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106 pages

English

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A young woman dies in an unfortunate accident--unfortunate for her but perhaps lucky for the scheming mayor of the ski resort town of Columbus, Colorado. Had she uncovered a plot to ruin this mountainous Eden? Columbus is an Old West town full of the usual cast of characters: robber barons, gunslingers, Native American warriors, snake oil salesmen, rustlers and feisty cowgirls. It's a setting Cutter Williams can't resist when civic leaders opposing the mayor come looking for their own hired gun. So he packs his limited arsenal into his bedroll and heads to Columbus to carve his name into the annals of the Wild West. His crusade takes him from smoke-filled offices to historic saloons, from a private jet to a luxurious ski chalet, and from staid boardrooms to riots in the streets, with the occasional time out, of course, for a round of golf or a couple of beers. But like many a Knight Errant, Cutter is saddled with the foibles which could sabotage his mission and destroy him. In his second book, J. Woodburn Barney explores the gamut of human relationships. Like an insect caught in a web, Cutter finds himself entangled in the creation of another. Or is it of his own creation? Crushed by the weight of deception, Cutter must address the self-serving behavior of everyone around him, including himself. Barney questions the validity of a person's word and the concepts of loyalty and betrayal as he examines the relationship webs spun by all of us. With the help of his cast of characters, Barney traverses a wide spectrum of emotions. From manipulation and betrayal to cooperation and trust. From rancor to humor. From unbridled greed to a father's willingness to show up for his kids in moments when he'd rather not show up to life at all. Barney demonstrates how life is continuously changing and requires immediate adaptation. When everything falls apart, truth is left uncovered.

Informations

Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	01 octobre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781506902234
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0480€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

CUTTER
Director’s Cut

j. woodburn barney
Cutter, Director’s Cut
Copyright ©2016 J. Woodburn Barney

ISBN 978-1506-902-23-4 EBOOK

May 2016

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .

An Appalachian Acorn Book
Cover design and illustration by Tad Barney
for Deborah
and for my kids, sired and acquired.
“And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear, millions of mischiefs.”

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
When my twin brother, J. Smith Barney, was reading my first book, Cutter, he wrote me and asked, “How much of this is true?” My response was, “I would like to think that it is all true, but if what you are asking is ‘how much is factual?’, then not very much.” More than a few readers I know personally told me they sometimes got bogged down reading Cutter because they were trying to figure out who was who in real life. To each of them, I explained not one character was real. While they may have shared traits with some real person, or even uttered words a real person had said, they all were creations of a rabid imagination. Such is the case with this story. Do not look for anyone you know, including me or yourself.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
CUTTER
Director’s Cut
ONE

Jean Smith smiled. She finally had him. She had been absolutely positive the mayor was planning something which would betray the good folks of Columbus, Colorado. But until now she had no proof, only the suspicions of a bureaucrat who finds a snake under every political rock. And she had him recorded. Talking to someone about Riverside Park. Not that talking about a park was a crime or anything, but it was the mayor’s tone. Jean could tell. He was up to no good.
Jean had managed to patiently work her way into a job in the mayor’s office, putting in years of boring pencil-pushing labor, starting as a clerk in the Human Resources Office of Job Safety, eventually becoming an assistant safety officer and now was the safety officer for the mayor’s office, a public trust she took very seriously. Though not as seriously as her civic responsibility to root out and expose those who would use their city positions to benefit themselves. Or their friends and relatives. Everyone else in the office just saw her as a pain in the ass. A pain in the ass who spent her time, and wasted city dollars, warning everyone about the dangers of paper cuts and reminding them not to lean back on two legs of a chair.
“Ruth, this is Jean,” she whispered into her cell phone, though she was alone in her car.
“Hey,” was the only response. Ruth was not happy to hear from Jean. Again. Ruth Roberts was the hatchet woman for the Columbus City Times, the best newspaper in the region. Naturally, since it was the only newspaper in the region. The editor, on direct orders from the publisher, kept Ruth on a tight chain to be released only when the publisher decided to wage war on someone in the community. As a result, Ruth was seen, at least by the unwashed masses, as a crusading reporter they could trust to find and lay bare the evil doers in the city. Most everybody in public service thought of her as just what she was, the publisher’s personal Rottweiler. But everyone agreed they would rather have a task force of FBI and IRS agents knock on their doors than have Ruth start sniffing their trail.
Jean saw Ruth as her natural compatriot in the never-ending battle against the forces of evil. Ruth saw Jean as another one of those crazy paranoids she had to dismiss on a daily basis. Sadly, because Jean worked in the mayor’s office and might accidently stumble over something of real use to her, Ruth couldn’t tell Jean to fuck off. Which is what Ruth told the other crazies.
“Listen, Ruth, I have Mayor Humphrey on my recorder talking about Riverside Park and you have to hear it.” Ruth groaned. Ah, shit, not the Jean Smith recorder. The first four or five times Jean had contacted Ruth about something newsworthy on her recorder, Ruth had listened. What Ruth learned was everybody in city government already knew about Jean’s “secret” recorder. They all took turns making up stories they told loudly enough that even the cheap recorder could pick up. Stories that ranged from who was sleeping with whom to who was on the take to who participated in the post-council meeting orgy in the treasurer’s office.
This was, however, the first time Jean claimed to have the mayor on tape. Ruth reluctantly agreed to meet her for coffee the next morning.
“Great. See you at Ross’ at seven. Good night. And thanks.” Jean was excited. Her big break. Finally everyone would know she was important. Besides her mom and dad. They already told her how important she was. And Suzie, Jean’s significant other. Her life partner. At least until Suzie could find either a) a good job, or b) a new girlfriend with a good job. But Suzie always acted suitably impressed when Jean told her about her important work and the important people she knew and the important city inside information. Poor plain, drab, frumpy Jean. She did have a good heart. If she was just, just…Suzie didn’t even know where she would start to give Jean a makeover. Inside or outside.
Jean closed the connection on her phone and slid it into her purse. This was going to be great. She couldn’t stop smiling. Couldn’t wait to get home and share the news with Suz. First she had to grab the materials for her eight o’clock presentation of her new “Safety in the Workplace” class at the Health Department. She’d have to go back to her office for those. Her office was in the City Hall Annex, unlike her coworkers who had offices right there in the granite and sandstone historical City Hall. Sorry, Miss Smith, we just don’t have room here, but we have some really nice space in the Annex. Maybe now they would let her have an office in the real City Hall.
City Hall dated back to the 1890s, when Columbus was a small but thriving town on the Arkansas River. The town had been founded in 1880 by Christopher “Kit” Carroll when silver was discovered in the nearby mountains. Unlike many of the Colorado silver rush boomtowns, Columbus had actually flourished after the silver played out. Thanks in large part to Kit’s understanding that sooner or later, every rush ended and only the folks who planned for that eventuality made any real money from the silver mania. So Kit put up cheap wooden gambling halls and bars and brothels and saved every penny, or more correctly, every bag of silver nuggets. With that he built substantial structures downstream, first a saw mill, then a bank, then a hotel, and then laid out a downtown and residential areas. By the 1890s, the silver was gone. He burned down the bars, the gambling dens and the whorehouses and turned the old town into a park, all six hundred acres of it. In time, the city grew around the park and its neighborhood became the center of community wealth.
Now Columbus was the third largest city in Colorado with a balanced economy which saw it through bad times and allowed it to thrive during the good ones. Kit had started things off well for the city, and his son Kit Junior did even better. The son bought up all the riparian rights for many miles up and down the Arkansas to control water access, convinced the state legislature to locate Central Western State University on land his family donated just west of downtown (of course, the family kept the land on all sides of the donation, since, who knows, maybe one day the state would need to buy some for expansion, which it did, at an inflated price) and gave the federal government land for the Office of Mining Oversight.
With that, Columbus had a guaranteed source of water and access to markets, it had a continuing source of bright young people, and it had a recession proof government business. Over the next seventy-five years new businesses started and flourished, so the city was now home to a major national insurance company, the biggest regional bank west of the Mississippi and a thriving data industry. When the mountain sports boom of the 60s began and flourished, Columbus’ quaint downtown and proximity to world class skiing, hiking, biking, camping and golf insured that every year it was named a top ten place to live and work.
As patriarch of the family, Ty Carroll, great, great grandson of Kit, continued the family tradition of personally controlling all of the family businesses and interests. Which were plentiful. They owned controlling interest of the regional bank and the largest local health provider. They had a major share of the insurance company. They were the largest landholder and developer in the area. They owned the most popular local radio and television stations. And Ty himself served as publisher of the city’s only newspaper. Most everyone agreed the Carroll family always had the best interests of the community at heart. Those who voiced concern about the power of the family soon found themselves being shunned by community leaders. At best. At worst, they found themselves the subject of a Ruth Roberts exposé.
When Ruth arrived at Ross’ for her meeting with Jean, she knew she had to tread carefully. In the unlikely