STORY MERCHANT BOOKS - FEBRUARY BEST SELLERS

Mrs. Mike by Benedict Freedman & Nancy Freedman

Write Time: Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision—and Beyond by Kenneth Atchity

The Messiah Matrix by Kenneth John Atchity A gold coin reveals the true origins of Christianity.

So Help Me God by Larry D. Thompson An abortion gone wrong pits church against state.

Writing Treatments to Sell by Chi-Li Wong & Ken Atchity

Summer's Winter by Robin Johns Grant A passionate, well-wrought mystery by a Christian novelist to watch.

Southern California Writers Association Highlights Kenneth Atchity

Southern California Writers Association

Newsletter

Volume 13, Number 3 -- March 2014

SCWA  March Newsletter Featuring KJA 

Guest Post George Fowler: Cuba Libre

James P. Farwell 

In the movies, evil bad guys are often stupid and hire stupid people to do the wrong thing. Fidel Castro shows that evil people can be very smart, and find bright people who do the right things in advancing their goals, no matter how twisted. In My Cuba Libre (Beverly Hills: Story Merchant Books, 2013), eminent maritime attorney George Fowler has written a very insightful memoire of growing up in Cuba prior to Castro's revolution, while leveling a searing indictment of Castro's rule. Fowler exposes the dark underbelly of a repressive dictatorship that persists despite media reports - he is especially critical of The New York Times - that Castro is receding into the background and turning over power to his brother Raoul.

Castro is still the string puller. And the strings he pulls are often around the necks of dissidents who criticize him or challenge his ham-fisted regime. "There is no questioning Castro's intelligence," Fowler acknowledges. "He is brilliant, manipulative, and resourceful." Anyone who doubts that can read part of the eloquent defense that Castro delivered at his trial after an armed attack in 1953 on Moncada Barracks failed. William Safire has hailed it as a classic example of exceptional rhetoric. Castro sounds like Thomas Payne, not Joseph Stalin, in accusing the Fulgencio Batista regime of precisely the blood-thirsty crimes that on seizing power Castro perpetrated, describing the Barracks as a "workshop of torture and death."

It was a lie. As a University of Havana law student, Castro earned the nickname dirtball, writes Fowler, a reputation he feels Fidel managed to overdo during a long career in power. Many feel that Batista gave up prematurely and could have defeated the revolution, but he chose to flee with his cash, leaving behind the hapless citizens of a country that was prosperous and had a growing middle class. Fowler points out that in a population of only 7 million, Castro has since 1959 sent over 500,000 Cubans through prisons and concentration camps, and argues that the dictator's henchmen shot between 15,000 and 17,000. An extensive security apparatus monitors behavior and conversation.

Even slight infractions can send a citizen to infamous prisons like Kilo 5.5., infamous for using sleep deprivation, or the G-2 prison of Santiago de Cuba, where cells are kept at very high or very low temperatures with prisoners stripped, thrown into isolation chambers, and awaken after twenty minutes - causing irreversible psychological damage. Cuba may be situated 90 miles from Florida, but Castro's agents, Fowler cautions, are active inside the U.S. and act vigorously to murder dissenters inside U.S. waters who try to aid refugees escaping from the Communist dictatorship.

Fowler's prose is concise and clear, but his passion is evident on every page, as he calls for the U.S. to indict Castro criminally, and warns that tourists who see a charming, benign Havana are seeing a carefully orchestrated charade that hides the ugly, everyday reality that Cubans confront. Only Fidel's death will bring change, insists Fowler, and opening up trade or giving the regime access to foreign currency through commerce or tourism will merely prolong the suffering of Cubans.

A good part of the book - in many ways for me the most interesting - is Fowler's account of growing up in Cuba as a young boy and his family. Today a wealthy, esteemed expert on maritime law with an international reputation, he was born to wealth. But the revolution sent his family into severe financial straits. He worked during high school as a construction worker, and studied at a very tough, disciplined Jesuit high school in Puerto Rico before college and law school. He earned his success the old-fashioned way: through hard work and talent.

Still, his portrait of pre-revolutionary Cuba is fascinating. His affection for his large family runs deep in his roots, and his parents and grandparents - successful in the sugar business - emerge as vivid, colorful, fascinating individuals in their own right. Havana and the life they led was exciting, and while the wealthier classes enjoyed an elegant lifestyle, Fowler is emphatic that prosperity was shared and that the family went out of its way to ensure the well-being of those it employed.

Fowler's beautiful wife, Christina, hailed from a similar background, and endured a heart-breaking experience at the age of 12 when Castro jailed her father and her mother managed to get her out of Cuba. Christina was one of the "Peter Pan" children, placed on an airplane with her sisters after Castro goons smashed their dolls, and sent to the U.S., where stern Catholic nuns shipped her to a cold, inhumane existence at a Catholic school in Indiana until a farming couple took Christian and her older sister Mercedes in to live with them. The story has a happy ending: Castro released and exiled her father, and the family reunited in Laurel, Mississippi.

Fowler has a formidable intellect and he is a relentless advocate for his ideas, but writing the book, like the experiences he has gone through, proved deeply emotional for him. That he makes no effort to conceal the pain and hurt that he and those he have known strengthens this compelling story, which anybody interested in Cuba ought to read.

Author 101 University event in Los Angeles March 6- 9, 2014

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Story Merchant Books Launches Richard Pena's Last Plane Out of Saigon

Foreword: The Wall

Richard Pena

Recently, the Traveling Wall—a smaller replica of the National Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.—came to my community in Austin, Texas. My wife Carolyn, whom I have known since before I went to Vietnam, thought that we should go visit it. For me, and many other Americans, viewing the Wall is an emotional and somber experience. This time was no different.

The Traveling Wall spanned the length of our local high school football field. We walked slowly past the etched names of all the soldiers who died or went missing in Vietnam. I saw one woman making a rubbing of one of the names with charcoal and a sheet of paper. For her, bringing the soldier closer in that way might have made the hurt a little more bearable. Seeing her tears, I knew that her pain had lasted for a very long time. “It will never go away,” I thought to myself.

Loved ones had left all sorts of mementos and flowers by the memorial. There was even an old newspaper clipping of one soldier’s death announcement. We slowly walked the length of the football field before turning back and revisiting the names a second time.

A young boy, about ten or twelve years old, walked towards us. He, too, was paying tribute to the fallen in his own way. By the look on his face, I could tell he was seeking some understanding from the memorial. He wore a red and black football jersey, the colors of the local high school. The school had recently won three state championships, and he must have been proud. One day, I thought, he might even play on the team himself and maybe even compete in the state championship. I sighed and prayed that he would have the opportunity.

Each of the names represented a real loss. Carolyn wondered out loud what each person would have become, given the chance. She reflected on all the hopes and dreams that went unfulfilled because of the war, on what a waste it was—not just for the families, but for our country.

As we walked past the thousands of names—Donovan, Olson, Watson, Salinas, West, Yardoch, Neu, Viado, Stokes, Young, Torres, Spillner, Castle, Lopez, Zeller, Magee, Lafever—I felt only sorrow and regret. Most of these lives had been extinguished just as they were beginning. I no longer felt anger, for I had learned to accept this reality long ago. But like all the times I visited the Memorial in Washington, D.C., it felt as if I had been punched in the stomach.

In that moment of sadness, I wanted to reach out to those brave soldiers who died. What would they want now, some thirty-seven years after we left Vietnam? I feel they would want the truth to be told. It is for the sake of the 58,286 soldiers whose names are etched on the Wall, their families, the 3,100,000 soldiers who served in the Vietnam War—and, most of all, the truth—that John Hagan and I have pushed this book to publication.

While stationed in Vietnam as an operating room specialist, I kept a record of my wartime experiences and reflections. I left Vietnam on the final day of the American withdrawal, on one of the two very last planes out. Upon my return, I put the manuscript in a cardboard box, where it remained hidden away in the garage or attic for thirty-seven years. I knew that the American public had mostly overlooked the war, an important moment in their nation’s history. But everyday responsibilities kept me busy, and I went on to quietly live my life. It wasn’t until 2003, when I led a law delegation to Vietnam, that I realized the true significance of my departure on that final day.

Hanging on a wall of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City was a photo that depicted Americans troops boarding the final planes out of Vietnam. The inscription under the photo read, Last Plane Out. Carolyn and I both immediately recognized a much younger me in the photo, carrying my law school briefcase. I had never seen this picture before. The Vietnamese consider this photograph to be one of the iconic images of war, but to my knowledge the American public has been unaware of its existence.

Per the Paris Peace Accord signed January 23, 1973, America was to withdraw from Vietnam in sixty days. Those of us on the last two planes left on the sixty-first day. The American press was gone, the brass was gone—nearly everyone had left. I noticed a Viet Cong soldier taking a picture of. As I boarded the plane, I had a sense that someday the photo would surface.

Many Americans believe that the “end of the war” came in 1975 with the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy via helicopter. The photos of that event are deeply etched in our collective memory. However, historians know that American military involvement in the Vietnam War actually ended in March 1973 with the withdrawal of the last American combat troops. To this day, I am glad that I was one of the last ones out. At the time, I was relieved to know that no additional American soldiers would be sent to die for that war.

I would like to thank John Hagan for his tireless work—without him, this book would not have been possible. It was John who had me pull my manuscript from the attic and who understood its historical significance. The core of the book consists of journal entries I wrote while serving in Vietnam from 1972 to 1973.

I would like to thank the People To People Citizen Ambassador Programs for selecting me to lead the law delegation to Vietnam. Because of them, I was able to discover the Last Plane Out photo hanging in the American War Museums in Ho Chi Minh City. I thank the American Bar Foundation for its support and encouragement.

I would also like to thank my family and friends, who tried to understand and accept me back into “The World” when I returned. I would like to thank my wife, Carolyn Malley Pena, for her understanding, love, and support throughout these years. Above all, I would like to thank all those who continue to remember Vietnam and work to provide medical care for the veterans of all of our wars.

As you read the following pages, please understand that I wrote these words in real time as the war was happening. Stakes were high and emotions were raging. These are the truths as I experienced them.

Please remember, this is only an interpretation.

The truth, of course, is far stranger.

Introduction: For a Mistake?

John Hagan

John Kerry once asked which young American would be “the last soldier to die for a mistake.” Richard Pena knew that he did not want to be the answer. It was 1972, and the Vietnam War was still raging. Despite American troop withdrawals, the killing and dying continued unabated. Young and angry, Richard had no wish to accept a death sentence or prolong the inevitable American defeat. However, if he was going to serve in Vietnam, he wanted to be among the final American soldiers to leave—alive. As one of the last men out, he would bear many of the lasting lessons from this war.

In his youth, Richard learned to be proud of his country and his ability to find “his own way.” He learned many valuable lessons through the compassionate discipline shown by his parents, Merced and Rebecca, as he was growing up. His parents and extended family, who were proud of their Hispanic heritage and values, taught him by example. Merced served in World War II and won a Silver Star for his service at Iwo Jima as a Marine field medic. Upon his return to San Antonio, Texas, he married Rebecca, his high school sweetheart and worked as a postman for the U.S. Postal Service, while Rebecca worked at Kelly Air Force Base. As rising middle-class parents of two baby boomer sons, they lived a version of the post-World War II American Dream.

Richard was born in 1948, fourteen months after his older brother, Mercy. Richard would never be tall, but he was fast. His father believed that Richard’s speed and scrappiness would make him a basketball star, and he promised his son that there was “a way to win.” Richard’s mother would add, “There is always a way.” In San Antonio, children played in the church leagues before moving on to middle school basketball. Richard’s father put up a basketball hoop in the backyard and led the community effort to build a neighborhood church, which resulted in the Northwest Christian Church.

Eight-year-old Richard became a standout church-league player for Northwest Christian Church. When Richard was thirteen, he became starting guard for the basketball team at Horace Mann Junior High School and won several city championships. He later played on a high school team that was among the best in the city and in his senior year he received the best all around athlete award. Richard’s childhood friend, Fred Biery, still remembers a time when they played on opposite teams in their church league. One of Fred’s exceptionally tall teammates played defense at half court and tried to stop Richard’s dribble. To everyone’s surprise, Richard dribbled through the legs of the tall defender and drove to the rim for a basket. “There is always a way.”

Although his parents voted for Richard Nixon over John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, Richard hardly knew the difference between the candidates. His political awareness only emerged after the assassination of President Kennedy, and he became more politically engaged after he went off to college. In the fall of 1966, Richard enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. The basketball coach, who had coached one of Richard’s opponents in high school, wanted him to join the team as a walk-on. Richard declined, deciding to make schoolwork his priority instead.

The University of Texas at Austin was only seventy-five miles away from Richard’s hometown, but the culture of the school made it seem worlds apart. During his undergraduate years, Richard became interested in the questions others were asking about American foreign policy. His interests took a bookish turn, and he abandoned sports completely in favor of economics and political science. The world was changing, too. Antiwar politics were on the march across America’s campuses, and the University of Texas at Austin was no exception.

These were turbulent times. In 1966, draft card turn-ins and burnings attracted national attention. The fall of 1967—Richard’s sophomore year—brought events like “Stop the Draft Week,” the shutdown of the Draft Board in Oakland, and the first major Pentagon protest in Washington. That year was also stained by the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Late that summer, the whole world watched as policemen rioted in Mayor Daley’s Chicago and attacked antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic Party Convention.

The year 1968 became a wakeup call for Richard. The war had already killed nearly 40,000 U.S. soldiers by the time Lyndon Johnson returned to his Texas ranch to plan his presidential library on the Austin campus. Meanwhile, Hubert Humphrey became the Democrat’s newly nominated war candidate, and the Vietnam War was in full swing as people were being drafted and killed. America was tearing itself apart. Richard started asking, “Why?”

The revelation of the My Lai massacre struck a raw nerve in Texas during Richard’s senior year. A young journalist for the St. Louis Dispatch, Seymour Hersh, broke the explosive story that in March 1968 a twenty-six-year-old soldier, William Calley, deliberately led the mass slaughter of at least 109 Vietnamese civilian men, women, and children. Fuel was added to the fire when, in the spring of Richard’s senior year, President Nixon announced the expansion of the war into Cambodia. Students roared into action in Austin and at over one hundred other university campuses throughout the United States. The American Council on Education estimated that there were nearly ten-thousand incidents of protest in 1969.

In May 1970, Austin antiwar leaders decided to hold a week-long protest. They planned to march across campus in order to avoid the need for a downtown parade permit, which the city had previously denied. The Monday before the march, word spread of nine wounded and four dead in Ohio. The young National Guardsmen who arrived at Kent State University had fatally shot the students with M-1 rifles recklessly loaded with live ammunition. The Crosby, Still, Nash & Young song “Ohio” eulogized the dead students and later became a poignant call to arms.

By noon on Tuesday, 8,000 had gathered at the University of Texas at Austin to protest the Kent State shootings on the main campus mall. A crowd of 5,000 marched across the University and then headed downtown, disregarding the required permit. Richard participated in several campus demonstrations over the next week, some of which were reported in the national news media. Observers estimated that about half of all American university students took part in the May 1970 demonstrations. Richard ironically recalled that he held up a sign that read, “Hell No, We Won’t Go.” Only a few months later, he would be a soldier in Vietnam.

During another march in Austin that spring, a front line of demonstrators left campus and headed downtown into a phalanx of ten police officers. Followers fanned out around the initial melee. Five blocks on, the crowd encountered another twenty officers. The road of attack led to the state Capitol building, a symbol of government control in Austin. One student leader later gave an account of the event: By this point, the planners of the march were no longer in control. We had never left campus like that before; we all knew we wanted to go downtown. When we got to the Capitol, most of us went around. There were probably thirty armed police in riot gear and holding tear gas containers. . . . Some of the more militant people headed straight at the police. Fistfights broke out between police and students; some rocks were thrown. Four people were arrested. The police began firing tear gas. They went absolutely nuts, even shooting off tear gas inside the Capitol as the students retreated toward campus. . . . A lot of people were blinded, being led by those who could still see. We were very inexperienced.¹

Richard was among those young political protesters who were upset by all the wrongdoing and violence caused by the war. He viewed the marches as legitimate responses to the Kent State killings. To him, the Vietnam conflict was an illegitimate, politically motivated war that sacrificed young Americans without good reason. Those in power justified the war with the “domino effect” theory—that is, if the war was not fought, communism would spread like falling dominoes. Richard found the logic of this argument to be incoherent and disingenuous.

The week of protest in Austin snowballed into a general strike, and tens of thousands of students became involved in the rallies. The protesters even briefly took over the state Capitol. By Friday, students had completely abandoned classes in order to attend the strike. Governor Preston Smith, like governors in fifteen other states, called out the National Guard, and the city turned out 200 riot-equipped police. FBI agents with rifles lined the top of the clock tower as police helicopters swooped down over the campus.

During Friday’s demonstration, 25,000 people came to protest the Cambodian invasion and the killings at Kent State. Led by a girl dressed in black, the march spanned thirteen blocks and featured a procession of American flags and coffins. As historian Beverly Burr writes, “The Friday march was the largest student protest activity to occur in Austin history, and has yet to be rivaled. The march turned into a huge love-in, which lasted into the twilight. That evening a memorial service for the four who were killed at Kent State was held on the main mall”² The demonstrations were a powerful continuation of the free speech and antiwar protests of the 1960s.

The historian Todd Gitlin concluded that the protests after the Kent State shooting marked the peak of the student antiwar movement.³ This may have been true for radicals on college campuses, but ordinary citizens everywhere were still being drafted into the military. Pro-war soldiers often became antiwar after being sent to Vietnam, and many servicemen were angry and motivated to halt the U.S. war effort. As the student movement broke off into factions, leadership of the antiwar initiative passed to veteran and active-duty soldiers.

---

This is My Downtown - Nancy Nigrosh Chapter

 

About Nancy Nigrosh

Nancy Nigrosh is a former talent and literary agent at Innovative Artists and The Gersh Agency, who has represented many award winning writers and directors for film and television including Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and Stuart Beattie (Collateral, Pirates Of The Caribbean). She teaches at UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a frequent contributor to Indiewire. Through her company, Literary Business, Nancy offers freelance developmental and consulting editing for authors and screenwriters. Follow Nancy on Twitter @nancynigrosh

Robin Johns Grant's Summer's Winter FREE Download February 27th to March 2nd!

When Jeanine finally connects with film star Jamie Newkirk, the object of her obsession, will it be a dream come true? Or will she be pulled into his family's nightmare of secrets, control, and death?

At age ten, preacher's daughter Jeanine fell in love with young movie star Jamie Newkirk and the character he played--Danny Summer. Jeanine believed God Himself promised Jamie would be part of her life--that he would rescue her from boring rural Georgia. But eleven years later, she's graduating college and about to settle into the dreary nine-to-five life with no word from Jamie or God.

And then Jamie bursts into her life in an amazing way. There are plans to resurrect the Summer series of books and movies, and Jeanine is right in the middle of it all. Jamie seems to be falling for her, just as she'd dreamed. And yet...

She never expected all the dark undercurrents. Jamie is hiding out in Georgia following the suspicious death of his former girlfriend. And isn't it odd that he found his mother dead of a supposed suicide in that same house two years before, and that both women had the same strangely-shaped burn on their bodies? And who knew there would be so many sinister characters involved in Jamie's life, and in the Summer series? There's his young co-star, Charlie--the Summer author died in an unexplained fire at his house. And Jamie's stepfather, Elliott, and uncle Richard seem to be in a vicious competition for control of the Summer series and of Jamie's life.

Jamie is obviously hiding things--about his family, about the deaths of his mother and girlfriend. The media and the public have declared him guilty. Jeanine longs to prove his innocence. Unless she can, Jamie's dark secrets may shatter her dreams, her faith--and her life.



Even when we mortals don't understand, God's plan is unfolding around us. Summer's Winter is an incredible mystery that teaches us to believe in that divine plan for our lives. The twists and turns in Summer's Winter kept me reading into the night...I couldn't wait to reach the end! Robin Johns Grant's Summer's Winter is a heartwarming read in which good and evil collide. I loved it!

~Nancy Grace, HLN host and author of The Eleventh Victim and Death on the D-List

Part murder mystery, part Hollywood dream-world and part thought-provoking Southern lit, Summer's Winter takes the reader on a romantic ride, filled with movie-star moments that plummet into hair-raising hairpin twists and turns. Jeanine and Jamie's relationship crackles with sparring, spirituality and suspense, leading to an ending worthy of your favorite Hollywood finale.

~Elizabeth Musser, author of The Swan House and The Sweetest Thing

The 7k Report

Written by: Hugh Howey

It’s no great secret that the world of publishing is changing. What is a secret is how much. Is it changing a lot? Has most of the change already happened? What does the future look like?
The problem with these questions is that we don’t have the data that might give us reliable answers. Distributors like Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t share their e-book sales figures. At most, they comment on the extreme outliers, which is about as useful as sharing yesterday’s lottery numbers [link]. A few individual authors have made their sales data public, but not enough to paint an accurate picture. We’re left with a game of connect-the-dots where only the prime numbers are revealed. What data we do have often comes in the form of surveys, many of which rely on extremely limited sampling methodologies and also questionable analyses [link].

This lack of data has been frustrating. If writing your first novel is the hardest part of becoming an author, figuring out what to do next runs a close second. Manuscripts in hand, some writers today are deciding to forgo six-figure advances in order to self-publish [link]. Are they crazy? Or is signing away lifetime rights to a work in the digital age crazy? It’s hard to know.

Anecdotal evidence and an ever more open community of self-published authors have caused some to suggest that owning one’s rights is more lucrative in the long run than doing a deal with a major publisher. What used to be an easy decision (please, anyone, take my book!) is now one that keeps many aspiring authors awake at night. As someone who has walked away from incredible offers (after agonizing mightily about doing so), I have longed for greater transparency so that up-and-coming authors can make better-informed decisions. I imagine established writers who are considering their next projects share some of these same concerns.

Other entertainment industries tout the earnings of their practitioners. Sports stars, musicians, actors—their salaries are often discussed as a matter of course. This is less true for authors, and it creates unrealistic expectations for those who pursue writing as a career. Now with every writer needing to choose between self-publishing and submitting to traditional publishers, the decision gets even more difficult. We don’t want to screw up before we even get started.

When I faced these decisions, I had to rely on my own sales data and nothing more. Luckily, I had charted my daily sales reports as my works marched from outside the top one million right up to #1 on Amazon. Using these snapshots, I could plot the correlation between rankings and sales. It wasn’t long before dozens of self-published authors were sharing their sales rates at various positions along the lists in order to make author earnings more transparent to others [link] [link]. Gradually, it became possible to closely estimate how much an author was earning simply by looking at where their works ranked on public lists [link].

This data provided one piece of a complex puzzle. The rest of the puzzle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I received an email from an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data. All of this data is public—it’s online for anyone to see—but until now it’s been extremely difficult to gather, aggregate, and organize. This program, however, is able to do in a day what would take hundreds of volunteers with web browsers and pencils a week to accomplish. The first run grabbed data on nearly 7,000 e-books from several bestselling genre categories on Amazon. Subsequent runs have looked at data for 50,000 titles across all genres. You can ask this data some pretty amazing questions, questions I’ve been asking for well over a year [link]. And now we finally have some answers.

When Amazon reports that self-published books make up 25% of the top 100 list, the reaction from many is that these are merely the outliers. We hear that authors stand no chance if they self-publish and that most won’t sell more than a dozen copies in their lifetime if they do. (The same people rarely point out that all bestsellers are outliers and that the vast majority of those who go the traditional route are never published at all.) Well, now we have a large enough sample of data to help glimpse the truth. What emerges is, to my knowledge, the clearest public picture to date of what’s happening in this publishing revolution. It’s a lot to absorb, but I believe there’s much here to learn.

The Value Ratio

I’m going to start with some of the smaller lessons to be gleaned from this data. We’ll conclude this report by looking at author earnings, but I don’t want that bombshell to drown out these equally important observations.

The first thing that jumped out at me when I opened my email was these next two charts, which our data guru had placed side-by-side. What caught my eye was how they seem to be inversely correlated:





On the left, we have a chart showing the average rating of 7,000 bestselling e-books.¹ On the right, we have a chart showing the average list price of the same 7,000 e-books. Both charts break the books up into the same five categories. From the left, they are: Indie Published, Small/Medium Publisher, Amazon Published (from imprints like 47North), Big Five published, and Uncategorized Single-Author.²

It’s interesting to me that the self-published works in this sample have a higher average rating than the e-books from major publishers. There are several reasons why this might be, ranging from the conspiratorial (self-published authors purchase their reviews) to the communal (self-published authors read and favorably rate each others works) to the familial (it’s friends and family who write these reviews). But the staggering number of reviews involved for most of these books (over a hundred on average across our entire sample) makes each of these highly unlikely. As I’ve seen with my own works—and as I’ve observed when watching other books spread organically—the sales come before the reviews, not after. There are a number of more plausible explanations for the nearly half a star difference in ratings, and one in particular jumped out at me, again from seeing these two charts next to one another.

Note the shortest bar in one graph correlates to the tallest in the other. Is it possible that price impacts a book’s rating? Think about two meals you might have: one is a steak dinner for $10; the other is a steak dinner that costs four times as much. An average experience from both meals could result in a 4-star for the $10 steak but a 1-star for the $40 steak. That’s because overall customer satisfaction is a ratio between value received and amount spent. As someone who reads both self-published and traditionally published works, I can tell you that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the two. Most readers don’t know and don’t care how the books they read are published. They just know if they liked the story and how much they paid. If they’re paying twice as much for traditionally published books, which experience will they rate higher? The one with better bang for the buck.

This raises an interesting question: Are publishers losing money in the long run by charging higher prices? Are they decreasing the value/cost ratio and thereby creating lower average ratings for their authors and their products? If so, this might have some influence on long-term sales, and keep in mind that e-books do not go out of print. What if in exchange for immediate profits, publishers are creating poorer ratings for their goods and a poorer experience for their readers? Both effects will hurt a work’s prospects down the road (a road with no end in sight). And since ratings on e-books also apply to the physical edition on Amazon’s product pages, this pricing scheme ends up adversely affecting the very print edition that higher e-book prices are meant to protect [link].

It is common these days to hear that the quality of self-published work is hurting literature in general. I counter this notion with one of my own: Pricing e-books higher than mass market paperbacks used to cost is having an even more deleterious effect on reading habits. Books are not only in competition with each other, they compete with everything else a reader might do with their time. Creating a poor experience is a way to lose readers, not a way to protect a physical edition or a beloved bookstore. And high prices are a quick and easy way to create a poor reading experience, harming everyone.
High prices are also a way to drive customers to other, less expensive books. Rather than serving to protect print editions, publishers are creating a market for self-published works. And harmful price practices is not the only way the Big Five are powering the self-publishing revolution. Next, we’re going to look at some sales numbers within these genre bestseller lists to see how underserving a high-demand market has resulted in the creation of a brand new supply of books.  

Listening to Reader Demand

The next chart shows the percentage of genre e-books on several Amazon bestseller lists according to how they were published:

The bestseller lists used were Mystery/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Romance. All of the subcategories within these three main genres were also included. Why choose these genres? Because they are the most popular with readers. Our data guru ran a spider through overall bestseller lists and found that these three genres accounted for 70% of the top 100 bestsellers on Amazon and well over half of the top 1,000 bestsellers.³ Future earnings reports will look at all of fiction⁴, but for now, we started with a simpler data set that captured the vast majority of what readers purchase.

What this chart shows is that indie and small-publisher titles dominate the bestselling genres on Amazon. We can clearly see that the demand from readers for more of these works is not being fully met by traditional publishing. Among the advice given to aspiring writers, you’ll often hear: “Write in the correct genre.” And here we see the sales-potential of that advice.

Looking back to the price/review comparison and also to the chart above, we can surmise that major publishers would be well-served by publishing far more titles in these genres and also by charging less for them. This is wisdom the indie community knows very well. Publishers must be tuning in, as prices began to decline last year [link], and publishers such as Simon & Schuster have announced new genre imprints [link]. Hopefully this data will help accelerate these trends, for the benefit of both the reader and the newly signed author.

Now take a look at this chart:




Again, daily unit sales are estimated by sales ranking, using publicly shared data from dozens of authors who have logged the correlation between rank and daily purchases (included among those authors are the two involved in this study).⁵ Some obvious things immediately jump out. The first is that Amazon has an incredible ability to market their own works, which shouldn’t be too surprising, considering it’s their storefront. We see from this and the previous chart that their 4% of titles command an amazing 15% of the sales. That’s impressive. It’s nearly 4 times the average unit sales volume per book. Now look at the Big Five, who with all their marketing efforts and brand recognition actually end up with pretty average per-book sales: a mere 1.2 times the overall average.
The other eye-popper here is that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. That’s the entire Big Five. Combined. Indie and small-press books account for half of the e-book sales in the most popular and bestselling genres on Amazon. Instead of feeling any sort of confirmation bias, my immediate reaction was to reject these findings. Surely they weren’t accurate. And so I complained to our magical data snoop that we were only looking at e-book sales. What percentage of the overall reading market does this represent? Our data guru said this was a question we could easily answer. You won’t believe what he found.

Everything You Know About E-Books is Wrong

The experts? They have no idea. It’s not entirely their fault; it’s just that the data they’re working with is fundamentally flawed.

You may have heard from other reports that e-books account for roughly 25% of overall book sales. But this figure is based only on sales reported by major publishers. E-book distributors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play don’t reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25%.

Neither are small presses, e-only presses, or Amazon’s publishing imprints. This would be like the Cookie Council seeking a report on global cookie sales and polling a handful of Girl Scout troops for the answer—then announcing that 25% of worldwide cookie sales are Thin Mints. But this is wrong. They’re just looking at Girl Scout cookies, and even then only a handful of troops. Every pronouncement about e-book adoption is flawed for the same reason. It’s looking at only a small corner of a much bigger picture. (It’s worth noting that our own report is also limited in that it’s looking only at Amazon—chosen for being the largest book retailer in the world—but we acknowledge and state this limitation, and we plan on releasing broader reports in the future.)
There’s a second and equally important reason to doubt a 25% e-book penetration number: The other 75% of those titles includes textbooks, academic books, cookbooks, children’s books, and all the many categories that are relatively safe from digitization (for now). Print remains healthy in these categories, but these aren’t the books most people think of when they hear that percentage quoted. E-book market share is generally spoken of in the context of the New York Times bestsellers, the novels and non-fiction works that are referred to as “trade” publications. If we look specifically at this trade market, it’s quite likely that e-books already account for more than 50% of current sales (some publishers have intimated as much [link]). Factoring in self-publishing and further limiting the scope to fiction, I’ve seen guesses as high as 70%. But that can’t be possible, right?

I asked our data guru if we could find out. Could we look at the bestseller lists and tally by format? Of course, we would be looking only at Amazon, which might skew toward e-books—but to reiterate, we are looking at the largest bookseller in the world, digital or print. To do a first study of this sort on a smaller distributor would be less than ideal. Still, keep this caveat in mind.

We analyzed the overall Amazon bestseller lists for several categories and used the web spider to grab the text description of format type: paperback, hardback, e-book, or audiobook. This is what we found:






Did the smelling salts work? Are you with us? It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100 best-selling books in these genres are e-books!
I know, right? Allow that to soak in for a moment, and then let’s look at author earnings. Here, we will see that publishers should cross their fingers and hope that the share of e-book sales increases rather than flattens. Because they are doing quite well on the backs of their authors. Major publishers are taking in record profits [link], but they aren’t the big winners to emerge from this report. Read on. The real story of self-publishing is up next.

Writing Doesn’t Pay?

This is a story that has been sensed by many. The clues are all around us, but the full picture proves elusive. It is being told in anecdotes on online forums, in private Facebook groups, at publishing conventions, and in the comment sections of industry articles. Authors are claiming to be making more money now with self-publishing than they made in decades with traditional publishers, often with the same books [link]. I’ve personally heard from nearly a thousand authors who are making hundreds of dollars a month with their self-published works. I know many who are making thousands a month, even a few who are making hundreds of thousands a month. But these extreme outliers interest me far less than the mid-list authors who are now paying a bill or two from their writing.
My interest in this story began the moment I became an outlier. When major media outlets began asking for interviews, my first thought was that they were burying the lead. My life had truly changed months prior, when I’d first started making dribs and drabs here and there. And I knew this was happening for more and more writers every day. But that inspiring story was being buried by headlines about those whose luck was especially outsized (as mine has been).

Before we reveal the next results of our study, keep in mind that self-publishing is not a gold rush. It isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. There are no short cuts, just a lot of effort and a lot of luck. Those who do well often work ludicrous hours in order to publish several books a year. They do this while working day jobs until they no longer need day jobs. This is also true of the writers earning hundreds or even thousands a month. Please keep this in mind. The beauty of self-publishing is the ownership and control of one’s work. You can price it right, hire the editor and cover artist you want to work with, release as often and in as many genres as you want, give books away, and enjoy a direct relationship with your reader. It isn’t for everyone, but you’re about to see a good reason why more authors might want to consider this as an option.

Here is what our data guru found when he used sales per ranking data⁵ and applied it to the top 7,000 bestselling genre works on Amazon today:




Looks good for the Big Five, doesn’t it? When it comes to gross dollar sales, they take half the pie. Remember, they only account for a little over a quarter of the unit sales. Also keep in mind that they only have to pay 25% of net revenue to the author. By contrast, self-published authors on Amazon’s platform keep 70% of the total purchase price.⁶  Let’s now look at revenue from the author’s perspective:



It’s a complete inversion. Indie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon. Nearly half. This next chart reveals why:





Blue represents the author. You can clearly see that for Big-Five published works, the publisher makes more than twice what the author makes for the sale of an e-book. Keep in mind that the profit margins for publishers are better on e-books than they are on hardbacks [link]. That means the author gets a smaller cut while the publisher takes a larger share. This, despite the fact that e-books do not require printing, warehousing, or shipping. As a result, self-published authors as a group are making 50% more profit than their traditionally published counterparts, even though their books have only half the gross sales revenue.

Before we move on, take another long look at this chart. Here you find everything that needs to change in the publishing industry. Readers and writers alike should take note.

A quick note on how we calculated author earnings for the Big Five publishers in the above graphs. These numbers are based on estimates of wholesale pricing for e-books (publisher’s net was modeled as 80% of Amazon price). That estimate could be off by 10% either way, but even if we adjusted it to assume a wholesale price of 120% of retail (which would mean Amazon is taking a loss on every traditionally published e-book sold), indie authors would still come out on top. Also interesting is the observation that for the top-selling genres, Amazon is currently making nearly as much profit from indie e-books as from Big Five e-books.⁷

It’s also worth keeping in mind that this graph ignores the long tail of publishing. We’re just looking at the top 7,000 genre e-books. This represents the most popular offerings from both self-published authors and their traditionally published counterparts, which makes it an extremely fair comparison. Other surveys have compared all self-published works to only those in the traditional route that made it past agents and editors. That is, they compared the top 1% of traditionally published titles to the entirety of self-published works. Looking at bestselling charts avoids that mistake. Here we have 7,000 e-books as they are selling on any given day, which also serves to move the discussion away from misleading outliers and into the more interesting midlist. Now let’s see how Uncle Sam feels about all of this.

Tax Brackets

We’ve seen that self-published authors are earning more money from genre e-books than traditionally published authors. But how much more? The next thing we wanted to do was estimate yearly e-book earnings for all of these authors based on their daily Amazon sales. We ran this report and put each author into one of seven income brackets. The results, again, were startling:



Indie authors outnumber traditionally published authors in every earnings bracket but one, and the difference increases as you leave the highest-paid outliers. But even these extreme outliers are doing better with their self-published works. The scale is difficult to see, but the breakdown of authors earning in the seven figures is: 10 indie authors, 8 Amazon-published authors, and 9 authors published by the Big Five. The much higher royalties and other advantages, such as price, seem to counterbalance the experience and marketing muscle that traditional publishers wield. This is something many have suspected to be true, but which now can be confirmed.

Of course, we still doubted this even after seeing the results. Our first thought was that top self-published authors can put out more than one work a year, while Big Five authors are limited by non-compete clauses and a legacy publishing cycle to a single novel over that same span of time. Indie authors are most likely earning more simply because they have more books for sale. Was this skewing our results? We ran another report to find out, and to our surprise, it turns out that only the handful of extreme earners have this advantage. Most self-published authors are, on average, earning more money on fewer books:

This suggests that the earnings discrepancy will grow greater over time, as self-published authors develop deeper catalogs. We hope to answer questions like this as we run reports every quarter to track shifting trends. For now, the full data set for this study has been anonymized by removing the title and author info, and is available for download below this report. By tweaking the values in the yellow areas of the spreadsheet, you are able to play around with the data yourself. Our aim here is complete openness and to invite community discourse. It is also worth remembering that all of our base data comes from publicly perusable bestseller charts, so there’s an added layer of transparency and reproducibility. The information was there all along; grabbing a useful quantity of it simply required someone like my co-author to come along and snag it. 

An Easier Choice?

Choosing which way to publish is becoming a difficult choice for the modern author. This choice has only grown more challenging as options have expanded and as conflicting reports have emerged on how much or how little writers can expect to make. Our contention is that many of these reports are flawed, both by the self-selected surveys they employ, the sources for these surveys, and, occasionally, the biases in their interpretation. Our fear is that authors are selling themselves short and making poor decisions based on poor data. That is the main purpose for fighting for earnings transparency: helping aspiring writers choose the path that’s best for them. A secondary goal is to pressure publishers to more fairly distribute a new and lucrative source of income. Operating in lockstep in offering authors only 25% of net is not just unfair but unsustainable, as more and more authors are going to jump to self-publishing.

Of course, self-publishing isn’t for everyone. There is no absolute right or wrong way to publish; the path taken depends entirely on what each author wishes to put into their career and what they hope to get out of it. But as marketing falls more and more to the writer, and as self-published authors close the quality gap by employing freelance editors and skilled cover artists, the earnings comparison in our study suggests a controversial conclusion: Genre writers are financially better off self-publishing, no matter the potential of their manuscripts.

Consider the three rough possibilities for an unpublished work of genre fiction:

The first possibility is that the work isn’t good. The author cannot know this with any certainty, and neither can an editor, agent, or spouse. Only the readers as a great collective truly know. But what we may simplistically, and perhaps cruelly, call a “bad” manuscript stands only a slim chance of getting past an agent and then an editor. To the author, these works are better off self-published on the open market. They will most likely disappear, never to be widely read. But at least they stand a chance. And those who fear that these titles will crowd out other books are ignoring the vast quantities of books published traditionally—or the fact that billions of self-published blogs and websites don’t impede our ability to browse the internet, to find what we are looking for, or to share discovered gems with others.

The second possibility for a manuscript is that it’s merely average. An average manuscript might get lucky and find an agent. It might get lucky a second time and fall into the lap of the right editor at the right publishing house. But probably not. Most average manuscripts don’t get published at all. Those that do sit spine-out on dwindling bookstore shelves for a few months and are then returned to the publisher and go out of print. The author doesn’t earn out the advance and is dropped. The industry is littered with such tales. Our data shows quite conclusively that mid-list titles earn more for self-published authors than they do for the traditionally published. And the advantage grows as the yearly income bracket decreases (that is, as we move away from the outliers). It is also worth noting again that self-published authors are earning more money on fewer titles. Our data supports a truth that I keep running into over and over, however anecdotally: More writers today are paying bills with their craft than at any other time in human history.

The third and final possibility is that the manuscript in question is great. A home run. The kind of story that goes viral. (Some might call these manuscripts “first class,” but designations of class are rather offensive, aren’t they?) When recognized by publishing experts (which is far from a guarantee), these manuscripts are snapped up by agents and go to auction with publishers. They command six- and seven-figure advances. The works are heavily promoted, and if the author is one in a million, they make a career out of their craft and go on to publish a dozen or more bestselling novels in their lifetime. You can practically name all of these contemporary authors without pausing for a breath. We all like to think our manuscript is one of these. And from this hubris comes a fatal decision not to self-publish.

Why is that decision fatal? Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published. These outlier authors are already doing better via self-publishing, when compared one to one. Now consider that the authors with the greatest draw, the most experience, and possibly the best abilities, are not yet a part of the self-publishing pool. What will our graphs look like once more up-and-coming authors skip straight to self-publishing? What will they look like when self-published authors have a decade or more of experience under their belts? What about when more authors win back the rights to their backlists? Or when top traditionally published authors decide to self-publish, as artists in other fields are doing? [link] [link] [link] What will these graphs look like then? We look forward to finding out.

Final Thoughts

What is presented here is but one snapshot of the publishing revolution as it stands today. That revolution isn’t over. These reports can be run so long as books are ranked. Our hope is that the future brings more transparency, not less. Other artistic endeavors have far greater data at hand, and practitioners of those arts and those who aspire to follow in their footsteps are able to make better-informed decisions. The expectations of these artists and athletes are couched in realism to a degree that the writing profession does not currently enjoy.

Our ambitious goal is to help change that, but we can’t do it alone. And so we hope others will run their own reports and analyze our data. We hope they will share what they find and that this will foster greater discourse. We also hope publishers and distributors will begin sharing their sales figures. We expect many to disagree with our analysis. We expect flaws will be found in our reasoning and our sampling methodologies. Discovering those flaws will lead to better data, and we look forward to that process.

If I had to guess what the future holds, I would say that the world of literature has its brightest days still ahead. That we have come so far in such a short period of time is revealing. We take for granted changes in other mediums—the absence of that tall rack of CDs beside home stereos, the dwindling number of people who watch live TV, that missing thrill of opening a paper envelope full of printed photos. There will be casualties in the publishing industry as the delivery mechanisms for stories undergo change. There already have been casualties. But there are opportunities as well. And right now, the benefits are moving to the reader and the writer. Speaking as both of these, I count this a good thing. I marvel that there are so many who fight for higher prices for consumers and lower pay for authors, all to protect a legacy model. That model needs to change.

Publishers can foster that change by further lowering the prices of their e-books. The record margins they’re currently earning are certainly seductive, but taking advantage of authors is not a sustainable business model. Hollywood studios had to capitulate to their writers when a new digital stream emerged. Publishers will likewise need to pay authors a fair share of the proceeds for e-book sales. 50% of net for every author is a good start. If they do this, they will stop losing quality manuscripts, back catalogs, and top talent. If publishers nurture their authors and work hard to satisfy their customers, they will see those average ratings go up and sales increase. They will see more people spending time with a book rather than on a video game or on the internet. And then the entire publishing industry, as well as those who love to read and those who hope to write for a living, will benefit.

Download the raw data this report is based on (.xslx)

Reposted From Author Earnings

Guest Post: Peter O'Toole and Sid Caesar: Two Fallen Redwoods

 by Dennis Palumbo

In the past month, a number of highly-regarded performers have passed away. Of special note, because of his drug-related death at such a young age, the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman has seemed particularly tragic.


But, from a personal perspective, the two iconic performers whose deaths resonated most with me were actor Peter O'Toole and comedy genius Sid Caesar. In differing ways, their lives intersected with mine in a manner that had a profound impact.

Though I've been a licensed psychotherapist for the past 26 years, in my prior career I was a Hollywood screenwriter. One of the scripts I co-wrote was for a film called My Favorite Year, which starred Peter O'Toole and featured a fictional 1950s TV comic named King Kaiser -- who was based on Sid Caesar.

As the character named Alan Swann -- a thinly-disguised Errol Flynn -- O'Toole gave what I and many of his fans consider one of his best performances. He perfectly captured Flynn's exuberance, narcissism and insecurity -- as well as the famous swashbuckler's self-deprecating wit.

In the role of King Kaiser -- host of a weekly comedy series based on Your Show of Shows

-- Joseph Bologna replicated Sid Caesar's enormous personal energy, embodying his infamous anger as well as his comedic intensity.

Both O'Toole and Caesar were, in their heyday, larger than life personalities. Famous for their struggles with alcohol, they were willing to live life on their own terms -- even when the consequences of that choice caused them more grief than glory.

Regardless, each, in my opinion, should have been given the opportunity to work much more than they did. Especially when both performers were at the top of their game. That they weren't always afforded that opportunity is our collective loss. In fact, it's unlikely that we'll see many performers of their monumental talent and outsized personalities again.

When each of their deaths were reported in the news, I thought of something a friend of mine had said when film director Stanley Kubrick died. "Well, that's one more fallen redwood in a rapidly dwindling forest."

That forest is now missing two more redwoods.

As a fan, and as a former screenwriter who'd once been professionally connected -- at least tangentially -- with both men, I mourn the passing of Peter O'Toole and Sid Caesar. And offer a posthumous thanks for the richness that each added to my life.

Rest in Peace.

A former Hollywood screenwriter, Dennis Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author of Writing From the Inside Out. He also writes the Daniel Rinaldi mystery series.


Reposted From The Huffington Post

STORY MERCHANT BOOKS LAUNCHES KING PIRATE BY TOM STERN

A modern-day privateer - a pirate of pirates - seeks revenge on a criminal terrorizing the Malacca Strait known as King Pirate.

Chapter 1

Ryan Kelley knew he was in deep shit when he turned the manila envelope over and a severed ear plopped onto the sticky bar.

“Sonofabitch.”

He stared at it for a long moment. The ear was pierced. A steel Jolly Roger. Both the ear and the earring belonged to Brody. From the jagged cuts, it looked like whoever had removed the ear needed three or four tries. Or maybe he was just taking his time. For the fun of it.

The bartender came back. An ex-pat Australian with sleeves rolled up to show off faded tattoos on hairy arms. He ignored the ear, nodded at Kelley’s empty mug. “Need another?”

There are about a dozen holes in the area around Kuala Lumpur where you could drop a severed extremity on the bar and expect not to get any hassle. Kelley was on a first name basis with the bartenders in all of them. This one happened to be in Port Sweetenham, just to the southeast of KL.

“I’d better just settle up, Gar.” The other man moved off.

Kelley remembered the envelope still balanced in his hand. He peered inside. A few errant blood streaks. Other than that, empty.

There was no name on the envelope. No markings. But he knew who had sent it. Because sixty seconds before, a 10-year-old local kid had dropped it in front of Kelley. The kid had met Kelley’s eye, and repeated the only two English words he knew:

“King Pirate.”

…

Kelley stepped out onto the street. Early evening, on the late side of magic hour. It was still hot. Humid, like his body had been wrapped in boiled cellophane. He immediately felt sweat gather at his hairline.

Kelley wore beat-up jeans and black boots with rubber soles, the kind that don’t slip on a wet deck. He wore a simple black t-shirt pulled tight across a refined chest.

Kelley was a tough guy. Not huge like a bodybuilder. He had the lean hardness that came from years of manual sea labor and boxing. Kelley looked like a golem built from spring steel and whalebone. He had spikey blonde hair and mid-afternoon stubble. He could throw a look from his dark blue eyes that made men step back like he’d punched them in the forehead. Not many people gave Kelley shit unless they had a gun or knife in hand. Several jagged white scars slashing across Kelley’s face and hands testified to those rare exceptions.

He also wore a gold wedding ring on his right hand. It was dented and bent. He kept it for his own reasons.

Kelley immediately spotted the two assholes across the street. They were exactly the kind of Malaysian street punks Kelley’d expected to find waiting for him. Every one of them the same, like they were slapped together in a single sweatshop: tattoos of tigers and/or dragons, cheap bling, designer knock-offs, all affecting the same wannabe Triad hard guy routine. Kelley figured about one in twenty were worth keeping an eye on; the rest were background noise. They sipped from cans of Coca-Cola, probably laced with codeine and kratom. It was a trendy drink with the kids, invented by Muslim teens. Getting drunk on alcohol was a sin, but catching a buzz on laced Coke apparently didn’t count as a big deal. It had caught on throughout Southeast Asia.

Kelley swerved his way across the street, dodging through traffic that didn’t slow down. The punks waited and smoked. Kelley arrived.

“Where?”

They didn’t answer. The punks gave him the stare of two guys trying to come across as stone-cold killers. The punks had Malaysian eyes. Flat and jet-black, like a doll’s. It was unsettling if you weren’t used to it, or if you were a pussy. Kelley was neither.

After paying the bar tab, Kelley had stuck Brody’s ear back in the envelope and folded it up until it fit into his back pocket. He took out the envelope and repeated himself, this time in Malay.

The first punk smirked, showing off the gangsta-style gold front teeth. “King Pirate say, fifty thousand.”

“Dollars or ringgit?”

“Dollar.”

Kelley glared. “What if I don’t have it?”

The smirk turned into a grin. Gold Tooth shrugged. Don’t know what to tell you, man.

“How about I knock those gold teeth out of your head and give them to King Pirate as a down payment?”

The punk casually flicked away the cigarette butt with a quiet snap. “Try it. See what happen.”

Kelley glanced around. They were in a sketchy part of town. Lots of shady characters. Kelley and the punks fit right in. This wasn’t the financial district. Some trouble could go down. But there were plenty of people around. In traffic. Sitting in bars. On the sidewalks. Witnesses. He’d be easy to spot in a crowd. Someone called the cops, they’d find him. They’d lock him up. He’d sit in a cell for a while. They’d cane his white ass. Kelley wasn’t scared of a caning. He’d gotten several, with the trophy scars to prove it. Puckered stripes on his back and buttocks. Both cheeks. But the whole process would burn time Brody didn’t have. Kelley turned his attention back to the punks. Gold Tooth kept smiling, having no idea how lucky he was to still have teeth in his head.

Brody was a friend. He and Kelley met while working on the Asian Princess. Kelley and Brody stayed in touch. They had several interests in common. Hard drink. Women of various nationalities. And the sea. Always the sea. Both were refugees from the first acts of their lives, men who had tried and failed to handle the nine-to-five. For them, it was nothing but boredom and authority. To the squares left in the wake, they were losers, detritus who couldn’t get their acts together well enough to fit into normal society.

You know what? Fuck ‘em. Even a cattle herd needs a few rogue bulls.

Brody was a damn good friend. If they weren’t working on the same ship, Kelley made sure to look him up in port. Their work took them both throughout the Asian seas. They’d chased skirts in Japan, brawled in Vietnamese bars and wept into their beers in Indonesia. Kelley and Brody were rough men given to extremes of mirth and melancholy.

Brody was one of the best friends Kelley’d ever had. He’d been taken captive when pirates swarmed howling over the bows of the Lucky 88 five days before. Kelley knew the pirates would force him to give up family names for a ransom demand. Brody didn’t have any family. Or, at least, no family that would pay cent one for his worthless skin. Brody only had Kelley.

Hence, the ear. And Kelley’s shortening patience.

“How long do I have?”

“One hour.”

“An hour to pull fifty thousand bucks together.”

Again, that languorous shrug. Kelley was ready to break this guy’s arms.

“I want to talk to King Pirate.”

The punks chuckled, derisively shaking their heads.

Kelley stepped up, getting in their grilles.

“If King Pirate wants this money, I’m talking to King Pirate.”

Gold Tooth’s eyes narrowed. Trying to man up in the face of Kelley’s vicious glare.

“You don’t give money, you don’t get friend.”

Kelley closed in farther. They were nose-to-nose, like fighters in a ring.

“What happens when King Pirate finds out you cost him fifty large because you couldn’t dial a phone?”

Gold Tooth looked away; Kelley had broken him. He edged out of Kelley’s space, backing off. The Malay punks quickly discussed their options. Kelley caught one word in three.

The punks nodded toward a nearby alley. Kelley followed them in.

…

Gold Tooth made the call on a cell phone the size of a credit card. A whispered conversation. Kelley occupied himself with staring down the other guy. He wanted both of them to get the clear, unspoken message that he was not to be fucked with.

Seconds later, Gold Tooth extended his phone to Kelley: “Talk. Then you pay.”

Kelley kept an eye on the punks. Put the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”

An electronically-distorted voice buzzed across the tiny speaker. Excellent English, with an unplaceable accent strong enough to bleed through the noise.

“My friends have already explained the deal. I trust the down payment we gave you made our position clear. Do you have what I want?”

Kelley considered his options for a moment. Realized that he had none. “I don’t have the money. But I can get it.”

King Pirate went silent. The device disguising the voice hissed. Then, “Can you get it in an hour?”

“No.”

“Are you sure, Mister Kelley?”

“Yes. But I can get it. It’ll take me a few days, but I’ll figure out a way.”

Again, silence. Hissssssss…

“In that case, you can have your friend back – “

Kelley fought to keep the punks from seeing his obvious relief. “Thanks.”

“– in as many pieces as you’d like. You see, we’ve already chopped him up as fish bait.”

The words took a moment to register in Kelley’s brain. Echoing in his skull, growing and rebounding, until they came out of his mouth as a primal scream of sheer fury.

King Pirate chuckled. Through the voice-blurring distortion, it was like hearing a swarm of bees laugh.

Kelley’s reaction was a pre-arranged cue for the punks. They whipped out extending metal fighting batons.

Kelley responded without thought. It takes most people a long time to react to the threat of violence. They have to realize the violence is real and immediate. They have to think and decide what to do about it. They have to deal with their fear. The whole process can take several seconds to a minute. The punks were counting on the delay time.

They didn’t get it.

With the speed of muscle memory, Kelley shot his right elbow into Gold Tooth’s face. There was a wet gok sound, like when you snap a carrot in half. His nose breaking. Hot blood sprayed onto Kelley’s arm.

The other guy cocked back the baton to crack Kelley’s skull open. He never got past mid-swing. Kelley tagged him with two fast left jabs: pop-pop! Nothing that would knock a guy out. But it broke the punk’s rhythm, put tears in his eyes. Rocked him back. Good enough.

Kelley grabbed the baton wrist with both hands. Threw the guy to the ground, still holding the wrist. Got a grip on the hand holding the baton. Gave it a quick twist. Kelley felt the delicate wrist bones snap under his fingers. The guy yelped. Kelley stomped him in the jaw. Bitch.

He took the baton away. Heard Gold Tooth recover, coming at him from behind.

Without looking, Kelley crouched low and whirled. Gold Tooth’s baton came down in an arc. It was meant to tag Kelley in the back of the neck. But Kelley was low, inside the swing. Moving. The baton glanced and rolled off his left shoulder blade.

In the same motion, Kelley slammed his stolen baton into Gold Tooth’s ribcage. He heard three break at once, like fast applause. Gold Tooth folded in half. Kelley grabbed him by the hair and guided his face right into a rising knee strike. Gold Tooth flipped backward. Hit the ground. Bleeding and moaning in a back alley, where all worthless chumps like him eventually end up.

Kelley searched the ground. He found the fallen cell phone. It was thin and delicate. Broken into a dozen shards.

Kelley cursed his luck. He wanted to tell King Pirate that he was a dead man. That, no matter what, Kelley would find him. And do to him what he’d done to Brody. But the phone was broken. So Kelley would have to deliver the message to these punks, and keep it simple enough that they wouldn’t forget any important details.

And then Kelley would find another seedy, shit hole bar. Because it was the only kind of place where Brody would want Kelley to throw back a shot in his honor. And swear his oath of revenge. With two words.

“King Pirate.”

…

A month later, Sanjay Gupta was using the office phone to make long-distance calls when a boop-boop told him there was someone on the other line.

He switched to line two, also switching from Hindi to Malay: “International Piracy Reporting Center.”

“Director Han.”

Sanjay rolled his eyes. Switched languages again, now in slightly British-accented English, “Call back in exactly ten minutes.”

He punched off. Went back to his call on line one.

Exactly ten seconds passed.

Boop-boop.

Dammit. Sanjay apologized to his girlfriend, at the moment on a business trip in Toyko.

Again, in Malay: “International – “

“Quit jerking me around. I wanna talk to Han.”

Sanjay clenched his teeth. These idiots.

“He’s not available to take a call at the moment,” he patiently explained.

“I emailed Han and he never responded. When’ll he be back?”

“If you wish to speak to Director Han, you’ll have to make an appointment.”

“Fine. When?”

A hint of frustration slipped out as Sanjay asked, “Who is this, and may I ask the purpose of your call?”

“I wanna talk to him about King Pirate. I checked out your website. Han’s the man I gotta see.”

Obviously, this guy was just some nut calling to waste everyone’s time.

“Call back tomorrow at nine o’clock precisely.”

Sanjay hung up without another word. When the moron called tomorrow, Sanjay would tell him to call again the next day and the next, ad infinitum, until he got the hint and crawled back into his hole.

He shifted back to Hindi as he punched back to line one. “Sorry, this idiot keeps ringing…”

…

A dial tone bled from the cell phone. Kelley snapped it shut. Fucker.

He stood in the midst of Kuala Lumpur’s business district. Kelley was across the street from the International Chamber of Commerce building at 27 Jalan Sultan Ismail Road. The building also housed the International Maritime Bureau, which in turn shared space with the International Piracy Reporting Center on the thirty-fifth floor. Kelley stared up at it, as if he could see through the steel and glass to spot Director Han. The Petronas Twin Towers loomed on the horizon.

“Nine o’clock, my ass.” He’d tried coming in the official way. Now it was time to get in the Kelley way.

Kelley headed for the building. Guards armed with automatic weapons stood at attention by the glass front doors. Their eyes immediately picked him out of the crowd. Caucasians were rare in Kuala Lumpur. The guards watched Kelley without reaction.

He’d come downtown expecting to see Han. Kelley wanted to make a good impression. He was wearing his only collared shirt, and his only tie. The night before, Kelley dropped some ringgit on matching dress shoes with thin rubber soles. Rubber was cheap in Malaysia. The country grew a healthy percentage of the world’s rubber plantations.

Kelley pushed through the glass doors. He came into the air-conditioned lobby from the dense, tropical heat. It was like hitting an invisible wall. His skin tightened.

Kelley stared across an ocean of marble. There was a car-sized reception desk on the far side. Four more guards stood nearby.

The guards outside had let Kelley through without a hassle. The guards inside didn’t. Two moved to intercept Kelley as he headed for the desk. They wordlessly blocked his path. The first guard was a meaty dude. He smelled like sandalwood cologne. The tag on his uniform shirt said: Min.

Kelley said, “IPC.”

The guards traded a look. Min the guard cocked his head. Telling Kelley he could proceed to the desk. He did. They followed him.

Kelley found a Malay receptionist. Mid-twenties. Magazine-cover lovely. Gorgeous body. Stylish clothes. Eyes like a jungle cat. Kelley wanted to write poetry about her, with his tongue as the pen and her skin as the paper. He wanted to drop out of a tree and surprise her as she drank from a stream.

His blood heated. It had been a while. Kelley had a rotation of favorite hookers in various ports, Kuala Lumpur included. He liked the regularity. But, since Brody’s untimely death a month hence, he’d been too busy to take care of business. It wasn’t an issue until his eyes drifted to the receptionist’s silk blouse and the wonders it held.

Woman like this behind the desk, no wonder they needed so many guards in the joint. She asked Kelley if she could help him. In more ways than one, he thought.

“I have a job interview with IPC,” he lied.

“Sign the register, including your identity number.” Her voice was music. She could have read from the phone book, and Kelley would listen all day.

Kelley felt his face flush. She picked up on it. A beautiful woman knows the effect she has on men. She smiled, narrowing her eyes just enough. Kelley could tell where her thoughts were going.

It took ten full minutes to get past the guards. IPC had tight security. Kelley came prepared. He gave them every paper they asked for, every number ever assigned him. Through the process, it occurred to Kelley that living in today’s world meant collecting an endless series of numbers. The longer you live, the more numbers you get. It was like guessing a tree’s age by the number of rings. Cut a man down, and it looks like a pi sequence.

Kelley thought about the man he recently cut down. He vaguely wondered what the last number in his stream was.

It got his mind off the receptionist. Kelley focused on the reason he was here.

They finally approved his entrance. Min the sandalwood-scented guard led him to the elevators.

…

Three minutes ago.

Sanjay leaned into the phone. “A job interview?” Again transitioning back to Malay. “There’s nothing like that on the schedule.”

“That’s what he says,” the main lobby receptionist answered. Sanjay frowned. This made no sense. Unless…

“What does he look like?”

“White guy. Blonde. Good looking. Tough guy, maybe a shipsman or a soldier or something.”

She was practically purring. Sanjay wondered if the guy was standing right there, and if he understood Malay.

Sanjay immediately thought of the moron call. A hand flew to his forehead. “Tell him to go away!”

“No. Send him up.”

The disembodied voice came from the tiny speakers hidden throughout the IPC offices. Loud and sudden. Like God interjecting. A man. Irish brogue-inflected English, thick enough that ‘Send him up’ became ‘Saynd hem oop.’

“Tell Han” – ‘Tayell Hehn’ – “to stop whatever he’s doing and see this guy. I’ll pull his ID from the security desk and run ‘im.”

Whenever the boss spoke, Sanjay’s eyes unconsciously drifted to the ceiling. There was nothing for him to see. It was a reaction to what might as well have been a voice from the sky. The boss could hear and see everything that happened in IPC. The men and women who worked at IPC rarely saw their boss in return. Like the Great and Powerful Oz, he preferred to direct the agency’s efforts against Pan-Asian piracy from behind the scenes.

Cuchulain was a private man.

…

Now.

Kelley stepped off the elevator. He took one look at the neat, officious East Indian man behind the desk and knew this was the prick on the phone. But Kelley wasn’t here to start trouble. At least, not with this guy.

“Director Han.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“You know I don’t. That sweet little piece behind the front desk called me up. You know my name, you know the lie I told. But you buzzed me up, anyway. Which means he’ll see me. Quit wasting my time.”

Sanjay briefly imagined stabbing this rude idiot in the heart. But he smiled in his headset and pushed a button on the phone.

“Director Han? I have Ryan Kelley here to see you.”

Listened. Nodded. Met Kelley’s eyes.

“He’s available to see you right now. Just step through to the door to your left. Can I get you something to drink?”

Kelley ignored him and went through the door on his left.

The moment the door latched behind Kelley, Sanjay’s phone rang.

It was Cuchulain. Calling on the inter-office phone line so Kelley wouldn’t hear the speakers. “It would be difficult to find another office manager fluent in six languages. But not impossible. Quit wasting IPC’s time and giving our visitors shit. Understand?” Click.

Sanjay kept his face impassive. Stared straight ahead. Knowing he was watched. Inside he boiled. Getting a hard time from two white guys in the space of a minute could turn a rational man into a racist.

…

Kelley found himself in a tiny foyer. Three doors. He tried the knobs. All three were locked. He thought the East Indian guy was fucking with him. Kelley turned to go back in the office and dump him out of his chair when the center door opened.

William Han. Director of the Center. A moon-faced Malaysian in a white shirt. He wore a badge. Han was fat. He moved slowly, like he was full of rocks. Short cop hair. Graying at the temples. Flat, black, Malaysian eyes. Seeing everything. Giving away nothing. Except a calm smile.

“Mister Kelley?”

They shook hands. Kelley followed Han.

They went into IPC’s chic-but-functional conference room. Three walls of glass looked out upon the IPC office. The fourth wall was opaque. Dominated by a map of the world. Red pins marked spots in the Caribbean and off the cost of Africa. Many more stabbed the area around Kuala Lumpur, concentrated on the Straits of Malacca.

Kelley knew unseen people were running his whole life history right now. Han didn’t start with the usual who-are-you preamble. Han got right to it.

“What can I do for you?”

Kelley walked over to the map, looking it over. “I’m looking for a pirate.”

Han said, “We don’t keep pirates here, Mister Kelley.”

Kelley cocked his head.

“You’d do better looking for pirates where they operate,” Han said. He fluttered a hand at the wall map. “Those are all recent piratical activities.”

There were a lot of pins.

Han joined Kelley next to the map. His cold eyes flicked across the pins. He plucked one pin out. Held it in front of Kelley’s face.

“This one. Pirates killed everyone on a tugboat pulling a big barge of copper ingots worth ten million dollars. We had an informer inside the dockworkers, so we took the pirates down when they landed. Only their leader escaped.”

“King Pirate?”

Something flickered across Han’s face. “No. One of his top three lieutenants. Fong Sai-Yuk. We’ve been after him for years. He’s too smart. Even with our inside men giving us info, he’s always three steps ahead. Fong’s like a ghost.”

Without turning, Kelley asked, “Do you have any pictures? Anything distinctive about him?”

Han nodded. “Fong likes bling. Necklaces. Earrings. Bracelets.”

“Rings?”

“He likes rings best of all. He buys new bling after every raid. The only piece he keeps no matter what is a ring. Gold. Three dragons, each biting the other’s tail. Their eyes are jade. We’ve heard it’s an heirloom. His mother gave it to him.” Han finally got to the inevitable question. “Is he the pirate you’re looking for?”

Kelley answered with a wry half-smile. Mirthless. It made him look like a sniper squinting into a scope.

“You’re wrong about Fong Sai-Yuk. That ring. It was from his stepmother. On his eighteenth birthday. A week later, he hit the seas on a raid. A rival pirate gang came looking for him. They found her instead. Fong was gone for three days. The gang stayed in the house with his stepmom. Having their fun. They finally got bored of waiting and split. Fong eventually came back and found what was left of her.” Kelley nailed Han with his eyes. Letting the mental image sink in.

“Each one of those guys, Fong tracked down. Cut off their dicks and shoved them down their throats. Every member of that gang died choking on their bloody cocks. Fong proved he was no one to fuck with. But he still had a soft spot in his heart for poor old stepmom. That’s why he kept the ring.” He paused.

“This ring.”

Kelley reached into his pocket. He took out Fong’s gold dragon ring. He flicked it like a quarter. It landed on the conference room table. Its tinging and rattling filled the room. The ring at last rolled to a stop.

Han considered Kelley for a long time in silence. He finally picked it up. Gave it a close look. Han had spent a lot of time staring at grainy, black-and-white surveillance photos, zoomed in on the ring Fong wore. Photos in their database. A detailed description from witnesses given to their agents. And here it was, between thumb and forefinger.

Cuchulain’s disembodied voice boomed from the speakers. Breaking the silence. “Yer hired.”

Kelley did a double-take. “What the hell is that?!”

“I’m Cuchulain. I run the IPC. I’m the top guy here.”

Kelley’s eyes roamed everywhere and nowhere. Searching for whatever camera this guy was using to watch him. He motioned to Han. “Then who’s this cat?”

“My right-hand man in the office.”

Han was used to speaking with Cuchulain through the speaker. Instead of searching the ceiling like Sanjay and others did, he picked a spot on the wall and addressed it as if Cuchulain were standing there. He held up the ring.

“This could be a fake.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Where do you think, a pawn shop? I pulled it off of Fong’s hand. He didn’t need it anymore.”

“Why did you bring it to us?”

“I’m looking for King Pirate.”

Cuchulain and Han chuckled. It was an odd effect; one live in the room, the other coming over a speaker.

Kelley frowned. “I ain’t kidding.”

“Didn’t think you were, Mister Kelley. You say ‘King Pirate’ as though he could be found in a bar. Like it’s that easy. We’ve been hunting him for years. The man has never been caught on film.”

“I found Fong Sai-Yuk. Took me three weeks, but I found him. And he was in a bar when I caught up. The same Fong you guys have been tracking for years. The guy Han here called ‘a ghost.’” Kelley grimaced. “He is now. So you are the last two guys in KL who should be laughing like I’m some chump. This office. These ‘inside men.’ Your cute little conference room. Fuck you.”

Kelley could tell that, behind the placid Malaysian exterior, Han was ready to go ape shit. He liked it that way. Angry men didn’t think. They reacted. To what Kelley did or said. That made him in control.

Cuchulain was a different story. He was completely removed from the situation. This office was his realm. Kelley realized this Cuchulain knew what he was doing. But the absolute control only extended to the boundaries of the office. Kelley looked around. Just as Han had said, no pirates in here. Just pictures of pirates, and a bunch of peckers like Sanjay and Han staring at them. For all the good it did. The pirates were out on the water. So who gave a shit? Kelley wondered if even the pirates did. He was already losing patience with these limp-dicks.

But they might know something about King Pirate. Kelley had come up dry. Now he was here.

Han took a deep breath. Re-asked his first question, this time measuring his tone. “What can we do for you, Mister Kelley?”

“I asked around. I checked out your website and did some research. You guys have a database. I can hunt, but I’m just one guy. I’ve only been looking for King Pirate for a month. I’m sure you guys have some pile of information in these hard drives. I figure, if I could check it out, it’d give me a lead. One lead’ll turn into another. And I’ll find King Pirate.

“To be perfectly, one-hundred percent clear: I want access to your pirate info database. That’s all I want.

“I understand this is all super-secret, and I’m not in here pushing pencils and listening to some fat guy yell into a speaker at people – “

“Fat guy?”

“Am I wrong?”

Cuchulain didn’t answer.

“You’re in an air conditioned office all day watching Han answer a phone. I’m out there looking. On the water. In the heat. I’m out there looking. I don’t need inside men. I am an inside man. With some leads, I’ll find King Pirate. And I’ll kill him. It’s a win-win situation if you gimme a lead. Gimme access to your database. What do you say?”

“Why do you want him dead, Mister Kelley?”

“He sent me something in an envelope, and I want to return it,” Kelley said. He left it at that. Kelley didn’t feel now was the time to let them know Brody’s ear was in a cooler full of dry ice in his rented storage unit. It might give them the wrong impression of the kind of man he was.

Han said, “I’ll have you know, we work in this office between raids. Our security is tight because we hit the pirates head-on, where it hurts the most. We take out crews where we find them. The lucky ones don’t make it to prison.”

Kelley gave him an up-and-down. I’m sure you’re out front with a machine-gun in each hand, pal.

After pondering in silence, Cuchulain made himself known. “By international mandate, only members of this agency are cleared to fully search our database. You want leads, you’d have to join us.”

Kelley cast a disdainful gaze at the cold office around him. “I don’t do office work.”

“Didn’t say you would,” Cuchulain continued. “What I’d like to know is, how’d you find Fong Sai-Yuk? And can you find the other two lieutenants?”

“Probably. Especially if I’m not doing everything by myself.”

“You won’t be,” Cuchulain said, the words coming out ‘Yeh wun.’ “And you’re right. We have a lot of information compiled. But we don’t always know what we’re looking at, or what we should be looking for. If you join, you’ll earn the clearance we both need to get you involved. And with you involved, we’ll find King Pirate’s two lieutenants. They’re likely the only way to get to the King, at last.”

It seemed like the way to go. But the last thing in the world Kelley wanted to do was join a government organization, wear a badge and take orders from a speaker voice. Hell. He tracked down Fong. The other two would be more alert by now. Would make things harder, but not impossible. Nothing is impossible in this world, if you set your mind to it and sacrifice everything to see it done.

Kelley shook his head, musing. Simply said, “Bullshit,” and headed for the door. Out of here. Into the open air. He threw open the door.

And almost ran straight into the perfection of the female form.

Everyone’s born with a sexual type, something in someone that flips their ultimate switch. It could be a nationality, an attitude, a style. Kelley had several types. The biggest one, nestled at the base of his psyche, was a deep longing for haughty Russian women.

When he was a kid, Kelley watched a movie called Weird Science. In it, these two high school geeks invented a woman-making machine. You type in everything you want in a woman and, poof, out she comes. If Kelley ever got a crack at that machine, the woman who popped out would be no different from the one now standing in front of him.

One arched eyebrow cocked in vague curiosity. Soft brown eyes floating in white skin. It was beyond Kelley’s ability to take his eyes off her pooched lips. Russian women did this thing where they press their lips together just a tiny bit whenever they notice a man watching them. If they have thin lips, it creates something like a miniature duck bill. But if those lips were full, Lord help weak men. In her heels, she was almost exactly as tall as Kelley. Every kiss would be a bed kiss. She moved smoothly into the room. Grace and power in her body. Kelley was a fighter. He could tell at a glance if someone had training. Three steps in, Kelley knew she was a dangerous woman to cross. In her eyes. In her movements. In the scent of expensive perfume, mild enough to merely entice. She wore an outfit that cost enough to buy a Malaysian house and the family in it. All tailored, form-fitting silks. Expertly put together. Kelley forgot about the receptionist downstairs. That girl was like a potted flower, pretty but forgettably common. This Russian goddess was a collector’s orchid. She was more woman than any man anywhere would know what to do with.

Except him.

With the same total, immediate devotion with which he had sent himself on a deadly road to avenge himself against King Pirate, Kelley decided he would rather die than suffer a life that didn’t include having this woman.

He would pursue her. Win her. Take her.

And he didn’t even know her goddamn name yet.

She blew straight past him. Dropped a thin stack of files on the conference table.

Han said, “Ryan Kelley, this is Anastasia Petrovskya. She works in Investigation.”

Kelley casually shook her hand. Met her eyes. She saw the desire gleaming in his. Kelley was trying to play it cool. She was too smart. She taunted him with an icy smile. It sharpened her high cheek bones. In most women, it would have given her a witchy look. For Anastasia, it only made Kelley wonder why a woman who could dominate any modeling agency in the world was chasing pirates. He’d find out.

“You seem bewildered, Mister Kelley. What did Cuchulain do to you?”

Cuchulain laughed to himself, a low rumble echoing through the hidden speakers. “I offered him a job.”

Anastasia idly flipped open one of the folders. Leafing through photos. “You’re in luck, Mister Kelley. Getting you to work at IPC is the worst thing Cuchulain can do to anybody. After you leave, you can go about life knowing everything will be happier and easier from here on out.”

Her voice lilted with a light St. Petersburg accent. Kelley felt goose bumps rise on the back of his neck. He zeroed on the photos.

“What are those?”

Without looking up, Anastasia told him, “They’re surveillance photos of the men we’re almost sure are King Pirate’s two remaining chiefs.”

How did she know he’d -- ? She saw the question in his eye. “Cuchulain asked me to pull the files while you were busy giving Director Han your atrocious American attitude, Mister Kelley. Though I do commend you for finding and eliminating Fong Sai-Yuk. You probably don’t know how many lives you’ve saved.”

Thirty seconds into each other’s lives, and they were already communing, unspoken. Kelley hated every moment he’d lived before meeting Anastasia. He’d never let her see it, if he could help it. She’d know, anyway. She heard his thoughts, saw them written in his eyes. She knew everything. He was helpless.

Which is why it was time to leave. Kelley scooped up one of the files. Headed back for the door.

“That file’s IPC property!” Han barked. Kelley ignored him.

“Where are you going?” Anastasia asked.

“I’m gonna find a bar and huddle over these until I work out how I’ll find these two.”

Cuchulain backed up Han. “I told you, our information is only for members of the IPC.”

Kelley looked hard at Han. Anastasia. “You can give me a badge when I come in tomorrow.” He have them a hard smile they didn’t understand. “Nine o’clock precisely.”

Han watched the unspoken exchange with eyes downward. Expressionless, but aware of the interplay between Kelley and Anastasia. He frowned at the wall spot he’d chosen for referring to Cuchulain.

“Don’t I have any say in this?”

“Of course you do, Director Han. So long as what you say has to do with making Kelley a member of the IPC.”

Han kept at it. “We’ll need a week to clear him with Interpol.”

“Are you an international criminal, Mister Kelley?” Anastasia crossed a leg. Bouncing her foot.

“Not yet.”

“I suppose I should say welcome aboard, Mister Kelley. Or should I call you Ryan?”

“Mister Kelley’s fine.”

Kelley winked and left the room. Gone. With the files.

…

They waited a moment. All three listening to Kelley’s departure through the office. Out of earshot. Then:

“Excellent work, Anastasia.”

“We’re making a terrible mistake on this guy, Cuchulain,” Han warned.

“Anastasia? What do you think?”

She closed her eyes. Thinking.

“We’re making a mistake. But for all the right reasons. Han’s right. This guy’s trouble. I say we harness that trouble and aim it at our targets.”

…

“You were an insurance investigator?”

“Yup. Good one, too.”

Kelley walked next to Anastasia, who was showing him around the IPC offices. His first day.

“That kind of investigation takes time. You don’t seem like a man who would like detail work.”

They were killing two birds with one stone. Kelley’s background check had come through. Interpol required a formal interview as well. Ordinarily, Han did the interview in the conference room.

Not this time.

Anastasia jotted notes into a PDA as they talked.

“I had assistants who did the grunt work. All I had to do was pretend I was the asshole, and figure out how I would pull the scam.”

“Why’d you quit, if you were so good?”

“They fired me. After a year, it was turning into laying bricks. The cases weren’t interesting anymore. Most people aren’t very smart. They don’t have imagination. Thing is, they think they’re these masterminds, like no one’s ever thought of their brilliant insurance fraud scheme before in the history of mankind. It’s never brilliant. Just stupid. Every once in a while, a cool case came down. But it didn’t happen enough. I started smoking a lot of weed during office hours. Boss had enough. Now that I think about it, I was pushing him to fire me so I could collect unemployment while I decided what to do.”

“What did you do?”

“Smoked more weed. Surfed.”

They came to the Control Room. Anastasia leaned forward for a retinal scan. When she was done, Kelley did the same. The door opened.

“I’m already in the system,” he said.

“Provisionally.”

“I want a badge.”

Anastasia curled a hand around his bicep. Lead him through the door. Kelley concentrated on the sensation. Making sure he remembered the light pressure of her fingers on his skin. Her warmth. He quietly inhaled her scent.

The Control Room had a tall ceiling. Soaring like a cathedral, or a war room. Computer terminals were arrayed in a semi-circle. Surrounding a two-story-tall display of the world. The whole thing reminded Kelley of pictures he’d seen of NASA’s Mission Control.

“What about your military service? Before your civilian life?”

Kelley lowered his voice, like he didn’t want to disturb any of the people working at the terminals. He didn’t care if they were disturbed. Kelley wanted an excuse to push the bubble of Anastasia’s personal space.

“You know I was a Marine,” he muttered.

Anastasia replied in a normal tone. Letting him know they didn’t have to whisper. Or turning it around on him?

“I mean, your specialty.”

Kelley dropped the whispering act. “Sniper.”

“Were you good at that, too?”

“Better than most.”

There were fifteen people working the Control Room. None of them older than forty. They were all nationalities. No Caucasians. Anastasia and Kelley stood out in the crowd. Literally: they were both tall.

“And after you surfed, you joined the Border Patrol.”

“For a stint.”

“There’s a flag on your file.”

Kelley deflected. He pointed at one of the screens. “What’re these rolling numbers?”

Anastasia followed his finger. “Registration numbers for ShipLok. It’s an emergency tracking system, like a LoJack for ships. If there’s a piracy, the captain can activate the locator link.”

“You find a lot of ships this way?”

“Some,” Anastasia told him. “But the pirates are getting smarter. They know where to look for it, and how to stop the signal when they find it. Unless the pirates are new or stupid, it’s little more than an early warning. ShipLok gets us into action that much more quickly.”

“Cool.”

“Your Border Guard experience – “

“I knew I’d hear about that.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Kelley put his hands behind his back as they strolled. Reluctantly rewinding old mental footage. He stopped next to a glowing plasma screen. Lines like sine waves flowed over a multi-colored map of the Asian seas.

“What’s this?”

“You’re dodging my question. Won’t look good in my report,” she said, only half-teasing.

Kelley stared at Anastasia. “Just tell me what it is and I’ll answer your question.

She relented. “Almost every square foot on Earth is claimed or regulated by someone. A country, a land-owner, whoever. No one owns the sea. The ships are like herds roaming a frontier. All we can do is track and arrest. Like a Wild West that will never be tamed.”

“You’re pretty up on American history.”

“It was my minor.”

“What was the major?”

“This is your interview, Mister Kelley.”

“You just perfectly described why I went to sea.” Kelley let her think about that. Closely watching to see if she dug it. No response. “Okay, the Border Guard thing.

“Friend of a friend scored me a shot at working with La Migra. I was running out of money. I didn’t wanna start dealing. I saw where that road went. I took the job. For a while, I stood in the booth checking trunks and shit. But ‘cause of my insurance work, they pulled me off that pretty quick. Got me into investigation.”

“How did you get the job, with all of your recent drug use? They don’t test for that in America?”

“Sure they do,” Kelley said with a grin. “I bought some clean piss from the guy who got me the job. He was cool. We surfed a lot.”

Anastasia didn’t know if Kelley was kidding with her. Kelley went back into his story.

“We were mostly tracking down coyote rings. Sometimes kidnappers. Sometimes drugs. We worked with other agencies, FBI, Homeland Security, all those guys. We got assigned to a combined operation with the DEA. They had info on a gang of Salvadoran mobsters. All of ‘em illegals, operating a meth lab out of a warehouse near the border. Most of the guys we went after were a bunch of jokers. Not these guys. All M9, former military. Armed and dangerous.

“Twenty of us kicked down doors. Managed to take down their look-outs, so we had total surprise on our side. Didn’t matter. They were well-trained, a hard-ass crew. Purely on instinct, they had guns in their hands and went at us. Card-playing one second, shootout the next. It was a war, total chaos.

“Now that I look back, the DEA could’ve done a better job on recon. Or us, I don’t know. Thing is, the boss had his little girl there. She was visiting, no idea. What kind of a guy brings his kid to a meth lab? Maybe it was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Who cares. She was there, in the middle of this crazy fucking gunfight. It was so loud we didn’t even hear her screaming. Like a trapped bunny, it was awful. She wasn’t hit, she was just scared.

“I had daddy pinned down. He was trying to save his kid. I let up on the gun and made for her. I wanted to get the kid first. To save her. And get this asshole to tell his guys to put down their weapons.

“He panicked. He took a shot at me.”

Anastasia listened, rapt. Finally, she said, “Did he hit his own daughter?”

“No,” Kelley said. “He gave me this.”

Kelley rolled up his sleeve to show her a puckered bullet wound on his left arm, in the flesh between the bicep and tricep.

“And, before I could stop myself, I gave him a bullet in return,” Kelley continued. “I shot him dead between the eyes. Right in front of his kid. By instinct.”

Anastasia met his gaze. Her breathing was shallow. Kelley could almost feel her fitting the scene he’d just described with the man standing before her. Deciding how she felt about it. Hating herself for being attracted to dangerous men.

“There was nothing different you could have done,” she said, her accent lilting over the words. Telling him she didn’t mind he was a killer. Now Kelley knew he had one foot in the door. He played the next card.

“No,” he growled. “You’re wrong. There are plenty of other things I could’ve done. Or, at least, the inquest told me so. But I shot the sonofabitch down, anyway. Daughter or not, he was a kidnapper and an asshole. Maybe the kid’ll be in therapy. I don’t give a fuck. Lots more people won’t suffer because her daddy got sent straight to hell. Maybe she’ll take it as a life lesson. Maybe she’ll come after me with a bullet of my own one day. Either way, I don’t care.”

Anastasia’s eyes widened. Shining, like a pair of blue suns. Her head lilted back. Exposing her neck.

“What do you care about, Mister Kelley?”

Kelley leaned into her ear. This time she didn’t pull back. And he muttered, close enough that she’d feel the vibration of his voice on her tender skin.

“King Pirate.”

With that, Kelley turned and walked away.

Anastasia blinked. Inwardly kicking herself. Not again.

Her cell phone rang. Rang again.

“Gonna answer that?” Kelley asked over his shoulder.

Anastasia nodded, breaking herself out of the reverie.

Cuchulain. “Do anything necessary to push through Interpol’s clearance. We need to get him in the field as soon as possible.”

“Agreed,” she simply replied, closing the phone. She stared at Kelley. Before he tears the walls down, she thought. For starters.

…

Two weeks later. The IPC conference room.

Director Han started. “Pirates boarded a tugboat off the coast of Thailand last night. The Atlas. It was pulling a barge loaded with teak logs from Burma.”

Anastasia was there. Kelley. And several lower-level IPC team members, some of them on loan for training from other international law enforcement agencies.

The Italian guy from Interpol said, “Why heist a bunch of logs?”