"I can understand you wanting to get away to complete the problem scenes in the second act, but to such a remote place? Do they even have cell service in—what did you say its name was—Oyster, Virginia? It sounds like a dump. Or a pile of rubbish. I have visions of an oyster shell pile on a deserted scrub beach. Everything washed out in soft, weak pastels; ev...
Chapter One: Mission Ritual The only sound in the dimming summer evening light inside the airplane hangar was his grunting and her moans and sighing. She was perched on her ass on the worn wooden desk off to the side of the two P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers taking up most of the room in the hangar. A lightbulb hanging on a chain above the desk swayed bac...
[For an earlier story in the NYPD vice detective Mike Kavanagh series, see "Inevitable Case."] Mike Kavanagh stood at the French balcony window of his "seen better times" hotel on Canal Street, looking at the festival parade units forming below him, and then beyond to the western edge of the French Quarter. He was lucky to have found a residence hotel this...
Chapter One: Christmas Present for Himself Jan heard his voice in the foyer and glided away from the man who was circling in on him and went to the door. The big Slavic bear of a guy, who had been introduced to him as Victor, had been pursuing him for nearly an hour and Jan was running out of ploys to politely elude him. That couldn't last long, because a c...
Chapter One "Of course you have a choice." Silas Collins sat there, assessing what was really going on here and whether everything was down the tubes for him. Yesterday morning he'd been in the Colombian jungle, just "that far" from seizing the daddy of all drug cartel lords, and now he was sitting in front of a desk, facing two suits and overlooking North...
Chapter One: Kazan to Novorossiysk As soon as he had seen the truck convoy start to pull into the courtyard of the makeshift main building of the Imperial Military Academy, Pyotr dropped the weights he was working with in the exercise yard and loped down the slope and through the grove of trees that bordered one side of the river park on the rise above Kaza...