Chapter 1

The big graphics plotter wound down to a hum and the print arm parked itself with a solid thump. I snatched the thirty-six by twenty-four inch drawing off the print bed. I slipped the lower right corner of the drawing in between the stainless steel jaws of my professional seal and squeezed the grips tight, embossing the pages with my name and my state license number: Joshua T. Fuller, ME, License number: CGA1050505.

I was proud as hell of that drawing, because the floating spiral staircase it depicted was the most challenging piece of engineering I’d encountered in the three years since college. The staircase was to be the center piece of an eight thousand square foot model home for a custom housing development. If the developer approved my design, my fledgling construction company would build the model. If I brought the model in on time and on budget, we would become the developer’s preferred builder. We would build any houses he constructed on speculation, and he would recommend us to interested home buyers. It was the break we needed to really take off, and my team was ready for the challenge.

I walked out of the room that housed our network server, plotter and printers, and into the foyer of our small office suite. My office manager, Mitzi Morrison, gave me a grin.

“Hey, Boss, I was about to call you. It’s four-fifty-five, time for you to make like a sheep herder and get the flock out of here.”

I chuckled when she called me Boss more than at her bad pun. Yes, I owned the company, and at the job site I was in charge; but Mitzi ran the show around the office. Mitzi was organized, efficient, and she didn’t take any shit from anyone, me included. She was also loyal to the extreme; I knew everything she did, whether I liked it or not, was in my best interest. Taking a chance on hiring the middle-aged divorced mother of three was one of the smartest things I’d ever done.

“If you’ll put this drawing with the Davenport project, I’m out of here,” I said breezily.

I was in a rush to leave because it was my anniversary, and I had big plans for my adorable wife.

Before Mitzi could reply with her usual smart-assed remark, the heavily tinted front glass door swung inward and a man wearing a neatly pressed light-weight suit walked in from the bright sunlight. The man came straight up to me and spoke before I could introduce myself.

‘Are you Joshua Fuller?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Call me Josh. Now how can I help you?” I replied as I stuck out my hand to shake his.

He didn’t shake my hand. Instead, he slapped a manila envelope into my palm.

“Mister Fuller, you have been served,” he intoned sonorously.

He tapped the manila envelope and continued.

“This is a petition for the dissolution of the marriage between you and Lindsey Clark Fuller.”

He placed two smaller business-sized envelopes in my paw.

“This envelope contains an order of protection enjoining you from contacting or approaching within three hundred feet of said Lindsey Fuller. And finally, this is a note from Missus Fuller and the key to unit seventeen at the U-Store-It on Tenth Street. All your personal effects are already there, except for a duffle bag of items Missus Fuller thought you might need immediately. That bag is in the back of your truck.”

With that he spun around and departed, leaving me devastated in his wake. I looked down at the envelopes in my hand, and the significance of them hit me like a ton of bricks. A wave of vertigo swept over me, and I dropped heavily into the chair by Mitzi’s desk. The next thing I remember is Mitzi pressing a pill into my hand and handing me a cup of water.

“Here, take this,” she ordered.

I took the tablet from her and gave her a questioning look.

“Xanax,” she answered my unasked question.

I nodded and popped the pill, chasing it with a slug of water. Then with shaking hands, I opened the envelope with the note from Lindsey and started reading. The note was short and to the point.

I read the note twice, disbelieving my eyes the first time I read it. After the second pass, I handed the flimsy sheet of paper to Mitzi and watched her reaction as she scanned it. When she finished, her eyes lasered in on mine.

“You had no idea this was coming?” she asked incredulously.

I shook my head dumbly.

“Not ... a ... clue,” I answered.

It was her turn to shake her head as she handed the note back to me.

“Springing this on you on your anniversary is possibly the most coldhearted thing I’ve ever heard of,” she said angrily.

I nodded. On that we were in complete agreement.

As soon as she said that, Mitzi stood up from her desk, fished her car keys out of her purse and grabbed my arm.

“Come on, you are staying at my place tonight. I’m not about to leave you alone,” she ordered.

I did not argue with her, because I knew the alternative was sitting at a bar getting shit-faced and feeling sorry for myself ... or worse. I did protest when Mitzi insisted on me riding with her, but in the end I grabbed the duffle bag the process server had put into the bed of my truck and got in her three year old Toyota Camry. Mitzi was quiet on the ride to her house, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Those thoughts went way back to when this all started.

I was an unmotivated and mediocre high school student, preferring to party and chase girls instead of studying. So when I graduated high school, my father showed me some tough love and refused to pay my way through college. Instead, he made me an appointment with an Army recruiter. My mother went along with the old man, so with nothing else to do, I enlisted for three years. In a fit of adolescent stupidity that more than proved my father was right about my lack of maturity, I enlisted to become an airborne-ranger, and volunteered for assignment to the 75^th Ranger Regiment. Proving that my father was right once again, signing up was the smartest thing I’d ever done.

It took two tries and six months of the Ranger School cadre kicking my ass, but I finally put my ducks in a row and graduated, and was awarded the coveted Ranger Tab.

Sometime during my second year assigned as a grunt in a line battalion, I suddenly decided what I wanted to do with my life. I would serve out my enlistment and go to college on the GI bill.

It was a good plan and I was within a couple of months of executing it, when a bunch of fanatical terrorists decided to fly fuel-laden jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. My battalion was immediately alerted for deployment to Afghanistan, and I hurriedly reenlisted to go with them. I ended up pulling two tours humping a rucksack through the arid mountains before my second enlistment ended. This time I had nothing to prove, so I separated from the service and started college at the state university campus in my home town.

I had completed a year of college courses thru the Army Education Center, so I started my college career as a twenty-five-year-old sophomore. I had saved my re-up bonus and much of my pay; so – with the GI bill – I was fine, money-wise. I had the money to live in the dorm, but I had so little in common with the typical student there, the idea did not appeal to me. My parents solved my housing problem by offering me the same deal they had given my younger sister. I could move into the basement my dad had converted into a guest apartment and live rent free, as long as I obeyed the house rules and kept my grades up.

The apartment was a great deal. It was about five hundred square feet, with a bedroom, living room, kitchenette and full bath. It even had a separate entrance from the outside that led to an extension of the driveway where I could park the small used pickup truck I’d just purchased. Best of all, the room came with an open invitation to supper every night, and my mom was the best cook in the county.

I guess here is a good place to insert a paragraph or two about our close-knit family. There are four of us Fullers, my mom and dad (Sandra and Jack), me, and my sister, Shelby Jane. Shelby is fourteen months younger than me. My father manages a drug store and my mom works from home as a commercial illustrator.

My mom and dad grew up as hippies in the 1960s, and still have some fairly unconventional ideas. My folks are also still crazy in love after over twenty-five years together, and make no bones about how hot they still are for each other. When I was a teenager, they use to embarrass the hell out of me with their open sexuality. They never hid the fact that they frequently engaged in hot monkey sex at the drop of a hint from one or the other.

My sister Shelby is a software designer for a company that makes simulator training programs for the military. She is engaged to and lives with another computer geek named Archer Paulson. Archie administers the computer systems for a large hospital. Shelby and I have always been best of friends as well as siblings. We were each other’s confidants and advisors on the opposite sex. Shelby and mom are both five-six, well padded, blue-eyed blonds. My father and I were both slightly above average in height and solidly built with light brown hair. The old man’s eyes are light blue and mine are some kind of weird blue-gray.

So anyway, I moved into the basement apartment and started college. I fell into mechanical engineering as a major, on the advice of my faculty advisor, because I couldn’t stand the idea of a full time indoor job. I dated some during my first year of college, but mostly I concentrated on my studies. Unlike my less than stellar high school career, I was now totally focused and highly motivated toward my school work.

I also had a ‘friends with benefits’ casual hook up with Shelby’s best friend from high school, Regina Arnold. Regina was some sort of human resources person at the hospital where Archie Paulson worked. Regina was a sassy five foot - nine inch, robustly built, redhead with a hyped up sex drive. She felt safe using me to dull the edges of her constant horniness while she looked for Mister Right. Mister Right for Regina would have to be a cross between a porn actor and the Energizer Bunny.

At the end of my first year of college, I interned for the summer with a medium-sized engineering company that specialized in high rise buildings. I lucked out in drawing that position, because ‘Weaver & Wilson Engineering Services’ had an excellent reputation in the industry. Gilbert Weaver was the engineering genius behind the company, and his partner John Wilson ably handled the business side. My main job at Weaver-Wilson was as Gil Weaver’s aide de camp. I went everywhere he did, taking notes and running errands. The great thing about Gil was that he explained everything and then quizzed me at the end of each day about what I had seen and learned that day.

I met Lindsey Clark the first day of the second semester of my junior year in college when we ended up in the same Effective Writing course. Lindsey had medium long auburn hair and deep green eyes. She was about five-six and slender but curvy. Lindsey was pretty, but did nothing to draw attention to the fact. She dressed conservatively, wore her hair in a ponytail and didn’t wear make up. Lindsey was very smart and as serious about her studies as I was. Lindsey was attending school on a full ride academic scholarship. Her major was criminal justice/pre-law.