Paint the Silence

By Kevin Hunter

It's a dark windy night as the rain pelts down hard on a Louisiana highway.  Headlights appear out of a racing car.  Lightning flashes across the sky revealing an ethereal shape for a split second followed by a startling thunder.  Inside the car is psychic detective Ruston Bock who grasps the steering wheel tight and leans into the window. The rain cascades against the windshield like a giant shower curtain preventing him from seeing out of it. He squints trying to make out the road ahead.  What lies in front of him on his journey is the deranged and eccentric Granger family.  He'll discover they hold a wealth of disturbing secrets that can help him bring a New Orleans killer to justice.  Drama, action, horror, mystery, and thrills abound in this easy fun quick read.

TESTIMONIALS FROM READERS:

"I just read the whole "Paint The Silence" book tonight and holy cow!   Wow, what a different book than the authors spiritual books!!  Talk about drama and horror.  Wow!  I couldn't put it down once I started reading it and kept thinking what's next!   I liked it, but ohhhh so gory and sorta leaves you feeling acckkkk!!  Thank you for writing this great book!  Now I hope I can go to sleep!" - A Reader

"Unbelievable! I totally just read the book from cover to cover in one sitting and absolutely LOVED IT.  I can't even begin to wrap my mind around how a spiritual writer wrote something like this, but it reminds me of the movie, "Red State" and some clips covered on polygamy in New Mexico.  Anyway bravo!  This was written with class and style!" - A Reader

Chapter | 1 | Ruston Bock
Chapter | 2 | The Mansion
Chapter | 3 | The Dinner
Chapter | 4 | Logan Granger
Chapter | 5 | Confrontation
Chapter | 6 | Where's Donna?
Chapter | 7 | Serving Up Revenge
Chapter | 8 | Arresting Development
Chapter | 9 | The Bayou Swamp
Chapter | 10 | The Persecuted and the Damned
Chapter | 11 | Face Off
Chapter | 12 | Ruston's Rebirth
Chapter | 13 | Halloween
Chapter | 14 | Breaking and Entering
Chapter | 15 | The Brush with Evil

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warrior of Light Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781477416457

Book preview

Chapter  1

Ruston Bock

In the City of New Orleans, the French Quarter’s buildings, streets and architecture are prominent through Bourbon Street.  It’s a place where voodoo, occult and psychic shops are on grand display competing for attention with the equally fun of the bars.  Trailing over the swamps of the Bayou, the water is murky and thick with a sense of foreboding.  Trees are tall and creepy, sprouting out of the water, in and out and over the marshlands looking like ghostly apparitions.  Crocodiles crawl onto land as they trail after their prey.  Not far off is a vast grey graveyard with headstones in various shapes and sizes rising above ground.  Immortal shadowy shapes rush past in the distance behind them.  Huge mansions line the streets in a rich neighborhood in the Garden District.  The mansions grow ghostly and barren the further down the road you move.  One particular massive mansion structure looks as if it’s haunted.  It hides in the corner of a cul-de-sac shielded off by a forest of creepy crooked trees.  A dark spirit rests at the foot of the mansion fading away into the dreary daylight.

A rundown van drives into the parking lot of a huge recreational park.  Loud country rock music echoes around it.  Robert King, a large fat ass in his late forties is at the wheel with an American Flag bandana on his head.  He sports sunglasses and looks like he came out of the Jerry Garcia era.  He resembles the generic depiction of a white trash, whiskey and beer drinking hick.  He hops out of the van leaving his rock music blaring loud into the air.  He opens the sliding door of the van to allow the music full range.  His dog leaps playfully towards him, then races onto the grass in the park.  Robert whistles calling to him across the way.  He notices a couple of Creole men sitting on top of a park table.  One of them strums a guitar lazily.  A young girl does a round off in the distance to the amusement of a friend while two teenage boys play Frisbee on the grass.  A woman walks briskly pushing a stroller while her little boy glides next to her on a toy scooter. 

Robert dumps water out on the edge of the grass and returns to the back of the van through the opened sliding door.  Something moves fast behind him prompting a shriek of birds to take flight from a nearby tree.  Robert jumps and turns around, but there’s no one there.  He grunts and spits, then turns back towards the van straightening out crap and gear.

Out of nowhere....

He is knocked unconscious in the back of the head.  He falls and slumps into part of the back of the van.  The front of his body rests inside with the bottom half set outside. 

It’s nighttime and the howl of a man in agony fills up the walls of a dark cave.  Robert is on his back on a platform that is being lowered into this cave of blackness.  He screams with agony and fear.  Intense chirping of bats echo and rise through the cave as they approach the victim.  There are metal pipes, wooden clubs and table legs lying all over the dirt floor.  Someone stands at the bottom to greet Robert as he reaches the floor.  The man is unrecognizable in the shadows with a hideous sheet sewn mask resembling an altered version of a KKK clan member’s hood.  He wears orange-brown overalls with a white muscle t-shirt underneath.  His arms are muscular and the only thing visible about him.  He holds an axe in his hand, but this is no ordinary axe.  This one is made up of car parts.  The blade is a brake disc rotor cut in half, sharpened and welded to a metal pipe.  The faceless man moves at lightning speed towards Robert lifting the axe in the air and swinging it down hard.  Robert screams as the axe comes crashing down on him, but just before it hits him - lightning strikes!

NewOrleansFleur1

IT’S A DARK, WINDY night and the rain pelts down hard on a Louisiana highway.  Headlights appear out of a racing car.  Lightning flashes across the sky revealing an ethereal shape for a split second followed by startling thunder.  Inside the car is Ruston Bock, a handsome guy in his mid-thirties, who grasps the steering wheel tight and leans into the window. The rain cascades against the windshield like a giant shower curtain preventing him from seeing out of it.  He squints trying to make out the road ahead.  His girlfriend, Donna Seamus, is in the passenger seat uneasy and irritated.  She is a stunning young woman with blonde hair in her mid to late twenties who was voted, Most Beautiful in High School.  She was one of the popular girls then, but was prone to being arrogant about it.  It was a trophy she never felt she had to earn and yet was instead handed to her.  After High School, she grew lost when everyone scattered, moving away, heading off to College, or to get jobs.  It was as if someone pulled the rug from underneath her.  That was until she met Ruston. 

She was lost on her way to a class in College when she classically and purposely bumped into Ruston and dropped her books.  He was outside of a school course he was teaching on forensic research and investigation.  His handsome looks initially attracted her in along with the maturity and self confidence he carried with him.  He is ten years older than her, but she was done with the immaturity of the guys her own age.  Their only goal was getting into her pants which she didn’t seem to mind, but she started feeling pointless beyond her looks.  Her insecurities about everything other than her external beauty sprouted out in several directions like an entangled vine. 

Every now and then, Ruston shows Donna another side of himself.  This is where he anxiously appears as a different person altogether than the one she thinks she knows.  This anxiety grew from within him and has risen over time due to the fact that he can communicate with the dead.  This is a gift he is not particularly comfortable with, but since he has never been able to do anything about it, he accepts it ungraciously as if to be a blister on the bottom of his foot that he is stuck with. 

He was attracted to Donna when he met her, but was on to her game.  At the time they met five years ago, he didn’t seem to mind this conceitedness about her.  When you’re initially attracted to someone, you ignore the red flags right in front of you.  Nowadays he is suspicious and distrustful of her after discovering she went on a blind date with someone when they were taking a break from one another years ago.  She decided on the break, and he later realized that he should’ve seen right through that.  He did not know that taking a break meant seeing other people.  She typically denied that it was anything and that her friends set it up.  She went along with it to be a good sport.  Now whenever in Ruston’s presence she senses his skepticism and constant distrust as if she’s lugging around twenty pounds of guilt on her back.

The window of the car fogs up and Ruston frantically eyes around grabbing a cloth.  He wipes down the window in front of him when Donna reaches for it so he can focus on the road.

Here, I’ve got it.  She says wiping the window down as he puts his defrosters on high.  They have had their share of problems, but he still manages to appreciate her small measure of assistance.  Thanks.  He is troubled and concerned, I can’t figure out why Trinity hasn’t called me back.  It sounded urgent.  I’m sure something was wrong.

Donna rolls her eyes plopping the towel on the floor, Yeah, but isn’t it always like that with her?

Ruston is silently not appreciative of Donna’s distaste over Trinity.  He chalks it up to jealousy.  Trinity is much older and confident than Donna is and that threatens her.  He knows that Donna was a former snob in High School and now the remains have subsided revealing a wavering bitterness.  Whenever Donna saw Ruston and Trinity together, the animosity would run up her spine.   She sees them as having a natural ease with one another that seems beyond chummy.  They both more or less finish each other’s sentences and know what the other is going through without saying anything.  Donna found herself tumbling far down off her High School pedestal where she commanded those halls.  Now she realizes that nobody cares or is interested.

Lightning scatters across the horizon and thunder smacks down prompting them to jolt.  Ruston blanks out realizing his mind was somewhere else.  His eyes fill with emotion