Title: A Living Grave
Author: Robert Dunn
About the book:
The
first in a gritty new series featuring sheriff’s detective Katrina
Williams, as she investigates moonshine, murder, and the ghosts of
her own past…
BODY
OF PROOF
Katrina
Williams left the Army ten years ago disillusioned and damaged. Now a
sheriff’s detective at home in the Missouri Ozarks, Katrina is
living her life one case at a time—between mandated therapy
sessions—until she learns that she’s a suspect in a military
investigation with ties to her painful past.
The
disappearance of a local girl is far from the routine distraction,
however. Brutally murdered, the girl’s corpse is found by a
bottlegger whose information leads Katrina into a tangled web of
teenagers, moonshiners, motorcycle clubs, and a fellow veteran
battling illness and his own personal demons. Unraveling each thread
will take time Katrina might not have as the Army investigator
turns his searchlight on the devastating incident that ended her
military career. Now Katrina will need to dig deep for the
truth—before she’s found buried…
Excerpt:
I felt like it was the end of summer.
Not that there was a hint of green or the creeping red-oranges of
leaves turning. In Iraq, everything was brownish. Not even a good,
earthy brown. Instead, everything within my view was a uniform,
wasted, dun color. It was easy to imagine the creator ending up here
on the seventh day, out of energy and out of ideas after spending his
palate in the joy of painting the rest of the world. This spit of
earth, the dirty asshole of creation we called the Triangle of Death,
didn’t even rate a decent brown.
I had been in country for eight months.
I had been First Lieutenant Katrina Williams, Military Police,
attached to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division for
a little over a year. Pride and love had brought me here. Proud to be
American and just as proud to have come from a military family, I was
in love with what the ROTC at Southwest Missouri State University had
shown me about my country’s military. I fell in love with the
thought of the woman I would become serving my nation. I wanted to
echo the men my father and my uncle were and add my own tone to the
family history. Iraq bled that all out of me. Just like it was
bleeding my color out into the dust. Bright red draining into shit
brown.
It was the impending weight of change
that made me feel like the end of summer. As a girl, back home in the
Ozarks, the summers seemed to last forever. It wasn’t until the
final days, carried over even into a new school year, when the air
cooled and the oaks rusted, that I could feel them ending. Their
endings were like the descent of ice ages, the shifting of epochs.
That was exactly how I felt bleeding into the dirt. The difference
was that I felt an impending death rather than transition. The
terminus of an epoch. In Iraq though, nothing was as clear as that.
It was death; but it wasn’t.
Lying on my back, I wished I could see
blue sky, but not here. The air was hazed with dust so used up it
became a part of the atmosphere. There was no more of the earth in
it. Grit, like bad memories and regret, hanging over an entire
nation. I coughed hard and it hurt. A bubbly thickness slithered up
my throat. Using my tongue and what breath I had, I got the slimy
mass up to my lips. I just didn’t have it in me to spit. Instead, I
turned my head to the side and let the bloody phlegm slide down my
cheek.
Dying is hard.
Wind, hot and cradling the homeland
sand so many factions were willing to kill for, ran over the wall I
was hidden behind. It eddied there, slowing and swirling and then
dumping the dirt on my naked skin. A slow-motion burial. Even the
land here hated naked women.
I stayed there without moving, but
slipping in and out of consciousness for a long time. It seemed long,
anyway. I dreamed. Dreamed or remembered so well they seemed like
perfect dreams of—everything.
Green.
We played baseball. Just like in old
movies with kids turning a lot into a diamond. No one does that
anymore, but we did. My grandfather played minor league ball years
ago and I had a cousin who was a Cardinals fan. Everyone was a
Cardinals fan, so I loved the Royals. When the games were over and it
was hotter than the batter’s box when I was pitching—I had a wild
arm—my father would take me to the river. Later when we had cars, I
was drawn there every summer to swim and swing from the ropes. We
floated on old, patched inner tubes and teased boys. That was where I
learned to drink beer. My father would take me fishing on the river.
My grandfather would take me on the lakes. I used the same cane pole
my father had when Granddad taught him about fishing. Both of the men
used to say to the girl who complained about not catching anything,
“It’s not about the catching, it’s about the fishing.” I
don’t think I ever understood until a good portion of my blood was
spilled on the dirt of a world that hated me.
My head spun back to the moment and
back to Iraq. If I was going to die, I would have done it already, I
figured. At least my body. That physical part of me would live on.
That other part of me, the girl who loved summer… I think she was
already dead. Death and transition.
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About the Author:
I
wasn't born in a log cabin but the station wagon did have wood on the
side. It was broken down on the approach road into Ft. Rucker,
Alabama in the kind of rain that would have made a Biblical author
jealous. You never saw a tornado in the Old Testament did you? As
omens of a coming life go, mine was full of portent if not exactly
glad tidings.
From there things got interesting. Life on a
series of Army bases encouraged my retreat into a fantasy world. Life
in a series of public school environments provided ample nourishment
to my developing love of violence. Often heard in my home was the
singular phrase, "I blame the schools." We all blamed the
schools.
Both my fantasy and my academic worlds left marks and
the amalgam proved useful the three times in my life I had guns
pointed in my face. Despite those loving encounters the only real
scars left on my body were inflicted by a six foot, seven inch tall
drag queen. She didn't like the way I was admiring the play of three
a.m. Waffle House fluorescent light over the high spandex sheen of
her stockings.
After a series of low paying jobs that took me
places no one dreams of going. I learned one thing. Nothing vomits
quite so brutally as jail food. That's not the one thing I learned;
it's an important thing to know, though. The one thing I learned is a
secret. My secret. A terrible and dark thing I nurture in my
nightmares. You learn your own lessons.
Eventually I began
writing stories. Mostly I was just spilling out the, basically, true
narratives of the creatures that lounge about my brain, laughing and
whispering sweet, sweet things to say to women. Women see through me
but enjoy the monsters in my head. They say, sometimes, that the
things I say and write are lies or, "damn, filthy lies, slander
of the worst kind, and the demented, perverted, wishful stories of a
wasted mind." To which I always answer, I tell only the truth. I
just tell a livelier truth than most people.
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