The KKK

(Length: 42,000+ words)

Fourth in the Somebody Special comedy romance series. Please see the book pages for Somebody Special and The Pimps for more information.

This is how it begins:

Chapter ONE

With a month to ourselves, Faye and I didn’t have a worry in the world as we traveled south on the New Jersey Turnpike. We had been planning little more than to relax in her home in the burbs of Baltimore. Just think, only the two of us. Um, well, the two of us and Sweetie, our golden retriever that insisted on hanging his head over the top of the front seat so he could whine whenever Faye decided to kiss my cheek or lean her head on my shoulder.

“When is your sister expecting us to visit?” As soon as I slid an arm around her shoulder, Sweetie whined for attention. “Shaddap,” I growled; he curled up on the back seat and said something in doggy language that I didn’t understand.

Faye extended a hand over the seat’s backrest and scratched the dog’s head. “I love you, too, honey bunch.” Then she turned her attention to me. “I told her we have a little cleaning up to do this weekend and promised we’d visit at the end of next week.”

“Is there much cleaning to do?” I asked, not that I minded doing that. Faye and I had been sharing the housework in my place.

“Not really.” She placed a hand on my thigh and casually slid it up and down a few times. “When I went down there last week, I removed all the sheets from the furniture and gave the place a good vacuuming. The kid next door has been mowing the lawn and weeding the gardens. I’m going to have to give him a little bonus when we get there.”

Now I have to do a little explaining, just in case you didn’t read “Somebody Special”, “The Pimps” and “The Terrorists”, preferably in that order. While working on a thesis for her master’s degree in sociology, Faye, who is a gorgeous redhead with a fantastic body, became a hooker in New York City. Uh huh, she really did.

Well, since her sister, Megan, ran a drug rehabilitation program in Baltimore, Faye sent some of the hookers who were on drugs down there for the cure. Of course, her pimp didn’t like that and shot her. In the head! And she died! So she’s really a ghost. I know. You don’t believe me.

Posing as her nonexistent, twin sister, Caroline, Faye organized the hookers in a part of midtown Manhattan and they formed a union. At the same time, she manipulated me into helping her to manipulate the Mafia into bumping off the pimp who had killed her. It even got messier. One of the outcomes, however, was that she and I fell in love with each other. By the way, the only other person who knows that Faye is a ghost is a former Vietnam commando named Bad Mike Murphy, but you’ll meet him later.

Looking down, I noticed a small band aid on Faye’s left index finger. “How did you cut yourself?”

Faye held her hand out for a few seconds and looked at it curiously. “I cut it last night while slicing some onions.” She shrugged as if having accepted a minor detail and returned her hand to the top of my thigh.

“Does it hurt?” I asked, even though it didn’t appear to be serious.

“Nope,” was all she said and kissed my cheek as a reward for my concern. But then, she said something else. “The strange thing is that it didn’t bleed.”

“Was it a deep cut?” I asked while paying more attention to the road than to our conversation.

“Deep enough,” she responded with a distance in her voice. “It should have bled a little.”

“Strange,” I said absently.

“Maybe not,” she murmured and held the finger up to look at it again.

“Why maybe not?”

Faye returned her head to my shoulder and grunted a laugh. “Did it ever occur to you that we make love almost every night?”

“Yes, it has,” I said and smiled broadly. “Not that I’m complaining. But what does that have to do with your finger not bleeding?”

Faye explained her thought. “Well, don’t most women my age have to refrain from having intercourse for about a week out of each month?”

Then I caught her drift. “So you’re saying you don’t bleed?” Never having done any research on ghosts before I had met her, that stuff was all new to me.

“I guess not.” She paused before explaining further. “Because I’m really dead.”

Confused, which was a chronic ailment of mine since having met Faye, I asked a stupid question. “Isn’t there an encyclopedia of ghost information around somewhere?” Surely, there had to be something like that on the Internet.

“Doubt it,” she said dismissingly. “I guess other ghosts just hang around to haunt houses, not to fall in love with investigative newspaper reporters.”

The second I opened the door that led to the back deck of Faye’s house, Sweetie dashed between my legs and was off to terrorize the squirrels he never caught. I took a few steps outside and took a deep breath of the clean, Maryland air. Life couldn’t have been better.

“Hey, Tony? How’s my favorite Yankee?”

I looked to my right and saw Steven, the kid who lived next-door. “Great,” I said and smiled. “What’ve you been up to, professor?”

He put a hand on the top railing of the three-foot-high fence and hopped over it. “I’m going to save the world from oil,” the sandy haired boy said with a broad smile as he shook my hand.

Already having been introduced to the seventeen-year-old’s extremely creative mind, I had no doubt that he was serious. “What cha working on?” I asked, mainly out of curiosity.

Although he didn’t look like the studious type at all, Steven gave me a quick rundown on his latest project. “I’m working on an electrical system that will generate more electricity than it’ll need to operate.” He looked at me hopefully. “Want to take a look at it?”

Having told Faye where I would be, I accompanied Steven to the neatly organized workshop over his family’s two car garage. I looked around the clean room and noticed several wooden cabinets with their doors closed, shelves with methodically arranged, labeled boxes and a sturdy, wooden table. On it, there was a seemingly simple contraption with wires connecting its components.

“Here,” Steven began, “I have a low wattage motor that runs off a large, nickel-cadmium battery. There are newer types of batteries with greater storage capacity, but that’s in the future. For now, though, this motor turns a generator that feeds more electricity into the battery than it takes to run it.”

I continued listening as he gave me a bunch of technical jargon about relay switches to turn off the motor when the battery approaches its capacity, voltage regulators, wattage output, conversion to alternating current and a few other things, all of which went over my head like a flock of nervous geese during hunting season.

Then he explained the reason for his device. “When this is perfected, it’ll be able to provide the electrical needs for a house and maybe even an apartment building or office building. The technology will even be useful in cars, trains, planes and ships. And…” He paused and held up a halting hand as if to stop me from commenting. “There won’t be any need for fuel oil, natural gas or gasoline.”

I had to hand it to him. The kid had some mind. “I guess the big oil companies and suppliers of electricity aren’t going to like that.”

Steven leaned toward me and chuckled conspiratorially. “Do we really care?” he asked.

We laughed about that for a few seconds before Steven showed me the progress he had achieved thus far. The thing actually ran a two hundred Watt bulb and stored more electricity than it used. Then I got an idea. “When you have a working model, I can do a story on it for my paper. Would you like that?”

“Sure!” he agreed excitedly. “You just have to give me time to take a patent out on it.”

I agreed, but I didn’t realize the problem my interest in his project would eventually cause for him.

On the following weekend, Faye and I went to a barbecue at the home of Megan and Robert Casey, her sister and brother-in-law. As usual, Megan disguised her few extra pounds under a pair of loose fitting jeans and an even looser fitting shirt. Robert, who was a minister, cut a handsome figure with graying temples and an athletic looking body that was probably the result of playing tennis and golf when he wasn’t busy with other things.

“Ready for another beer, Tony?” Robert asked over a shoulder as he flipped a hamburger on the grill.

As the ladies sat to my right, catching up on only those things Faye wanted her sister to know about, I hefted my can. “I’m still good, thanks.”

“Well, help yourself when you’re ready for another one,” Robert chuckled. “We’re not much on ceremony down here.” He flipped over another burger and walked back to sit next to me.

I looked toward the back of the property and watched Sweetie walking back and forth while apparently wondering how to get into the twenty-foot-long cage that housed Robert’s hunting dogs so he could play with them. Whenever his nose would get too close to the mess, the three dogs would start barking to warn him away. “Sure is peaceful down here,” I sighed and took a sip of beer.

“Yeah, we love it,” Robert said in a way that suggested he’d already found Heaven. “Too bad you and Faye can’t stay here.”

“Somebody’s gotta write about the bad guys up north,” I said and chuckled.

“And you do a great job of it.” Robert sounded proud of me. “The stories you did about those terrorists must have really knocked the tar out of them. I’m sure you set them back a few years.”

“I didn’t know you read the New York papers.” I was genuinely surprised.

“Get your paper every day.” Seemingly thinking about something, Robert shook his head. Then he said what was on his mind. “What gets me is that those Muslims think everyone believes that they really want peace.”

“Oh, they do,” I said sarcastically and smiled. “They just don’t say how they intend to achieve that peace.” I suddenly regretted not having changed the topic. Hopefully, Robert wouldn’t start preaching the need for another Crusade against Islam.

But he picked up on it. “They intend to achieve peace by converting the willing to Islam and killing the unwilling.” By then, his eyebrows were arched, and he appeared to be ready to jump to his feet and start promising Hell and damnation.

We were saved, however, by the appearance of two more guests. Faye’s cousin, Frank, who was a detective on the local police force, and his wife, an attractive woman with long, brown hair and large, brown eyes, joined us.

“Howdy, folks,” Frank said before he leaned over to kiss Faye on the cheek. Taking a step toward me, he extended a large hand and smiled. “You have to be Tony. Glad we’re finally getting the chance to meet.”

I stood, returned the greeting and nodded to Barbara, whom he introduced to me as his wife. “Faye has often spoken very highly of the two of you,” I threw in to keep the pleasant atmosphere flowing.

It wasn’t until an hour had passed, the food had been eaten and a case of beer had been consumed that Robert remembered the topic of our earlier conversation and picked it up again. “Frank, I was telling Tony about the problems those Muslims have been causing in the country.” He repeated his complaints as the rest of us listened politely.

Although seeming interested, Frank cleared his throat and changed the subject. “To tell you the truth, it’s not the Muslims I’m worried about.”

We all looked at him and waited, but I was apparently more interested in what he had to say than the others were.

Frank was silent for a long few moments. There was a look in his eyes that said he should have kept his mouth shut. But beer has a way of loosening someone’s tongue, so he went on while seeming to select his words carefully. “I think we’re going to have some major problems with the Ku Klux Klan.” He bit his lower lip as if to keep it from continuing.

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