Slow Walk to Hell
Excerpt
Chapter 1
FRIDAY NIGHT
It was around 7 P.M. on a Friday evening and I was standing by the punch bowl in a drafty school gym, trying not to appear completely bored as I helped chaperone my daughter's formal middle school dance. I'd like to say that I volunteered for the duty out of a sense of parental obligation, but I hadn't. I'm Martin Collins, chief of police for Warrentown, Virginia, a small town seventy miles west of Washington, D.C., and babysitting three hundred adolescents came with the territory.
Understandably my thirteen-year-old daughter Emily wasn't exactly thrilled by my presence. She made me promise not to embarrass her in any way. By "embarrass," she meant I wasn't supposed to take photographs, talk to her or her friends, or come anywhere near her.
I tried to placate her by telling her I wasn't going to wear a uniform. "So you can chill. Your friends probably won't even notice me."
She gave me her patented "get real" look. "I think it's best if you pretend not to know me, Dad."
"Might be a little difficult," I said dryly. "I'm driving you to the dance. Remember?"
She stuck ... read full excerpt from A Slow Walk to Hell ebook