Paul R. West
Simon Hardman is an ex drug enforcement agent living a secluded life in a Florida tourist town called Destin. An email from his sister tells him about his high school girlfriend being shot down and is hanging on by a thread. She was in the process of prosecuting a brother of one the drug gangs in the area. It turns out he is associated with the number one drug cartel in the world. It takes all of Simon’s years of training to take down the people responsible for the shooting, along with the help of close friends still with the agency. The twist in all of this is his girlfriend had twin daughters who are now teenagers and they are Simon’s.
Paul R. West is a senior engineer with a major defense contractor. He also served in the U.S Navy as an air crewman and aircraft electronic technician. In between times he was an iron worker for various construction companies. He has lived in the Mediterranean, New Orleans and South Florida. He decided several years ago to create a group of characters and start a series of books called the “Tides”. The first in the series is New Tides followed by Old Tides which is nearly completed. Paul lives in a quite but thriving town in North Georgia with his wife and two daughters.
Escape and Thought
The tanned bleach blond man with a Fu Manchu mustache and crew cut to match from years in the sun and well muscled from years of swimming, running and working out in gyms. With his shirt off you could see the scars of four bullet wounds, but few people rarely saw the scars because he would keep his shirt on around people he did not know. It saved answering question he did not like to answer.
Slowly he backed his Dusky 33 named Redemption out of his private dock space at his house on the Choctawhatchee Bay close to the beginning of the entrance known as Santo Rosa Sound in Fort Walton Beach.
His only company was his two black labs Trav and Grets. After receiving a disturbing email just a few minutes ago from his sister who lived in a small town in North Georgia, he decided to go fishing and think about what the content of the message had said.
He put on his favorite bleached white by the sun cap that had seen better days and his Arnett sunglasses that he was never without in the hot bright Florida sun. He liberally applied sun block on his face and the rest of his body as he always had done for years. He did not need skin cancer, so he protected himself as best as one could to be living in Florida.
Now he was ready to get in the sun and enjoy the calm feeling he always felt when out on the water. A nice three-pound grouper or snapper with a small salad would be his supper tonight.
He might even have a glass or two of a good California wine. He watched the amount of alcohol he drank, never getting drunk. He could not remember the last he had been drunk unless when he graduated from BUD training and that was a very long time ago. He did not smoke and avoided being around people who did. The same could be said for drugs.
If other people wanted to smoke and do drugs it was their business but Simon cared too much about his body and mind to have those kinds of addictions. For the kind of life he lived, his body and mind had to be sharp, clear, and finely tuned.
It had really surprised him to get an email from his sister. Simon had nothing to do with what was left of his family since the death of his mother and the messy way his brothers and sister had handled both the funeral and the will. He had cut all ties with them at about the time he left Miami barely alive and had moved to the panhandle of Florida.
He was a man alone and was truly at home with that decision. People just seem to be pains in the butt now days and he seemed to be more cynical as he got older. So being alone most of the time did not bother him. His friend Marty usually came over from Panama City Beach every other weekend or so and they would fish and go to one of the local bars and on occasion Marty would pick up a woman for the evening.
