Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  The Bad Reputation

  Summaries

  Bad ReputationCHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  Balmoral

  The Core

  West Bound

  Runaway

  Fearless

  Breaking

  Murmurs

  About the Author

  Bad Reputation

  The Complete Collection

  MATT HADER

  ThinkBox Entertainment • Vancouver, Canada

  Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection

  Published By

  THINKBOX PUBLISHING

  a division of ThinkBox Entertainment Ltd.

  1027 Davie Street, Suite 235

  Vancouver, BC.

  Canada, V6E 4L2

  All rights reserved

  Copyright 2015 Matt Hader

  Foreword by John K. Manos

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Hader, Matt, 1960-

  Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection

  [electronic resource] / Matt Hader.

  Electronic monograph in ePub format.

  ISBN 978-0-9876986-8-1

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experiences, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person or places is intended or should be inferred.

  For Lori

  Foreword

  Success as a writer can be defined, I think, in a very simple way: You’ve succeeded if your readers are caught by your work, if they keep reading it to find out what might happen next. This seems to be true for everything from a newspaper article to a literary novel. And all successful writers are doing the same thing well: They all tell a story that readers want to hear.

  Among a good-sized body of strengths I might ascribe to Matt Hader, telling a story is at the top. And I’m damned if I can come up with a greater accolade for a writer. Matt is a great storyteller.

  He applies this talent liberally, whether it’s in a movie, a novel, or a description of his nephew’s exploits as a high school track champion. In every instance, Matt’s tale unfolds with human warmth, intrigue, and suspense and with a complete, sympathetic understanding of the damaged, self-deluding slabs of flesh who are moving about with as much purpose and insight as they can.

  I met Matt Hader at a library reading in Evanston, Illinois. My novel Dialogues of a Crime had just been released, and I was participating in a small authors’ panel. Matt was reading from Bad Reputation. We both made every effort to be engaging, entertaining and intriguing. Matt was all of those things and much more, casually demonstrating his skill with humor, warmth and grace. I was immensely thankful I didn’t have to follow him.

  Afterwards we spent some time talking, exchanged copies of our books and made the usual vague plans to “get together sometime.” But what wasn’t usual is we both meant it. Many friendships have begun with less.

  Over lunch we discovered a lot of common ground beyond our writing. We both grew up in the Chicago area. We both made our acquaintances with local law enforcement, and Matt even worked on the right side of the police line for a number of years. I knew well the towns where Matt chose to set Bad Reputation, which takes place in an upscale suburb on the “northwest” route of the old Chicago & Northwestern train line out of Chicago, almost exurbia when we grew up but now essentially part of the contiguous megalopolis. I lived halfway between the model for “Balmoral” and Park Ridge, the town where Matt grew up and played football at Maine South High School, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater and one of Chicagoland’s best secondary schools by almost any measure. He went on to prove himself as a rare specimen - a Division I athlete, playing wide receiver as a walk-on for Oklahoma State’s football team - but decided to be something even more rare, a top-tier athlete who can write.

  I might re-order his achievements, not only because I value his writing skill more highly than his athletic talents but because athletic ability is guaranteed to fade in the face of its implacable enemy, the calendar. On the other hand, Matt’s writing ability seems to improve each year.

  As I noted earlier, Matt is a great storyteller. I would add that he’s a fearless writer as well. So when he completed Bad Reputation, he gladly accepted an additional challenge, to glance back at the peripheral characters who helped drive the original story forward and tell us their stories as well. And in this compendium you get to read all of the stories that Matt set in motion around Balmoral, Illinois. You’ll find it a delightful, remarkable roller-coaster ride into and out of the sine curve of these suburban people’s lives. Now combined into a single volume, all of these fascinating, clumsy people will tantalize you and draw you into Matt’s unique map of their world, from John Caul’s hilariously desperate attempt to get even with his home town after two decades of life as a pariah to Dwayne Bowling’s profoundly conflicted view of freedom and criminality and the unaccountably sexy and unintentionally liberated Sharon’s stumblingly erotic journey into her own past.

  From time to time Matt and I have compared notes about writing, sometimes suggesting new angles on characters, sometimes contrasting our attitudes about the physical act of getting the elusive words onto the paper, occasionally sending up trial balloons about plot and characters. We always seem to return to a simple question: What’s the story? If you can’t diagram it on a story outline, like a high school freshman enduring English class, then what is the point? No one will want to read it.

  You’ll want to read Matt’s work. Your friends will want to read it too. You may want to re-read Matt’s writing, just as I do. Because Matt can tell a story. Man, can he tell a story!

  John K. Manos

  Author, Dialogues of a Crime

  Preface

  “If someone treats you poorly, and you want to get some long-lasting revenge, kill
them with kindness. It works. Now eat your liver and onions.” – Mom

  Ten years ago, when I was living in California, that old mom-approved axiom, “kill them with kindness,” helped me to create a new story idea. The piece of fiction that sparked to a start was about a small town/suburban loner who commits crimes in order to serve a greater good in his seemingly bucolic community. During the initial story musings, I knew that I wanted the protagonist to be a victim of ruthless systemic bullying. The abuse would start during his teen years, and last through to adulthood. By the time the hero (really an anti-hero) entered his 30’s, he would finally be fed up enough to demonstrate – through obviously antithetical means - that he was not the worthless person his tormentors thought he was. The use of bullying tactics to abuse another person is truly an ugly human trait -- one that my character would do his best to put a halt to.

  Growing up on the cramped north side of Chicago, and in Park Ridge, the small town of Barrington, Illinois was, to my childhood mind, a magical place. But it was a destination that I had never been to. I knew only that it was situated way out northwest of the city limits, and that it was where people lived on vast acres of land. The Barrington that was depicted to me, all those years ago, was a quaint spot where horses were kept on homeowner’s front yards. Yes, horses -- on peoples’ front yards. Seriously. Sure, we had greenery in the area where I lived, but we didn’t have horse-on-the-front-yard greenery. I remember first hearing all of this fascinating information as I hung upside down on the monkey bars during recess at Roosevelt Elementary School. It was my fellow 8-year old buddy Bernie Brady who gave me the lowdown on Barrington that day. He had voyaged there the weekend before and witnessed all of its glory with his own eyes. If Bernie said it was real – it was real. I had no reason to doubt him. So far, he’d been right about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, as well as the lowly Cubs.

  Right from the very start, I knew that I wanted Barrington to be the locale for the new project.

  How could anything possibly go wrong in a place like Barrington? There could never be vicious people who would systematically bully a fellow resident in that sort of magical little community. And using that scope of child-like reasoning, I chose the renamed “Balmoral, Illinois” as the backdrop for my new story Bad Reputation. We all know that life circumstances are not as cut-and-dried as they may seem. If a crime-ridden area has more good-natured individuals than not – a beautiful little town like Balmoral could have some bad actors. Why did I change the name from Barrington to Balmoral? To me, if you say Balmoral just right, it sounds like ‘bad morals.’ I’m easily amused.

  I wrote a short treatment, and then crafted a detailed outline for Bad Reputation, in hopes of completing the piece as a speculative screenplay, one that my agent could successfully hawk for me. Did I mention that I’m a screenwriter? Anyway. Other projects came along. Paid screenwriting projects. The new story I had dreamed up about the bullied man in the pretty little town was relegated to the shelf.

  In 2010, through happenstance, my wife and I moved to, yes -- Barrington, Illinois. I didn’t even see that one coming. Once I moved into town, though, I quickly realized that my crafted fictional version of the burg was - outside some of the geography described in the novel - nothing like the genuine town at all. Thankfully. Barrington is lovely. The only downside to this realization was the discovery that folks actually did not have horses on their front yards – at least not within the town limits.

  My cross-country move to the mystical town I could only dream of living in as an 8-year old seemed to me like a sign to finally complete the shelved story. And everything kind of fell into place for Bad Reputation when a production company I had done creative work for in the past advised me that they were branching out and starting a small publishing arm. They asked, “Do you have any book ideas?”

  Yes. Yes, I do.

  Once the novel was completed, and released in October of 2011, the publisher came up with a brilliant idea. That was to create several ancillary novelettes (7,500 – 15,000 word documents) about various side characters from the book. So soon after the release of the novel, in between writing projects, I began to craft the next set of Bad Reputation stories. The novelettes follow 6 individual characters (Larry, Rita, Dwayne, Enright, Keith, and Sharon) as they journey outside the realm of the novel itself. The new stories have tiny bits and pieces of the original tale woven into them, but mostly expand the universe of Bad Reputation as a whole, and introduce you to many more new characters, as well. Some of the novelettes are darkly humorous, others more dramatic. As a creative writer, I try to embrace variety whenever possible. Four of the novelettes were published previously. But here’s the exciting part. Two formerly unpublished stories (Fearless & Runaway) are being released right now as part of this complete collection. And they are exclusive only to this compilation – they won’t be sold separately.

  I hope you enjoy all of the stories, and thank you so much for taking the time to read Bad Reputation: The Complete Collection.

  Matt Hader

  PS – Attached to the end of this compilation is a sneak-peek sample chapter from my new novel Murmurs. Happy reading.

  The Bad Reputation

  Summaries

  Bad Reputation (the novel)

  John Caul has decided that it is finally time to wreak some havoc on the townspeople who’ve ostracized him for the past 20 years. When he was a 17 year old kid, John did the inexcusable - he accidentally burned down the brand new high school gymnasium on the eve of their championship basketball team playing the first game of their season. Now 37 years old, John decides he’s had enough and he hatches a plan for some payback. And with any well-planned, or in John’s case, not so well-planned scheme...nothing goes as designed.

  Balmoral (9 months before events in novel)

  In the novel, Larry, the talented and dedicated cook at Dink’s Diner, a popular Balmoral meeting spot, met a 37-year old loner named John Caul. Unknown to Larry at that time, John Caul was hatching a wayward plan to bring harm to the town of Balmoral for the lifetime of ostracization he’d been experiencing. Ostracization brought on by the accidental damage John, himself, caused the town twenty years earlier when he was a teenager.

  Balmoral takes place nine months before the events of Bad Reputation. Larry has yet to even discover the town of Balmoral and, sadly, having recently given up on his artistic dreams, he’s floundering through life without purpose, which leads to an unfortunate, but inevitable, arrest.

  While serving the community-service portion of his sentence delivering meals for senior citizens, Larry meets Mr. Herman in the town of Balmoral. Mr. Herman is a somewhat unlikeable recluse who enlists the reluctant Larry to help him complete a task to right a wrong he caused earlier in his own life. Larry doesn’t quite realize it then, but the steps he takes in assisting Mr. Herman will be the catalyst he needs toward becoming the man he is to soon be.

  The Core (Concurrent with the events in the novel )

  In the novel, Enright, a shady private investigator, bullied his way through the town of Balmoral on his quest to locate - and steal for himself - the money that the “Baby Face Robber” had taken.

  In The Core, Jack Enright must regain his emotional footing after discovering that the brutal grandfather who raised him was not the man he thought he was. The family secret rattles Enright’s foundation and could lead him to either absolution or into making a fatal error.

  West Bound (2 days after events in novel)

  In the novel, the ever-affable Dwayne Bowling confessed to crimes that he didn’t commit so he could return to his true home - prison.

  In West Bound, just two days after his arrest, Dwayne is released when the police learn he falsified evidence. Once free, Dwayne discovers that his long-lost love may have been kidnapped. He sets out to rescue her, and in doing so, struggles to overcome not only the repercussions from past cri
minal indiscretions, but also his own recidivist urges.

  Runaway (4 months after events in novel)

  In the novel, Sharon, the mother of Danny, a troubled teen, and one-time criminal partner of the “Baby Face Robber,” was barely holding on to her crumbling suburban existence and declining marriage.

  In Runaway, Sharon travels from Balmoral to her hometown of San Mateo, CA, to establish a new life in advance of her pending divorce. But her plans for a productive trip are sidelined when she reconnects with an old love interest. Sharon and the man from her past set out on a daytrip that could lead to either an exhilarating new relationship, or disastrous consequences.

  Fearless (9 months after events in novel)

  In the novel, Keith, the twitchy marmot-like town councilman, pilfered donated money meant for a good cause so that he could fund a shady land-purchase deal.

  In Fearless, Keith’s life is on a moral upswing, but his newfound contentment becomes threatened by a criminal associate from his sordid past. Faced with a palpable ‘it’s your money or your life’ situation, Keith must battle to save his family and himself from near certain annihilation.

  Breaking (2 Years after events in novel)

  Rita Dimos, a wife and mother of two, grew-up in a dysfunctional family. The abuse she endured was constant; the disabling effects on her persona, permanent. In the novel, Bad Reputation, Rita was intertwined in John Caul’s errant revenge scheme and forced to commit murder. Inexplicably, all her pent-up emotional turmoil instantly dissipated the moment she pulled the trigger.