Winter Kills
Here comes Victor Storm.
Here comes trouble.
In many ways, Victor Storm is an average retiree. He lives a simple life, supported only on his pension, and he attends a class at the local community college. In other ways, Victor Storm is anything but average. He’s a former Special Forces soldier, already retired at the age of 41. He doesn’t own a car. He’s haunted by his past, and he’s taking a philosophy class to try to figure out the big truths.
When his quiet retirement is shattered by a random act of extreme violence, however, Victor is torn from the textbook and put on the front line of philosophy, asking the big questions. Then an inept bureaucracy drops the ball, and it’s up to him to set things right. Unfortunately for the perpetrator, Victor Storm is more than up to the task.
This first book in the Crusader series shows how Victor Storm found a new life, by losing it all, in the mean days of winter.
This book is for anyone who ever wished he or she could make a difference. When you think of one person alone and screaming in the night, daring to do the things you don’t, think of Victor Storm.
Get It Now
The publishing arrangement of Provocative Press allows Winter Kills to be available in a variety of formats and locations. Get it now from these fine sources …
- Trade Paperback available at Amazon and Lulu.com
- Hardcover exclusively at Lulu.com
- E-Book distributed by Lulu.com
… or read on for more information.
News
The latest about Winter Kills, as reported in my weblog:
Characters of Winter Kills
The Major Players
- Victor Storm
- Retired from the Special Forces at 38, Victor just wants to live a quiet life. He is haunted by bad dreams, and he wants to find a philosophical framework for looking at his life. None of this, of course, will turn out as he hopes.
- Lou Rollins
- A former soldier who served with Victor, Lou now works as a police officer with the St. Louis Police Department. Here he becomes Victor’s confidant, until he can’t be anymore.
- Samantha Storm
- Victor’s sister, who has always been close with Victor. The events of this book bring them still closer. Her son, Duncan, treats Victor as a playmate, and Victor enjoys this.
The Minor Players
- Henry Storm
- Victor’s father, also a retired Special Forces soldier, and now looking to retire from management of a flower shop.
- Katherine Storm
- Victor’s mother, still the prim and proper military wife. Her maternal instincts will become a problem.
- Detective Ortega
- The detective in charge of the case, it is he who will handle, and mis-handle, the investigation.
- Gordon Sham
- As prosecutor of the case, legal justice in the case will fall on his shoulders.
- Dario Mullen
- A small-time criminal who’s moved up to the big leagues without really thinking about it. He has chosen poorly.
In the Periphery
The characters prominent in the later books are also present from the beginning, albeit in very fleeting roles. Watch for them.
- The Travel Agent
- Here Victor meets his travel agent for the first time. They will later develop a strange and close relationship.
- The Reporter
- Here the reporter who later works to unmask Victor will call him for the first time, though it will be a very long time before she realizes who he is.
- The FBI Agent
- Here the FBI agent looking for a big case volunteers to help with Victor’s. If his help had been accepted, the adventure possibly could have ended here.
Excerpt: Chapter 16
…he knew he wasn’t going to watch television. He’d known all along. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.
After eating dinner alone and making the obligatory phone call to his sister, Victor thought seriously about calling Lou Rollins. What would he tell him, though? Wish you were here? No. You should have been there to see the awesome jury selection? No. Heard any good jokes lately? No.
What then?
How about: you should have seen the look on that guy’s face when I punched him last night!
At one time, Victor would have been able to share a story like that with Lou. Now, though, things were different. Lou was a cop, and it was his job to arrest people for assault, not applaud them. Maybe Lou would choose to look the other way, but it would be unfair for Victor to put Lou in a position of having to make such a choice.
Out on the balcony of his hotel room again, Victor smoked a cigarette and thought about everything. He watched the moonlight twinkling on the black water as the waves rolled silently onto the beach, and it reminded him of the black water of his Mississippi. He wondered briefly when his father had last seen the Mississippi, and if the moment had carried any significance to him. When he finally threw the cigarette into the wind and went back inside, he knew he wasn’t going to watch television. He’d known all along. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.
Tonight, Victor went walking the other way down the street in front of the hotel. After several blocks, he slowed down, looking for a specific kind of bar. After several more blocks, he found it across the street.
This bar occupied the end of a strip mall building. The front and side were occupied by huge windows, intact but painted black. The sign on the front showed crossed pool cues, and only had one letter burned out. Victor crossed the street and walked through the parking lot to the back of the building. As he’d hoped, he found a little space behind the building, with a low wall separating it from the houses on the other side. Back there, too, Victor found a dumpster, with several broken pool cues inside it.
Satisfied, excited even, he untucked his shirt, ruffled his hair, turned over part of his collar, and went inside.
Did justice require a system?
Why couldn’t it be the action of one man?
If one man alone was all of judge, jury, and executioner, what did it matter, if he was right?
Inside the bar, Victor adopted a staggering shuffle, though he was stone sober. He went to the bar and got a beer, then surveyed the crowd. Although it was a weeknight, there were quite a few people in the place, and not too many drunks. Three pool tables with clean green felt sat under beer lights on the side of the room by the door. All of the tables were in use, with stacks of quarters waiting on deck. On the side of the room opposite the door, a scattering of tables sat in moderate darkness. Victor headed over to those tables, swaying a bit as he walked.
Many of the tables had groups of guys at them. All of them noticed Victor as he made his way across the room.
Victor found a table with half-full glass on it and sat down. A minute later a rough character wearing leather sidled up from the direction of the bathrooms. “Hey, man,” he said to Victor. “You’re in my seat.”
“Sorry,” Victor muttered meekly, then moved to an empty table down a ways.
He could feel the eyes watching him. He finished his beer and took out his wallet, holding it open wide to take out a handful of bills. Money and wallet still in hand, he shuffled up to the bar for another beer. This time he got some quarters, too, from the bartender, and swayed over to the pool tables, carefully surveying the stacks of quarters already there before gingerly adding his to the farthest table.
He could feel the crowd watching him as he staggered back to his table in the darkened part of the room, bumping people and muttering apologies as he went.
Back at the table, he sat with his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, and pretended to fall asleep.
A moment later, he jerked himself up straight and looked around as if he didn’t recognize the place. Many heads were turned in his direction.
It was time.
He took one more good look through his wallet, drained the last of his beer, and headed for the door.
Outside in the cool air, he walked slowly toward the back of the parking lot. He heard the door huff open behind him, then squeak closed, but he didn’t turn around to look.
Still shuffling, he went back to back alley, around the corner, and stood by the dumpster.
He had barely turned around when three thugs rounded the corner. He had seen them inside, young guys, hungry looking.
“Hey, man,” one of them said. “Give us your wallet.”
“Hey, man,” Victor said. “Come and get it.”
Ninety seconds later, Victor emerged from the back alley, tucking in his shirt and straightening his collar. Seeing the commotion had attracted no attention, he looked back at the three thugs. They were down, but they were still breathing.
“You’re lucky I’m in a good mood today,” he said.
As he walked back to his hotel, he wondered: was this justice?
He decided: who cares?
Interesting Trivia About Winter Kills
Hats
Hats are subtly present in Winter Kills and the other Victor Storm books, for no particular reason. Both of Victor’s parents wear hats in Winter Kills. Victor wears a hat as part of his disguise in Summer Storms. One hat of particular interest is Victor’s father’s straw hat. Though it isn’t stated, the FBI Agent Ronald Hill’s straw hat in Summer Storms will remind Victor of his father, and he will feel protective of him because of it, even though the FBI man is out to get him. Both Agent Hill’s hat and Victor’s father’s hat are copies of the straw hat I bought in Hawaii in 2005.
STLCC PHL101
In Winter Kills, Victor attends a philosophy class at the local community college. The St. Louis Community College really has an Introduction to Philosophy class, and its course description (as of 2006) is used verbatim in this book.
Philosophy Class
The conduct of Victor’s philosophy class in Winter Kills is modeled after my own experience in a community college philosophy class. Though the characters, of course, are different, many parts–the writing on the board, the pointless questions for the sake of questions, the people with all the answers–are true to life.
Victor Storm and I Crossed Paths
In Victor Storm’s chronology, he was an instructor at the U.S. Army Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia, in February of 1987–which is when I was going through the school. This is strangely interesting, almost tempting me to look through my souvenir photograph book to see if I can spot him.
Jazz
The jazz club where Victor and Lou both want to watch their backs is the same one where Victor takes Amy in Summer Storms. Victor likes jazz because I like jazz. I made the decision to set the story in St. Louis because it is central for Victor’s travels. It turns out, by pure coincidence, that St. Louis is a big jazz city.
The Gang’s All Here
All the major characters from Summer Storms appear in Winter Kills. We see Amy Bishop become Victor’s travel agent; we hear Rebecca Dubois try to get a story from Victor; and Agent Hill is the unnamed FBI agent who offers to help Detective Ortega with the investigation.
Jacksonville Robbery
My parents, like Victor’s in Winter Kills, were victims in a robbery of a restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida, though the outcome of the robbery of my parents, thankfully, was quite different. The reaction of my father, however, was nearly the same as the reaction of Victor’s father, and I’m proud of that.
The St. Louis Greyhound Station
Victor likes to ride Greyhound, and so do I. In my younger days, I took quite a few extended trips on Greyhound, going from Florida to Buffalo and Phoenix to Buffalo and back and so on. Many Greyhound stations retained the grand feel of their heyday, and traveling by bus was like looking back in time. The St. Louis Greyhound station, however, was my favorite. By the time I went through, much of it was no longer in use, but the original fixtures were there: ornate clocks, fine decorative tile floor, grand hallway, fancy windows, little shops, and even shoeshine stands. It was easy to walk through that place and imagine another time.
Victor’s Greyhound Trip
The Greyhound trip that Victor takes in Winter Kills is true to the real details of that route. That route is Grehound’s schedule 4711, departing St. Louis at 6:40 in the evening, changing buses in Nashville, Atlanta, and Lake City (Florida), and arriving in Jacksonville at 4:15 in the afternoon. I should take that trip someday.
Free Software-Free Culture
Winter Kills is a triumph of the free software/free culture movement. The book was written, edited, and typeset in OpenOffice.org Writer on machines running Debian and Ubuntu. The cover features a photograph posted to Flickr by Chris Darling under the Creative Commons Attribution license and an icon from the Tango project, released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. The text is set in Victor Gaultney’s beautiful and versatile Gentium Book Basic font, which is provided under the generous SIL Open Font License, and the title font is Ray Larabie’s excellent Glazkrak. To carry on this spirit of free software/free culture, the distributed files of Winter Kills are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License, and the characters, locales, and such of the book are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. (The intent of this licensing is to allow the characters and such to be used in other stories, but to restrict the distribution of this book to the exact form produced by Provocative Press.)
Blue and Water
Both water and the color blue are featured strongly in Winter Kills, though it is left to the reader to determine what significance that may carry.
The Song Called Winter Kills
Winter Kills is also the title of a song by Yaz, on their album Upstairs at Eric’s. I listened to the song repeatedly while writing the book, and the tone of the book, I like to think, is the same as that of the song: very somber.
Edition Information
Third Edition
This, the current edition of Winter Kills, should be the final edition. This edition features a beautiful new cover in the Provocative Press signature style, and it now incorporates the Interesting Things section. The publishing arrangement of Provocative Press allows it to be available in a variety of formats and locations.
Trade Paperback (ISBN: 978-0-9713697-2-6)
Most who want a physical copy of the book will want the trade paperback, currently available through Amazon and Lulu.com.
Casewrap Hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-9713697-3-3)
For those libraries demanding a sturdy volume, Winter Kills is available in a beautiful casewrap hardcover edition, sold exclusively through Lulu.com.
E-book (No ISBN)
The PDF e-book of Winter Kills, an exact copy of the trade paperback and casewrap hardcover editions, is now available as well, distributed through Lulu.com.
Second Edition (trade paperback, no ISBN)
The second print edition of Winter Kills was available at Lulu.com for a while and sold few copies, making it a rare and valuable edition. Though it is no longer available through official channels, copies may turn up sometimes.
First Edition (trade paperback, no ISBN)
The first edition of Winter Kills was produced with an unfortunate ugly cover. It did not last long, and I may own the only copies of it ever sold. None are available through official channels at the moment.
