Richard Drebert
Writing Stories "for Such a Time as This."
Is your heritage a mystery to your family and friends?
I partner with storytellers who hire me to create their book or story. As a ghostwriter, sometimes I am not officially credited for my work. My name may not appear on the cover of a book at all. RD
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“The following short stories have been written by me and appear in books published by Good Catch Publishing.”
Wings of Power
Written By Richard Drebert
© Good Catch Publishing
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We were catching up, rapping about old friends that we had in common, as he walked me home from Jack in the Box. I hadn’t seen Rex in five years, since junior high. He seemed nice, kinda handsome, pleasant. At the door of Mama’s apartment, he had paused, and I said, “Would you like to come in for a minute?”
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High Lead to Heaven
Written by Richard Drebert
© Good Catch Publishing
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If sweat and blood could grant a man title to timberlands, I hold deed on many a mountain in Southwestern Washington. For decades, my towers roosted atop saw-tooth ridges and cabled mammoth Douglas fir, conifer, and hemlock logs to landings my fallers clear cut. My 50-ton loaders grappled logs in iron fists and stacked the naked trees on the backs of idling trucks. In the clean breezes at dawn, black diesel smoke wafted above my rigs as they mucked down muddy inclines — roads that I gouged out of hillsides in the painful glare of bulldozer headlights.
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Trickster’s Roost
Written by Richard Drebert
© Good Catch Publishing
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I yanked the thick boat canvas over my three sisters and me, where we shivered inside the tin-roof smokehouse. It was minus 30 degrees, and the loose straw stored for the dogs pricked our cheeks and caught in our hair. Even bundled up in heavy parkas, we weren’t much bigger than the Eskimo dolls sold as souvenirs in Anchorage. Aata (Dad) had tanned the seal skins for our mukluks (boots), and Aana (Mom) had sewn love into every stitch of our rabbit fur parkas — but on long winter nights in Mountain Village, Alaska, when Aata poured homebrew into metal cups at the kitchen table, my parents hated each other.
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Flight from Perversion
The Story of Roy O
Written by Richard Drebert
© Good Catch Publishing
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The Butcher Baker is a convicted serial killer. He was also my barber. And while we talked, sometimes his eyes glazed over as he drifted in his own private universe. He had confessed to murdering at least 17 women.
I was serving jail time, too — where the Butcher was incarcerated, 461 years.
I would be imprisoned for five years of a 12-year term, and upon my release, society would track every move I made for as long as I lived — this was my life sentence.
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Rebuilding Borahana
Written by Richard Drebert
© Good Catch Publishing
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Would the villagers kill to possess what Papa unearthed? The leathery-faced town elder made the sign of a cross, and leaned close to my father’s burly chest.
“I’ve seen the fire rising from our ancestors’ graves, Don Porfirio. The gold is buried with them at the foot of the giant pine tree!” He crossed himself again as the greedy villagers stepped aside for him to limp past.
A worried scowl crossed my father’s face as he started up the old bulldozer, and he noticed concern in my eyes too. “Its okay, Hijo (Son),” he reassured, but I wasn’t convinced.
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Second Chance Drifter
Written by Richard Drebert
© Good Catch Publishing
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The crystal meth clawed at my nerves like starving stray cats in a cage. My guitar soaked up my tremors as I choked the neck, strumming a throbbing, euphoric rhythm. I perched on an oak stool, flanked by a jerry-rigged amplifier, crooning my signature song, “Barstool Country,” watching the performer aping in the dirty mirror across the bar. The man still enchanted me, his cadaverous face a contorted, animated blur. The man in the mirror was me.
Barstool country, it ain’t never gonna die. Barstool country will always be alive. ‘Cause I play it every night, and you know I play it right.
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New Blood
Written by Richard Drebert
© Good Catch Publishing
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Blood trickled slowly from my body, and I shifted impatiently, eyes shut tight.
Four hours left.
Compressors, engines, pumps — I’d always worked machines, but this one was working me. I sat, at its “droning” mercy, helpless, like a fidgety mannequin. A nurse in drab green and heavy white shoes monitored freakish dials as the apparatus sucked blood from my neck, digested it, then expelled it into my body again, bright red and “kidney clean.”
Doctors at Virginia Mason Medical Center had pronounced sentence months ago — dialysis — while dangling the possibility of finding a healthy kidney for me someday.
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The Roughest Ward
Written by Richard Drebert
(c) Good Catch Publishing
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Kenny:
If he got to my .45, he would kill me.
We writhed on the barroom floor, slick with beer and blood. I gouged, kicked and kneed — but the man was stronger. I felt his legs lock around my waist as he smashed me over and over with one boney fist. His other hand groped down my right hip to my leather holster, and we shared a moment of truth.
I jammed my hand into a painful place, squeezing with all my might, praying for agony to channel past the booze to his brain, and suddenly he shoved away, howling, like he was repulsed by my badge. I cuffed one brawny wrist on the fly and barely secured the other before I heard the shell chambered.
Did the suspect have a friend?
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