Deeply-tanned skin the color of cinnamon, there was something odd about the skin texture on the left side of Jesse Vega’s face.  Heavy makeup concealing a blemish of some kind.  Scar tissue.  But her eyes drew him past it without close scrutiny.  She was the sort of woman, he suspected, could be trouble without even trying, and the tone of her voice combined with the look in her eyes told him that she was probably trying.

Skyshooter

Working on Skyshooter, near the climax, & Jessica Vega (the antagonist) is starting to creep me out.



 

She had lost a lot of weight after Jessica’s father ran off, she said as if answering unasked questions, yet another intimate detail of several she offered up as if she thought Hoot should know.  As if it explained why her skin was creased and sagging in places you wouldn’t ordinarily think susceptible to creasing and sagging, leaving her looking as if she was wearing hand-me-down skin that had belonged to a much larger woman in a previous life.  To Hoot, she resembled a stick of flirtatious pepperoni. 

From Skyshooter



 

 

Hoot sometimes thought of his sex drive as being like his spleen – a minor organ he’d left behind in Vietnam.  “It’s something that may be handy to have – nice even, when it’s working right – but not mandatory,” the field surgeon had explained; then, “Your life may not be exactly the same without a spleen.  How could it be? – the changes, the vulnerabilities, but you’ll go on until, eventually, you won’t even miss it.”  And then he’d used super glue to patch him up.  The surgeon had been right – Hoot had got on with his life and hardly missed it…the spleen or the sex.

            Maybe Linda, his ex-wife, had been right when she said that Hoot was a romantic psychopath, incapable of distinguishing between love and lust, forever convincing himself one was t’other.  “Truly, with you, if Lust isn’t at bat, Love isn’t even in the game,” she had claimed.  But, in the beginning at least, it had been reciprocal.  All he knew was that there hadn’t been anyone serious in his life after Linda – though he would commit grievous bodily harm to himself before admitting it out loud in public.  He wouldn’t even dare to think it in Linda’s presence, the way she had always seemed to know his thoughts before he thought them. 

Theirs had been a fierce love affair without bounds, his and Linda’s – this, before the freeze came and turned the sheets cold.  But when it had been hot, it had been reallydamned hot.  Being with Jesse reminded Hoot of that long ago time with Linda.  The good times.  The passion.  The heat.  And the sheer fun of it.  The difference was that, in Linda’s case, it was genuine wild-child abandon that drove her, whereas Jesse’s passion seemed more…calculated – even distracted, sometimes.

If Hoot ultimately became a bit zealous for sex after his return from Vietnam, it was Linda who’d showed him the way.  He remembered one warm summer night early in their relationship – must have been almost forty years ago, now – he and Linda were walking through the woods on the east side of the U of Maine campus, and on a dare she had stepped behind an elm tree, slid out of her dress and everything else, and stood there in the dark as naked as the day she was born, giggling about it.  She double-dared him to put up or shut up…and he had put up. 

Yes, Hoot thought, Linda had been the real deal back then, a true flower child of the sixties turned into a hot-blooded vixen, striding through the seventies in high heels and hot pants.  And then the fire died…slowly enough that Hoot had hardly noticed until the embers were cold.  But they’d still hung on for some years, routinely patching their growing marital malaise with thin bandages of detachment and indifference, using liquor for ointment.  Maybe it was his job taking a toll.  His maddening search for his best friend turned murderer.  While, the whole time, he and Linda kept on hanging on, pretending it was for the kids’ sake.  Whatever it was – it ended very anticlimactically.

Good as it had once been, after a while Hoot didn’t yearn for the sex so much.  The pressure of his job taking a toll, just hanging on for the kids' sake took too much effort to leave energy for much else.  Then came the shell.  Like a callous, it slowly formed around whatever soft places he’d once possessed, hardening and numbing him.  It had taken a long time to form the shell, no doubt, but he became suddenly aware of it when informed him in no uncertain terms; “We have an appointment tomorrow night with a marriage counselor, and you should do whatever is necessary to be there.” 

This was August 19^th 1992.  And, coincidentally (though Hoot didn’t know it at the time), it was the same day that twelve-year-old Jessica Vega picked up a rusty old miniature golf putter and discovered the killer lurking within.  Hoot was scheduled later that evening to join a chartered US Marshalls Service flight heading for the now-famous fracas at Ruby Ridge in the remote woods of Northern Idaho.  He missed his appointment with the marriage counselor.  

***

 

- from Skyshooter



 

 

Announcing Troubleshooter is now available at Seattle's iconic Elliott Bay Books (Frasier's favorite hangout) - the author takes a hike around Lake Tye in Monroe...hooray for Hoot!



 

 

Me...at 2 - a Crime Fiction Writer in the Making!

 





About Rod Lindsey, Author of Troubleshooter

 

I sometimes get asked when and how I became a writer.  Occasionally I even get asked why. 

I was a mediocre artist and photographer before I gave it all up to spend my creative energy becoming a writer.  Initially, mediocrity was an okay benchmark for me in all these endeavors because everything was done very selfishly – to please a very limited audience…mainly me.  I could always squint up my eyes and see it as I meant it to be.  Writing doesn’t work like that.  While these other creative efforts produced tangible objects that could be appreciated in passing, even if imperfect.  Writing was entirely different.  Like music, it must be consumed, expressed, or both.  And mediocrity ruins it for me as surely as a couple of rancid bits in the quiche.  The reason it took me so long to publish my debut novel is simply because my writing wasn’t good enough before now.

            Storytelling is a skill that can be learned and I was a slow learner.  Having a worthwhile story to tell is altogether something else – it haunts you and taunts you.  I had the stories, and felt the need to express them.  But would I have started down this path of becoming a novelist if I’d known gaining the skills necessary to tell a ‘worthwhile story’ meant a serious commitment of time and energy for roughly 40 years of my life?  Probably.  I’m hardheaded that way.  I certainly believe that Troubleshooter was a worthwhile story – only the readers will tell.

            I don’t think I became a storyteller.  I think I always was one – I simply never gave up being one.  I was the kid who laid-out and graded (with my Tonka road grader) God-only-knows how many miles of roads in my father’s long gravel driveway so the other kids in our gang could play, the one who created the virtual sheriff’s office, the card table general store; I’ve never quit being that kid at heart.  I became a writer – and that’s a long story of missteps and stumbles, and overriding determination.

            My life has largely been about reinventing myself, the first time being when I walked away from a novice creative job at Hallmark Cards to join a crew of laborers on a large commercial construction site in Kansas City.  I stayed in construction for roughly 30 of the next 38 years, earning my nickname, Beamwalker, doing exactly that – walking beams.  I was a laborer, carpenter, superintendent, and contractor, ultimately becoming a vendor to the industry.  Along the way I became a freelance photojournalist and photo studio owner catering to the Capitol Hill crowd in Seattle, winning first place in Seattle’s first (and only) International Erotic Art Show at the infamous Lusty Lady.

            A battle-scarred refugee of the oh-so-fickle agent-at-the-door traditional publishing skirmishes, I came into the self-publication fray at the cusp of industry-wide change thanks to the meteoric ascent of e-pub.  It’s precisely the same paradigm I encountered in photography with film vs. digital, hand-colored vs. Photoshopped, and I held fast to the familiar old ways – this time I’m on the train with the rest of the New World pioneers.  I published Troubleshooter on Kindle in April, and it’s now available in trade paperback at select Indie bookstores.