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Description of Black Beast: A Clan of MacAulay Novel (Volume One):
“Black Beast” is the first in a series of “Clan of MacAulay” novels. Decorated Denver Detective Bobby Macaulay has faced down a truckload of tragedy over recent years. The death of his partner; the loss of his own leg in the line of duty; the companionship of his beloved wife to cancer; his faith in God to his inner demons.
After the man who ruined his leg and killed his first partner is executed, Macaulay becomes the lead detective investigating the Sloan’s Lake murders. The method of killing in this double-homicide is so heinous it leads Macaulay and his partner down an ever-darkening path–one that must be traversed if they are to discover the evil forces behind the slaughter.
Just when Bobby Macaulay is questioning the very career that has been his salvation, he will discover a heroic history buried within his own family roots: The Clan MacAulay–a deep family lineage of protectors at the very core of a millenniums-long war against unimaginable evil.
Accolade:
“Black Beast is the first in the series of A Clan of MacAulay novels, and establishes Guthrie as a bonafide talent. Black Beast centers around the haunted life of Detective Bobby MacAulay as he discovers secrets from his family tree just as all ‘hell’ starts to break loose. Bobby is likeable, vulnerable and just tough enough to be very real. The best super sleuths among you will not be able to predict what will happen next in this story, and you won’t want to stop reading. Black Beast is fast-paced, interesting, unique and a wild ride.” Beth E. Harris, author of “Vision”.
Reviews:
Black Beast: A Clan of MacAulay Novel (Volume One) currently has a customer review rating of 5 stars with 37 reviews! Read the reviews here.
An excerpt from Black Beast: A Clan of MacAulay Novel (Volume One):
Life for a death row inmate at the CSP consisted of twenty-three hours in an isolated cell, one hour per day for shower and exercise. All meals, visitors, and bathroom functions happened during the twenty-three hours cellbound. No exceptions other than the infirmary or the morgue.
The CSP had a special segregation unit called the Execution Suite. During warrant week, a seven-day period established by the governor, the condemned prisoner was moved to the Execution Suite to await delivery of sentence by lethal injection.
Eb Durning was scheduled to ride the river at twenty-one hundred hours.
9PM.
We entered the interior of Hotel California—so called by the hacks and cons—through a large, double-shielded door with another gated checkpoint. I was asked to sign a second register and also to read a short list of dos and don’ts.
“You’re the guy,” the officer at the station desk said.
“I’m the guy,” I said. “Detective Macaulay.”
“He got your partner, too?”
I pushed the paperwork back across a pine-top desk scarred with cigarette burns. “It was a long time ago.”
“Time for the fiddler to get his. Maintain the yellow line,” he replied, the eyes falling involuntarily to where my jean fit too loose on the prosthetic.
Like skin over meatless bone.
There was a solid, faded yellow stripe that ran down the corridor, five feet from the three holding cells. The guard buzzed me in.
Ebony Durning was in the first cell, closest to the guard station. He did not get up as I stopped in front of his door but finished drawing on a small roach, extinguishing it by licking the tips of his fore and middle finger and pinching the small coal. There was an audible hiss and the aroma of bad weed: pungent, like something already dead.
“The bulls are lenient here at Hotel California on D-day,” was the first thing he said to me.
“I’m glad,” I replied.
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leeeeve,” he crooned.
“I know the song. Do we have business, Eb?”
“They’re gonna do me this time, Detective. No more appeals. The Governor ain’t too friendly to cop killers. Eleven hours and change. Ain’t much of a future.”
“More than my partner got.”
“Officer Wells, it was. And the old lady at the store,” Durning said. “I sent letters.”
He was still supine on the narrow, wall-mounted cot.
“Fuck you, Eb. You don’t get to tell me the names.”
He swung his long legs to the floor and stood. He was a full six five, all bones and loose flesh. Ganglier than I remembered. Durning’s mother was white and his father black—Eb’s skin was the color of sun-bleached cardboard.
“Bobby Mac. Basketball legend.”
He threaded his spidery arms through the rungs and leaned on the crossbar, his veins bulging beneath an aqua jailhouse tattoo that was too faded to make out.
He looked awful: afro reduced to patches and tufts, like a lawn with fungal rot. His complexion was dull and fishy.
“What is this about, Eb? I came early because of Lucinda. She said this was important.”
“They’re gonna pump my veins full of potassium chloride. Last cocktail I’ll ever have, Mac, stop my heart dead. Is that important enough?”
“You’ve earned your station, Eb, and then some. A little late for redemption, don’t you think?”
“I don’t believe in that shit.”
“Good. You have a nice trip. I won’t be losing any sleep over it.”
He was hollow-eyed, as if he had already checked out with the bellhop. His were the marble eyes of the shark: lifeless.
“Do you remember the nineteen-eighty-five State Championship, Mac?”
“Ancient history,” I said.
Durning played forward for Mullen and I played for Cherry Creek. The game exhausted three overtimes before Durning hit a running jumper with time expiring to end our run of three consecutive championships.
He bottomed out three years later when a hooker overdosed in his small apartment on Colfax and he tossed her in a dumpster at King Soopers with a case full of needles with his prints all over them.
Since doing the unlawful death time he hit a couple foul balls—county lockup stuff, mostly. Then he poked one out of the park by participating in the murder of my partner Danny Wells and an old woman—the oriental shopkeeper who ran a local market on Broadway.
Durning got into his getaway car in the parking lot, bouncing off the other vehicles like a pinball, and crashed into my patrol car, pinning me and turning my left leg to ground round.
“We were so fucking happening in eighty-five, Mac. Like shit just turning to gold.”
And for a moment I saw it: the perfection of adolescence—when the slate is clean and everything is possible; when all that mattered were how many points per game and who was getting laid.
His flat eyes flickered with the memories of a better time—a distant, furtive glow at the center of his being. It was as if he were back there: the squeaking of gum rubber on hardwood, the roar of the crowd, the perfect backspin of the ball as it arced through space, the crisp snap of the net.
It was a magical time. But it was over.
“You brought the world crashing down, Eb. No one else.”
“True enough,” he allowed. “But I never meant for it to get as fucked up as it did. You gotta know that, Mac.”
“Is this an apology for getting my partner killed and sacrificing my leg, Eb? Because if it is I think you need to spend a little more time in front of a mirror.”
“You know I never wanted it to go down like that, man. C’mon, Mac, we played ball together. It’s your leg.”
“I know damn well whose leg it is, Eb. And what about my partner? What about Danny? He had a wife and kid.”
“Well, I guess I ain’t too proud about any of it.”
“Damn. A dozen years to reach such profundity. You gotta love the system.”
“Listen, this just ain’t comin’ out right. I-I wanted to tell you if I could somehow give you your leg back, I would. This ain’t redemption because I don’t believe in that shit, Mac.
“I wake up nights and see that leg, all ruined and shit. It will be the last thing I see. I have no doubt.”
He seemed to mean it, and I had relinquished my clutch on pity years earlier, but now, standing in front of Durning, the horror show came rolling back in. All I could think was how much I wanted to see him suck that last breath; watch his body spasm involuntarily against the clutch of the chemical reaper.
Exit stage left, the curtain falls.
“Tell it to the spiritual advisor, Eb. I don’t have any more room.”
“I’m sorry,” Durning said.
“Not a chance, man. No vacancy.”
“You want to know the funny thing, Mac?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
“I play it over and over, and I don’t want it to happen, but I know if it went down the same way, I’d probably be caught up in it just the same.
“I was crazy on the shit, man, and my perceptions was not right, but that’s how it played. It’s fucked up, man, I know that. It’s hard to live with.”
“You want to know something, Eb? If they’d let me push the plunger on the syringe I’d do it right now. No hesitation; no questions asked.
“That’s some messed up shit, too, but I’ll live with it.”
“You gonna be there for the big show?”
I ignored the question.
“Hold Lucinda’s hand. She couldn’t ask you herself.”
“You could have left that in a message with the PA,” I said.
“There’s something else,” he said, fidgeting nervously.
“I’m still here.”
“Maybe nothing, but I’ve been going over it for a long time.”
“Time’s running out, Eb.”
“Something was strange that night, the night we knocked over that store. We shoulda been in and out, but Jackson took too much time. He let the old lady see him. Said that was why we had to kill her.”
He was talking about Arliss Jackson, a homeboy Durning cruised with; the only perp I had ever killed. It was Jackson who shot my partner before I could get a draw on him. At trial, Durning claimed it was Jackson who wanted to stay and finish the old Chinese woman—allegedly because the old woman called Jackson “hei gui”, meaning “black ghost”—on the streets.
Chinese slang for “nigger”.
“I heard this crap at trial.”
“We shoulda never been there, Mac. Shoulda been long gone. I think maybe Jackson wanted the cops to get there. I think he was counting on it.”
“You have any reasoning on this?”
“A week before, Jackson gets this visit from a guy. Big white dude. The two of them, they go off in the white guy’s car. I asked around when Arliss wouldn’t come clean, started acting all strange and shit. Somebody recognized the description. Guy’s a big dumb muscle-thug they call Brain. Works for Calypso.”
Calypso was a major pot smuggler from Ocho Rios, Jamaica, who ran much of the dope business in the city. Vice and the DEA had a major hard-on
for Calypso. Jackson had been small time; a neighborhood punk who stole televisions and boosted cars during Bronco games.
An arrangement between him and the big Jamaican made no sense.
“What does this have to do with anything, Eb? Jackson is dead.”
“Arliss was a gambler. Played the ponies. Owed a lot of money. No secret about that. Word was he tried to set up a dope deal that went south. Owed some even bigger scratch to Calypso.
“Dude’s henchmen carry blowtorches, Mac, they don’t fuck around. I think Arliss was scared. Maybe he cut a deal.”
“To kill my partner,” I said.
“It don’t make sense, Mac. I can’t figure out why we were still there. What the hell does Arliss Jackson care if some old woman calls him nigger? Arliss was careful, man, he didn’t want to go back to prison. It don’t figure.”
“The idea of prison does that to some people. Makes a scumbag willing to do what he has to do. It doesn’t always make sense.”
“We shoulda been gone when you got there, Mac. He took his time with that old woman. I almost booked.”
“That would have been the best decision you ever made. You’ve earned the needle, Eb. I gotta go.”
Durning lowered his head and pressed it against the bars. “My hair’s been falling out all week. I was never even scared or nothing and it started falling out just the same.”
He rubbed his left hand along the top of his head. He looked like someone had taken the shears to him while he slept.
“Do you know about Samson, Mac?”
He was looking up, tears brimming in those lifeless eyes.
“His strength was in his hair. I wasn’t even scared, Mac, and the shit started fallin’ out anyway.”
I stared at him. I could imagine the stress he was feeling but I didn’t care. Then again, maybe all this was just Durning’s way of tuning up for the long trip.
“Do you believe in God, Mac?” he said.
The question startled me. I didn’t answer.
“Do you believe he will forgive you if you’re truly sorry?”
“I believe in God, Eb. You worry about the forgiving part.”
He turned around and shuffled back to the bed. He sat down slowly, like a decrepit old man, steadying himself with shaking arms. He was sweating and I again smelled the reality of his predicament. It permeated the cell, the hoary smell of the end.
If Hell had a distinct odor, this was it. I think Eb Durning had figured that one.
“You want to know something? That thing about having anything for your last meal is bullshit. You gotta order off a menu,” he said.
“That so?”
“I’m havin’ me a plate of meatloaf, two slices of whole wheat bread, and some ketchup packets, because when I would come home from basketball practice my moms would slice me a big piece and make a cold meatloaf sandwich.
“Things was golden then, Mac. Golden.”
“I’ll be seeing you around, Eb.”
“Don’t forget about Lucinda, okay Mac? She got no one and she trusts you.”
His words were fading, as if he was getting sleepy, but he was still sitting erect, staring blankly at the wall.
“She’s my sister and now she got no one.”
“Lucinda will be fine,” I said as I moved toward the exit.
“Vaya con Dios, Mac,” he said quietly.
“Not me, Eb. You need him more.”
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