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  Praise for previous novels in the Reed & Billie Series

  Must love dogs. Great story and great characters. I hope there will be many more about Reed and Billie. It took a while for me to figure out the why, but I like a good mystery and this is one. Thanks again Mr. Stevens. I look forward to reading the next one. – Amazon Customer

  Thrillers are some of my favorite reads because I love to be pulled into a story and through intense situations, all in the safety of my own home. I've read some pretty good ones lately and can now add to that list author Dustin Stevens' "The Boat Man". The story of Detective Reed Mattox, who is attempting to lay low after the death of his partner, yet is pulled into a pretty intense serial murder investigation. The killer is called The Boat Man and is name after Charon from Greek mythology, who carries souls across the rivers Styx into the world of the dead. This is essentially a story of vigilante justice and the mystery involved is a very good one. I found the read to be both intense and very enjoyable. Would definitely recommend and I now plan on checking out some of this author's other novels. – Top 500 Amazon Reviewer

  One of the best books I have read since getting my Kindle. The book is very suspenseful while dealing with a subject that has generated a great deal of controversy through the years. While reading the book there is a definite struggle between your heart and your brain over how you should be reacting to the events in the book. I wish every book I read was close to the quality I found in this book. – Kindle Customer

  Best book I've read in a long time and I read for hours every night. It was so good to read a police thriller without the main character being "saved" from himself by some hot woman. Fantastic character development and being a dog lover, loved that he is K-9 cop. The book held my attention and I didn't figure out what was going on until the end. I read so much that I rarely leave reviews but I want the author to know how much I enjoyed his work. I highly recommend this book. – Amazon Customer

  It certainly was a Thriller. I was intrigued by the complexity of sub-plots, the difficulties experienced by Maddox just trying to do his job; trying to do the right thing. Because doing the right thing is all we have to define our character once the cards are dealt. And in what was left of The Boat Man's mind he believed in his cause, too. First exposure to this author's excellent, engrossing work of art. – Amazon Reviewer

  I had never put much thought into the work life of highly-trained military and police dogs, and found it quite fascinating. Billie, along with the human she has trained to supply her with food, was an interesting character. The most interesting character was the Boat Man himself, both because of what he was doing and why and how he was doing it. It was impossible not to feel empathy for him. There were several other interesting people who helped make this book very readable. – Kindle Reviewer

  Other works by Dustin Stevens:

  The Subway

  Danny the Daydreamer

  One Last Day

  The Debt

  Going Viral

  Quarterback

  Scars and Stars

  Catastrophic

  21 Hours

  Ohana

  Be My Eyes

  Twelve

  Liberation Day

  Just a Game

  Ink

  Four

  The Zoo Crew Novels:

  Moonblink

  The Glue Guy

  Tracer

  Dead Peasants

  The Zoo Crew

  The Hawk Tate Novels:

  Hellfire

  Fire and Ice

  Cover Fire

  Cold Fire

  The Reed & Billie Novels:

  The Partnership

  The Kid

  The Good Son

  The Boat Man

  Works Written as T.R. Kohler:

  The Ring

  Shoot to Wound

  Peeping Thoms

  The Scorekeeper

  A Reed & Billie Novel

  Dustin Stevens

  The Scorekeeper, A Reed & Billie Novel

  Copyright © 2018, Dustin Stevens

  Cover Art and Design: Paramita Bhattacharjee, www.creativeparamita.com

  Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work, in whole or part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, is illegal and forbidden, without the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, settings, names, and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, places or settings, and/or occurrences. Any incidences of resemblance are purely coincidental.

  He who fights with monsters might take care lest he

  thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for

  long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

  --Friedrich Nietzsche

  By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the

  future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they

  will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here,

  who seek it in aught else than that which so closely

  surrounds them here - the Infinite.

  --Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  The knuckles on her left hand were smashed beyond repair. Done by pounding her fist one time after another into the pine boards just inches from her face, she had lashed at her enclosure long after it proved any good to do so.

  Long after the first stripes of pain rippled through her arm, angry wails from nerve endings embedded just beneath the surface.

  Even well beyond the point where she felt the skin split, warm blood oozing down the veins and tendons running along the back of her hand.

  One time after another she had pounded at the boards in front of her. What had started as a frantic, angry attempt to get through the pine box she was tucked into had quickly turned into so much more. Over the course of just a few minutes, it had become something that bordered on cathartic, a chance for her to take out the myriad emotions she was feeling.

  The shock and fear of waking up in total darkness. The pain of her exposed body rubbing against the bare wood inside the box. The realization that this place would likely be where she took her last breaths.

  The burning hatred for whoever had put her here, their reasoning for doing such a thing still beyond her most valiant attempts to decipher.

  The state of her right hand was only nominally better. At least three of her fingernails were cracked or broken. The skin on two others was peeled open, her fingers sticky with dried blood.

  Not long before, she had read that survival was the most basic of all human emotions. It compelled people to do things, to continue pressing forward no matter the circumstances stacked before them.

  It had caused her to crush the bones in her left hand to bits. To continue scratching at the makeshift walls around her even after it was clear that there was no reprieve to be found there.

  And it was what now had her clinging to the tiny electronic device in her hand, staring at the empty flashing box in the corner, praying with everything she had that the last few gasps of battery it contained would be enough to bring about her salvation.

  Chapter One

  The loamy scent of the earth filled The Scorekeeper’s nostrils. Rolling his head back, he let the intoxicating aroma infiltrate his nose, rising directly through his nasal cavity and into his brain.

  Better than any pharmaceutical, better than any pleasure of the flesh, it filled him with a euphoria he hadn’t known in years. In that instant, he seemed so much more than just a man, in
finitely beyond his own corporeal form.

  In its place was a weightless drifting, memories and evoked responses from a previous life, a state he had not known in quite some time.

  Allowing the feeling to linger for several moments, The Scorekeeper drew in every detail of the world around him. The cool air on his skin. The damp earth pressed between his exposed toes. The grit of soil embedded in his palms, streaks of it smeared across the handle of the shovel he was leaning against.

  That magnificent, wondrous smell.

  Peeling his eyes open, The Scorekeeper could see the wan light of the early morning sky outside. Almost milky white, it gave an ethereal glow to the world around him, hinting at what lay in the day ahead.

  With that realization, The Scorekeeper forced his focus back down to the task at hand. There would be plenty of time for revelry soon enough. For now, there was a job to be completed, a progression about to begin.

  Justice to be meted out.

  Pulling the pointed tip of the shovel from the earth, The Scorekeeper looked at the spread around him. Stretched wide on either side was the hole he’d been digging, a trench cleaved with the utmost precision. Seven feet in length and three feet across, the small enclosure he was now in was just barely large enough to contain it and the dirt piled high on every edge.

  Shallower than most, it was only half of what was usually expected. It stopped mid-thigh, leaving most of his body still exposed above the lip of the trench.

  Not that there was any fear of being seen. The location, like every other minute detail of the coming days, had been scouted and planned with the utmost of care.

  Doing something like what he was about to took a great many things, none more important than the time to see them through.

  And time was one of the few things he’d had in abundance these past years.

  The reason for the shallow depth brought a thin smile to The Scorekeeper’s face. Shifting his gaze to the side, he let it settle on the single object waiting just outside. Built from plain pine boards, the homemade coffin was a far cry from the high-end models that companies now used to gouge customers. There was no rounded and polished top to it. No knobs of gold or silver on the corners.

  Not even a pillow or velvet lining to provide comfort on the inside.

  Nothing but bare wood and carpenter nails, the sort of structure a man could be proud of. The kind put together for a specific purpose, much more concerned with function rather than form, designed by an engineer and put together by a man good with his hands.

  Lying flat on the ground, the top of the coffin leaned against the side of it, ready to be slid into place and nailed shut. Once it received its final deposit, it could be closed and pushed down into the hole he has now standing in, covered over by the heaping pile of fresh soil that waited just inches from his hip.

  The wood was so pristine, it almost gleamed under the morning light, a rare splash of color in a world demarcated by earth tones.

  Releasing his grip on the handle of the shovel, The Scorekeeper looked down at his hands. Long out of practice, the skin that at one point had been nothing more than leather had gone soft. A task that years before would have passed without a mark had now left behind a trail of blisters over the age line in his palm.

  On his thumb, a similar blemish had torn open, exposing pink flesh beneath. Angry and irritated from the mud and sweat that had pushed their way in, he could feel the omnipresent sting.

  Just one more reminder of what had been lost.

  Of the reason behind what he was now doing.

  Clamping his molars down tight, feeling the frustration clench in his jaw, The Scorekeeper shifted his attention to the mound of fresh soil beside him. With such a shallow grave, it rose just barely level with his shoulder. Swirls of black and tan were present in equal amounts, a few errant tufts of leaves and moss providing just a slight break to the color scheme.

  Taking up the shovel again with both hands, The Scorekeeper drove the point down into the earth beneath him. Lifting a heaping load, he turned at the waist, feeling his oblique and serratus muscles tense as he tossed it onto the pile.

  As he did so, he imagined how different things would be in just a short while, already able to hear the sound of loose particles slapping against the top of the box.

  Again, the smile returned. Too long he had been deprived of such pleasures.

  At long last, his wait was over.

  Chapter Two

  The witness chair at the front of Courtroom Three, tucked away on the second floor of the Franklin County Municipal Courthouse in Columbus, was one of the more uncomfortable seats Detective Reed Mattox had ever sat in.

  Not in the proverbial sense – as a ranking member of the Columbus Police Department, Reed had testified in dozens of cases over the years – but in the actual literal manner.

  Small and confined, it was cut from solid wood. Without even the addition of a cushion or pad along the bottom, Reed could feel his glutes and hamstrings tightening. Digging into either kidney were the edges of the chair back, the model apparently not designed for anybody standing taller than five-foot-three.

  Which was a full foot shorter than he was.

  “Detective Mattox, can you please explain to the court what makes your particular position unique to others that might have been investigating?”

  Six feet away, Prosecutor Lara Langston stood with her fingers laced and hanging before her. Somewhere in her late thirties, she was dressed in a gray skirt and white blouse with a black blazer. A string of pearls was just visible around her neck, offset by dark hair pulled back behind her.

  Though she was looking his direction as she asked the question, her shoulders were turned slightly toward the jury box beside her.

  “Simply put?” Reed replied. “Her.”

  Looking from Langston to the jurors, he raised a hand, pointing to the floor beside him.

  There, perched on her rear haunches, the bulk of her weight supported by her front paws, was his partner Billie. With an elongated body and nose, she appeared to look like a solid black wolf, more than sixty pounds of coiled muscle sitting calm and docile.

  “Which is to say, I am a K-9 Detective, as is my partner here, Billie.”

  At the sound of her name, Billie looked his direction, the overhead light flashing over her moist eyes the only splashes of color visible.

  “And can you please explain the unique skillset that Billie provides to the department?” Langston asked.

  Not long before, she had ascended from her role as Deputy Prosecutor to the top name on the marquee. Done as a result of a sudden heart attack to her boss, it was still as yet unknown how long the man would be sidelined.

  In the meantime, the court didn’t seem to be in any major hurry to replace him, the constant caseload and Langston’s familiarity with it making her the natural choice to slide into the position.

  If in the fall there was the need to hold a special election to fill the role, it would be dealt with at that time.

  “She is a Belgian Malinois,” Reed replied, “and is equipped with one of the more sensitive noses on the planet.”

  Turning his focus to the side, he stared at the collection of local citizens beside him, making sure the importance of what he was about to share was imparted.

  “Which is to say, she was born with more than two-hundred-and-twenty-five million scent receptors, over forty-five times what you and I have. Her nose is so precise, nearly a quarter of her brain is devoted to parsing through all that data.

  “Her mind identifies and deduces smells the way ours might sight. She doesn’t just smell the orange juice somebody spilled on the carpet, but also the cat that was there last week, the French fry that was dropped a week before that, and the chemical cleaner used the last time it was shampooed.”

  Of the dozen people on the jury panel, all but three looked to be older than fifty. Of those, the group was split evenly between male and female, black and white.

  About the only thin
g they did seem to have in common was their focus on him, many raising their eyebrows and nodding slightly at his explanation.

  Which was pretty much his reaction the first time he heard such information as well.

  “That’s very impressive,” Langston said, “but a dog such as Billie still has to be trained to harness all that ability, correct?”

  Reed had known the question was coming. It being the third time already he had testified with Langston, they had been through the list a couple of times before.

  Leaving his attention on the jury, he said, “Yes, that’s correct. Prior to joining CPD, Billie was with the United States Marine Corps. She was trained as an active drug and bomb detection agent and did two tours overseas before making her way to us.

  “Even now, she and I take part in frequent training together.”

  Turning her shoulders slightly, Langston took a few steps across the center of the floor. In doing so, she opened up a line of sight from Reed to the defendant’s table, a young woman with hair dyed green glaring up at him.

  Beside her, a public defender scribbled furiously, the boy looking to be no more than a month or two out of law school.

  Which wasn’t surprising, the public defender’s job in a place such as The Bottoms – the aptly named portion of Columbus that Reed patrolled – ranking only slightly higher than sanitation officer.

  And that was solely because it paid better.

  “So, you weren’t actually looking for Ms. Crenshaw on the night in question, were you?” Langston asked.

  Adjusting his weight against the wooden chairback, Reed shook his head. “No.”

  “Had not been tipped off from a local informant?”

  “No.”

  “Had you ever even seen the defendant prior to that night?”

  Again glancing to the woman staring hard at him, Reed was reasonably certain he would have remembered that visage if ever he had come across it.