The Deadliest Sins Book Tour & Giveaway

Jack Murphy
Thriller #7

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Pub
Date: 10/16/18

“Reed
writes as only a cop can.” —Nelson DeMille

Chapter 1
The “Coyote” sat in the booth, drinking stale coffee, eating a crust of cherry pie, and writing in a five- by
nine-inch ring notebook. He had to record his thoughts, his feelings. That’s what his shrink said. His
shrink was an asshole, but at two Benjamins a session Coyote didn’t want to waste the advice.
The gray-haired waitress shuffled over in dirty house shoes. She was wearing faded gray sweat pants
and a shirt with stains and smudges of flour.
“Coffee?” she asked.
Coyote looked around the shabby café. It was narrow, with a six-foot counter on one side and two
ramshackle booths on the other—one of those had duct tape holding a leg together. There were no
other customers. The varnished seat of the booth had turned to a gummy residue, but the top was worn
smooth. Mounted in one corner of the ceiling was a defunct surveillance camera, its wires disconnected
and hanging. The coffee in the bottom of the carafe was black and thick as syrup. She calls this drain
cleaner coffee?
He was polite. “No,” he said. His voice was gruff, deep for a man barely five and a half feet tall. He was
wearing a charcoal-colored Burberry coat, black leather gloves, black Western Stetson, crisp white shirt
with imitation-pearl snap buttons, creased blue jeans, and Western boots. He wasn’t a big man by any
standard, but only a few men had made the mistake of seeing him as “small.”
The woman said, “Closing in five.”
He ignored her as her shoes scuffed across the stained black-and-white tiles. He dug deep in a pocket
and pulled out a crisp twenty-dollar bill. He slid the twenty under his cup and read what he’d written so
far:
I’m tired. Tired of everything and everyone. People disgust me. Food doesn’t taste good. No happiness
anywhere for me. I see people pretending to sing, their words full of hate and anger and violence. They
dance with faces showing hate and confrontation. What are they so unhappy about? Why do they want
to disrespect everything they got for free? They won’t work. They think they can be rich and happy taking
drugs. They dishonor their parents and each other. They fight from a safe distance with texts and
computers and phones. Cowards.
Everyone is out for themselves and the only thing they can agree on is that their elders were wrong,
racist, or homophobic. They don’t see why “elders” always talk about the past, about the lessons that
took a lifetime to learn. They are confused about who they are, who anyone else is, angry that their
elders didn’t give them more. Why should they take any blame or responsibility?
This is where my mind goes when I’m on the road. Alone, thank God. My dreams are visions,
premonitions of things to come. Slackers, drug addicts, and alcoholics, irresponsible, arrogant pretenders
surround me. They have created a world where they matter. They don’t. If the last three or fourgenerations were wiped from the face of the earth, we wouldn’t notice. They contribute nothing. They do
nothing. They want everything. They’re using my air.
“Time,” the old woman said.
Coyote got up. He couldn’t wait to leave. The smell of putrid coffee mixed with the odor of fried onions
was enough incentive to go. He walked out the door, his boots crunching on rock salt. He pulled his coat
tighter against the frigid air, looked down the street at the car with the fogged-up windshield. The
asshole had made Coyote wait. Coyote respected that.
He tugged the coat collar up around his neck and face. He pulled a cigarette from inside his jacket and lit
it. Holding it between his lips, he slipped his hands into his pockets and turned down the alleyway.