by Tom Swyers
David had to say something to Ben. He’d left him hanging long enough. “I believe you, Ben,” David said softly. Whatever Ben had done to his father, David knew that Harold would never want charges pressed against his son. The killdeer posters on Mark’s bedroom walls drove that point home. Harold was willing to sacrifice his life for Ben and Mark.
“I’m so glad you believe me, David. I haven’t been able to talk about that night with anyone—not even my therapist.”
“We’ll get through this, Ben. Don’t you worry.”
Mark finally pulled the refrigerator from the wall and fixed the plug. He came back into the living room to join the conversation. After a few minutes more, David said goodbye to them both.
David could hear “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” playing on the radio through their single-pane windows as he walked to his Mustang parked out in front of the apartment. On the drive home, David thought about Ben. What he knew for sure was that his client did commit a crime the night Harold was killed. Ben had admitted to jumping Harold and pushing Harold’s head into the ground. That was good enough for a battery charge right there. On top of that, Ben might have at least contributed to Harold’s death by striking the first blow to his head. Beyond that, David didn’t know what happened.
After David pulled into his driveway, he released the steering wheel and turned the engine off. Harold’s hands were no longer on the wheel—he wasn’t driving David’s life anymore. The anger David had felt toward Harold evaporated as David sat in the car. David couldn’t be mad at a man who had been trying to protect his family. He’d done the same throughout his ordeal. David understood the secrets now and believed he had the answers.
Through the windowpanes of his home’s side door, David could see Annie and Christy sitting around the dining-room table. He knew they were making homemade gingerbread cookies just like they did every Christmas Eve.
When David opened his Mustang’s squeaky door, he didn’t want to think about how Ben and Mark might have attacked Harold. That idea was making him sick. So when he shut the car door, he decided to forget what Ben had told him about the night Harold was killed. He’d file that thought in a compartment in his brain and lose the key. He’d let Yasin and Kincaid take the rap for Harold’s death and for anything else that had happened. They could carry the full burden of all the atrocities of that night. They had but one life to lose to the lethal-injection needle, and conviction on the terrorism charges alone would put them out of their misery.
You can’t kill a man more than once.
As he walked to the side door, the snow under David’s feet crunched and then popped with every step. A gust of frigid air blew through him. He knew that the law would never be satisfied with his approach. The law, in his mind, could be an insatiable beast—a predator—when set into motion. It demanded that every charge be aired in some manner. It could suck you up and spit you out in a heartbeat. His arrest and stay in jail only served to reinforce his belief.
But David wasn’t going to let that happen to Ben and Mark Prior. They were just beginning to get their lives back on track. They had suffered enough, and they’d probably suffer even more if they learned that Harold was both a father and grandfather to them.
All the charges related to that night wouldn’t be aired and resolved by the legal system—not if David could help it. He would not allow anyone to unleash the law on Ben and Mark. If necessary, he would deceive the law to protect them.
That’s what Harold would have wanted.
When David opened the side door to the dining room, his mind was made up. There was no need for David to go to his office to dust off his legal-ethics handbook. What it said didn’t matter. With their clothes spattered with flour, Annie’s and Christy’s smiling faces said it all.
That evening, the law would get a cold shoulder from an old friend. David wouldn’t let it destroy his family or Ben’s, either. He would protect the nest on Christmas Eve and beyond. Family before law. So long as justice was served, the law could freeze to death outside for all David cared.
“Hello,” David said, stepping inside. “It’s good to see you guys.”
“Hey, Dad. Look, we made cookies for Santa,” Christy said, meaning they were off-limits to David. “Maybe he’ll leave you one tomorrow morning if you’re good.”
David smiled. “Santa and I are on good terms.”
“If you’re hungry, David, you can have this broken angel cookie,” Annie said, giggling.
“I’d like that,” David said before turning around to shut the door. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his key ring as one of the cats brushed up against his leg. David saw Harold’s shiny gold key hanging next to his house key. His face lit up.
I guess there’s a little killdeer in all of us.
David’s smile broadened as he locked the side door behind him. They say when one door closes another door opens, but nothing could have prepared David for who would appear at his front door when he opened it that coming spring. It would be the shock of his life.
THE END
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Who appears at David Thompson’s front door in the spring?
Read all about it by clicking the link at the end of this section. You will simply not believe the story behind the next book in the Lawyer David Thompson Series. Join my Readers Group at the same link too. Click to learn more: Join Readers Group.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Cher, my wife, and Randy, my son, for their support and encouragement in making The Killdeer Connection come to life. They proofed the first draft, gave me their honest feedback, and sent me back to my office with some solid ideas on how to improve the story. My mom and dad chipped in, too, and my entire family supported my effort in their own way.
Without Christine Perham, my editor, this novel simply wouldn’t be at its very best. Her rewrite suggestions were invaluable. She helped to add depth and detail to the story. I am very lucky to have her at my side.
I also had valuable editorial input from Paul at Amazon and from Valerie at Kirkus.
I would also like to thank Justin Mikulka and Ron Schalow for providing their expertise on oil trains and fracking. While The Killdeer Connection was written to entertain, it was also written to raise awareness of the real, pressing issues relating to both oil trains and fracking.
A writer without readers is nothing, and so I’d also like to extend my appreciation to my team of early (beta) readers. They provided valuable feedback to the final manuscript and helped to get it ready for publication.
A writer needs marketing help too. Thank you, Jeff Rauch, for your support!
A writer sometimes needs other support as well. I’d like to thank Teneka Frost for selecting me to serve as an administrative law judge for the New York Department of State at the time I was writing this book.
Finally, a writer needs some hometown backing. A special thanks to my hometown of Niskayuna, New York, and to Joe Landry, town supervisor.
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The Killdeer Connection, a legal thriller, is the first book in the Lawyer David Thompson Series and was selected as a winner in Amazon’s international Kindle Scout competition in 2017.
Saving Babe Ruth is the prequel to this series and the 2015 recipient of two Benjamin Franklin Book Awards for “Best First Book, Fiction” (first place) and “Best Popular Fiction” (second place).
Here’s what Saving Babe Ruth is all about:
; Why go down swinging when you can go out shooting . . .
Survival is the name of the game when two obsessed men teeter on the cusp of madness in a war over a kids’ baseball field in this thriller based on a true story.
Travel baseball promoter Rob Barkus has a full bench. He’s backed by a corrupt board of directors, a sports-fixated high school administration, and a mob of crazy travel baseball parents. He’ll stop at nothing to kill the town’s sandlot baseball league so that his elite travel teams can take over its beautiful Babe Ruth baseball field.
The only obstacle between Barkus and his field of dreams is David Thompson, a Civil War buff and burned-out lawyer. When Thompson steps up to save the crumbling league for his son and the rest of the sandlot players in town, Barkus unleashes a cunning and ruthless attack against David, his family, and his teenaged league of misfit players.
Thompson is outnumbered and surrounded. He’s like a man who walked into quicksand. The harder he struggles to save the league, the deeper he sinks. On top of it all, Thompson is stuck in a family Catch-22. If he surrenders, he might lose his son's love along with his own self-respect, not to mention losing the game of summer for the sandlot kids in town. Yet if he doesn't back down, it threatens his marriage and deprives his son of any chance to play on the high school team.
Thompson is on an emotional roller coaster and he can't get off. He is fighting his own civil war as he struggles to make a difference in the town he cherishes without harming the family he loves.
Standing alone and pushed to his breaking point, he needs to figure out when to fold and when to fight. One thing is for sure: if he finally snaps, he won’t take any prisoners.
Captivating characters lead double lives and keep secrets in this award-winning page-turner, laced with humor, about a man who takes a stand and risks it all to make a difference in a world gone mad.
New York Times bestselling author Margot Livesey says Swyers "has created a man for all seasons" in David Thompson and calls Saving Babe Ruth "an absorbing and compulsively readable novel."
Now with a foreword written by Babe Ruth’s grandson, Tom Stevens.
Grab a copy of Saving Babe Ruth on Amazon: Go to Amazon’s Saving Babe Ruth Page
Enjoy the first chapter of Saving Babe Ruth below.
SAVING BABE RUTH
CHAPTER 1
David’s Hill
ARMED WITH AN 1859 Sharps carbine, David Thompson gazed beyond the baseball field, across the asphalt and slate-shingled suburban homes of Indigo Valley, wondering how these twenty-one thousand residents would feel if they knew that baseball was dying. It was April 18, 2009, opening day, and as the town league’s Babe Ruth commissioner, David had been preparing for this date since the end of last summer. It was, for him, a time of rebirth, the beginning of baseball season, and the end of the other season called winter.
But baseball wasn’t the only reason David celebrated spring’s arrival. The winter of 2008 had devastated his elder-law practice because most of his clients had died. Two had stroked out, another had checked out with a massive heart attack, and yet another had been laid out in a crosswalk by a teen intent on making it to Starbucks before closing time. When David had closed up his last estate before opening day, he’d half-jokingly told Annie, his wife, about his decision to pursue a new career in positive law, a specialization that he’d created through declaration. His first case would be to save the town’s Babe Ruth baseball program for the benefit of their eighth-grade son and only child, Christy.
That morning, David was on the lookout for the man who had briefly visited the field for the past four days. He was determined to discover his identity. David’s silvery-brown hair waved in every direction. He stroked the grizzle on his chin, wondering if he might be acting a little crazy. He felt certain Annie would think he had lost it if she knew he was at the kids’ baseball field armed with a gun.
David loved his gun. The reproduction Sharps carbines turned him off; they were historically inaccurate. So David had bought an authentic one. His had been used by a Union cavalryman in defense of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, the first day of battle. The carbine’s owner had recorded the serial number in his diary, and David had cross-referenced his name against the war-casualty records.
David’s infatuation with the Civil War had been sealed when he’d purchased the Sharps some twenty years earlier for his thirtieth birthday. He had been thrilled to find out that General John Buford had commanded the original owner of the gun. David already knew that his great-great-grandfather, Joseph Thompson, had fought on the Union side with the Fifth Pennsylvania Reserves at Gettysburg before being captured in a later campaign and shipped to Andersonville prison. Joseph Thompson had started a family after he’d been released at the war’s end. David knew full well that if Joseph had not survived the war, he himself wouldn’t be here today.
In studying the movements of Joseph Thompson’s unit at Gettysburg, David had become an expert on the battle and admired Buford for his choice of ground. On the first day of the battle, Buford had ordered his men to dismount their horses and offer resistance on the outskirts of town. This decision delayed the Confederate advance and allowed the Union reinforcements to take up a superior defensive position on the high ground of Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge. It was “good ground,” as they say in military circles, and if Buford had not developed a strategy to defend it, there might not have been a Union victory at Gettysburg.
David checked his wristwatch. It was 6:10 a.m. For the past week, David hadn’t been able to sleep past 4:30 a.m. He’d roll out of bed to work the field for an hour and then climb the hill to stew about the season ahead. But since he’d first spotted the man coming to the field each morning at the same time, he had retreated to the hill earlier.
David had left his Bardou & Son Civil War–era field glasses at home this time, as they had not given him a clear view of the man’s face. He’d opted instead to bring his modern-day binoculars. With his back to the ball field, he peered straight down into the Mohawk River, more than one hundred feet below, and then across the treetops of Saratoga County on the opposite bank. He imagined this hill might be the highest point in the town of Indigo Valley. David appreciated the protection from the rear that both the high ground and the river afforded. Gazing farther north, he hoped to catch a glimpse of one of the church spires reflecting the early morning sunlight in Ballston Spa, the birthplace of General Abner Doubleday, the mythical inventor of baseball.
David’s thoughts had turned to Doubleday not because of baseball but because of his role at Gettysburg. On the first day of battle, General Buford’s morning success in delaying the Confederate advance had been bolstered by infantry reinforcements under the command of General John Reynolds, whose death on the battlefield had enabled General Doubleday to assume command. Doubleday’s efforts had solidified the Union’s position on Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge. David imagined that while Doubleday probably didn’t invent baseball, he sure knew how to defend it.
David considered this hill his “high ground” and found it superior to Cemetery Hill. Although Cemetery Hill was twice as high, its slope was much more gradual. David’s hill shot up fifty feet above the ball field and achieved its stature within one hundred feet of its base. It also boasted a six-foot-high chain-link fence around the outfield that would mark a kill zone for any enemy assault.
Even so, David’s satisfaction with his hill’s defensive superiority over Cemetery Hill came up short. Cemetery Hill was a natural hill made up of underlying igneous rock. David’s hill was anything but natural. The more recent generation of townspeople referred to the hill as an Indian burial mound for the indigenous Mohawk Indian tribe. Maybe that explanation would take root in history over the coming centuries. But David, a longtime resident, knew that the hill had been shaped and molded from the former town dump that had been buried, capped, and closed years earlier. Had it not been for the dumping of years’ worth of refuse on the site, there would be no steepness to the
hill; in fact, there would be no hill at all. David tried to convince himself that he was perched atop the town’s history, an archeological site for future generations to explore. But as the hill’s foul stench lingered in the air, the archaeological site once again became a landfill, a dump, an undeniable pile of crap.
David could not locate the Ballston Spa spires. His failure to locate Doubleday’s birthplace reminded him that there were no reinforcements coming to his aid that day or that baseball season. He stood alone with ten live rounds of .52 caliber ammunition stored in his authentic black-leather Union cartridge box, which hung from his black-leather belt.
He picked up his son’s new Derek Jeter Rawlings baseball glove and slipped it on his left hand while he began working the pocket with the fist of his right, pounding it like he was in the ready-set position during a game. Christy had always been a passionate but average player, but now, at age thirteen, puberty had bolstered his strength and speed. David was optimistic about Christy’s upcoming season and was breaking the glove in for him.
David’s watch read 6:20 a.m. It was about time for the man to arrive. David trampled on the grass so it did not impede his vision of the field, then slid his athletic frame face-first into position on the ground. He felt safe hidden in the high grass. David laid the glove down on his left and the carbine on his right. A shiver ran up his spine as the heat generated from the decomposing dump gently warmed his body. Through his binoculars, he scanned the parking-lot entrance for the red SUV.
Seeing no vehicles, he took in the baseball field. The dormant grass had turned to hunter green. No weeds. Not even clover. Freshly cut with a crisscross pattern, the outfield sported a morning layer of dew. The chalk baselines were perfectly straight and solid, like white icing on gingerbread. The tines of the grooming tractor had brushed the dirt of the infield in perfect, uniform strokes. The bases and pitcher’s rubber and home plate had been freshly spray-painted white to match the brilliant chalk lines. There were no footprints to be found anywhere, not even within the batting boxes where David had hand raked. It was true artwork on a canvas of dirt and grass, and the field’s beauty would have caused even the most diehard baseball fan, player, or coach to stop and wonder, at least for a brief moment, if that field looked too good to play on.