Excerpts from TRUCK STOP Amazon.com: ISBN-13:978-1499694666 , ISBN-10: 1499694660
SYNOPSIS: When Lulu Mae married Hank, she thought he’d help her become her dream of being a country western singer. But when she realized that all Hank wanted was a wife and for Lulu Mae to waitress in his honky-tonk truck stop saloon, as she had at the diner where he met her, she soon became infatuated with the handsome, and possibly dangerous, new bartender, Brad.
Then the town was shocked by the news of a car containing two well-know people going over a hill and crashing at the bottom with a tremendous explosion, destroying most of the evidence as to the cause. The sheriff’s department was quick to attribute the tragedy to a faulty accelerator, but crafty old Sheriff Bob, after fifty years on the police force, secretly suspected it was murder.
As the one or ones suspected of the tragedy with the car scramble to avoid justice with the sheriff’s department hot on the trail, the plot thunders to the dynamic conclusion where everyone has their final rendezvous with destiny to even the score in this lurid tale of obsessive sexual desire, murder, greed, and betrayal in a small, rural Kentucky town one steamy-hot summer, set in a honky-tonk truck stop saloon situated along the Southern interstate.
FROM CHAPTER TWO:
And so it was, standing before the open window in her bedroom, towel-drying herself after a bath, warm breeze caressing her body, drying her, that she saw him getting out of a black Jeep. It was instant, like a switch had been pulled and everything inside her released. All six foot two of him: tight jeans sleekly roaming his muscular body, allowing his manhood to be perceivable to the left of his crotch, not intended as a braggadocios display, but rather how his anatomy was made.
His head was shaved and black stubble spilled down his chiseled face onto his jaws and chin, creating a short-cropped beard. Thick, black eyebrows hovered over his dark brooding eyes like ominous clouds promising a storm. His chest and abdominal muscles strained through his tight, black tee-shirt, while red and black tattoos snaked over his biceps and down each of his arms that he carried out from his body like a panther ready to pounce. Black cowboy boots with higher heels coaxed his body and arms to swing side to side from his waist up in a cocky way, as he strode across the gravel parking area outside.
Lulu Mae moved back from the window, pulling the towel up around her shoulders, not from discretion, which wasn’t her nature, but a shudder rippled through her body like a cold chill, an odd sensation that she had never felt. She wished the organdy curtains would stop fluttering outside, calling attention to the window. But they didn’t, and he looked up, their eyes clashing like flint striking together, revealing their mutual attraction that rippled like an electric current had been switched on. She had a perverse urge to yank away the towel and expose herself to him, but instead she remained frozen in the window as a statue, aware that he could see her nervously gnawing on the edge of the towel with an impish, child-like grin on her face.
He smiled back, and her grin grew wider. She wanted him there in the bedroom with her, regardless the risk. Even at that distance, both were sure that wicked destiny had more in store for them.
He never took his eyes off her, and she remained frozen, partly by plan, partly from fear, until he was out of sight and inside the truck stop.
If he was the new bartender, she was certain she could become a drunk.
FROM CHAPTER THREE:
The heat dominated the night but it didn’t keep Hank from sleeping. He told Lulu Mae that good people and babies always sleep well, as he always did, but with Lulu Mae being neither, she didn’t sleep well, and she couldn’t sleep well that night.
The ceiling fan only irritated her, providing little relief, and she grumbled about it to herself, constantly tossing back and forth over the clammy bed sheets, drenched from her perspiration. She resented that Hank wouldn’t allow air conditioning in the bedroom, and he even had the effrontery to sleep undisturbed next to her with no problem. She wanted to wake him and give him a piece of her mind, but she just tossed back and forth.
No breeze came through the open window and the petrol fumes and noise from the interstate were intolerable. She had gotten used to the noise, even the fumes, but with the heat, it was all too much. She pulled herself up from the damp sheet that stuck to her skin, got out of bed and went to the window where she hoped for a miracle breeze to cool her.
Dark smoky clouds prowled the night sky in search of the new crescent moon that was allowed to peek through only at intervals until the greedy clouds returned to dominate the sky. From years of raising tobacco, Lulu Mae predicted the thick, dark clouds indicated that rain would soon chase away the heat and restore the earth to sanity. It couldn’t come soon enough for her.
In the light from passing vehicles on the interstate, her nude body glistened from perspiration. Other than the monotonous whooshing sound of the passing vehicles, the night was dead still, not the sound of a cricket or a bird, perhaps too hot themselves to make a stir. In the distance, almost indiscernible, the faint sound of Brad’s guitar penetrated the silence, like the doomed beckoning from the mythological Sirens. That tingle raced again through Lulu Mae’s body, invading it, overpowering her, and she willingly opened to it. She could smell Brad’s masculine presence, as the scent of her lingered with him, as two dogs tracking one another.
In white boxer shorts sitting on his bed, behind which Hank’s crucifix hung on the wall, Brad strummed his guitar. He was also soaked in perspiration, right through his shorts, and he yanked them off, tossing them onto the floor to allow his genitals to cool off. He and Lulu Mae were in the same sweaty condition, not only from the temperature, but their sexual heat as well.
In prison, he had dreamed of a girl like Lulu Mae: young, full round breasts, and a fine figure, that he would ravage like a ravenous coyote over a rabbit. He could smell her, too, a smell that only men can smell because women don’t know of it. For him, it was an aphrodisiac, nectar of the gods.
His father had been a rodeo clown in San Antonio and neighboring states. He had met Brad’s mother in Monterrey, Mexico-- a Mexican girl seventeen at the time--smuggled her into the states and back to San Antonio where they eventually married.
The girl had no education but she learned to be a manicurist and got a job in a hair salon. But the father drank and encouraged his young wife to drink until they both became drunks and drug addicts. Still vivid in Brad’s mind were his father’s rages, the beatings his mother endured: the slaps, punches, the dull thud to the floor, resonating through the table that Brad and his younger brother cowered under in the kitchen, holding onto one of the legs for security.
When his father was drunk, a bull gutted him, killing him, forcing Brad’s mother into prostitution to support the family. The sounds of her nightly sexcapades with strangers penetrated the thin wall between her room and where her sons slept on the other side, as terrified as from their father’s tirades.
It was no surprise when the boys became teenagers that they would turn to crime and end up in juvenile detention facilities. With years and jails between them, Brad had lost contact with his brother and had resolved after his last release from jail to go straight, but, as things currently looked, it might be straight to bed with another man’s wife.
Brad’s melodic strumming on his guitar lilted across the parking area into Lulu Mae’s receptive being, closing her off to anything else, even Hank’s snoring. The vibrations transported her into Brad’s bed where he was pushing himself inside her, filling her, completing her. More than ever she had to have him.
The strumming invaded Nell’s bedroom, too, and filled her—but with fear. She imagined what was going on with Lulu Mae in her bedroom and it alarmed her. As the melodic sound grew more intense, Nell switched on the bedside lamp and trundled into the bathroom for a sleeping sedative. She would have to do something drastic soon—this she knew, and she recognized the urgency--but what, she hadn’t yet decided. She only knew it would have to be drastic and she was preparing herself for it. She returned to bed and Brad’s guitar continued, and that was the last she remembered until the morning.
