Category: A Two Part Story
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BOONE DANIELS, PART II: The Trojan Pony
PART II OF A TWO PART STORY Boone Daniels moved into the Lincoln-Mercury Division with near-mythical status, the kind of reputation that got whispered about in elevators and cited in meetings by men who weren’t there but wished they had been. He was the architect behind a maneuver that laid bare General Motors’ greatest weakness…
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BOONE DANIELS, PART I: Mustangs and Buffaloes
PART I OF A TWO PART STORY “Are you sure we can trust this kid? He sounds like a hayseed.” The question came from the man in the darker blue suit, the one with the heavy watchband and the habit of asking questions only after he already knew the answer. He leaned back in his…
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NUTS & BOLTS, Part II
In a trifecta of fate that felt less like coincidence and more like a personal audit, Bolts Beaumont’s life came apart all at once. First came the sales reports. They arrived quietly, as bad news often does, buried inside routine emails and politely worded summaries. The Chevy SSRs were lingering. Not moving. Not selling. Sitting…
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NUTS & BOLTS, Part I
Detroit, early 2000s, had perfected the art of looking busy without appearing curious. The General Motors boardroom was a master class in that discipline. The African mahogany table dominated the room, long enough to suggest authority and wide enough to discourage intimacy. It had been polished so thoroughly over the decades that it reflected overhead…
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THE SILVER SPEEDSTER, PART II: The Cost of a Shine
Part II of a Two Part Story Cody didn’t sleep. He sat at the kitchen table with the lights off, staring at nothing while the house made its quiet nighttime noises: the fridge humming, the walls settling, the distant sound of a truck on I-10 like someone else’s life moving along just fine. Marissa sat…
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THE SILVER SPEEDSTER, PART I: Borrowed Shine
Part I of a Two Part Story Fort Stockton had a way of making a man feel like he was standing still while the world drove past at seventy-five, windows up, A/C on, and no intention of stopping for gas or gossip. That was especially true in late spring, when the wind came off the…
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THE SULTAN’S SANDCASTLE, Part II
Part II of II They said you couldn’t outrun a legend. But in Fort Stockton, all you needed was a 1978 Mercury Marquis — 400 cubic inches under the hood, rust under everything else — and a couple of good ways to keep folks guessing. It was five months to the day since the silver…
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THE SULTAN’S SANDCASTLE, Part I
Part I of II If you’d told the regulars at Grounds for Divorce that Fort Stockton would one day be blessed—in the biblical sense—by something called a Lamborghini LM002 Wagon by Diomante, they would’ve nodded politely and blamed your condition on dehydration, heatstroke, or Rusty Hammer’s expired beef jerky. Nobody in Pecos County had ever…
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THE BUFFALO BUS, Part II: The Resurrection
Part II of a two part story involving sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Or, just another day in Fort Stockton. Then the title to the Buffalo Bus wandered into a fog most of us call paperwork and reappeared in the name of Iwania Goodman, the mayor’s newest wife and longest-standing donor to his campaign, though one…
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THE BUFFALO BUS, Part I: The Arrest at the Amphitheater
Part I of a two part story involving sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Or, just another day in Fort Stockton. They called it the Buffalo Bus because calling it a miracle would’ve made the Baptists nervous. Thirty-five feet of pearl white and silver aluminum, the coach pulled into Fort Stockton like a traveling moonbeam: black-and-red stripes…