by Alex Kava
At the time, I thought she was joking. Sure Maggie threw back a few Scotches in SPLIT SECOND but it was nothing compared to what some male protagonists consume. Because Maggie’s mother is a suicidal alcoholic I thought it made sense that alcoholism might be something Maggie struggled with. Another tightrope for her to be walking. But according to this bookseller – and for the record, she was right – readers aren’t comfortable seeing a female protagonist deal with her problems by throwing back hard liquor. So now Maggie still struggles with “the urge” while she sips an occasional beer or sticks with Diet Pepsi.
Ironically, my female protagonist faced some of the same stereotypes that women were still dealing with in male dominated fields. So for DAMAGED I purposely put Maggie alongside another strong female – Coast Guard rescue swimmer, Liz Bailey. Both women are brave and compassionate in different ways and through their necessary partnership I’m able to show their true characters. For Maggie, who is slow to trust and stubbornly independent, she learns to drop her guard with the younger Liz Bailey, who wins Maggie’s trust and respect early on.
With Liz Bailey I’m able to show a generation of women who don’t complain about the double standards in their male-dominated fields. Instead, they simply fight the stereotypes by proving themselves. At 28, Liz has more Katrina rescues over New Orleans than her air crew pilot and co-pilot have together, yet she’s the newbie on their crew. And although Liz yearns for the day they’ll finally call her “their rescue swimmer” instead of “the rescue swimmer,” she doesn’t begrudge the slight. She simply proves her talents and skills and bravery. It’s exactly what Maggie O’Dell has been doing in the FBI.
At the same time, neither woman is a superhero. Both have flaws and vulnerabilities. That’s also an important part of making them real and believable. Maggie may not be throwing back Scotches any more but she has a very real fear of flying, something many people (myself included) can certainly relate to. One of my favorite chapters is when she realizes that in order to view the crime scene she’ll need to get inside a Coast Guard helicopter. And because Maggie is a tough, smart female protagonist, she gets inside the helicopter.
RESEARCH TRIVIA FROM DAMAGED
I love doing research for my novels but often there’s trivia that doesn’t make it into the novel, or sometimes there’s a story behind the story. Here are some bits and pieces. You’ll also find these on my website at www.alexkava.com.
Pensacola, Florida, was the “original” first settlement.
In 1559, six years before St. Augustine, Florida, was settled the Spanish explorer Don Tristan de Luna y Arellano landed on Pensacola's shores with a fleet of 11 ships and a crew of 1,400. Within two years a violent hurricane destroyed the colony, so St. Augustine gets the credit for being the first “permanent” settlement, but we Pensacolans know who was really first.
Real life serial killer, John Joubert.
In DAMAGED Maggie refers to real-life serial killer John Joubert who killed two little boys in Nebraska and one in Maine during the early 1980s. A piece of unusual rope helped lead to his arrest. Joubert pleaded guilty, was convicted and executed in 1996. Incidentally, the Joubert case was partially the inspiration for my debut novel, A PERFECT EVIL.
First Woman Rescue Swimmer
Kelly Mogk was the first woman to complete the difficult Navy Aviation Rescue Swimmer School in Pensacola, Florida, and the first woman in all the military services to qualify as a helicopter rescue swimmer. She graduated from the Coast Guard program in 1985. At last record, she is now Lt. Cmdr. Kelly Larson and a rescue helicopter pilot in Port Angeles.
Hurricane Ivan
For DAMAGED, I decided to use the same path for my fictional Hurricane Isaac that Hurricane Ivan took in September 2004. It was the first hurricane I had ever experienced as a new resident of Florida. I gave my fictional storm the same coordinates; however, I lessened Isaac’s steam just before it came ashore. I didn’t have the heart to put Pensacola through the same devastation that Ivan and Dennis did, even for the sake of fiction.
Coney Island Canteen
The character of Walter Bailey is based on real-life Naval Commander, Walter Carlin. When Walter retired he bought a rusty mobile canteen, cleaned, polished, painted it red, white and blue, and named it the Coney Island Canteen. He parked it on Pensacola’s old fishing bridge and sold hotdogs and Coke. He’d had plans for an entire fleet of them but instead of dealing with city politics, he decided to really retire. Walter passed away September 2008 at the age of eighty-five.
Abraham Lincoln Embalmed
Doctors had developed a new technique called embalming during the Civil War. They decided to use it on Abraham Lincoln so that his body could be paraded around the country on a funeral train. The trip lasted twenty days and everyone marveled at Lincoln’s lifelike appearance.
The Coffee Cup
Maggie and Charlie Wurth have breakfast at this Pensacola café that has been a downtown tradition since 1945. If you’re in the area, stop by and try their awarding winning Naussau grits.
A waitress named Rita.
In eight of my ten novels you’ll find a waitress named Rita somewhere in the story.
The Lost First Chapter of DAMAGED
One of the toughest things I have to do as an author is cut paragraphs, sometimes sections and even characters out of a novel. However, I’d never cut a first chapter before DAMAGED. Usually my first and last chapters are the two that take me the longest to write. I want to grab the reader’s attention from the very beginning and then I want to leave them in the end with a feeling of “wow.”
I loved this chapter, because it allowed me to show immediately the devastation and damage caused by a hurricane and I thought it would foreshadow what Maggie was going to face. You’ll also see that it gives some insight to a piece of the puzzle found in the cooler. That’s all I’m going to say so I don’t spoil anything.
However, my editor believed the chapter with Liz Bailey and the Coast Guard crew was so strong, it absolutely had to be the introduction to the novel. I agreed with her and I still think it’s probably one of the strongest first chapters of all my books. But I still loved the chapter that got cut. Here it is for you enjoy.
Port St. Lucie, Florida
Thursday, July 10th
The damage was almost as brutal as the storm. But Vince Coffland kept the thought to himself, unnerved by the thump of his car door and the echo sent throughout the cul de sac. Silly to be unnerved by that when he and his wife now stood in the middle of what looked like a war zone.
Debris littered the ground. Street signs and electrical poles lay at thirty-degree angles. Power lines dangled. Pine trees were snapped in half. Windows had been shattered. Chunks of roofs were gone. Furniture scattered across lawns, broken and shoved between sections of boat docks. Pieces of bright-colored fabric stabbed through the mesh of a chain-link fence. A huge live oak sprawled over their yard and driveway, its root ball still attached and almost two stories tall. And despite the damage, Vince couldn’t help thinking they were lucky.
“We must be the first ones back,” his wife, Irene said the obvious.
Her voice sounded like a whisper. Now without the car’s engine running he couldn’t help but notice the absolute stillness. No air conditioners humming, no kids playing, no dogs barking, no lawn mowers buzzing. No planes overhead. In fact, the sky, freshly scrubbed and indigo blue, was eerily quiet.
What the hell happened to the birds?
Vince Coffland told himself he needed to stay calm for his wife, Irene‘s sake. He had been telling himself this the entire drive back even as his heart drummed harder against his ribcage than he knew was safe. The pounding brought back memories of the days before his defibrillator implant and he didn’t like the reminder.
On the drive back to their housing complex he tried to pretend the storm damage was exactly as he expected. He couldn’t let Irene see his shock even when she gasped at the sight of their stainless-steel refrigerator toppled
and spilled in their backyard. The cute little magnets with bits of their grandkids’ pictures were still attached.
The wind and water had knocked out their French doors despite his barricade of plywood. No other window in the house was broken. Even the roof remained intact. But all of their first-floor furniture, including the refrigerator, had been sucked out onto the backyard lawn.
He couldn’t waste time over the broken pieces. He’d left Irene to do that, wandering around, quietly picking through piles, almost joyful when she discovered a jar of Smuckers grape jelly still intact.
“Look, Vince,” she had held it up for him to see, “It didn’t break.”
He simply smiled and nodded. She seemed so pleased to find something undamaged. He watched her cradle the jar against the crook of her arm and he didn’t have the heart to remind her that she bought homemade jams and jellies from the farmers’ market and had probably never owned a Smuckers product in the last decade.
Yes, he knew they were lucky. The drive back had told both of that. At least the hurricane had left them a house. So what if most of their furniture -- what the storm hadn’t shredded -- had been tossed around the neighborhood. Their drive had shown them that others had less. Others would return to only a pile of debris where their houses once stood.
He reminded himself of that as he hauled pilings from a boat dock away from his garage door. He wasn’t supposed to lift anything over fifty pounds. Maybe it didn’t count if he slid it through the mud.
The drumming inside his chest continued, a steady rhythm now, pounding in his ears almost drowning out the screech of the double-wide garage door as he yanked it up. He couldn’t let it stop him. He used to be strong as an ox. Not anymore, he realized as he dragged the generator out. He wanted to get some juice running before dark. Already the shadows swallowed the last of daylight. He had an hour at best.
The sheared tops of trees looked like skeleton hands, stripped of leaves, raw and broken, reaching for the dimming sky. He wiped at the sweat dripping from his forehead. No mosquitoes. Even the bugs were smart enough to leave.
He was breathing too hard. His fingers jerked with an irritating tremble to them. Just enough to splash precious gasoline over the funnel. The fumes made him nauseated and lunch backed up in a belch, leaving an aftertaste of the bologna sandwich. Too much mustard mixed with stress. After he finished with the generator he’d pull out the grill. They’d have steaks from the freezer, probably already thawed.
Everything took too long. It was like moving in slow motion, which fit the surreal surroundings. But the sound of the generator, its engine coughing and sputtering to life, blasted the silence and actually started to calm the pounding in Vince’s chest. By the time he found Irene she had mopped the mud and debris from their living room and kitchen floors. Their neighbors, Katherine and Henry had returned. They were in the backyard with Irene, examining the contents Henry had pulled up in his skimmer net.
“Brim,” Henry told Vince when he saw him. He brought the dripping net forward under one of the lanterns Irene had arranged in the backyard. Inside the net was a mound of dead little fish, their wet shiny scales glittering in the firelight. “My pool is filled with them.”
“Brim are fresh water fish,” Vince said, glancing up at the bay just 100 feet away. It lapped quietly now at the chewed out craters it had left of their backyards. The moon peeked out over the horizon flickering across the water’s surface. The sun had just gone down.
“Fresh water is about ten miles up the bay,” Katherine said.
“I’ve got the grill going,” Vince told them in the same tone he had used to invite them over many times. “We’ll have steaks.” Then he smiled. “No brim.”
That’s when they heard the boat engine.
Vince looked at Henry. Neither one of them said it but they were thinking the same thing, “Could it be looters already?”
“Stay here with Katherine and Irene,” Vince told him. He didn’t wait for an argument.
He stopped back at the garage and grabbed a rifle. The boat had stopped somewhere along the shore.
Vince threaded his way through the debris to the water’s edge, staying on his neighbor’s lawns. He kept to the shadows, watching the shoreline. When he finally saw the boat it looked empty except for bags of ice.
The man came up behind him and Vince spun around, swinging the rifle up at him.
“Whoa, slow down,” the guy said.
“Sorry.” Vince dropped the rifle as soon as he saw his uniform. “Didn’t expect any of you out here so soon.”
“Any of your neighbors back yet?”
“A couple. My wife and I’ve been back only a few hours.”
Vince turned back toward his house. He couldn’t see it through the trees. Not even to give them a wave that it was okay.
“I’ve got some supplies,” the guy said. “Plenty of ice if you like.” And he pointed inside the boat.
Vince set his rifle down. Seemed awfully early to be distributing ice when there was so much more to do, but he wouldn’t argue. They could certainly use the ice and he bent down to grab a bag. He didn’t even feel the gun barrel at the base of his skull. He barely heard its blast.
If you haven’t read DAMAGED yet, I hope you will. It’s available in hardcover (Doubleday), mass market paperback (Anchor), e-book (Kindle), and audio (Brilliance).
Praise for Alex Kava’s DAMAGED
“Rip-roaring action that only builds in intensity with every page…A true thriller!”
–Tess Gerritsen, NY Times Bestselling Author
“Contains all the hard-core thrills her readers expect.”
–Palm Beach Post
“This intense thriller builds to an eye-popping revelation that will leave fans eager for the sequel.”
–Publisher’s Weekly
“This action packed thriller…will appeal to all adrenaline junkies.”
–BookList
“Read this gripping, can’t put it down thriller. O’Dell could be Reacher’s long lost twin.”
–Lee Child, NY Times Bestselling Author
