The Ridge
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Mike Sullivan glanced at the revolving sign over carousel B. ---Flight 1175--- "Let the crowd gather, then move in." He said. Sully glanced at the rest of his party. They could have been any group of friends returning from a vacation, but they had not been on flight 1175. The four men and two woman were here for a pick-up. A buzzer sounded and the bags started out of the chute. Four golf bags and two duffel bags, Mike thought. Get the Bags, get the van and hit the road. Sully stood 6’1" and weighed about two hundred and twenty five pounds. Normally he dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and a baseball cap, but not today. Today he was playing the part of a golfer, wearing a polo shirt, shorts and a straw hat to hide his shoulder length hair. On board the 727 chaos reigned. When the shots rang out and Cal fell through the cargo door, Larry Webster almost shot him again. He had just finished tying Chris’s feet and whirled to a firing position on his knees pointing at the fallen man’s head. "Sully! What the hell’s going on?" He yelled. Just then Jan burst through the door falling at Cal’s side screaming. "Cal! Cal! Oh my god Cal, don’t die." Chris could only see one side of his father’s face and it was covered with blood. He tried to rip free of the ropes, but there was no way. Tears streamed down his face. He never felt so helpless in his life. In the forward room Sully pointed the gun at Billy’s head. "If you want to live, get in the back room now and drag his sorry ass in there with you." He said motioning to Kann’s lifeless body. Billy pulled the body into the cargo hold followed quickly by Mike Sullivan. Jan was frantically trying to stop her husband’s bleeding with her hands and begging him to stay alive. "Too late for that sister. He thought. "He should have kept his cool." Fear started to rise from deep in Cal’s stomach. Everything they said registered with him. He understood that he was hurt. He also understood that he was in a hospital. He knew about Texas and where it would be located on a map, but he could not answer the last question. Dr. Yacamata could see the confusion on his face. Detective Lowery saw fear and wondered if it was real or manufactured. Carrie watched as a lone tear rolled down Cal’s right cheek. "I don’t know who I am." Cal said. His voice quivering. The only sound in the room was the beeping of the alarm on Dr. Yacamata’s wristwatch, signaling midnight and the end of a long day. Detective Martini read his handiwork one more time checking for spelling or grammatical errors. The report involved two suspects arrested the night before in connection with a string of apartment break-ins on the upper East Side. As he typed his name at the end of the page, the department door banged open. Phil Markey, of the Missing Persons Bureau, was known for making a grand entrance and today was no different. Waving a piece of paper over his head, he shouted. "Hey! Any of you guys know who this guy is? I know I’ve seen him before ,but I can’t remember where." Collins, whose desk was closest to the door, grabbed the paper and looked it over. Handing it back he said. "Yeah, you dope. It’s that Mitchell guy. You know. The millionaire who crashed his plane into a mountain out in Arizona. You’ve only seen his face a thousand times on T.V. in the last couple of months. "Proves how much you know. That guy is dead and buried. This picture was taken three days ago and sent out yesterday." Markey sneered. Martini was only half listening. He had put the Sullivan case aside as a dead end months ago, but it was never far from his thoughts. Now, slowly a scenario started to form in the back of his mind. Mitchell’s plane originated in New York. Sullivan disappeared from Kennedy around the same time. His mind raced as he rifled through his desk searching for the Sullivan file. His chair made a screeching sound and clattered to the floor, as he bolted from it, crossing the room in two steps. "Give me that!" He said, ripping the paper from Markey’s hand. The man in the picture sure looked like the guy he had seen all over the news outlets. Martini quickly read the report under the picture.
The access road ran about a mile from the highway to the front gate. When Rory Douglas first put the road in, he painstakingly made sure the landscape stayed the same. Accordingly, the trail wound around and through boulders, trees, rocks and bushes. The buildings on the ranch could not be seen from the trail until the gate came into view. Bo maneuvered the Blazer slowly along the road, stopping a few times to make sure no one was coming from the other direction. Finally they reached the main gate. The gate did not exist to keep anyone in or out. It consisted of two fifteen-foot high wooden beams, each one supported on the outside by a large boulder. A collection of beams across the top completed the structure with the ranch’s name, C I R C L E - R, framed in the middle. Bo parked the truck behind a boulder and got out, pulling the Beretta from his belt. Sully held the Magnum in his lap from the time they started down the road. Now he stood with it at his side and stared out at the group of buildings in front of him. "It looks like a ghost town." He said.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Career criminal Mike Sullivan and company arrive at Kennedy Airport to pick up luggage containing a shipment of cocaine arriving from Colombia, South America. Their job is to transport the drugs by van to Las Cruces, New Mexico. The monetary reward will set them up for life. Sullivan soon realizes the cops have been tipped off and are waiting for them. He needs to find another way out of New York. Millionaire businessman, and former CIA Agent, Calvin Mitchell and family are leaving Kennedy in the Company private plane to attend his daughter’s wedding in Tucson, Arizona. Sullivan kidnaps the family and hijacks the plane. The next twenty-four hours takes the reader from New York to Tucson to Midland, Texas and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Twenty-four hours later, Mitchell awakes in a Midland hospital having been found on Culverton Ridge by local rancher, Carrie Douglas. He had been shot twice and was near death. His memory gone, Cal spends the next three months on Carrie’s ranch. They begin to fall in love, but he knows that he must find his real identity. His memory comes rushing back when his partner Skip Amanski and his daughter Traci finally find him in Texas. Now he is driven to find his family and the people who tried to ruin his life. The Ridge is a story where crime, tragedy, and evil clash with family, friendship, and true love. It becomes a story of two men separated by moral values and a way of life, but drawn together in a final showdown of revenge and hate.
About the Author
Tom Blenk, 50, has been a postal worker in Exeter, New Hampshire for more than thirty years, having lived in and around the area for forty-five years. He comes from a large family of eight kids and has been married for over thirty years to his wife, Barbara. He is an avid fan of all sports, including being an avid golfer and, more importantly, a high school football coach for eleven years, the past six at Exeter High School. He enjoys traveling, a wide spectrum of music, movies and reading (wide variety of topics, including Military History). This is Mr. Blenk’s first novel. He got the idea for the story and started writing in September of 1999. After reading Stephen King’s book On Writing and rewriting his own book twice he finally had a finished product in late November 2001.