Chariot Canyon
A Rent Beacham Mystery
Release date: October 11, 2024
First Chapter
Rent Beacham cursed himself as he struggled to block all thoughts of immediate danger and recall the irony of how a seemingly innocent decision to take a soothing drive to the mountains led him to his lightless prison.
He leaned against the hard wall of igneous rock, holed up in what would likely be his grave: A gold mine near what in its heyday had been the boom town of Banner City, down valley from Julian, California. A single stick of dynamite—or a black-powder charge—could collapse its walls, precariously shored up by rotting timbers. Or the approaching atmospheric river, as the meteorologists called it, could flood the mine and drown him.
I think I’d prefer the explosion to slowly drowning. Then again, I’d rather be alive. At thirty-two, I’ve got a lot more years ahead of me.
He snorted in disgust at his own angst. Why could he never be satisfied with just doing his job and enjoying his leisure time like all those perfect people in the TV commercials? Perpetually plagued by dissatisfaction with the status quo, his restlessness had led him to a small mountain town, then to the desert, then to the discovery that opened his Pandora’s box. A box whose lid had come precariously close to banging shut—and literally burying him alive.
Then he chuckled. No, it wasn’t funny, but he had been cursed with a propensity to laugh at the ironic. It had gotten him in trouble in the past when he couldn’t keep such thoughts to himself.
Being an investigative journalist did that to him. Or was it the other way around? His knack of seeing a laughable lament even in the darkest of circumstances.
Maybe that’s what led me into journalism? he wondered.
At that moment, however, he could laugh his lungs out and no one would be subjected to his macabre brand of gallows humor. No one could hear him. Not while he sat trapped in the shaft of an abandoned gold mine miles beyond Bumfuck.
What else can I do? I may as well laugh, even if it is at my own expense. Crying and whining will get me nowhere.
If nothing else, his predicament spared him from his editor’s chastisement over a looming deadline.
But the only person who might be able to figure out where he had gone also wished him dead—at least in the figurative sense. His lady friend had become his foe.
As he waited for his would-be killer’s next move in a game in which he had become the wuss to his foe’s puss, he retraced in his mind the steps, in a relentless, inevitable progression, that had led him to this potentially fatal fix—and maybe come up with a way to get out . . . alive.
Buy the Book
The ebook version of Chariot Canyon is available for pre-order at Amazon and Draft2Digital.
Copyright © 2024 Larry M. Edwards
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