Hey friend,
Sometimes, as an author, you get a bug to create a certain type of story. I’ve always loved adventure stories, from Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island to movies like Indiana Jones. My parents wouldn’t let me have a whip, though :(
The first novel I ever published was an adventure story names Reagan’s Ashes. And I’m excited to get back into the genre with Penny Hendrix and the Charcoal Bullet. It’s the first book in a new series that I hope goes for a long time. I can’t wait for you to meet Penny Hendrix and Owen Sweeney, two high school friends reunited after eleven years… and a few secrets… apart.
The book takes place high in the mountains of Great Basin National Park in Nevada and deep in the caves underneath, with lots of thrills and banter and fun surprises. And, of course, being a Jim Heskett novel, there are some complex, morally-gray characters, as well as a twist or two…
Below is an excerpt of the book. Two chapters, 45oo words. We meet Penny and Owen after they’ve reconnected and decided to go on a road trip. The excerpt details their first hike together, toward a limestone arch in the desert. Of course, something crazy happens…
Great Basin, Nevada
They left the park and drove back around to the southern end to find the entrance to their first hiking jaunt, a trip up to Lexington Arch. Normally a six mile hike, a recent flash flood had washed out part of the road, necessitating a new trailhead and adding another mile to the beginning and end of the hike.
As they joined the bumpy road to the trailhead, Owen shifted in his seat. Penny had tried to ignore it to give him his space, but after a couple solid minutes of minor squirming, she figured she had to bring it up.
“Thinking about mountain lions?” Penny asked.
He pursed his lips and held his reply for a few seconds, then eventually nodded. “A bit. Are you not thinking about mountain lions?”
“Look, I’m not as hardcore as the parking lot guy with the poles and multiple spray weapons, but I do know what I’m doing.”
“Have you had a run-in with a deadly creature before?”
Penny wrinkled her nose as she flipped through hundreds of outdoor memories, looking for anything she might consider a deadly run-in. “I mean, sure. I’ve seen bears and wolves in California and angry-looking moose in Colorado and stuff like that. I’ve never had to punch a bear in the face, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He frowned. “I was hoping for a better story. Something with a least a little bear-punching.”
“I’ve been hiking and camping my whole life, and there are smart ways to deal with animal encounters.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Make plenty of noise when you’re moving, keep the headphones off and your eyes always looking, give any animal you see a wide berth. Most animals aren’t out looking for a fight, and they’ll get out of your way when they hear you coming. Besides, didn’t I used to go hiking with you? You should be used to this.”
“I know,” he said, grinning. “I’m mostly messing with you. I was actually thinking about mountain lions, though. It’s been a few years since I ventured out onto hiking trails.”
The van shook left and right as it navigated a road ravaged by the flash flood. They didn’t have much room for further conversation inside the vehicle as Owen braced himself and Penny concentrated on not unleashing the contents of her van cabinets all over the interior. That had happened once in upstate New York, and the cleanup had been no fun.
Blankets and other objects strapped down across the van held on for dear life. For a full ten minutes they bounced around like this. The road evened out after the rough patch, and then ascended through the foothills of this southern section of the park, through cacti and wispy desert shrubs, to the newly-made trailhead. Both of them breathed a sigh of relief to see flat gravel, with a single other car parked in the makeshift lot.
Penny checked the interior of the van via her rearview, and everything still seemed intact. All the cabinet doors were still shut, and everything else looked good. “Looks like we made it in one piece.”
Owen raised his arms toward the roof and barked an ironic, “Huzzah!” and they both let out the tension in a slew of cackles. Penny slipped out of the car and opened the back door. She glanced at the other car in the lot, a black sedan turned brown from trail mud. Out of state license plate. It didn’t seem like the sort of car with enough clearance to make it over the washed-out sections of the road. Still, here it sat.
Owen noticed her noticing and stood beside her. “I hope they check to make sure their muffler is still attached.”
“No joke.”
She pulled her bag from the back of the van and removed her stiff hiking shoes, hydration bladders, sunscreen, and other small supplies. Fortunately, Owen had brought his own hiking boots, since she didn’t have anything that would fit his big, manly feet.
Once they were geared up, Owen raised an eyebrow at her. “No hiking poles like the dude from the parking lot?”
“I carry hiking poles if I’m going backpacking, but it’s overkill for daytime trips, if you ask me. This should only take us about three hours or so, unless something terrible happens.”
“Oh, wait,” Owen said, then he went back to the front of the van to dig inside his bag. A minute later, he came back holding a Nikon DSLR with a zoom lens.
“Owen Sweeney,” she said, “You didn’t tell me you had a nice camera. That thing looks expensive.”
He held it out like a proud papa, turning it to show every angle, and then twisting the zoom lens to extend it. “This is one thing I would definitely never pawn. I mean, hopefully never pawn. Knock on wood.”
“I knew there was a reason I brought you along.”
“Huh?”
“I’m going to write an article about treasure hunting in national parks. I have a crappy digital camera, but it’s not a nice DSLR, like yours. An article like this needs high quality photography to go along with it. I write the words, you take the pictures to appear next to them. Yeah, this feels like it was supposed to happen.”
Owen held the camera to his chest. “If you’re going to turn me into an indentured servant, then I’m going to need a press pass, a per diem, and a fierce renegotiation of my salary.”
“Heh. I’ll take it up to management and see what they say.”
“Fair enough,” he said, smiling, then his face flattened. “Seriously though, I’m happy to take pictures for you, if it’ll help me earn my keep. I don’t mind.”
“I appreciate that.”
Penny tightened her pack straps to keep the bag from slipping around, then she pointed toward the trail. Owen waved a hand for her to lead the way, and they set out. The first few hundred feet of the trail were lined with rock and gravel between the banks of rocky shrubs, then it morphed into a dirt trail leading up the hills. Morning sun shone down, with only a few puffs of clouds breaking the otherwise solid color. Smaller trees and shrubs marked the sides of the trail. They had limited shade overhead. Penny observed a few of the larger bristlecone pine trees off to the side, the gnarled and twisted things that had persisted for thousands of years.
“Is that one?” Owen asked, pointing to a tree with branches that swirled like corkscrews.
“Oldest living things on the planet,” she said, and noted signs of burn damage all over the tree. How stout must these trees be to survive dozens of devastating fires over the centuries? Their determination to survive through every natural disaster over the years impressed her. It also intimidated her, at the same time.
They hiked up, and soon conversations hushed as their breathing rates ticked up and up with the elevation. Hard to talk when you have to gasp for breath between every other word. Owen snapped pictures of bristlecone pines, lang-range shots of Notch Peak on the other side of the basin, and more of the curious jackrabbits darting around the hills… engorged bunny-like creatures with lengthy ears atop their fuzzy heads.
They first saw the arch ninety minutes into their excursion. Just beyond the curve of a hill, Penny could make out the top of the formation though the trees. Sitting on the side of a mountain face was a limestone rock bridge that looked sort of like a huge, lower-case n. The hole at the bottom middle seemed about fifty or sixty feet high, with as much distance underneath from one end of the arch to the other.
As they pushed higher and the arch came more clearly into view, Penny could see what she presumed were the two occupants of the mud-caked other vehicle left at the trailhead. A woman stood near the base of the arch, with her head pointed up. Actually, as Penny squinted, it seemed like the woman was pointing a camera or a phone toward the top of the arch. She held the phone with two hands, using one over it to shield it from the sun. Another woman was actually on the rock formation, standing atop the middle of the limestone where the arch flatted on top to provide a narrow walkway. She was roughly seventy feet up in the air.
“Is that a person?” Owen asked. “What is she doing?“
“Dancing,” Penny said, as the various elements came into focus and Penny formed an idea of how this scene had come to be. A young woman had apparently climbed the arch as her friend recorded from below. They were either attempting some social media challenge, or the climber was an influencer up there acting like an idiot to hawk shoes or sunscreen or something else.
“That doesn’t look smart.”
Penny picked up her pace a little, and Owen fell into step with no complaint. As they neared the formation, Penny could see the one on the ground looked like a teenager, underdressed in a tank top and shorts. Her shoulders were pink with sunburn. She didn’t seem to notice these two new hikers approaching, keeping her gaze pointed up at the other one, dancing high up in the air.
“First of all,” Owen said, “the sun is behind her subject, so they’re not going to be able to see anything in the video because of the glare and shadows. Second—“
But Owen didn’t list his second point, because something happened. The girl standing atop Lexington Arch increased the frenzy of her dance routine, twisting in place and throwing her arms everywhere. She slipped. It was as if her feet just gave out and she sank down the side of the arch’s peak. She managed to catch herself before plummeting to her death, and hung from the side of the rock formation’s side, bellowing in a crazed panic. Her legs swung free in the open air beneath the peak, her hands clinging to shallow holds.
“Shit,” Penny said as an epic battle of thoughts clashed in her brain. Without taking the time to parse them all, she broke out into a sprint to finish the last couple hundred feet to the base of the arch. Owen raced after her, but she didn’t look back.
Penny didn’t bother to stop and chat up the videographer. She looked about sixteen, with pigtails and too much makeup for a morning hike. The girl’s eyes and mouth were wide open, staring in horror up at her friend, hanging from the side of a rock, fifty or sixty feet in the air. The girl froze in place as Penny raced past her.
Penny hadn’t rock climbed in a couple years, but she could see the path up the arch. Normally, she would study the rock for several minutes, planning and rehearsing which hand and which foot would go into each hold. No time for that now, so she would have to improvise. At a glance, there seemed to be enough hand- and foot-holds to climb up without much problem. Getting back down was another story, though.
“I’m going up the side,” she said, and didn’t give Owen a chance to offer a comment. At the southern base of the arch, she dug her hands and feet into the natural indentations in the rock, grateful for a dry surface due to no rain this morning. Within a few movements, she found herself twenty feet up in the air. She kept her eyes high and tried not to think about the fact that she wore no climbing harness and there was no rope to clip into bolts on the way up. Feet first, then find the higher hand holds to match.
The girl above her yelped and cried, begging for someone to help. Her babbling pleas were mostly lost in the increasing wind as Penny climbed, but she didn’t need to hear the words to consume their intent.
“Hang on! I’m almost there!” Penny shouted, balancing the need to hurry with the desire not to plummet to her death. Her body wanted to move faster than possible, and she had to force herself to slow down and rapidly consider each placement of her hands and feet.
She scurried higher, to an even plane with the girl in danger. While the top of the peak was flat, the sides offered no gradual rounding. The tricky part would be lowering herself to the edge of the arch’s top to reach her. Fifteen feet away. Penny gritted her teeth and started moving toward her. Five feet away. Shift over the right hand and right foot, then pull even. Three feet away.
Penny had descended on the side of the arch, now fully exposed to the world. If her hands or feet came free of this rock at any point, she would splat on the ground below.
“I’ve got you,” Penny said as she whipped off her pack and set it on the arch above her.
“I don’t want to die!”
“You’re not going to die. We’re going to be fine.”
Penny drew her fifty-foot braided rope, then grimaced. “How much do you weigh?”
“One-oh-four.”
Penny pressed her lips tight and considered her next words carefully. Or, as carefully as she could in the half-a-second she allowed herself to think about it. “What’s your name?”
“Naomi.”
“Naomi, my name is Penelope. I need to ask you again, and this time, tell me the truth. It’s really important. How much do you weigh?”
“About a hundred and twenty pounds, I think. I’m not sure.”
Penny’s grimace turned into a scowl. The rope should hold, but it wasn’t a guarantee. It’s not as if she had a better option. This would either work, or they were dead. She and Naomi would know soon enough.
She looped the rope around her waist and through her own belt, tying it with a quick figure-8 knot. She tossed the other end around the girl’s waist and cinched it, then she climbed up and back over to the other side of the arch, to use the rounded rock peak itself as a fulcrum. If this went well, it should counterbalance and Penny could slowly lower the girl down. If not, Penny might fall backwards off the other side. She preferred the former option, not the latter. Still, she would know soon enough.
“You can let go now, Naomi. I’ve got you.”
“I can’t. I’m scared.”
“I’m supporting both of our weights now, so you have to, or we’re both going down. Let go and you’ll be fine. I’ve got you. I promise.”
“Oh my God!” Naomi said as she let go, and then did not immediately fall to her death. Penny felt the strain of holding those 120 pounds, and she braced herself against far edge of the plateau.
As soon as Penny started to let out the slack to lower Naomi, she ran into the second unavoidable problem. The rope was fifty feet, with some of that taken up by Penny’s slack. They were at least forty feet above the ground, maybe fifty or even sixty.
The rope wasn’t long enough. The realization dawned on her like a bathtub rapidly filling with frigid water.
“Owen, I need help!” she shouted as loud as she could, pointing her face down toward where she hoped to find him.
Owen had been standing next to the hanging girl’s friend, chatting with her. He stepped out into the open and looked up to Penny, shielding his eyes with a hand against his forehead. Then he looked at the girl, then to the ground, and he waved a thumbs-up at her. He hustled over to place himself directly beneath Naomi.
Thank God he gets it, Penny thought.
She let out the slack a little at a time. As agonizingly slow as she could. She fought the urge to release it fast, since her whole body ached from pressing against the rock. In a few more seconds, she reached the literal end of the rope. Penny leaned over to see Naomi hovering about ten feet in the air, above Owen. Clinging to the rope for dear life.
He stood with his legs wide and his arms out, ready to catch her. Naomi’s friend lingered to the side, head in hands, paralyzed with panic.
“I’m out of rope!” Penny shouted.
Penny couldn’t hear what Owen said to Naomi, but she could see the eye contact, the reassuring smile, and she watched as Naomi untied the knot and dropped the last ten feet. She crashed into Owen’s waiting arms. When she impacted, he dropped to one knee from the collision, but he managed to keep her aloft and off the ground. He grimaced, but held firm.
Penny scooted back over to the area she’d climbed, hoping to use the same holds down the arch. She spent a full minute before attempting the descent to let some of the adrenaline dissipate. Her brain still buzzed with a soup of fight-or-flight chemicals.
Soon after, she heaved a giant breath and started down. By the time she’d reached the bottom, her friend stood nearby, coiling the rope around his arm. Naomi and her friend were off to the side, huddled close, sobbing and holding each other.
Penny marched over to Owen, her knees feeling weak. She needed to sit. “Thank you,” she said to him, and he responded with a silent dip of the head.
The two young girls made a slow march toward Penny. Naomi seemed visibly shaken, her lower lip jittering. “You saved my life. I’m so sorry.”
“Was it worth it?” Owen asked as he finished coiling the rope.
Naomi flared her nostrils at him, sneering as if the whole thing had been his fault. “Asshole!” She and her friend turned away and stomped off, back down the trail. Penny considered calling after them, but she didn’t see a point. The episode had concluded, no sense in getting into an argument about it.
Once they were gone, Owen said, “It seemed like a reasonable question to me.”
“That’s your mistake, trying to reason with a teenage girl.”
Now they were alone, with a gentle breeze whooshing through the nearby brush. Penny examined her hands, scuffed and cut and scraped from the frenzy of the rescue mission.
“Well,” Owen said, “what are we doing next?”
***
Penny’s adrenaline levels didn’t return to normal right away. While she was used to vigorous exercise, it didn’t usually come along with death-defying stakes, too. Owen also seemed a little shaken up, but he mostly kept it to himself.
In the meantime, since they were alone here and the weather remained pleasant, there was no reason to hurry back to the van. Penny sat under the arch studying the basin valley below, collecting her thoughts. Her hands were dry and achey. She desperately wanted to bathe them in lotion, but that would have to wait until they returned to her vehicle.
Owen wandered, taking pictures of the arch and the valley, as well as closeup shots of various plants and other things in the area. She liked listening to the soft digital click each time he pressed the shutter button. As he neared her, he lowered the camera and asked, “How did you know how to do all that on the arch?”
“Like what? The climbing? I’ve been doing that since high school.”
“What about the knots and stuff? How did you know to tie those knots around you and the dancing girl? How did you know you weren’t about to kill her?”
Penny took a moment to process the barrage of questions. “I guess I didn’t know. I mean, I felt confident those were the right knots in the two seconds I had to figure it out, but I couldn’t tell you how I knew it. It felt like habit; like something I learned in Girl Scouts.”
“Were you a girl scout?”
“Nope.”
He cocked his head as he sat next to her. “Are you a reprogrammed spy, like Jason Bourne?”
“Ha! Not as far as I know. I’ve just always known how to do knots, since I was a kid, I think. Maybe how I learned is just one of the things that got deleted from my brain when…” she mimed smacking herself in the side of the head.
“Wherever it came from, you were awesome up there. Cooler than Jason Bourne, for sure.”
“I’ll take it. I’m glad you were here with me.”
Penny sat and stared at a rounded mousey-looking creature as it waddled from one bush to the next, eying her. She tried to remember the name of the place where she used to climb in high school, but it escaped her. There were rock formations in the desert around Alamogordo, and she could visualize one particular spot that was always dusted with chalk.
It only occurred to her now, since returning to New Mexico for the first time in years, that she was asking herself these questions. It had been quite a long time since she’d thought about school.
“Where did we used to go climbing?”
Owen adjusted his camera and frowned at her. “I wasn’t much of a climber. I was always more for hiking and going down into caves, not up cliffs. I think you used to go climb with Carrie and Jemma and those girls.”
“Oh. I thought you used to go with me, but maybe not.”
Penny had a vague memory of her friend Carrie Greaves from high school. The name Jemma didn’t ring a bell at all, but that wasn’t surprising. So much of those years still felt blurry now. It was possible she’d forgotten entire people.
“When we were in school, everything seemed so important. Every sideways glance or backhanded compliment was like a life-or-death scenario. And it’s so silly, especially since I don’t remember most of those ‘life-or-death’ moments now. None of that mattered.”
Owen flashed a rueful grin. “I still know some of those types of people and their lives haven’t changed much. Except now the life-or-death stuff is about who sniped at who on social media and crap like that. It’s about who’s eating lunch at Brown Bag Deli with someone other than their spouse, and making sure everyone else knows about it. I barely talk to any of those people. I hate all the drama.”
“Tell me about Jemma. I don’t remember her.”
Owen blew out a sigh. “Okay, sure. Jemma Rowley was in our class. I think her name was short for Jememiah, or something a little strange like that. She was kinda short and built like a rectangle. She had a body type good for climbing, or that’s what she used to say. I didn’t know her too well, but she used to drive that ancient, beat-up Ford Bronco? You used to hang out with her more than I did, for sure.” He paused a few beats. “Any of this hitting home?”
Penny gritted her teeth, straining to remember a face to go along with the name. She found bits and pieces of a memory, but not enough to solidify into anything real. There were flashes of a blue Ford Bronco in the high school parking lot. At her school, it had been a springtime tradition for the graduating seniors to write silly messages in shoe polish on the windows of the junior’s cars. She could almost visualize a white smear on the window of a blue Bronco, but not quite. No way to tell if it was real, or if she was forcing her brain to invent something to fit the story.
“I think I almost remember her. Maybe.”
They sat in the quiet for a while, both of them still a little wound-up from all the activity. Little by little, Penny felt normal again. Eventually, Owen stood and dusted off his hands. “I’m going to get some shots of the arch from a little higher up the mountain.”
“Do I need to move?”
“No, you’re fine. I’ll be back in a minute. You take a rest, Ms. Hero.”
He labored up the rocky slope and Penny returned her thoughts to rock climbing. Trying to remember the names of other people she used to climb with. Their faces were so close, almost as if she could picture their yearbook photos. Had she picked up her senior yearbook? Probably not, since that would’ve been weeks after the Incident and—
“Hey, Penny, come check this out.”
She glanced up to spy him about a hundred feet higher, squinting at something at his feet. Penny stood and stretched, with most of her major muscle groups grumbling at her for making them work. That was one thing about climbing she for sure remembered: the aching forearms.
She came to a stop next to him and he pointed at a line of something small and angular embedded in the gravelly dirt below.
“You see that?”
She dropped to a knee and noted there seemed to be a rectangular impression in the earth, as if there were something foreign underneath the soil. Like a tumor. She dug her fingers into the mountainside, tearing away at the sides.
“Oh,” Owen said, “I guess we’re digging it up. Okay.”
Penny peeled back enough of the dirt and pebbles to see the top of a rusted G.I. Joe lunchbox. A tanned and blond soldier stood atop a tank, huge machine gun in each hand. She felt under the dirt to find the latch, then popped the top as Owen kneeled beside her, eyebrows raised.
Inside the lunchbox, the interior was not nearly as weathered. She found a paper map, folded up. She put the map aside and discovered underneath it a treasure trove of little kid spy equipment. A compass, plastic spyglass, a handful of half-eaten crackers, and a field notes journal filled with pages of scrawling, juvenile handwriting.
“This is interesting,” she said, because she didn’t yet know what else to say about it.
Penny picked up the map and opened it. It appeared to be a rough hand-drawn sketch of Great Basin park, with dotted lines leading toward the caves, and the words Muir’s Treasure written next to the big X. Done in a cartoony style, even.
“Gary Brewer,” Owen said.
“Huh?”
Owen showed her the field notes journal’s back cover, where a name and address in Ely, Nevada had been scrawled in the corner. “Think Gary found the treasure he was looking for?”
Penny again checked the map, staring at the big X. While she couldn’t say why, she felt a touch of excitement, holding a kid’s treasure map in her hands. “It wouldn’t hurt to look him up and find out. Maybe he wants his lunchbox back.”
She gave the side of it a tug to free it from the dirt, then she swiped along the corners to clean it off, as much as she could. Penny and Owen rose to their feet and made their way back down the trail. With the lunchbox under her arm, Penny finally felt at peace. She now had direction.
However, they did not see the pressure-plate trigger beacon embedded in the earth underneath the lunchbox. They had no idea that when the lunchbox was lifted, the beacon activated the GPS tracker hidden inside the lunchbox’s handle.
And then it called home.
