Running Scared

Joey Sapphire wakes with a splitting headache and she is cold. The overhead hatch is open and the boat is rocking more than it should. Then it hits her. Her boat doesn’t have an overhead hatch and the reason the boat’s rocking is because it’s at anchor, not in a slip. She tries to remember who she’d left the party with. She couldn’t have had so much to drink that she’d go to someone else’s boat. She didn’t do that kind of stuff. She didn’t.

A fly lands on her stomach, she slaps it, feels something sticky, blood. And she’s nude. She doesn’t sleep that way, never has. She feels someone next to her, his skin is cold. She screams because he’s dead. After she gets a hold of herself she realizes that she’s in big trouble.

Joey is in Trinidad. She and her husband Mick are sailing around the world. She is minding the boat while Mick is visiting his parents in Texas and supposedly taking care of business. It doesn’t take her long to realize that she must have been drugged and it also doesn’t take her long to figure out that she has to do something about the body, because they hang murderers in Trinidad. She drags the body topside, weighs it down and rolls it overboard. Then she washes the blood off, finds her clothes, dresses and wipes down the boat, trying to erase any fingerprints she may have left around.

Finished, she eases herself into the dark water and swims to shore. On dry land, she starts the half mile trek toward the marina where her boat "Satisfaction" is safely anchored. She thinks she’s going to be all right. Nobody will ever find the body, therefore nobody will ever connect her to the crime. Then she’s shaken with an icy shock because the killer knows and he knows about her.

Nina Brava is a young, beautiful and pregnant Brazilian girl who is pinning away in Fortaleza, "Satisfaction’s" last port of call. She’d been careless, fallen in love with Mick Sapphire, didn’t use protection and now she’s faced with raising a baby alone. She’s mulling over her problem when she sees Mick swimming in the hotel pool. He’d come back. She tells him about the baby. He’s overjoyed and they get married in a quick ceremony.

Later, as Nina is about to enjoy her first night of wedded bliss, a giant red bearded man breaks into their hotel room and attacks Mick and Mick flees with red beard in pursuit, leaving Nina and that’s the last she sees of him. She goes through his things, finds a camera case stuffed with cash, but not much else. She knows where Mick’s boat is, so she packs her bags.

In Trinidad Joey is anxious. She can’t get a hold of Mick and someone has broken into her boat. She’s afraid it might have been the killer. Then, when she thinks things can’t get any worse, pregnant Nina shows up. Joey is furious, but she can’t blame the girl for her bigamist husband. Now both women have a score to settle with Mick and Joey believes he might be in Tobago, staying with a movie starlet he knows, so they book a flight, but agents working for the American First Lady have planted something that looks like drugs in Joey’s bag and she’s arrested on arrival, leaving Nina to fend for herself.

Alone in a strange country, Nina goes to the police station to see if she can bail out Joey, however the cops have no record of Joey’s arrest. Nina leaves dejected, is attacked on the street and wakes in the hospital, but sadly she loses her baby. With no one to help her, the only thing she can think of doing is to go back to Trinidad to Joey’s boat and wait for Mick to show up.

Meanwhile Joey escapes from the cops, manages to get to Trinidad by the hair of her chinny, chin chin and together Nina and Joey go to America with passports supplied by a Brazilian drug lord to elicit the help of Mick’s father, a world famous defense lawyer. Along the way they learn about Mick’s plan to blackmail the President of the United States and they decide to spoil it, but what they don’t know is that Mick would just as soon kill them as bat an eye and by the time they find out it may be too late.

My name is Ken Douglas and I’m an underpaid writer, so underpaid that I have to do my own bio here. I write thrillers and suspense stories. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years, ever since my wife Vesta and I sold everything we had and bought a boat. We didn’t really understand the sailing part, had never done it before, but heck we’d raced cars across the Australian desert going real fast, so how hard could boating be, after all they only go between four and ten miles per hour, slower sometimes.

We bought a big old raceboat, sixty feet and named it "Great White Wonder," after that first Bob Dylan bootleg. The boat was run down and ready for scrap, but we put two years of hard labor into it in Trinidad and made it new again. Then we hired someone to teach us how to sail it and we spent the next eight years cruising up and down the Caribbean island chain till the money ran out.

Below please see a brief description of my books, then I’ll write a little more about me.

DESPERATION MOON: Sara Hackett must save two little girls from dangerous kidnappers, but she doesn’t have the money to pay the ransom.

DEAD RINGER: Maggie steps into her dead twin’s life to get out of a bad marriage only to find that her twin had been murdered and now the killer is after her.

RUNNING SCARED: Joey Sapphire wakes next to a dead man and now the killer is after her. She is in trouble and she has nowhere to run.

TANGERINE DREAM, written with Jack Stewart: Incest, death, tragedy, betrayal and teenage homosexual love, I don’t know how, but somehow it all works out in this different kind of thriller.

DIAMOND SKY, written with Jack Stewart: Beth Shannon’s husband stole conflict diamonds from the Russian Mafia before he died. Now they're after Beth, because they think she knows where they are. And she does, only she doesn’t know it.

There you have it, can’t get much shorter than that.

Oh yeah, did I mention that we sold the boat because the money ran out? Take a chance on one of my books, I think you’ll get caught up by the stories and you’ll be helping Vesta and me in our quest to save up enough money so that we can buy another boat, smaller this time, and go cruising again.

The sea, sometimes it’s cold out there, sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes hard, sometimes it’s terrifying, but it’s never boring.

Best regards,

Ken Douglas