Spent a lovely Sunday morning on a back road in Brooks, Maine (no, that’s not redundant) shooting footage with Ned Warner for the DAMAGED GOODS trailer. This required walking down a farm road toward a no-trespassing sign with a rifle, while shooting video from a stepladder. There was a house behind a hedgerow and some trees and the dogs there started barking. Then they started barking louder. Then a couple of guys came out and stared. We kept working. And then one of the dogs bounded through the brush and barked up close. He was followed by one of the men, understandably. After all, there were two strangers on the dirt road next to his house. One was carrying a gun. The one with the gun kept walking slowly back and forth. Time for the neighbors to lock and load?
Not in Waldo County, Maine. The fellow came over. He was in his late 40s, looked like he knew his outdoors business. We introduced ourselves, shook hands heartily. He asked what we were doing. I explained in a way that probably made no sense (shooting video for a book?) but he just nodded. “I thought you musta lost something, the way you were walking back and forth,” he said. You got the feeling that if we had (a knife? A compass? A handgun?) he would have joined in the search.
But there was no search. He apologized for his other dog, still barking back at the house. “She’s a hunting beagle,” he said, “and she sees somebody with a gun, she thinks it’s time to go.” He looked at my brown leather jacket (we weren’t in the woods) , and advised us to wear blaze orange, unless it was Sunday. We thanked him, complimented his choice of a homesite, atop a ridge with a westward view as far as Mount Washington. “Oh, it’s pretty,” he said, “and then the wind starts to blow.” And he called his dog and headed back through the woods to his house.
Maine. Sometimes it really is the way life should be.
In PORT CITY SHAKEDOWN, the first Brandon Blake novel, Brandon gets a full dose of bad guys. A brawl in a funeral home introduces him to Joel Fuller, a sociopathic hustler. Fuller is fresh out of jail and determined to take Brandon out—after Fuller and his sidekick Kelvin shake him down.
Rocky isn’t a tough guy. He’s a skinny little kid with crooked glasses, and he shouldn’t be homeless in Portland, Maine. When McMorrow and Roxanne pluck him from under the stomping feet of a gang of street kids, Rocky latches onto McMorrow–and drags him into a world of murder, both old and new. Why is McMorrow protecting Rocky? The cops want to know. Why is Rocky on the run? McMorrow wants to know. Why does death follow in Rocky’s wake? Jack and Roxanne need to find out before they’re added to the list. 
Facebook
Twitter
RSS