The Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Series Boxset
Page 1
Troy Bodean Box Set
Adventures 1-3
David Berens
Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller
Box Set 1-3
A Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller
All Rights Reserved © 2017 by David F. Berens
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
Finegan Press 2017
Printed in The United States of America
Contact the Author at:
www.DavidFBerens.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Foreword
Rogue Wave
Part I
1. Non-Discretionary Spending
2. Troy’s Crick
3. Spotted Dick
4. Another Hat Trick
5. Hairre Today, Gone Tomorrow
6. Guts for Garters
7. Geaux Tigers!
8. Georgiana On My Mind
9. Ev’rybody Jus’ Be Cool
10. #Hottie #Headboat #Ouch
11. Balancing Act
12. I’m Gon’ Flick ‘Em Off
13. Venus Fly Trap
14. Hard Drive
15. Zig Zag
16. Buckets Of Spew
17. The Hat
Part II
18. Hard Labor
19. Hospitable Hospital
20. PINs And Needles
21. Deal or No Deal?
22. A Böhring Family Vacation
23. Bad Timing
24. Where The Hell Is Troy?
25. Follow The Money
26. Don’t Eat No Yellow Snow
27. Can You Hear Me Now?
28. Sayonara, Jackass
Part III
29. Shocking Troy
30. Sharpie Scribbled Initials
31. A Really Böhring House
32. Welcome To The Brady Bunch
33. Behind The Balls
34. Break A Leg
35. Trade Route
36. Kid Napping
37. I’m Your Ice Cream Man
38. I’ll Take It
39. Sweet Sorrow
40. Check It Out Now
41. Ocean Blue
Afterword
Deep Wave
Prologue
Part I
1. The Ride
2. Treasure Daydreams
3. Señora De La Muerta
4. Sloppy Joe’s
5. Lucky Cat
6. Irish Kevin’s
7. Object Fear
8. Wyatt 1
9. Report
10. We Need A Better Boat
11. Sunset Pier
12. Black Depth
13. Fanning Detritus
14. Stingray
15. Location, Location, Location
16. A Living Thing
17. A Man About A Crane
18. X Marks The Spot
19. Buried Deep
20. Cut The Rope
Part II
21. Rough Riders
22. Ahab’s Cellphone
23. Cover That Up
24. A Blaze Of Glory
25. This Too Shall Pass
26. Can You Hear Me Now?
27. Shot Through The Heart
28. Dreams Of You
29. Nice Nap
30. Needles And Pins
31. Troika Huge
32. An Odd Bowl
33. Don’t Lose Your Head
34. Ocean Blue
Part III
35. Between The Bars
36. Droning On And On
37. You’re Going The Wrong Way
38. Overheard
39. Santa Maria
40. Smoke Signals
41. Motion Sickness
42. History
43. Flaring Up
44. Light My Fire
Epilogue
Blood Wave
I. Light The Way
Prologue
1. Life’s A Beach
2. Ain’t Missin’ You
3. Canal Point
4. Coronas With Orange
5. Rally Rally Rally
6. Daddy Dearest
7. Follow Me
8. No Turning Back
9. Gram Dolls
10. Hedge Holes
II. What’s That Smell?
11. Blackmail For You, Sir
12. Tied Up At The Moment
13. Scratch My Back
14. Whadda Ya Know, Joe?
15. Turnabout
16. Do You Hear What I Hear?
17. Good Old Boys
18. Dead Zone
19. Walk In My Shoes
III. The Miracle
20. Mama, I’m Coming Home
21. An Incident
22. If The Shoe Fits…
23. A Mission From God
24. Sister Save Me
25. Union Of The Snake
26. The Beginning Of The End
27. Broken Promises
28. This Girl Is On Fire
29. Back In The Saddle
30. Redeemed
31. Throw Down
32. A New Hope
Epilogue
Also by David Berens
Foreword
Troy Bodean came into my life in the summer of 2012. My family and I always stay on Pawleys Island at a beach house for a week around July 4th. A tropical storm (Debby to be exact) raged through and threatened to ruin our vacation.
Luckily, we are not a group to sit around and be bored by a little rain. We sat at a giant table playing board games and cards and watching the next door neighbor fishing on the creekside dock. Enter Troy Bodean…or at least a man that we “imagined” was Troy.
We spent our afternoons watching this guy, who thankfully, wore a distinctive straw cowboy hat, and making up a backstory for him. Our version of his life became wackier and zanier as we built it and we had more than one laugh as we brought Troy to life.
In the end, I began to add a plot and extra characters and the result is what I began to call Rogue Wave - A Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller #1. He was wildly successful and people I didn’t know personally began to read the book and ask when the second book was coming out.
Um…I hadn’t really planned on a second book, but the public demanded. So, I grabbed another old plot I had collecting virtual dust in my laptop and Deep Wave - A Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller #2 came to life.
By now, Troy was becoming a very real character to me. I was happy to continue with a new mess for my plucky hero to get tangled up in. For Blood Wave - A Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller #3 - I started with a blank page. It was the toughest one I’ve written to date and has a lot of different plots and characters that I really like. I may revisit some of those people one day in stories of their own.
Anyway, enough blathering on about Troy. I hope you enjoy reading his stories. And as long as you do, I will continue to throw the poor guy into situations that only he could get out of…
If you enjoy my work, please be sure to drop by my website at www.DavidFBerens.com and there you’ll find everything I’ve written. You can also join my READER GROUP to be kept up-to-date with all the happenings around my writing.
Thank you Kind Reader,
Rogue Wave
A Troy Bodean A
dventure #1
Part I
Hat Check
“Put one person’s hat on another person’s head.”
-Chinese Proverb
1
Non-Discretionary Spending
Rick Hairre had not known before today that the barrel of a gun tasted like pennies. Or maybe the taste was the coppery tang of his own blood pooling in the crevices of his ever-swelling mouth. He also had not known the butt of a gun felt so heavy and cold when used as a hammer on one’s head. He guessed he would probably lose most of the teeth he’d spent so much money on veneering prior to the last election cycle, and wondered if he’d ever get a chance to see his dentist again… an odd longing… to see the dentist.
As the current Vice-Chairman of the 2012 Murrell’s Inlet’s Board of Directors, he counted his acquisition of funding in excess of seven million dollars for the Tourism Conservation & Wetland Education Project as his crowning achievement. It was a private deal, with several under-the-table understandings. All parties to the deal would remain anonymous, and a small fee of a half million dollars would be deposited directly into another account of his choosing for managing the deal with… discretion.
But beyond his selfish interests, the money would provide the local community with informational pamphlets, catchy bumper stickers, kids coloring books, and rental home refrigerator magnets discussing and educating tourists about the delicate ecosystem at work in his precious inlet home.
Counting the zeroes on the check helped him stomach the fact the money had come from the nearby Consolidated Paper Mill. Naturally, the check had come with an understanding—Rick would bury any mention of the pollution the independent environmental scientists had discovered traveling downstream from the mill.
The mill’s owner had channeled the money through a governmental sounding company and encouraged Rick to say he’d procured a federal grant for the work. With this cover story, he’d soon be rising above Vice-Chairman.
As the blood trickled from his nose, he vaguely wondered if the two hooded men interrogating him suspected that a completely untraceable cashier’s check with a seven and six zeroes was tucked away in his Outback Tea Stained straw cowboy hat. Another thought occurred to him through his throbbing haze of pain; what if these two men had been sent by the mill owner to collect the check and get rid of any evidence of the deal—namely Rick. But that didn’t make any sense. The deal had just been made, and everyone was happy to go along with the stipulations of said deal.
Okay, happy was a stretch. But when Rick had chosen the life of a politician, he’d been too green to know the lower tier guys in local governments made little if any in the way of salaries. Some were even volunteer posts. Most were only in it for the power. He smiled wanly at that last thought… what power did the Vice-Chairman of the 2012 Murrell’s Inlet’s Board of Directors actually have? Not much.
But his acquisition of these funds—however ill gotten—would’ve gone a long way to further his ambitions. And he’d long since given up being selfish in that regard. He was in it for his daughter. He thanked God he’d had the foresight to wire his half a million straight into her account. He smiled at the thought of her the next time she checked her balance, yet he ached at the likelihood he wouldn’t be around to explain the huge addition of funds to her.
The Outback Tea Stained straw cowboy hat he wore had been a gift from her long ago. She’d only been six or seven at the time, and thought the hat was just perfect for her dad. And though it was somewhat out of character for a short, pudgy bald man to wear such a thing, he wore it proudly. As he struggled to maintain consciousness, he couldn’t remember why he’d folded the check and slipped it into the band of his hat behind the colorful peacock feather perched there, but there it remained.
Rick retraced his steps back to the meeting at the mill and sorted through what he could remember of the conversation, but nothing struck him as sinister. He’d walked out after shaking hands with the mill’s owner, and there had been smiles all around. His last text to his daughter (a newly acquired skill for him) had said he’d be stopping by for dinner. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what had prompted his sudden kidnapping outside Lee’s Inlet Kitchen and was even more unsure why they had smashed the butt of what appeared to be an AK-47 against his face and sending his beloved hat skidding across the floor. He would’ve handed over the check had they just asked! He’d tried to tell them that, but his efforts to speak were hampered by his crushed jaw.
His dinner—Lee’s homemade clam chowder—exploded violently from his stomach with the pain from the first wicked blow to his skull, and he was still retching as they hovered around him whispering to each other.
“Where is it, mate?” one of the hooded men growled in a strange accent—maybe Australian, or South African?
Rick opened his mouth to answer, but all that came out was more of his favorite from the appetizer menu at Lee’s.
Apparently that was an unacceptable answer, as the man’s fist slammed into the top of Rick’s head, dislodging his expensive European hairpiece. Guaranteed to stay on in a hurricane, my ass, he thought as the toupee flopped to the ground.
His baldpate glistened brightly as warm blood began flowing down into his eyes. His thoughts began to jumble wildly through his life and he saw himself in his high school senior pictures with already thinning hair. After a few unsuccessful attempts at a comb-over, he just clipped it closer and closer to his head. By the summer of his senior year, he was a nineteen-year-old bald guy. It’d been bad enough that he was born with a build like that of Danny DeVito and not as good-looking as most of the guys he’d played with on the football team, but his last name was Hairre. Hairre, for God’s sake. With a name like that, and a chance to re-invent himself upon starting college, he’d sought out remedies to his ever-expanding baldness. Since the summer between high school and his freshman year at Clemson University, he’d been a closet member of the Hairre Club for Men.
Before the chocolate-brown head of hair—woven strand-by-strand—had become part of him, his high-school classmates often asked if he’d shaved it because of sickness or cancer treatments; sometimes he said yes. Years later, Susan, his wife of fourteen anniversaries, had succumbed to the pancreatic version of his lie. When he visited her in the hospital, he would remove his hairpiece and be bald with her as she suffered. He wondered if his current hair-jarring episode was karma circling back around for another go at him.
As the images faded from his mind, he wasn’t sure if he was losing consciousness, the blood was clouding his eyes, or his thick-rimmed glasses had finally shattered away, but his vision began to swim and fade. His head lolled down to touch his chest and he thought with sadness that he would never get the blossoming red stains out of his seersucker sport coat. God, he loved that jacket… just like Matlock.
As if on cue, thug number one ripped the front of the jacket open and shoved his hands down into the inside pockets.
“No,” Rick moaned, but no one was paying him any attention—just like no one paid attention to him at the city council board meetings. But all that would change when he delivered the seven million dollar check.
His view of the world was dimming rapidly when the man tore into his pants pockets, scattering the assorted contents on the concrete floor of… wherever they had taken him. A crumpled toddler photo of his now grown stepdaughter slipped out of the hooded man’s grasp and hit the floor. A spatter of blood from Rick’s forehead dripped down onto the picture. Everything was in slow motion now. He knew his end was near.
He wanted to cry out, take my wallet, take my ‘56 Dodge Royal convertible… take anything you want… take the check, for God’s sake, just let me live to tell my sweet girl I still love her! But his wrecked jaw could only mumble and spew blood.