If Thoughts Could Kill -e

A Tornado Man Mystery, Vol.2

by Matthew L. Schoonover

Former FBI agent Jack Monosmith survived being sucked into a tornado and thrust into fame. Now Jack has hooked up with Bartholomew, (the butler from A Sense of Endless Woes) to drive long-distance loads in his Peterbilt "Baby." A mysterious load to the palacious home of millionaire Carter Blackwood, leads them to murder and things get more complicated by the minute.

ISBN 1-59431-258-3 Mystery/ Thriller/Locked Room

Cover Art/Maggie Dix



Chapter 1



Bright blackness and blinding light.

The road was quickly disappearing in the night's darkness. The dancing demons of snow that pranced around in front of the Peterbilt reflected my headlights back into my eyes. I felt the snow chains slip momentarily on the icy slope as we inched ever so slowly up the mountain road. One wrong turn, one slip too many, and we wouldn't stop until we hit the ground one thousand feet below.

I tried to think of something else, but the only thing that came to mind was trying to figure out the name of the fellow who dropped two different size balls from some tower in Italy to prove that mass had nothing to do with the rate at which two objects, like the Peterbilt and myself, would fall.

From the corner of my eye I saw Bart sitting quietly in the passenger's seat, trying to read a new book in the afterglow of faint light coming from the sleeper compartment. He looked at me, then leaned up and over me to look out my window, shook his head in a sad, disapproving way, sighed, and sat back down.

"You want to tell me again why we're coming up here?" he asked.

"Galileo," I said. My mind was, after all, elsewhere.

"Jack," He paused to make sure he had my attention. "He's dead."

"Who's dead? Carter Blackwood?"

"No. Galileo."

"What's Galileo got to do with us coming up here to see Carter Blackwood?"

"I don't know. You tell me."

"Nothing," I said. "As long as we don't go over the edge."

Bart sighed deeply. He might as well have said tsk, tsk. "I'll tell you one thing about Carter Blackwood," he said. "If thoughts could kill that guy would've been dead a hundred times over by now."

"You know Carter?"

"I know of him. Never met the man myself."

"Luck of the Irish?"

He shrugged. "You know, back in my truck driving days, I used to drive State Highway 130 all the time, and let me tell you, it was never built with truckers in mind. Potholes and shear drops, no shoulders or road markings to speak of. It's a nightmare to drive on in the best of weather. Right now I wished I was back on 130 instead of this tinker toy truck route Carter calls his entrance road. Carved it out of the bedrock with a kid's beach shovel from the feel of it."

"It's the only road that leads up to his estate."

"Carter's Castle," he said. "Doesn't own a car, does he?" Bart put his book away and turned off the light from the sleeper. That helped my night vision, although not by much.

I said, "He has a helipad at the top of the mountain."

"Doesn't go out much, huh?"

"He's a recluse."

"Eccentric?"

"Agoraphobic. He hasn't left his castle since it was built four years ago. Or so I hear."

The heater in the cab was running full blast. Despite that, I was wrapped in a cold blanket of worry and fear that made me shiver with every few feet we moved up the mountain. The first snow of the season had only just begun to fall, it started shortly after we began our ascent and effectively reduced visibility to minus zero. The air was thinning and rapidly building up force; a force I was even more worried about. A down-draft between the mountain and our rig could push us over the edge without our realizing it. I was also worried about rounding a curve and finding it too sharp to navigate with our trailer. Or finding someone driving down the road in front of us. Backing up was impossible.

It would have been much safer to drive the rig over the side and walk the rest of the way in below freezing temperatures on the icy road, slick as a slippy-slide, with no light to see by and no feeling in hand or foot to warn of cliff or curve, crevasse or crag.