“Working Vacation“, the new BoogeyMan e-book, is live on Amazon.

Here’s the blurb:

Martin Shelby, called the BoogeyMan by friend and foe, returns in two new stories.

In “The Devil Drinks Sweet Tea”, a young Shelby thought his Grandpa was just being grouchy about having to help out with the gardening. That is, of course, until Grandma’s geraniums spontaneously burst into flames and the lilies started chanting in Latin.

In “Working Vacation”, the BoogeyMan just wants to relax on the beach with his wife, but his plans change when an old friend tracks him down to call in a debt. Shelby races against the clock to find a missing client before the full weight of the world falls in on his quiet vacation.

Thanks much to the beta readers for all their suggestions and corrections, and many thanks to Irish Woman, who has had to listen to me babble about this one for a few weeks.  These are a lot of fun, and I seem to have developed a habit of going over them out loud.

This is a quick snippet from the first story in the book, The Devil Drinks Sweet Tea.  Please enjoy Working Vacation, and if you have a moment, I’d really appreciate an honest review up on Amazon or Goodreads.

I was about halfway through weeding the tomatoes and considering whether the potato patch needed work when I heard Grandpa calling my name.  I dropped the hoe and trotted around the side of the house, but stopped when I saw Grandpa coming from the front yard.

He didn’t wait for me to speak before he pointed toward the flower beds. “Go take a sniff over there and tell me what you smell.”

“Grandpa, I know what your farts smell like.”

He made an exasperated sound and waved me toward the petunias.  “Not that.  At least, not this time.”  He took my arm and started walking back toward the flowers.  “I swear, I smell sulphur over here.”

“Grandpa, really.  Is this like the time you ate too much egg salad when we were driving back from Nashville?”

“Boy, just tell me what you smell,” he ordered impatiently.

We stopped a few feet from the goldfish pond.  I looked sidewise at my grandfather and took a quick sniff, then another.  He was right.  There was something funky in the air, like old gym locker mixed with bad eggs.

“Algae?” I suggested.  “Maybe we need to clean out the pond a bit?”

The pond was Grandma’s front yard pride and joy, even though she kept the best flower garden in the county.  It was about ten yards long, about two yards across at its widest, and anywhere from six inches to three feet deep.  She had dug it all by hand one spring when I was little, and had lovingly raised dime store goldfish in it until some of them were almost a foot long.  Molesting the fish or playing with the waterfall was a sure way to earn a swat on the butt, no matter your age.

“Nah, it’s not that.  Cleaned out the filter last weekend.”

I took a few steps away from the pond and sniffed again.  “It’s stronger over here.”

“I hope nothing’s died under your Grandma’s flowers.  She won’t be happy if we tear them up trying to find it.”

“Maybe it’s the mulch.  Where you’d get it?”

“Same place as always, Jones Supply over in Simpsonville.”

He looked about the flower garden, then shrugged again.

“Might as well get this done before it starts storming.”  The ancient freckles on Grandpa’s nose came together as he scrunched up his face and examined the sky. Dark clouds were piling in from the east, and the breeze had returned to rustle the tall oak’s leaves.  It wasn’t enough to shade us from the sun or dry out my sweat-soaked tee shirt, but it promised rain in our near future. “We’ll figure it out after church tomorrow.”

I was walking back to the vegetable garden when the first tremor struck.  It felt like a freight train was running underneath the grass, and sounded like it too.  Grandpa’s dog, an old mutt named George, started barking from the back yard, and I heard the tree above me groan as its limbs shifted in the strengthening wind.  Then I heard my grandfather shout again.

The ground was still shaking as I skidded to a halt next to Grandpa, who stood where I had left him.  Around us, the front yard was coming apart.  Gouts of rich, black earth were flying up from the center of the rose bushes, while Grandma’s geraniums were beginning to smoke.  The smell of sulphur was almost overpowering, and the wind was whipping the trees and bushes back and forth.

Just as the geraniums burst into pillars of blue flame too bright to look at for long, the lilies started chanting in Latin.  At least I thought it was them.  The voices, deep and just a little off-key, were coming from their little stone-bordered plot.

I looked up to Grandpa, and saw that his head was cocked to one side, as if he had seen a three-headed rooster run out of the old coop out back and was wondering what in tarnation was going on.  As the geysers of mulch and topsoil grew in height and girth, he turned to me.

“Marty, you seeing this too?”