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Lunch Time Reading! Enjoy a Free sample of fast-paced new thriller Blood Line 1 by John J. Davis

 On Friday we announced that John J. Davis’s Blood Line: 1 is our Thriller of the Week and the sponsor of thousands of great bargains in the thriller, mystery, and suspense categories: over 200 free titles, over 600 quality 99-centers, and thousands more that you can read for free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime!

Now we’re back to offer our weekly free Thriller excerpt:

 Blood Line: 1

by John J. Davis

Blood Line: 1
5.0 stars – 1 Reviews
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:

If your family is a target, you have to be a weapon.

When a simple home invasion turns out to be not so simple, Ron Granger must put aside his quiet rural life and return to the Central Intelligence Agency to take on international arms dealers.

Aided by his beautiful wife, Valerie, and resourceful teen daughter, Leecy, Ron must quickly decide who to believe among the calculating opportunists, shrewd criminals, and power-hungry rival agencies racing to possess the technological breakthrough that will change the face of modern warfare forever. But when Leecy is kidnapped, Ron and Val must choose between the mission and a rescue.

Facing an impossible decision, with time quickly running out, Ron only knows one thing:
When you can’t trust anyone else, trust your family.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

The sudden explosion of breaking glass and splintering wood
reverberated inside the house like a clap of thunder. I was awake instantly, and
the rush of adrenaline coursing through my veins propelled me out of the bed
and into action.
“Valerie!” I yelled at my wife, who was already leaping out of the other
side of the bed. “That should have set off the alarm.”
She was rounding the end of our bed just as I flipped on the overhead
lights and opened the door of our room. There was someone in the hallway,
but the beam from a high-powered LED flashlight blinded my eyes before I
could look away.
I heard a voice.
“Back the fuck up! Keep your hands where I can see them.”
I felt the round end of a small pistol barrel poke me in the chest before I
could blink my eyes and begin to see the revolver in one hand, the flashlight in
the other.
“Both of you back up, hands in the air, and stay right where you are.”
I raised my hands and backed up until I bumped against my bedside
table. Then the guy swung the pistol and hit me in the face hard enough to get
my attention, but not enough to hurt me.
He aimed his gun at Valerie again. “Not another step.”
My vision had recovered so I could see the intruder was wearing a black
ski mask, t-shirt, jeans and boots. He was about five feet, seven inches, and
thin, about 160 pounds, so I had a distinct size advantage, being six feet and
200 pounds. But he had the gun, a revolver of some kind. That was actually
another plus for me since the hammer wasn’t cocked. Getting it ready to fire
would take all the time I needed.

He started moving the gun in my direction again when I heard the
scream.
“Daddy!”
It was Leecy.
“Valerie, there must be another one of them.”
I grabbed the man’s left wrist with such force the flashlight dropped to
the floor and spun away. I knocked aside his right wrist with my left hand as he
cocked the gun and fired, sending a bullet into the wall over my left shoulder.
Letting go of his left wrist, I turned into him with my back, grabbed his
weapon with both hands, and ripped it from his grip. I made a back left-handed
throw with the gun to Valerie, who was leaping toward the door to Leecy’s
bedroom. She caught the gun in the air as I landed a back left elbow to the
intruder’s head, followed by a crushing right cross to his jaw, knocking him
unconscious. I left the intruder falling to the floor and raced down the hall.
“Stop right there, lady,” I heard.
“Let her go,” she replied, very calmly and softly, “and I won’t kill you.”
I reached the end of the hall just as two shots slammed into the front
door behind Valerie. I ducked back inside the cover of the hallway, but Valerie
didn’t move and she didn’t return fire.
“Put the gun down and send my partner out here right now,” I heard the
man say, “or this will get messy.”
I walked into the foyer with my hands raised in a sign of submission, but
now he had two potential problems, and they weren’t in the same place.
“Your partner is incapacitated,” Val continued quietly, “and if you don’t
drop your weapon, you’ll be dead.”
“I’ll shoot her if you don’t put your hands up and send your man to
bring my partner to me right now,” he countered.
Streams of moonlight filtered through the dark room from the shattered
doors the two men had broken through, but I could see the man hiding behind
Leecy holding a gun to her head.
“Last chance to leave here alive.”
He’d backed up as far as he could go, pulling Leecy with him to make his
escape.
Valerie fired.
The bullet struck him in the center of his forehead, making a small black
hole and propelling him up and back. The look on his face was that of a man
realizing his mistake.
Leecy raced away from the dead man as Val dropped the weapon and
stood next to me. The entire incident was over in minutes, but it didn’t feel that
way to me. I was drained. I was sweating profusely and my hands were shaking.
Maybe it was my age; at forty-six, I wasn’t as young a man as when I started in
this business, even though I didn’t think of myself as an old man. But that
wasn’t all of it. Now that I had a wife and daughter, I had something to lose.
I hugged Val and Leecy. I held my wife and felt her calming presence
wash over me. As we both embraced our child, I thanked whatever gods there
might be that my two girls were safe.
“What the heck just happened?” Leecy asked from the safety of the hug
we had her sandwiched in.
“Home invasion,” Valerie answered, “we need to call Lester and get him
out here.”
“I’ll phone the station from the bedroom,” I said, “and check on the guy
back there while I’m at it.”
“Yeah, okay, so you say it’s a home invasion,” Leecy went on, “but don’t
most invaders steal your stuff and not try to kidnap you?”
I was back in our bedroom, stepping over the limp body of the first guy,
but could still hear Leecy’s voice.
“And Mom….you…uh…just killed someone.”
“I know, dear, but…”
“Dead.”
“It was a lucky shot.”
“Lucky shot?” Leecy wasn’t satisfied, obviously. “That’s not my point.”
I was so relieved we were all okay that it hadn’t occurred to me that
Leecy’s questions would have to be answered. And not just to her satisfaction:
we’d have to answer similar questions by the police, and if this incident were
classified as more than just a home invasion, we’d be in danger of generating a
lot of unwanted attention.
I dialed our local police station and was relieved to hear the woman’s
voice on the other end.
“Elizabeth. This is Ron Granger.”
“Hi, Ron. Why are you calling the police station at five minutes after
four in the morning? Is everyone all right?”
Elizabeth Williams was the pregnant wife of Park City, Georgia’s soonto-
be Chief of Police and current Captain, Lester Williams. Although Lester
had been performing the job of Chief for the past two years, everyone felt the

current Chief’s retirement was imminent this time, especially Elizabeth, who
ran the front desk, and just about everything else at the station.
It was Val who first met Elizabeth and Lester when they both were
working grunt jobs at her brothers’ family business, INESCO. She’d
encouraged them to go to the police academy in Atlanta and get the better jobs
they now had on the local police force.
“Yes, we’re all fine. We just had a little break-in here at the house and
need Lester or whomever is on duty to come out and take a look,” I said.
“We’ve got one dead intruder and one that needs medical attention.”
“Dead intruder? My goodness,” she said. “Sounds like those folks picked
the wrong house to break into this morning. Are you sure everybody is okay?”
She didn’t wait for my response. “I’m going tell the medics to take a look at all
of you while they’re there.”
I thought about protesting but knew it would be useless, so I just said,
“Thank you, Elizabeth,” and added, “I hope you are feeling better. I know
from talking with Lester last week the past few months have been difficult for
you.”
“I’m feeling just fine, thank you. Lester is on his way. I’ve got to call the
coroner and the paramedics. Now hang up, Ron.”
Elizabeth was a take-charge lady, no doubt about it.
I hung up the phone and laughed at my instinctive southern desire to be
polite at a time like this. Val and Leecy were coming toward me down the hall.
“Get dressed, kiddo, and meet me in the kitchen.”
“Okay, Dad. Hey Mom, I’m not finished with you.”
I pulled off the unconscious man’s belt and secured his arms behind his
back to the foot of the four-post bed, then joined Val where she was in the
bathroom stripping off her nightshirt and pulling on her jeans.
“Leecy has a million questions, and I don’t have the answers for her.”
“You’ve got the answers,” I said. “You just don’t want to tell her what
they are, and neither do I, not yet. For one thing, we have to find out who
these guys are and what they really wanted here.”
“It could be something we did five or ten years ago that’s finally catching
up with us…”
“Right…for revenge, retaliation…” I agreed. “A lot of our enemies
would definitely like to hurt us, but I’m betting they still don’t know for sure
who we really are. All they could possibly have is maybe our code names, or
whispers, rumors, and vague, mixed-up descriptions that don’t even match how
we really look.”

“And Ron,” Val went on, “if our old enemies did know who and where
we were, they’d come in greater numbers, more heavily armed and better
prepared.”
We stood silent for a moment, looking at each other.
“We’ve been out of action for many years now,” I finally said, with a
smile. “This could be exactly what it seems to be – just a couple of punks who
broke into the wrong house.”
“I doubt it,” Val said, “someone could even be thinking they could
leverage taking Leecy to get us to work for them.”
“What a terrible thought. Don’t even go there.”
“We have to consider everything.”
“I don’t know about that,” I tried to reassure her, “but we’ve definitely
reached the point where we have to tell our daughter a bit more about what
we’ve done for a living.”
“What if Lester and his boys don’t treat this like a break-in, but handle it
like an attempted kidnapping?” Val asked, “The FBI will roll into town with
their usual resources, and they have the clearance to find out whatever they
want to know.”
“Well, honey,” I pulled her towards me for a kind of sideways hug,
awkward in the small space of the bathroom, “we’ve put off this conversation
long enough. Leecy’s not a little girl anymore.”
“Don’t say that, Ron,” Val protested. “She’s still my baby…”
“And,” I continued, “maybe the one positive thing out of tonight’s
events is that we have to tell her now.”
“What would my Grandma Leona do?”
“She’d say you need to tell Leecy about our past and your family’s
history the way she told you about her past and the legacy she created. I
promise,” I said, and I pulled her to me again and hugged her tight.
“You may be right, Ron, but it’s not something you can do for me.”
“I know.”
“So let me figure out how to do it myself.”
“Agreed.”
I let her go and opened the bathroom door. The sound of approaching
sirens hurried me along.
“The police are almost here everybody.”
I turned toward the front door when I heard Leecy’s voice coming from
in front of me and not behind as I had expected. “Coffee’s ready,” she
announced.

“I’m on my way,” I said. Maybe we worried too much. Leecy really was a
young woman now and she deserved to be treated like one.
The sirens got a lot closer, and I heard several cars entering our
driveway. Red and blue police cruiser strobe lights danced across our front
windows with the orange and red lights of the ambulance.
“I’m going outside to talk to Lester. You and mom stay in the house.
Stay in the kitchen, okay?” I heard her say, “Okay, Dad,” as I opened the front
door and walked outside.
Captain Lester Williams climbed out of his patrol car, greeting me. “Hey,
Ron; sorry to be here under these circumstances. You all okay?”
“Yes, we’re just fine, all things considered.” I shook his hand.
I could see other officers working at the trunks of their cruisers, and the
paramedics were offloading a stretcher. The coroner wagon was just arriving.
“Tell me what happened.”
I noticed one officer had a handful of clear plastic evidence bags, and
another was carrying an empty cardboard box marked “Evidence, Granger
House, Friday, June 21st, 2013.”
“This won’t be the official statement since that will come later; just give
me the headlines,” Lester said before I could start telling him what happened.
I told a sanitized version, with as few details as possible.
“These two robbers broke in and tried to rip us off. Real lunk-heads. It
all happened so fast I really can’t remember, but I got the upper hand on one,
and Valerie was able to shoot the other. A miracle shot really. It’s amazing we
weren’t hurt.”
“What?” Lester interrupted.
“No joke. Kind of like the crazy shot that killed Kennedy. And when
that happened I was able to jump on the other guy and tie him up. He’s still
unconscious inside, last I saw him.”
“Okay….” Lester stood still without saying anything for a while.
“All right; good enough for now. Where are Leecy and Valerie?”
“Inside in the kitchen. Do you want to see them?”
“Not right now. I need to have my guys work the scene. We need to
collect evidence, take pictures, remove the body, and get the other guy to the
hospital in case he sustained any injuries when you jumped on him.”
“Right.”
“I can tell you right now, Ron, seems to me this incident falls under the
protections afforded a homeowner by Georgia’s Castle Law, and that you’ve
conducted yourselves in accordance with the law.”

“Thanks for the reassurance, Lester. Of course, Val and Leecy are real
shook up about this.”
“Let’s go inside, then.”
Lester and I started into the living room and made our way to the
kitchen, where Leecy was huddled close to her mother. I could see the
adrenaline was wearing off and she was beginning to feel the full weight of
what happened to her. Lester noticed, too.
“Larry; Murphy,” he said as he keyed his radio, “can you guys check out
the Grangers while I work the crime scene?”
Two men pushed a stretcher into the room. One of them lifted a large
orange medical kit off of the stretcher and placed it on the kitchen floor.
“I’m Larry,” the tall, thin, blonde paramedic said.
“And I’m Murphy,” the shorter, more muscular, black haired paramedic
said.
“Looks like the young lady is up first,” Larry said as he opened his
medical kit, removing a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope. I watched and
listened as he and Murphy checked Leecy’s vitals.
“High, but within normal range, given the circumstances.”
Lester came back into the room, brow furrowed. “Murphy, I need you
to bring your stuff. The guy back in the bedroom is coming around. What did
you hit him with, Ron, a baseball bat? I thought you said you jumped on the
guy.”
“Did you find one?” I regretted the words as they were coming out of
my mouth and immediately said, “I’m sorry. I’m just a little rattled. No, I didn’t
hit him with anything like that. I may have gotten a punch or two in during the
struggle. I don’t know. It all happened so fast.”
Lester disappeared back into the bedroom with Murphy in tow.
Meanwhile, Larry confirmed what I’d known when he said, “You’ll be fine,
Miss. All your vitals are good. I’d recommend having something to eat and
drink. Who’s next?”
“I’m fine,” Val said, “and I’m sure my husband is, too. Go do your job
so we can all go back to bed.”
Larry hesitated briefly. I could see he was thinking of challenging Valerie,
but he decided not to. He retrieved his case and without another word, turned
and walked away to find his partner. I followed him at a distance. Meanwhile,
the coroner and his assistant were maneuvering the gurney with the body bag
through the door and out to the driveway. In another moment, Murphy came
butt first down the hallway, lifting the stretcher out of the bedroom with Larry
at the head of the stretcher.
I could see the intruder’s neck was wrapped in a brace and his body
strapped to the stretcher. I stared into the open eyes of the now semi-conscious

and unmasked man. He looked familiar. He tried to look away from me but
couldn’t turn his head.
“Valerie! Come take a look at this guy. I think I know him.”
She got a good look at him as the two men carried him out of the house.
The door closed and we were alone.
“I recognize him too, Ron,” she said. “I think he works at INESCO. I’d
have to check the personnel records, but I’m almost 100% certain I’ve seen
him around the offices.”
Lester came back through the room carrying a box filled with the plastic
bags I’d seen earlier, and I assumed now contained crime scene evidence.
“Ron, Val, Leecy…I’m releasing the house as a crime scene and we’re
out of here. As I said before, this is clearly a case of home invasion and falls
under the protections offered homeowners by the Castle Law. I’ll need you all
to come to the station later today to complete some paperwork. How does 1:00
p.m. work for you all?”
“We’ll see you then, Lester, and thanks for your kindness,” Valerie said.
Lester nodded at me and smiled. “You broke the guy’s jaw. Murphy
thinks you may have also fractured his neck at the C1 vertebrae. He said the
guy’s injuries are consistent with those of someone being in a minor car
accident. If you don’t mind me asking again, Ron, how the heck did you inflict
so much damage on the poor sap?”
Valerie answered for me. “With his bare hands, Lester. See you at one.”
Lester walked out, and she locked the door behind him.

Continued….

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