Devlin's Defiance: Book Two of the Devlin Quatrology (49 page)

“
No, you're –
oh, geez.”

“
Gotcha, Gordy.”

“
No, you didn't;
I wrote that.”

“
No, you didn't;
I did.”

“
No, you didn't;
I” --

“
Hey, our
agreement was that you'd take credit and the heat for the book, not
actually for having written it and now for writing the sequel.”

“
But I did and I
am.”

“
No, you didn't
and no, you're not.”

“
Yes, I did and
yes, I am.”

“
No, you –
look, Gordy, I can prove that I'm writing all this.”

“
Oh, yeah? How?”

“
Easy. I'll just
make this satphone go dead.”

“
And you think
that'll prove something?”

“
Yup.”

“
That won't prove
anything. You can't just – hello? Hello? What the hell?
Hello? Jake? Shit.”

Alternate Epilogue -
Part 2

June
4, 2013
5:41
a.m. local time

Jake, half-awake,
rolled over and slid his arm over Pam's side, planning to give her
his usual early-morning back caress and massage, leading to an
early-morning reprise of the Bolero.

As usual, his hand was
buried in Pam's rolls of back fat, but since he was accustomed to her
350-pound weight, he simply began to caress and massage her,
beginning at the neck and working his way down to where her shoulder
blades should be, he guessed, but he was, again as usual, unable to
dig deep enough into her flab to find them.

Pam began to stir,
snoring and snorting as she slowly drifted up from the deep sleep in
which she'd spent the last nine hours, her lips moving as she
murmured unintelligibly, saliva drooling out onto the pillow case.

As she rolled her bulk
toward Jake, he deftly rolled his 400-pound body away as best he
could, nearly falling off the side of the king-size bed, but escaping
being engulfed by Pam's sweating, gelatinous, doughy mass, as he did
every morning.

He reached to the
remote on the night table, clicked it, and the Bolero filled the
room.

Pam giggled and rolled
onto her back as Jake began his Everest-like climb to get himself on
top of her, ignoring the overpoweringly foul stench of her morning
breath and the stench and sight of her dark green-brown flatulence,
which hovered around the bed like that dark rain cloud in the old
hillbilly-based comic strip.

But he was interrupted
by a loud explosion, which, as he later found out from his foreman at
the sewer plant, had been a meth lab in the trailer eight lots down
from his and Pam's in a decrepit park near Florence, Alabama.

In a McMansion on the
Gulf in Bonita Springs, over the tapping of keys on a keyboard, a
male voice hissed, “Turn off my satphone, will ya? Take that!
Payback's a bitch, ain't it, Jake?” followed by gloating,
slightly sadistic laughter.

Alternate Epilogue -
Part 3

June
5, 2013
7:41
a.m. local time

The duellers stepped
off the required ten paces on the umpire's count, and on his “Now!”
they turned and fired. Each hoped his aim was true and his
opponent's was off. Each was half right.

The projectiles hit
both of them in the center of the chest, dropping both of them to the
ground, writhing in pain, until the gooey messes that emerged from
the projectiles had enveloped their bodies completely and they lay
still.

The umpire and the
seconds wrapped the bodies in plastic and hefted them into a small
van, which carried them off to be sealed further and then interred in
statues that would be donated to two parks, one in Iowa and one in
Ohio.

“
Now maybe you
two will finally stop behaving like children and quit fighting over
who wrote what. Geez. Gordy, just for making me fat and farty, you
get to be in a statue downwind of a rendering plant. And Jake, for
your stupidity in making Gordy pretend to have written the book, you
will be enshrined in a statue of a pig in a park in front of a feed
store.”

Additional Epilogue

November
27, 2013
11:47
a.m. local time

“
I've just got
one suggestion, Sondra, but it's important.”

“
Okay.”

“
Other than that,
I think it's great; accurate and fun.”

“
Good.”

“
Here's the
problem. I promised Debbie I would call her Dallas and not use her
actual pen name.”

“
Oh, right; that
slipped my mind. I'm so sorry.”

“
So you've got to
change all of those before it goes live. She'd never forgive me.
And BORN would ban her for life.”

“
Oh, geez; right.
I'll fix that right now. Hang on.”

“
You can do it
that quickly?”

“
Yup. I'll just
run a Find and Replace tool, and it'll automatically take care of it.
Can I put you on hold for a minute?”

“
Sure.”

A minute later, Sondra
came back on the line. “It's all done, all fixed.”

“
Wow, that
was
quick.”

“
Yup.”

“
Wait a minute.
Suppose, just suppose – and I didn't see any when I read
through it – but suppose there was a typo of her name in there,
like if you typed 'Norma,' with an M in there, instead of 'Dallas'?
Would it pick that up?”

“
Nope. But I
don't think I did that, or any other typos on her name.”

“
Oh, good; so
we're safe and so is Dallas.”

“
Yup.”

“
I hope you're
right, Sondra.”

“
99.9 percent.”

“
Better than the
Obamacare website. But that's a pretty low bar.”

“
For sure. I
haven't been able to even get on, and I've tried nine or ten times.”

“
Well, they've
promised to have it fixed this weekend.”

“
I hope so,
'cause my company canceled my policy.”

“
Oh, shit. That
sucks.”

“
Yeah. And he
said 'If you like your plan, you can keep your plan; and if you like
your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.'”

“
Yeah, like we
can believe anything this administration says.”

“
Mm-hmm.”

“
Just another
Obamacon, like joining with his buddies in the Senate to set up the
government shutdown so he could blame the Republicans. And the
brainwashed Obamabots'll buy it all.”

“
And I voted for
him. Twice. But I've learned my lesson.”

“
You know, of
course, that none of that would have happened if Donne were actually
in charge?”

“
I know.”

“
Not that the
Republicans are any more honest or any less corrupt.”

“
I know.”

“
I mean, if I'd
written the book ten or twelve years ago, it'd be the same book, but
with Bush instead of Obama. Not much difference in the subject.”

“
Hmm. I'll have
to think about that.”

“
Oops; I can feel
my blood pressure getting up to normal. Good. But enough politics
for now. Anything else?”

“
Well, I've still
got a question.”

“
Okay; shoot.”

“
Did you and
Rosemary and Dallas actually have that three-way?”

“
Now, Sondra, you
know a gentleman never kisses and tells.”

And so this story comes
to an end … for now

Enjoyed this read?
Tell your friends

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JakeDevlin at
JakeDevlin.com

And keep your eyes out
for the third book

in this series, coming
in late 2014

“
Devlin
Sub Rosa”

Both a sequel and a
prequel to this novel

and to “The
Devlin Deception”