One Safe Place

Dear Reader:

We welcomed Alvin L.A. Horn to our Strebor Books family with
Perfect Circle,
a novel featuring characters all in search of love in the Emerald City.

Alvin returns to the cloudy skies of Seattle with
One Safe Place,
the follow-up, and he blends and captures the complexities of relationships with some of the original characters. Psalms Black, a former Secret Service agent, flexes his power whether he's on a mission to exact revenge or protect his lover, Gabrielle Brandywine, once the Secretary of State of the United States.

The novel is complete with love and lust while action-packed with kidnapping and crime scenes. All in all, everyone seeks one safe place where survival is key.

Alvin is known for his spoken word talent and showcases his creativity with verse throughout the tale. The noted artist was a winner of a 2012
Billboard
spoken word award. For more flavor, cocktail recipes are interspersed, adding another touch.

As always, thanks for supporting myself and the Strebor Books family. We strive to bring you cutting-edge literature that cannot be found anyplace else. My personal web site is
Eroticanoir.com
and my Facebook page is
Facebook.com/AuthorZane
.

Blessings,

Publisher

Strebor Books

www.simonandschuster.com

God, I want to thank you for your grace to bless others to have blessed me with their patience to help and understanding. I've had some tough days, weeks, months and a couple years, but still had an opportunity to write. While nominations and awards and wonderful reviews have come, they can never replace the people who have cared for me. Many have helped me navigate a maze of obstacles such as economics and health, and dysgraphia—my learning disability—and learning to live life after you have lost loved ones. Now despite it all, people are reading me and that is the greatest reward. My readers see something in the way I write and appreciate my narratives from my God-given creativity.

The blues and joys of life have been the fertilizer that has enriched my flourishing on paper. The blues and joys of life have prompted me to writing characters in situations with engaging contemplations, meditations, theories and accepted wisdoms and enjoining philosophies and judgments drenched with emotions, but never watered down. The songs says, “Nobody wants you when you're down and out,” and I have felt that burning spear thrown from afar and close to home, but I have been blessed more with great and faithful friends who accepted my struggle and often stepped in and done for me without me asking, and often never letting me return the favor. I want to say I love you all for just being who you are.

Thank you Minty, Elissa, Tracy, William, Charmaine, Diedra, Candy, Ron, Kari, Lady Flava and Omar W, Beverly, and Wyneice, Robert and Hazel and all others on a long list. Area codes will help to keep the list shorter much love to the 206, 425, 253, 415, 210, 405, 248, 317, 702, 862, 559, 843, 301, 513, 704, 214, 646, 212, 231, 713, thank you all.

Go RB Vikings, Quakers, and Bulldogs, and Seahawks and Huskies and Seattle Supersonics forever.

I give thanks to all the women elders who have taught me the value of the love of a woman all in their own way. I write about women like you—the textured fabric of life I have been wrapped in. Every woman handles the weight of mankind differently and that creates narratives, and I love writing them.

To the women near my age and younger, I see you, I feel you in my soul, and watch your journeys. I observe your smiles and hear your cries. I admire your heart and soul in being mothers, and lovers, and all that comes with being in a world full of trials and tribulation, but your smiles are to live for. Every woman who smiles is pretty, beautiful and sexy. I hope to always be a heart that beats in a way that brings you smiles.

To the men who helped to mold me with your rights and wrongs, thank you. I can walk into any room and represent myself well knowing my world is not narrow, but wide open. Because of you I am a gentleman and enjoying being one. Because of you I love the old soul in me, in how I dress, talk, and enjoy the music I listen to, and make. Because of my male elders, I am the renaissance man that I am, so I pen you in layers of storylines.

To the correction and fixers of my spilled ink that flows out of bounds or never made sense… Thank you Omar Willey, Charmaine Parker, and Stefanie Manns.

Thank you Charmaine Parker, the lady who knows how to put twenty-eight hours into twenty-four, plus always another ten-minute call. I'm also very thankful for the people around you who support you.

Zane, thank you for letting your family of authors express creative minds to open the hearts and minds of readers. There is no shame in what goes on in the mind, as there is nothing new under the sun; it really comes down to whether people want to look or…read. Thank you for allowing the ink to flow into stores and doors.

“Y
ou stole my wife; you took my daughter. So, ol' friend, I need for you to get my other kids. I don't care about their mother; I simply need you to get my other kids.” The tone of the voice had the resonance of a public bathroom toilet flushing and sucking the waste away. “You stole my daughter, and raised her as your own, but it's cool. Go take more of what's mine, and keep it. I can assume you'll keep them safe? Until—”

“Take more of yours? Keep it?” Tylowe said. His eyes glanced over at his friend, Psalms Black, who sat looking relaxed, but coiled like a snake ready to strike. Tylowe's expression seemingly asked, “Did you hear this fool's belligerence?” Tylowe didn't expect a response, amazed that his ex-friend, Elliot, was still an arrogant ass despite his circumstances.

Elliot Piste, with the toilet-flushing voice, was an inmate at a correctional facility in British Columbia, Canada. Tylowe Dandridge had married his ex-friend's wife after he had gone to prison, but first Tylowe had become the principal contributor in putting his former friend in prison. Elliot, the once ultra-handsome black Frenchman originally from Senegal, was Tylowe's old college classmate. He had a history of treating people whom he should care about ugly, and karma made a bitch out of him from his own ugly ways. Now, years later, Tylowe and Psalms Black, a distant friend of Elliot's, sat in a visitor's room across from him.

Tylowe and Psalms had made the trip to Vancouver from Seattle on their motorcycles. Tylowe had a history of crossing the border and having his life changed. It appeared to be no different this time as he sat across from the man he had helped to put in prison.

Elliot and Tylowe were buddy-buddy until Elliot crossed one too many lines. Twice a woman had come between them. The first time, Tylowe had his heart ripped apart after trusting the malicious Elliot. The second time, Tylowe had his heart healed when Elliot ripped a woman's heart apart. Tylowe saved her, and now she was his wife.

They sat in uncomfortable metal chairs. Elliot sat as if he were sitting in an easy lounger, looking relaxed. He looked at home. He sat sixty-plus pounds heavier than when he had first entered prison. An inactive gut hung low, and man boobs were starting to take over for once-rippling pecs.

In the past, most men were intimidated by his tall, handsome looks. At one time, he looked as though he were wrapped in dark, African silk hide, but now he was cracking like an old alligator shoe. A once-upon-a-time pretty boy now looked pretty ugly.

Tylowe stared at Elliot and thought about Denzel Washington in the movie
The Hurricane,
the story about an innocent boxer kept in prison for a crime he didn't commit and being unable to fight as the boxer he was. But, prison never defeated Hurricane's soul. Elliot had let prison beat him down, and he was unremorseful and polluted with unrepentant bile.

High above any normal ladder height in the visiting room, the windows had rusted. Metal screens crisscrossed, causing filtered dull light to cast dreary sadness. Psalms laughed to himself, and thought,
Long prison sentences must equate to slow death of the brain, body, and soul, creeping in like cancer.

When Tylowe and Psalms had first arrived, the sun was shining,
but the clang of metal doors and buzzers must have controlled the weather outside once they were inside. The two men sat across from a cancer and storm.

Elliot tried to hide that Psalms intimidated him as he always had, even in their legendary days of youth. They were always cordial, yet never friends. Psalms reminded him in a voice lower than the lowest piano key.

“So Elliot, Tylowe comes here at your behest, and you mentally masturbate your ego to spew your arrogance in his face? How can you expect this man to do anything for you?”

The tension was so damn thick; a Killer whale would have passed it by even if it tasted like a thousand salmon in one bite. Elliot's eyes avoided Psalms, keeping Psalms from staring down through his irises and looking for his soul.

Nasty blood had spilled between Psalms and Elliot, and they had kept the story of what happened between the two of them. Tylowe understood something was amiss, but what it was he didn't know. Elliot was a nasty asshole with no remorse or retention of civility. Tylowe found out that Elliot had slept with one of Tylowe's girlfriends back in college, and he and Elliot worked it out. Years later though, Elliot crossed the line again and it caused Tylowe a lifetime of hurt.

Elliot had two men sitting in front of him who despised him. He tried to keep a relaxed expression on his face, and spoke directly to Tylowe.

“Look, dude.” Prison vernacular had overtaken his French-American dialect. “You know you're gonna do it. I can't blame you for stealing my wife, but you also took my daughter, and she won't even write me. So go do what you do and play Mr. Hero, and find my other kids.”

Tylowe and Psalms listened to Elliot give the details of the
situation and basic knowledge of the kids he claimed, and about the mother of these kids. The story distressed Tylowe. The thought of his wife and the fact she would find out more about the repulsive life of her ex-husband instigated an internal struggle.

Elliot, the ex-husband! Tylowe felt insecure with the fact he faced for the first time, physically sitting across from Elliot—the man who used to put his manhood between the thighs of Tylowe's wife. Tylowe twisted in manly pride, and time had not changed the past anxiety when looking at a man who had caused such pain in Tylowe's life.

Married life. Tylowe was approaching the mid-century age with enough money and plenty of free time and material pleasures. The kids were grown and living their life, no longer in need of his parenting. Did he need this challenge to make him feel manlier? Had a cushy life made him less manly? Most men his age started putting feelers in the water, too often turning to younger women for a sense of danger, hoping a young thang might satisfy a desire. That fulfilled desire kept divorce lawyers in business, as desires make men and women bad liars. Did he need to climb dangerous mountains and risk falling? Tylowe played with the questions of his mind and heart, and it created soul acid burn.