I decided to post my book prologue since I'm too damn excited to keep it under wraps. It's just the prologue.
My working title is Rope A Dope, lol.
Rope a Dope
Nothing about this day was right. He’d like to say it’d been wrong from sunrise to sunset but that would imply sunshine, and it’d rained all blessed day. The windshield wipers squeaked like a couple on a cheap mattress and the low beams on his red Dodge Ram truck were still too high; they refracted off the raindrops like tiny mirrors, making night vision near impossible. He scanned through the channels but the radio stations played nothing but static so far out in such bad weather. He couldn’t even find a decent AM station to check on road conditions. Oh well, he could see that much outside his damn window.
Zack was so distracted by the deplorable driving conditions that he nearly missed seeing the crumpled heap on the side of the road
Almost
“What in the name of…” he mused aloud. The heap was human shaped; he’d have to stop and help. Zack groaned and swore under his breath as he pulled his truck off the road and onto the muddy shoulder. He mashed the black Stetson onto his head, opened the door and hopped out to perform his duty of human decency. He was soaked inside out before he was halfway there and could only imagine the pitiful shape this person must be in. Which begged the question, “Just what shape is this person in?” he wondered. Well, he’d find out soon enough.
A woman. A woman lay there in the mud and rain. He hunkered and felt for a pulse. He couldn’t find one and knew he wouldn’t. This woman was dead as a doornail and probably had been for quite some time. She was cold and rigor mortis had begun to set in. It disgusted him to think of all the people who must have passed her up, just going on their merry way to engage with life. Was he the only decent human left in this town? It made him shiver to imagine all the people he knew in town who took this road. Good people. Civic minded people. Or so he thought. Then again, someone may have dumped her here pretty recently. Who could say? Not him. He walked back to his truck and fetched his flashlight from the glove compartment hoping to find a purse or other identification.
~°~°~°~
He grimaced as he riffled through the dead woman’s pockets to search for a wallet or cell phone. Nothing turned up on her body at all. His flashlight failed to turn anything up around her as well. It was just rain, mud, and a dead woman in a plain t-shirt and yoga pants. She didn’t even have shoes on for God’s sake. He was no crime scene investigator but it didn’t take a genius to see that someone had strangled her. Well, he’d done his part, he’d have to go back and fetch Gabe, the sheriff. His cell phone got no signal this far out regardless of the weather.
As it turned out, he was spared the trouble; the automobile that crested the small hill was Gabe. He pulled behind Zack’s truck and got out. “What we got here, Zack?”
“Come see for yourself. I only just now found her.” He said, almost defensively.
Gabe Cleghorn walked up, stood there arms akimbo and looked down at the woman, then at his cousin Zack, then back to the body.
“Well shit.” He said.
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