“You go’n kill me?”
Slade Cartwright, Texas Ranger, ignored the question and continued cleaning his Colt revolver. In the campfire light, firewood popped and sparks dissipated. The scent of beans wafted from the kettle above the flames.
Ten feet away, Darren Dedrich sat with his hands bound behind his back, clad in a muddied
Sunlight glinted as Rayna the Red unsheathed her sword. Fierce lips hissed an incantation caught up and drowned by whipping coastal winds. Seagulls squawked overhead, taunting, foretelling a bad omen as the sky turned shades of amber violet.
“Witch!” Hrothgar, Son of Ragnar, awaited her on the beach, sword ready. “You’ve led us
“Got a mission for you, kid.”
Judy Suarez tapped the end of her cigarette into an ash tray. I leaned against the office doorway, pad and pen ready.
The Script Doctor’s eyes sparkled. “You ever read Blake Snyder’s magnum opus?”
“Who?”
“Never mind.” She inhaled a long drag, exhaling a plume of smoke
She waits for him in the parking lot.
It’s a Saturday—her day off—and Paxton is on time. The elderly man parks his ‘78 F-150 pickup and enters the library, returning a few minutes later with two tomes.
When he drives away, Greta’s car follows, but not too close. She’s wearing dark sunglasses
Her target would arrive any minute.
Tatum Albright emerged from the portal dressed in the usual style of 1922—a travel suit comprised of a gray skirt, blouse, and coat—blending in with the bustling Paris travelers as Gare de Lyon’s clock tower chimed the top of the hour.
The train station hummed
The scarecrow’s eyes glowed at twilight. Two slits blazed orange as the October sun dipped below a horizon of corn, ten feet tall.
Jester was strapped to a wooden cross. Dressed in a tattered flannel shirt and faded jeans. Straw for tendons and muscles. No heart or organs, much less a brain.
First thing you have to do with a dead body is bury it.
The year was 1862. Yellowstone country. Where no explorer dared tread alone. Shovel in hand, I dug a grave for Darryl Evans and scooped the dirt over his corpse.
After a short prayer, I said my goodbye while an orange
I will eat you.
My meal sits outside of a prison cell’s glass wall. Tempting. So close. Inches away.
Eat you how?
“I-I just wanted to say I’m not afraid of you, Morlock.” The figure holds an object in his hands. “I know that’s not your real name. But that’s what you are. Like
The bullet whistled and bit.
Roland Chadwick, Deputy U.S. Marshal, pressed a scarred hand against his blood-soaked shirt and half collapsed against the hotel’s cellar stairwell. Gunshots resounded outside where a gang of hired guns patrolled the frontier town’s streets with revolvers drawn.
The marshal stumbled down to the bottom step, where gaslight illuminated
Judy Suarez lit a cigarette and took a drag. Against her left shoulder she cradled a landline desk phone. In her right hand she clenched a screenplay lacerated with pen slashes.
“Hemingway once said to write drunk and edit sober. Honey, you should be writing sober.”
The screenwriter on the other end of the line said
“We’re clear of the stockade. Twenty yards or so.” Corporal Tiller’s sullied head emerged from the hole, poking into the shade of the primitive lean-to. “I reckon we run like hell, we can reach a river by dawn. Lord willing.”
Lieutenant Roland Chadwick helped the Union soldier from the tunnel’s entrance. Tiller
The door flung open before Marshal Roland Chadwick could finish pouring his morning coffee. The frontier town’s lawman, Sheriff Tiller, was away on his honeymoon, so Chadwick had offered to substitute. He sat at the sheriff’s desk, reading a worn copy of Emerson.
“Well?” the intruder asked, striding toward Chadwick with her dress swaying
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