.K. O’NEILL RECEIVES NATIONAL RECOGNITION FROM NIEA

Noir writer switches gears with hard-boiled Lake Superior detective novel

The 2014 National Indie Excellence® Awards recognized Jackpine Savages by author T.K. O’Neill as a finalist in the category of crime fiction finalist in this year’s competition.

This prestigious national award is open to all English language books in print from small, medium, university, self and independent publishers. Also this year, O’Neill’s detective fiction was judged “outstanding” in the 22nd Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards.

A trending Christmas gift favorite for fans of the genre, Jackpine Savages is hard-boiled detective fiction in the tradition of Ross MacDonald and Robert B. Parker, set on the rugged north shore of Lake Superior. It features novice private investigator Carter Brown, who, thanks to an inheritance from a well-to-do uncle and a mail order P.I. diploma, realized a boyhood dream. When word spread of a homegrown private eye in the backwoods of northern Minnesota and Carter landed his first case, Brown Investigations was born. Before he could cash his first check for services rendered, Brown found himself locked up on a murder charge and soon entangled in trying to solve a murder of which he was also accused.

Bluestone Press published T.K. O’Neill’s latest crime fiction in both ebook and paperback formats. O’Neill is also author of the noir Fly in the Milk, exclusively on ebook, and has also authored three pulp/noir books under the pseudonym Thomas Sparrow, one of which was translated and distributed by Fusosha Publishing in Tokyo, Japan.

Bluestone Press was established in early 1999 in Duluth, Minnesota. Jackpine Savages (trade paperback ISBN #978-0-96-720066-8; ebook ISBN #978-0-9672006-5-1) is available at major online retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Google, iBookstore (Apple), Sony Reader Store, Kobo (Borders) and ebookit.com. Book sellers can contact Ingram/Lightning Source. Excerpts from Jackpine Savages and other publications are available at www.bluestonesblog.com .

http://www.amazon.com/Jackpine-Savages-T-K-ONeill-ebook/dp/B00DH8JA8U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417328779&sr=8-1&keywords=jackpine+savages+book

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jackpine-savages-tk-oneill/1115718708?ean=2940016711300

http://www.ebookit.com/books/0000002959/Jackpine-Savages.html

Read Full Post »

%d bloggers like this: