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102 pages

English

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Extrait

Description

Developer Rusty Watson is determined to acquire, by any means necessary, a plot of land owned by an elderly man in the Willow Springs, Oklahoma, community. Driven by greed and personal torment, Rusty is hell-bent on retaliation against the one he believes took his son. But his adversary has different ideas. Elijah Montgomery is the grandson of a former slave to the Creek Indian Nation. He resides in the local nursing home, though he still owns the house and land his grandfather was once slave to. Rusty and his cohorts believe Elijah's tie to the land is simply sentimental. They hope he can, therefore, be bought with a price, but Elijah's dreams show him something that no one else knows. The story of this modern day Land Run twists and turns through events of fate, and everyone, including Elijah, will find that these events, like the extreme weather of their region, are driven by forces beyond their control. No one in Willow Springs will be left untouched by this battle. The unexpected conclusion to this contest of wills shows to all that this battle is not theirs to fight.

Sujets

Thrillers

Suspense

Fiction

Informations

Publié par	eBookIt.com
Date de parution	19 juin 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780989324809
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

LAND RUN
Mark Graham
Copyright © Mark Graham 2013
EPUB Edition
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, descriptions, entities, and incidents included in the story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, and entities is entirely coincidental.
Published by Bumblebee House Ink Publishing
2933 NC HWY 39 N | Louisburg, North Carolina, 27549 USA | 1.919.453.0941
www.bumblebeehouseink.com
Book design copyright © 2013 by Bumblebee House Ink Publishing. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Mark Graham
Published in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-9893248-0-9
1. Fiction, General, Suspense, Literary
2. Fiction, Multi-Cultural
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Description
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Mark Graham
Description
Developer Rusty Watson is determined to acquire, by any means necessary, a plot of land owned by an elderly man in the Willow Springs, Oklahoma, community. Driven by greed and personal torment, Rusty is hell-bent on retaliation against the one he believes took his son. But his adversary has different ideas.
Elijah Montgomery is the grandson of a former slave to the Creek Indian Nation. He resides in the local nursing home, though he still owns the house and land his grandfather was once slave to. Rusty and his cohorts believe Elijah’s tie to the land is simply sentimental. They hope he can, therefore, be bought with a price, but Elijah’s dreams show him something that no one else knows.
The story of this modern day Land Run twists and turns through events of fate, and everyone, including Elijah, will find that these events, like the extreme weather of their region, are driven by forces beyond their control. No one in Willow Springs will be left untouched by this battle. The unexpected conclusion to this contest of wills shows to all that this battle is not theirs to fight.
Dedication
For my wife, Christa, and her capacity to love and believe in me and this work. And for my children Caitlin, Kristina, Abigail, Matthew, and Ethan—that they may know to never drop their dreams along their way.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Carla Taylor, Scott McAllister, Pastor Steve Cobb, and Charles Curtis, for their constant encouragement.
Thank you to all my family and friends for their encouragement along this journey.
Chapter One

T he remaining light of the sun spread across the lake and seemed to mourn with Rusty Watson. He could only see in this evening event the impending darkness that would soon envelop him. The hazy red and orange reflection of the lake was probably a pretty sight to someone, seen as something like the hope of a new day only a fool could find. Cold darkness came packaged in every pointless day. He took another beer from the bag next to his lawn chair. Rusty imagined this day’s dying as a changing of the guard and, in a way, just a nasty little play God put on every day, something done just to say, “I’m in charge in case you forget.” He sat down before the lake alone.
Contentment never suited Rusty much. He was moving all the time and excited at everything he found to do. And he remembered having a reason for everything he did, even trusted that there was always something bigger going on around him with even greater reason. What crap, he thought. He opened his beer.
The horizon was the same from every angle in central Oklahoma. A flat, straight line always lay before him, a seemingly benign constant where in a sudden moment, the weather could upset with deadly force, terrorize with lightning shows unmatched anywhere on the planet, hail like golf balls, heat so sizzling a body forgets it has mass, freak ice storms that would immobilize whole cities and then dry the very next day—a country that once produced such a man as him and his ways, steady but never boring or predictable.
The dark was now in full both outside and inside Rusty. He finished his Corona and pulled a blanket from the bag. He closed his eyes and saw his wife for a moment and then the boy. Rusty finally moved into the familiar state somewhere between falling asleep and passing out.
Within four hours, he woke before the opening act of the new day. Rusty stumbled to the nearby woods to relieve himself before breaking his makeshift campsite. He dreaded that he would have to stop at his empty house before going to the trailer at the stagnant construction site. The traffic was busier than he expected coming back from the lake. Then he remembered it had been a weekend. Time had recently become a problem for him. Rusty sluggishly sorted and prioritized the day’s tasks when his cell phone rang. Since he was jammed in traffic, he decided to answer it. He knew better but answered anyway.
“Yeah.”
“Rusty Watson?”
“What?”
“Mr. Watson, we have been trying to get a hold of you for weeks. I’m Cort Johnson, and I need to inform you that you are grossly overdue on your construction loans with Sooner National. We need payment of—”
“Who is this?”
“Cort John—”
“Tell your boss that I’ll get it to him. I got a new deal he’s gonna like.”
Rusty hung up and tossed the phone to the passenger seat of his truck. He was offended that he was just a name on some no-name list. He was better than that, generated more revenue than that.
The road took over the trip. Plans for the day abandoned now. He just drove with some sense of restlessness. Rusty found himself doing this more than ever. He would just drive as he did in high school when it was just important to be out of the house. Where you went never mattered, just away.
The morning’s lie came back to him after a time. There was no deal, no ready salvation with which to impress the bank. As he lingered on the lie he told, it seemed real to him or was becoming less fabrication and more like a possibility. Thinking back, he realized it didn’t even feel like a lie when he said it. It had been a long time since ideas came on him like this, in this way. That compelling muse that made him see what wasn’t there. Rusty pulled the truck over in a place strangely new to him. He had driven past these fields a thousand times but today could not help but stop for a closer look. The land took on shape little by little as he walked closer to the fence line. The last light of day seemed to hang a little longer and brighter as if just for him, for this revelation. Rusty closed his eyes tightly for a time and then slowly released them from captivity with great anticipation.
The clubhouse had columns, tall, thick ones. There was a circular drive filled with fresh flowers of every color. The long drive was perfectly laid brown brick. Plush, green carpets of grass rolled out before him, and house upon house filled the scene, each custom and strikingly different. All the right trees remained and the wrong trees vanished from his view, as did acres of ugly woods as his mind now peered over the land as if in flight. Eighteen holes zigzagged between perfect island strips of the tallest trees. Rusty almost smiled.

Business was bad . Rusty only had two half-completed spec homes out in the middle of nowhere near the county line. One buyer backed out, and interest rates were on their way up again. He had been in this same spot once before, but it was a challenge then. This time was different; he was different. He didn’t much care if he got paid or even met payroll. But now he had this new dream. He had to have that land and would divert whatever funds were needed. Rusty was going for broke the way he had during the condo craze of the eighties but without the baggage of weighty concerns of debtors and workers. Thinking back, he wasted many late nights bending his wife’s ear about other people’s families. No more.
There were just a few calls to be made this morning, and the rest of the day would be spent at the future site. The obsession had begun in him with unusual urgency. The core of Rusty’s thinking now was this new property. Also, he thought, this is news and she needs to know. He had the perfect impersonal purpose, a task to discuss, and would try to get his wife’s number again.
“Rusty, hon, I just can’t right now. She needs some time. I’m sure—”
“Yeah.” Rusty cut his mother-in-law off and hung up.
The foreman at the worksite had called Rusty to tell him of the progress over the weekend. The man was new. Lately, there was always someone new working for him. Rusty cut him off as well and didn’t even get a kick out of what he was about to give the man.
“Here’s the thing. I’m about to get real busy across county. I’m not going to be able to track this job. Can you handle it?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean you need to supervise this. Just make the date before they start the mortgage, and you get a twenty-percent increase. You find some buyers, and you get another twenty of the sale. Deal?”
“But…yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Mr. Watson.”

By midday , Rusty was back at the new land site and became one with his Blackberry. In just a day, he managed to shed all his track homes and nearly felt excited about it. The afternoon sun warmed him into sitting down against a large, lone pecan tree atop an almost-hill. Rusty ran through the checklist on his clipboard again, looking to this: sell the vision to two core investors, and timeline the project with a rough cost estimate. Most everything Rusty did he did with a compelling sense of urgenc