“Ah. That.”
He looked at her now, his eyes glassy. “Would you have ever thought of me that way?”
She smiled and pulled the nozzle out. “I don’t know. You always seemed so shy around me. I don’t think you said two words to me all last year. Did you . . . think of me that way?”
“All the time.”
“And now?”
“Now,” Mike said. “Everything’s all mixed up.”
“I know.” She paused. “Milton . . . he has a wife in Riverside. Two little kids.”
Mike wrinkled his brow. “And you know about them now.”
She nodded. “He loves his wife, Mike. I’m . . . starting to feel it.”
“How is any of this possible?” he asked. “I mean . . . who are we? Really?”
She smiled and shrugged. “I know what you mean. Is it our personality? Our brain? Our body?” She shook her head. “Before tonight, I would have said it’s the soul. But now? Whatever part of us came into these bodies . . . it seems like it’s starting to leave. I’m not just remembering more things about Milton. I’m forgetting things about Ronnie. I know my grandma died, but I don’t remember her name. You know?”
“I know.” He sighed. “Do you think that’s why he kept switching bodies? So he wouldn’t end up forgetting who he was originally? I mean . . . do you think my body would have taken over eventually, and that thing wouldn’t have known how to fix that machine?”
Ronnie shook her head. “I doubt it. I think it took our bodies so it would know what to do—how to find the tools it needed, where to look in our barn, how to use the welding torch at the garage. Who knows? Maybe once it got its machine fixed it might have been able to repair its original body. Why else would it have carted it around from place to place?”
Mike thought about it, but had no answer. “Ronnie,” he finally said. “You’re going back to her, aren’t you? His wife?”
She gave him a sad smile. “I think so,” she said quietly. “It . . . just feels right.”
He reached out and touched her cheek—a man’s cheek with a day’s growth of stubble on it, but it was still Ronnie Clark, too. “Would you . . . before you go. Would you stay with me for a while?”
“You mean . . .”
He nodded. “Right now, you and me . . . we’re the only people like us in the whole damn world. Everything those guys are facing in the war. . . it’s nothing like what we’ve faced tonight. And by morning, it’ll be forgotten. You know? I don’t want to lose everything about you, and about me, without . . .”
Ronnie reached up and squeezed Mike’s hand, pushing it harder against her cheek. Then she pulled his hand away and led him to the passenger door of the car and opened it for him. As Mike sat down, he heard the first sirens in the distance.
*****
Wearing only a dressing gown, Ronnie Clark stood on the porch and watched the taillights of Milton Stubbs’ Plymouth grow smaller as he headed toward the road. The sound of his tires crunching the gravel grew faint, and Ronnie sighed. In a few minutes, he would be on 66 and headed for home. She felt terribly wicked about what she’d done with him, and it made her smile absurdly. It was all like a bad joke—the traveling salesman, the farmer’s daughter, one lonely night. Her mother would die if she ever found out.
At the same time, it was all a bit hazy. She couldn’t quite remember how Milton had ended up here. She had a dreamy memory of him coming up to the porch, and something about them needing gas for his car, but mostly she thought about him on top of her, the two of them sweaty and a bit desperate.
She also had a strange sense about needing to call the sheriff. Her father’s truck was missing. It had something to do with the sirens she’d heard out her bedroom window while she’d been up there with Milton. Unable to explain how she was so certain of it, she knew that George Parker’s service station had burned down. And his nephew, Mike, had died in the fire.
To the east, dawn was lightening the sky, and the thought of Mike Parker having died in the night brought tears to Ronnie’s eyes. She had known him since they were kids, but he had not been someone she’d ever given much thought to.
And now he was gone. She wiped at her eyes and turned back into the house. Mike Parker had been such a nice boy, she realized.
She wished she had had the chance to get to know him better.
*****
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Every now and then, even the undead need a little legal help.
Unfinished Business
An Ace Stubble Novella
Available for Free for a Limited Time
It’s an open and shut case for Ace Stubble. At least that’s what he thinks when he agrees to help an irritable ghost evict her ancestors from the family home. Unfortunately for Ace, everyone in the Dearborn house—the living and the dead—has a secret or two, and it’s not long before he’s caught in a web of deceit he may not be able to get himself out of.
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Other Books By Richard Levesque
Strictly Analog
“…fast-paced futuristic thriller…”–Publishers Weekly*
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What’s a private detective to do in a future where nothing is private any more?
For Ted Lomax, the answer is to find clients who need their info kept off the grid, and that’s what Ted has done for years, skirting the high tech that runs the new California and living on the fringes of society. But when his daughter is accused of murdering her boyfriend–an agent in the Secret Police–Ted has to dig himself out of the hole he’s been in for years in order to save her.
Before long, he’s pulled into a shadow world of underground hackers, high-end programmers, and renegade gear-heads, all of whom seem to have a stake in California’s future. The further he digs into the case, the clearer it becomes that it’s about more than one dead agent. Solving it might save his daughter. And it might get him killed. And it just might open the door to secrets that reach back to the attack that almost killed him eighteen years before. At any rate, Ted Lomax will never be the same.
*This review was of the manuscript version submitted to Amazon’s Breakout Novel Awards competition in 2012.
********
Take Back Tomorrow
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Eddie Royce is an up-and-coming science fiction writer with a terrible secret: he cheats.
He knew he'd get caught, of course. Eventually. But not like this. When disaster finally strikes, it strikes big, and Eddie is confronted by the worst person imaginable: his idol, the SF master, Chester Blackwood.
To Eddie's great surprise, however, Blackwood has secrets of his own, and instead of outing him, the master story-teller quickly embroils Eddie in a real-life mystery of time travel, beautiful women, and Hollywood gangsters. But then Blackwood disappears, so if Eddie wants to keep both the fame and the girl, he's going to have to do the one thing he's never been able to get right before: plot his way out of a crisis.
And the stakes if he fails? The very future of science fiction itself.
********
The Girl at the End of the World
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Her fight begins the day the world ends.
Scarlett Fisher is an average California teenager. She likes hanging out with her friends and talking on the phone. She does all right at school, and she's made the best of her parents' divorce. But in one way, she's special: on her fifteenth birthday, a fast-moving plague wipes out everyone she's ever known, yet somehow it passes her by.
Her family dead, alone in a corpse-strewn metropolis, she has no choice but to survive. She needs food, shelter, a safe place to sleep. She discovers that an ordinary girl is capable of extraordinary things, and that she's more resilient than she imagined. Even so, she wishes
more than anything that she could just find another survivor.
Unfortunately for Scarlett, not everyone who survived the plague is looking for companionship. And she's about to find out just how difficult survival really is.
********
The Devil You Know
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1946: The war may be over, but in Hollywood all hell is breaking loose.
When Marie Doyle discovers that demons are seducing the young women of Hollywood, she doesn't know where to turn for help. But when a demon takes the soul of her best friend, Marie has no choice but to stop them herself.
Church secretary, war widow, and now demon slayer, Marie enters a world she never knew existed--a world not just of desperate ingénues and Hollywood scandals, but also one of ravenous monsters.
The devil you know may be better than the devil you don't, but for Marie Doyle the choice might not matter. With demons on the loose and no one else aware of the truth, her only option is to send them back to hell--even if it means risking her soul.
This book contains adult material.
********
Foundlings
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Derek Chandler had it all—the education, the promising future, the beautiful wife—but a tragic accident changed everything and his life now stands in ruins. Haunted by the ghosts of what might have been, Derek tries to lose himself in his new job, but what begins as a minor academic mystery soon unravels, leaving him with the burden of a second truncated life: that of long-vanished science fiction writer, Kichiro Nakamura.
Convinced that finding Kichiro is somehow the key to finding his own peace, Derek is drawn into a frantic search of modern and post-war Los Angeles as he tries to reconstruct the shattered kaleidoscope of American and Japanese cultures. And the key to everything just might be the beautiful—and very suspicious—tattoo artist, Yuki Kamikaze.
Dead Man’s Hand
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Zombies, werewolves, vampires, rival Bowie tribute bands, and conjoined twin mobsters…it’s all in a day’s work for Ace Stubble, a gritty lawyer whose clients are the undead and paranormal.
Ace should have learned a long time ago that “easy” jobs are never that easy, but how could this one go wrong? All he needs to do is find the right re-animator to put some life back into the dead man’s hand that his friend Pixel Patterson has acquired. There could be a good deal of money in it–and it doesn’t hurt that Pixel is easy on the eyes.
Unfortunately, re-animators aren’t all that cooperative in this city, and before long Ace is calling in favors that lead to other favors. When a van-load of zombies goes missing, Ace realizes there’s more to the dead man’s hand than he’d thought, and there are people far more dangerous than Pixel Patterson trying to unlock the hand’s secrets. But now it’s too late for Ace to back out of the deal, and he has to rely on more than favors if he’s going to come out of this one still in one piece.
********
Unfinished Business
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It's another open and shut case for Ace Stubble, lawyer for the undead and disembodied. At least that's what he thinks. When Cordelia Dearborn--a ghost with a shady past--hires Ace to rid her home of pesky, freeloading descendants, Ace figures he'll have no problem collecting his fee. But there's more to this case than a cranky old ghost and houseful of unwanted people.
Everyone in the Dearborn family--the living, the dead, and the mentally ill--has a secret or two, and Ace can't avoid getting caught up in all of them. It doesn't help that Cordelia's beautiful granddaughter seems willing to do anything to keep from being evicted. It's all such a mess that no one--neither the living nor the dead--seems aware that there's bigger trouble brewing in the house. Ace Stubble has faced danger before, but is he ready for what's living in the basement of the Dearborn estate?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Levesque was born in Canada and grew up in Southern California. By day, he teaches composition and literature—including Science Fiction—at Fullerton College, and by night he works on his novels and short stories. He joined the ranks of independent novelists in 2012 with the release of Take Back Tomorrow and followed that with Strictly Analog and the first Ace Stubble novella, Dead Man's Hand. In 2013, he published a second Ace Stubble novella, Unfinished Business and a Post-Apocalytpic YA novel, The Girl at the End of the World. His most recent works are The Devil You Know, a paranormal mystery set in the 1940s, and Foundlings, a blend of historical novel and contemporary literary mystery. When not writing or grading papers, he spends time with his wife and daughter, works on his collection of old pulp magazines, and tries to be better than a mediocre guitar player.
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