FREE! NOVEL: SECOND CHANCES: Life,Death, Near Death, And Places In Between

request a FREE PDF Copy of my novel SECOND CHANCES, Life, Death, Near Death, And Places In Between, PART ONE by sending an email to: ejdaniel@q.com

FIRST 3 CHAPTERS OF SAME MOON, SAME SKY

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THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE,A Nick & Dagger Mystery is available now at Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble NOOK

Read Chapter One here:

THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE, A Nick & Dagger Mystery


Dedicated to Cerberus of the Red Zone:
“Park at your own peril, dude”



Chapter One
GETTING TO KNOW YOU


"Have you ever had a female partner?"

"Fuck yeah." He made an obscene gyration with his hips and hands which was internationally recognized as the body language for the bump uglies.

"How many?" Coolly interested, but not arctic.

"About twenty-five if you omit my ex-wife. She chewed raw bacon rinds and spit. A lot. She was a virgin when I married her and a virgin when we divorced. I never knew for sure if she was female. The stuffed moose head she hung over the kitchen sink should of alerted me that something was wrong with this picture."

"I meant a female partner. Like me."

"Oh. That kind. No. You're my first," he said.

"I hope I'm all you've fantasized."

"If you're not, we'll get an annulment. I know all the judges."

"You're a smart-ass."

"Absolutely."

"I'm driving."

Detective Nicholas Parti handed Detective Dagmar Erskine the car keys and maneuvered her to the unmarked police car. Unmarked was a misnomer. The vehicle was beat to shit. Enormous holes had been chewed in the steel doors by rampant rust rats. Dagmar slid behind the wheel and found the crap was only skin deep. Zero to sixty in six seconds.

"Knock yourself out," Nick said. "How old are you anyway, Dagger?"

"Twenty-eight. What's it to you?"

"Dagger. How the fuck you get a name like Dagger?"

"My Daddy was a knife-thrower in the circus. One of his gin-soaked knife tosses wavered off course and impaled his assistant, who happened to be my Mother. They did in-utero surgery to save me."

"Bullshit. You're Dagmar."

"If you knew, why did you ask?"

"Why did you get yourself transferred, Detective Dagmar Irksome?"

"Erskine. Because your reputation under the covers was impossible to resist. I had to see for myself."

"Is that all?"

"No. I heard no one wanted to work with you because you were losing your edge."

"So this constitutes a charitable gesture toward a fellow officer?"

"Yes and no. I had an ulterior motive."

"Aha. A double-edged-dagger. Why did you become a cop?"

"All my life I tried to look like a waif. Then I had an epiphany. I joined the police academy so I could justify eating the occasional doughnut. By the time I graduated from the academy, I knew I'd made a mistake."

"Oh, fuckin' wonderful! Breakfast at Epiphany's."

"I love police work! It was the uniform that got me down. When I put on the baton, the weapon, the dropcases, the portable, the handcuffs, the flashlight, the beeper, and the gas, I waddled. I had to find a niche that allowed me some fashion freedom. Paste-ies, maybe, or a riding habit and custom boots."

"And a crop. Don't forget the crop."

"Calm down. You're thinking S & M. I don't carry a crop when I'm walking around. A crop is used to tactfully remind the horse who's on top."

Really? He hadn't experienced that. Nick's mind locked onto the boots/crop fantasy. Then he whipped himself into the moment and critiqued Dagger's fashion choices: faded jeans, beat-up jogging shoes, and a shabby Hawaiian shirt. He'd read her file when he heard she was going undercover with him. She'd attended some upper-crust academic institution like Ms. Wizened's Country Day School for Rich Girls. Her Dad probably owned vineyards, and Dagmar and Mom doubtless 'hunted to hounds'. Nick wondered how her parents reacted when their precious child left Stanford for the Police Academy.

"Welsh ponies," Dagger said out of the blue. (Perhaps it was stream of consciousness produced by the boot/crop stuff.) "Now there's a breed to be reckoned with," said Dagger. "My Dad wouldn't let me ride through his avocado orchards. It can transfer root rot from infected trees and annihilate the healthy ones," she continued knowledgeably, expecting Nick to care. (Which he should have, if he liked guacamole.) "By the time you notice the trees are bummed, it's all over."

"Okay, so I was wrong about the vineyard," he said.

"What?"

"Never mind."

"For this investigation, are we supposed to be lovers?" Dagger fastened her ice-blue irises on Nick's yellowing eyeballs sizing up his off-hours alcohol consumption. "If you clean up, it won't look too far-fetched for us to be getting it on."

What the hell was happening? He was the one who was in charge of sexual harassment. Didn't she know nothing? Oh well, he didn't really give a rat's ass. He'd carried the macho-predator ball way too long. He was tired. It was somebody else's turn.

THE ANTICS OF ERIK...OR ??????

I'm getting up at 4 A.M. again with a compulsion to write the sequel to SAME MOON, SAME SKY. I don't know where these bizarre ideas are coming from, so I'll just blame Erik. I'm at Chapter 18 and all kinds of twists and turns or spins. If you read it...eventually...you'll understand. But I won't ruin Same Moon, Same Sky by giving you any hints about what happens after that novel ends.

Meanwhile, I have 4 eBooks at Barnes and Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle. All are $2.99 and both B & N and Amazon offer FREE APPS to download to a MAC or PC. You don't have to have a reading device like Kindle,a Nook, an iPad, iPod etc.

BOOKS ON AMAZON & B &N

SAME MOON, SAME SKY (Elisa Medhus and E.J.Daniel)
NICE AIN'T ENOUGH AND CUTE DON'T COUNT, A Psychic Eye Mystery (E.J.Daniel)
HAND IN GLOVE, A Psychic Eye Mystery (E.J.Daniel)
BLOOD MEMORY, A Tale of the Supernatural (E.J.Daniel)

Coming soon to eBooks: THE DEFECTIVE DETECTIVE (E.J.Daniel) and THE GREAT GOTCHA (GHOSTLY TALES) (E.J.Daniel)

It's only 10 A.M. here in the Colorado Rockies and I'm already tired. I'm cheating here, the columbines haven't bloomed yet, but the Aspen trees turned green almost over night.

HOW TO GET A FREE APP TO READ e-BOOKS

Here's a link to the FREE NOOK APPs.

Available for MAC, PC, ANDROID, iPHONE, iPAD, Blackberry

Click on the blue highlighted "this" to take you there:

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Amazon Kindle also has FREE APPS. Go to one of my book pages and you'll see the FREE APPS on the right side of the page.

READ CHAPTER ONE OF MY DETECTIVE NOVEL: HAND IN GLOVE

Now available on Amazon as a Kindle eBook. To download and read there are FREE APPS at Kindle for MAC, PC, IPAD,IPOD, etc.

Also available at Barnes and Noble: NOOK. FREE APP available for reading.


HAND IN GLOVE
Sequel to : Nice Ain’t Enough And Cute Don’t Count

Chapter One Detached

I was heading North on Highway 101 at La Conchita (where the hill slid down on a lot of houses years ago and nobody in the government seemed to give a shit). Further on at Rincon, the surf would be awesome with surfers vying for waves. Those were the days.

Anyway, I couldn't complain, all was cool with my life. I groped for my cellphone and commanded Karma, my secretary-factotum, (who actually doesn't take well to commands from man, beast, or God) to lock up the office and go home and get into trouble with Dave, a police detective a couple decades younger who helps Karma not to act her age.

I was clipping along at ninety, testing whether I could lose control like the assholes on the road in cellphone never-never-land talking to 900 numbers with the inevitable ensuing distractions. (I actually leave the 900 numbers to others.)

Flawless weather. I wasn't gonna play private investigator for the balance of the day. I was going home to Santa Barbara after a trip to L.A. to a spy shop loaded to the hilt, credit card and otherwise, with all the latest in surveillance devices.

Karma says I'm psychic, but a little high-tech help never hurts, especially if I've kept Dracula hours and am feeling a little less than indefectible.

The damned ancient pickup truck ahead of me didn't have his load covered and tied down. Where's the CHP when you need them?

I weaved between lanes trying to avoid any airborne detritus, perhaps coconuts (not really coconuts, but being an over-age-in-grade-surfer I like the Hawaiian image). Couldn't get close enough to pass without getting rejectamenta thrown into my wind-shield. A replaced windshield is never the same. It leaks. It sucks.

Baskerville, my half-wolf-half-malamute, was riding shotgun. She liked the bucket seats in my new Toyota Tundra truck. Ditto the CD and all the rest of its expensive options which will take me about four hundred years to pay for. But I had to do it. My old pickup groaned to a halt when two hundred and twenty-eight thousand rolled up on the odometer. It's a bummer when old friends die. But, life is short. That's basically it, and I don't want to live on a basic level anymore. Hence my extreme paranoia and caution about damage to my new vehicle. I'll have plenty of time for regrets when some moron bounces a shopping cart off the pristine finish. I stayed back. Way back. Maybe, I thought, I'll get lucky and some idiot will pull a L.A. trick and fill in the gap between me and the brain-dead-half-baked-driver and get his share of the shit.

No such luck. Whoa! A glove went airborne out the passenger side window. It bounced? Something wasn't right. I was at a section of the freeway that wasn't freeway. I made a U-ie and cruised back to where I was before.

I pulled over on the shoulder and stopped when I caught sight of the glove which had also pulled over on the shoulder and stopped. I got out of my truck. ("No Baskie. You gotta stay. Roadkill is for rodents.") I assumed my best investigative stance: I kicked the glove. Nudged it, actually. It was heavy for a glove. I rolled it over on its back: palm up, fingers curled skyward. I prodded it again, gently, with the toe of my cowboy boot. It was solid. I maneuvered it with my other boot so I could see inside. Then I stooped down and had a look. HAND IN GLOVE. Grotesque beyond imagining! I can’t stand the sight of blood, and there's something about amputated limbs that really gets me down.

Could the driver possibly have known he'd lost a vital part? Was he driving with one hand? This one was the right. Guess he couldn't turn on the radio as well as he used to. I hoped his vehicle was an automatic. He'd better have leather upholstery (highly unlikely in that old tincan). Blood's a bitch to clean off fabric unless he or she knew to use OxiClean. If the driver were a she, I'd expect she'd know this. I'll have to be excused for this sexist assumption.

I returned to my car and dog. Cellphone. Time to raise a reaction from my cop-buddy: the conversation was more or less: "Hi Dave. How's it goin'? Not much. A bloody hand in a glove. Blah. Blah. Sure, I'll guard it. No, I won't let Baskie eat it.”

SHOULD I SEND ROYALTIES TO A GHOST?

Elisa Medhus, M.D. and I started communicating via email in late November 2010 after I found her blog about her son, Erik.

We started writing Same Moon, Same Sky on January 8, 2011. Then we decided to do a sequel, but instead that became PART TWO .This decision to write a PART TWO created all sorts of TIME problems which we had to go back and fix in PART ONE to make them consistent with PART TWO.

Writing a novel with someone I'd never met and putting her deceased son, Erik, (whom I'd never met) as the main (fictional) character was pretty strange. I got up every morning at 4 A.M. and sat in front of my computer without a clue what that chapter would be about. Then suddenly I'd start writing. I'd email that chapter to Elisa and she would comment and edit as necessary. The parts she wrote flowed seamlessly into my writing.

SAME MOON, SAME SKY is for sale at AMAZON KINDLE and BARNES AND NOBLE NOOK as a downloadable eBook. Elisa has added a thumbnail of the cover on her blog. The novel takes place in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The cover is a photo I took of the Colorado sky.

YESTERDAY, as I was reading Elisa's May 12, 2011 blog, ( click on the highlighted 'this' to get to channelingerik.com) this I read this comment from ERIK.

Elisa transcribed it from a channeling session she had on February 8, 2011...when we were ripping along with Part One. The "me" in the transcript is Elisa. The "Betty" is Erik's reference to me since he doesn't know I write as E.J. Daniel. (He hasn't been paying attention!) Now I can blame my typos on Erik. But honestly, I'm a lousy two finger typist...which is a good thing because I compose as I type and that allows my brain to keep up with my typing.

TRANSCRIPT FROM FEBRUARY 8, 2011:

Me: So, Erik, you’ve really been channeling tons of information to Betty for the book (Same Moon, Same Sky). She’s been cranking it out like a machine! She sent me some bound copies, and I want to help her out, so how do you think I can best do that. The novel is awesome. Very funny, lots of bad words, just as you’d expect—

Erik: It’s so easy to download information to Betty. We have to wait until we’re a little closer to 2012 before it really takes off, because then, people are gonna want to take comfort and find humor in spirituality. There’s so much fear based on death and the idea of the world ending, disasters and stuff like that.
__________________________________________________________________________________________

SO THAT'S WHERE ALL 'MY' IDEAS WERE COMING FROM. WELL, NOT ALL. YOU THINK I SHOULD SEND ERIK ROYALTIES? WHAT IS HIS ZIP CODE "OVER THERE"? I HOPE HE CONTINUES TO HELP ME WITH THE SEQUEL WE'RE WRITING. IT'S TENTATIVELY CALLED "T".