The Ripple Effect

John Crawley

Description

This novel is an anatomy of a mass shooting. The story of the lives it touches and the consequences of gun violence in America. A mass shooting sets off a ripple effect like a rock hitting the surface of a pond, that spreads and widens its wake as it reaches out across our nation.
The Ripple Effect:
It is the 13th of November and Lincoln, Texas will never be the same.
Shortly before noon, some fifty people, workers and diners, are in a food court at Lincoln Mall in a small town in East Texas. Others are drifting in for a quick lunch, while they shop for a last-minute gift for a sister's birthday or a new belt, or a new pair of shoes. A young gunman appears out of the dark shadows of the mall and begins shooting; his assault rifle firing shell after shell until mass carnage flows. A class of preschoolers. Three old ladies meeting for their weekly hour of gossip about children and grandchildren. Burger cooks. Ice cream dippers. A salad store employee. A Texas Ranger. A man trying to find an anniversary gift for a wife that he is slowly losing, because he works too much. The reader is introduced to the people who will be in that food court in a matter of minutes. Some will live. Others...will not.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Chiltern Radio Network
• Suspense
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 16 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665746724
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE RIPPLE EFFECT
JOHN CRAWLEY


Copyright © 2023 John Crawley.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 
 
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
Cover design concept: Meredith Crawley
Cover art execution Archway Design Team
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4673-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4672-4 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023913055
 
 
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 07/14/2023
Contents
A note from the author
 
Chapter 1Father Mise
Chapter 2Mathew Stevens
Chapter 3The Parkers
Chapter 4Perry Reynolds
Chapter 5July Williams Bell
Chapter 6Texas Ranger Will Little
Chapter 7Alice Dixon
Chapter 8The Pre Schoolers
Chapter 9Hail Mary full of grace…
Chapter 10Matt Stevens (again)
Chapter 11Car 7
Chapter 12Where’s my daughter?
Chapter 13Royce Hursh and Eve Kholemann
Chapter 14Bob McAdoo
Chapter 15Father Mise (in a daze)
Chapter 16Earl Stevens
Chapter 17Julian Meadow
Chapter 18The Manhunt
Chapter 19The last to die.
Chapter 20Officer Hampton and Captain Morris Littleton
Chapter 21A few questions. Please?
Chapter 22Eduardo Parker
Chapter 23Todd Dixon
Chapter 24Jane Reynolds
Chapter 25Robert and Pella Williams
Chapter 26Earl Stevens
Chapter 27Bob McAdoo with Father Mise
Chapter 28The home of Texas Ranger Will Little
Chapter 29Randy White
Chapter 30The First Funeral
Chapter 31a private family service
Chapter 32the interview
Chapter 33the press conference and the barber shop
Chapter 34Eduardo Parker.
Chapter 35cleaning up the aftermath
Chapter 36road trip (part one)
Chapter 37the office of the National Gun Association
Chapter 38the stall
Chapter 39Thou shalt not shout.
Chapter 40The President would like to see you.
Chapter 41Everybody has something to hide. Find his closet.
Chapter 42Remember to close the gates.
Chapter 43Judith and Hal Davenport
Chapter 44Welcome to the network.
Chapter 45Be on your best behavior, Senator Cross.
Chapter 46The same old song and dance now has a new tune
Chapter 47A recording is worth a thousand pictures.
Chapter 48An eye for an eye
Chapter 49It has to end here. And now.
Chapter 50All Alone
Chapter 51The President needs a word with you
Chapter 52Sometimes words are not enough
Chapter 53 I have a favor to ask
Chapter 54The following is an editorial comment
Chapter 55Hunker down. The worst is yet to come.
Chapter 56Karen Ray
 
About the Author

 
 
 
 
Other novels and books by John Crawley
Among the Aspen
Baby Change Everything
The House Next Door
Under the Radar
The Uncivil War
Between Sunday’s Columns
The Man on the Grassy Knoll
Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt (a novella)
Stuff
Dream Chaser (a serial e-novel)
The Myth Makers
Fishing Lessons
Letters from Paris
The Perfect Food
The End
Lincoln, Texas USA (Short Stories including a print
version of Dream Chaser)
Wrong Number (including the novella The Gift.)
Of Poets and Old Men (a collection of poetry)
One Elephant Too Many

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Dedicated to David van Oz
Who, a long time ago, taught me to fight for truth.
A note from the author
The day after I turned the manuscript of this book over to my editor, another mass shooting occurred in America: at a mall in Allen, Texas – a suburb of Dallas. At this point eight are dead including a three year old.
My hope is this book will help light a fire under America and her political leaders to get this problem solved.
On another note, my daughter, who lives in Europe was about to board a plane to come visit my wife and me, when the airlines handed her and her partner an advisory notice that The United States was considered an “at risk” nation in which to travel. Think about that for a moment. Your country and mine is thought to be so wild and so accommodating of guns and gun violence visitors are warned travel could be unsafe.
God help us.
1
Father Mise
M ajor historical milestones are populated with the questions, “where were you when”…people ask each other, “where were you and what were you doing when…when John Kennedy was assassinated? … when Martin Luther King was shot?... or how about Robert Kennedy?”… “What were you doing when you first saw the planes crash into the twin towers on 9-11? Where were you when you first heard about Columbine? About Sandy Hook? About Uvalde? Where were you when you heard about Lincoln Mall?”
Remember? Father Richard Mise sure does.
It was the 13 th of November.
Shots rang out shortly prior to noon. Lincoln Township Mall. Twenty people dead. They had come to the mall to buy presents. To try on new shoes. To catch a pre-holiday sale. To have lunch with friends. Some were on a school outing, about to top off their lunch with ice cream. They were there for hundreds of reasons, and in an instant their lives were ended.
And Father Mise was squarely in the middle of the carnage.
Yes, it was the 13 th of November, a pleasantly cool day, just before noon.
If it weren’t fall, if it was in the heat of the summer, the waves of invisible radiation would be shimmering up from the blacktop roads, which stretched for miles around Grand Lake crisscrossing into and out of the oil fields and cattle ranches that make up the region– a region some call the last vestige of the Old Confederacy. The pine trees would be bent, not so much in a bow of respect, but from their desperate attempt to survive yet another year of drought in northeast Texas. The riverbanks would appear higher – taller – as the creeks and rivers recede lower and lower – the flow of the streams they cradled having lessened to a trickle. The lake itself would be showing her edges, like a woman wearing an evening gown pulled down on her shoulders. Rarely would a bird venture out from its protected shade and fly across the sweltering sky. Everybody – everything – would be moving in slow motion. Even time would seem to stand still in the oppressive heat of the summer. A lone cloud drifting over the sun in midday was cause for celebration and joy.
But in October – late October – just at the beginning of November – it finally rained. Not much. But enough to renew life and spirits in Lincoln, Texas.
Lincoln, Texas sits on the sandy loam of the eastern shore of Grand Lake. A great body of water created out of the dammed Sabine River, across the lake from its big sister, Kilgore and below Longview.
The town is perched on a rise above the valley into which the lake grew in the late 1950’s after the Corps of Engineers impounded the river. To its northeast is an extension of what remains of the northern arm of the Piney Woods of East Texas. Just north of Lincoln lies a band of red clay out of which has been mined a rich seam of grey-black lignite coal that fuels power plants, which dot the shores of the giant lake, sending their electrical waves to population centers as far away as Dallas to the west and Houston to the south.
To the southwest, are rolling sandy grasslands below which, were once home to the bountiful East Texas Woodbine oil pool; from whose deposits millions of barrels of crude and hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped to the surface making the region and some of its more fortunate inhabitants quite wealthy; while others continued to subsist as they always have, by the scrub of the parched land.
In the middle of the county, sits a small, humble town – Lincoln– that at one time was proud of its rich reserves of petroleum and coal, but today was waging a battle to keep its young people from leaving for new, more exciting- more profitable jobs. Trying to keep the schools at the top of the lists in the state. It’s a town, starting to ebb downward. But just.
The slide was just starting.
That morning, November 13 th , Father Mise pulled his small Chevy sedan up to the self-service island of Eddie McAlister’s Shell station. It was about the only one in town that had full-service mechanical bays. The station offered everything from car washes to complete engine overhauls. Eddie had won a contract from the Township of Lincoln to fuel and service the patrol cars while they were on duty. Something he did between the hours of seven in the morning until seven at night, when he turned the lights off and went home.
Parked next to Father Mise’s sedan was patrol car No. 7. It was driven by Darrell Hampton, a paris