Read a Chapter is *NEW* added feature at Beyond the Books! Here you’ll be able to read the first chapters of books of all genres to see if you like them before you buy them. Today we are featuring Concrete Pearl by Vincent Zandri. Ordering information follows. Enjoy!
Ava “Spike” Harrison might be a beautiful, classically schooled woman, but the single, 38 year old construction business owner is also plenty ballsy. Her late father taught her long ago how to handle the rough boys in an industry that’s almost entirely filled with hard-boiled men on the make. But now, with “the business dad built” from the ground up failing due to an unusual series of job-site injuries and just plain bad luck, Spike has no choice but to take on one last project she believes can pull the fledgling commercial firm from the depths of almost certain bankruptcy and family shame: The Renovation of Albany PS 20.
Problem is, Spike had no choice but to take the job on the cheap or, what’s known in the industry as, “at cost.” To make matters worse, she’s not only hired an asbestos removal contractor who, unbeknownst to her, low-balled his price, but she’s advanced him $10Gs from her own dwindling cash account as a “good faith” incentive to beat the project deadline.
Now, when that same asbestos contractor goes missing and it’s discovered by OSHA officials that he’s cheated on the project exposing more than 300 students to deadly asbestos fibers for months, the ever responsible Spike takes matters into her own callused hands and goes in search of him. What she discovers along the way however, is a path paved with deception, greed, murder, and eventually, her own ultimate demise.
Chapter 1
How does a headstrong girl like me learn to survive in a man’s construction racket? You learn to survive by taking your old man’s advice, even if it does come to you from six feet under.
After all these years I can still hear the proud baritone pouring out the mouth of the late great John Harrison. He used to say that a building erected by the Harrison Construction Company wasn’t meant to last for two or even three hundred years. Like the great Egyptian pyramids, it was meant to last forever.
I can see the short but sturdy man standing on the edge of a high-rise jobsite, concrete foundations already poured and cured, structural steel newly erected, a big American flag perched high above us off the top most section of rust-colored I-beam.
“You want a tower to last, A.J.?” he’d say, taking my small hand in his, callused fingers squeezing me tight. “You don’t skimp for nobody…You build it right the first time. No matter the cost.”
But I guess even he had to admit that there were those times when a perfectly executed construct might begin to fall apart for no apparent reason. Nothing apparent to the naked eye anyway. Maybe a tack-welded roof joist works itself loose. Or maybe a crack forms in a concrete foundation and over time expands its way up the length of a twenty-story bearing wall. In both cases the destruction is so slow and subtle you might not take notice until it’s too late.
Life is like that too.
Destruction isn’t always something that hits you over the head like a claw hammer. Instead it’s something that’s been building up for a long time, more like the rain that seeps into a brick wall and freezes during the winter months. The ice expands, cracks and eventually destroys the mortar.
Case and point: my own personal Jericho came crashing down on me on Monday, June 15th, barely a half hour into a hot and humid workday. Call it woman’s intuition or a sharply honed, built-in crap detector, but I knew something wasn’t right from the moment my Blackberry started vibrating against my hip.
I’d been trying to expedite the demolition of the Albany Public School 20 basement utility room, using my equalizer (an old 22 ounce grizzly bear-clawed framing hammer) to rip down the old plywood utility panel backer-board. But even with those four inch claws wedged in between the old, dry plywood and the brick wall, the bitch just wouldn’t budge. Which might explain why I barked into my Blackberry instead of answering it with good old, lady-like professionalism.
“What!”
“Yeah and good morning to you too, chief,” said my assistant and former Harrison mason laborer, Tommy Moleski. “Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a bit of an emergency up here. One which requires your ah…utmost undivided attention.”
I pictured the sixty-something, blond-haired, blue-eyed Vietnam vet with the trailer phone pressed to his ear, a lit Marlboro Red balanced precariously between his lips.
“A drop everything kind of emergency, Tommy?” I said. “Or an it-can-wait-until- coffee-break emergency?”
“Need you front-and-freaking-center-now emergency, chief.”
“Meet you in the trailer…and don’t call me, chief.”
Pocketing the Blackberry, I grumbled something about how much Monday mornings sucked, even when you got to be your own boss. Then I grabbed hold of the equalizer’s rubber grip and pulled like nobody’s business.
The old board tore away from the wall and crashed down at my Durango cowboy-booted feet. But then so did half the plaster ceiling. Guess this old broad didn’t know her own strength after all.
Leaving the mess for later, I high-tailed it out of the room and up the concrete stairs. As usual, I had a fire to put out.
– Book excerpt from Concrete Pearl. Purchase your copy at Amazon for only 99 cents by clicking here!
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