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The following is the first chapter of a novel I expect to release through G-Square Publishing toward the end of the year. The name of the book is NIKKI ARMSTRONG, MEASURE OF A WOMAN". It focuses of the adventures of a young black female who grew up in the projects, attended a prestigious college in New England, became an awarded Navy Pilot, New York City Police Officer and moved into independently fighting crime. Nikki is a kickass woman who doesn't take s**t from anyone. Please read the first chapter and let me know if there is anything about what you read that interest you and leaves you wanting more. This book will be availabe on paperback, ebook and audiobook. Your comments will help me make it the best that it can be. If any of you would like to read an advanced copy, please let me know. CHAPTER 1 NOTHING IN LIFE HAPPENS IN A VACUUM If my peace depends on external reality, then it is not peace Detective Nikki Evelyn Armstrong, a decorated member of the United States Navy and the New York City Police Department, stood at the site of the freshly dug grave surrounded by its moist piles of dirt. From where she stood, Nikki could see all the acreage known as the Canarsie Cemetery. The cemetery was a City-owned burial ground, which ran along Remsen Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, just a few blocks south of Canarsie Park, once a part of the famed hunting ground of the Canarsie Indians, and about two miles from the Belt Parkway, the handy escape route for many Canarsie residents needing to just get away for a while. This sacred ground was open to the public as a site to honor loved ones who had gone home to be with the Lord, or for those who question the existence of a higher being, it was no more than a final resting place. Over the years, it had become more and more the resting place for those who had passed on with no one willing to or maybe able to celebrate their life. Many of the Canarsie residents had taken to calling it, Boot Hill. Nikki began to shed a tear as her finely manicured, slender fingers stroked the oversized wooden casket sprinkled with knotholes, splinters and other imperfections that housed the small body of Kamari Prescott. A young boy who seemed to love life despite its harsh realities. Kamari had been befriended by abuse far too often in his battered young life and visited by death much too early than what Nikki believed the good Lord intended. As she stood at the grave, she questioned the wisdom of God’s gift of free will. It was clear to her that human beings had misused this precious gift. She was hoping that one day soon, God would remove the scales from the marred eyes of what seemed to be countless numbers of human beings daily abusing this unmerited gift. It appeared that in Boot Hill, caskets for impoverished members of society were purchased in bulk, and only came in one size, much like death itself. Nikki felt there was nothing spiritual or humbling about the place where she stood; everything was reduced to an assembly line process with the sole intent to get the product to the assigned hole in the ground. Nikki shook her head when she realized that the hole she stood before already had at least four other wooden caskets in it riddled with imperfections and housing the remains of life all but forgotten. Nikki thought to herself; I was always told that we enter life alone and we exit it alone. I guess no one here got the damn memo. Life meant nothing here, nor did death. All that mattered was keeping the damn assembly line moving. Nikki, was flanked on either side by two impatient gravediggers leaning on government-issued shovels, reminded her for the third time that union rules required that they take lunch no later than noon. There was a dirt truck standing by just a few yards away with three other gravediggers standing outside waiting to whisk away the two men to the nearest Fast-food hamburger joint for an artery-blocking meal and a step closer to their own holes, complete with government shovels and workers as soon as Nikki released them from their current disposal chores. Nikki smiled, giving no other response, but sadly noted that bureaucracy had no bounds and seemed to carry a universal passport of apathy that unfortunately, appeared to find comfort, even in the grave. It saddened Nikki deeply that she and the gravediggers were the only ones in attendance for the Home Going Service of a little boy whose life had been mercilessly and painfully taken by his uncaring bitch of a mother. The reality of this setting renewed Nikki’s rage over the entire heartless chain of events. As she stood wondering if there was more she could have done; more she should have done, she began to ponder the injustice of it all. To Nikki, it all seemed purposely designed to fail the people and to perpetuate the existence of spinning wheel bureaucracy, injustice, and the irrelevance of truth. The entire elaborate system turned out to be all form, with no substance. Nikki began to reflect on the words of her old ethics professor; "Nothing in life happens in a vacuum. Everything that you do or say; will influence someone else whether you want it to or not. The simple truth is that because you breathe someone's life will be changed." Nikki never wholly embraced these words or understood how they related to the Public Ethics class she was taking. Well more than a decade had elapsed since she first heard those words and began to ponder their meaning. It was only now, as she stood in a cemetery surrounded by broken lives, graves marked by numbers instead of names, wondering who all these people were, or could have been in life, that the wisdom of her professor’s words began to speak with clarity to both her heart and mind. The little boy in the casket had a corporeal existence of less than five years; born into an abusive household birthed by a brutal mother unmatched by any woman Nikki has ever crossed paths with in her life. Nikki did not know Kamari as a child who would run to sit on her lap whenever they were in each other’s presence to talk of his day of imaginary friends, superheroes or what’s for dinner. She and the boy never had a conversation focused on his hopes and dreams for his future and what he might want to grow up to be in life. What Nikki did know with certainty was that because Kamari breathed the air, her life was irrevocably changed. While the experience of losing him had hurt her deeply, she hoped the change was somehow for the better; she wondered how that could be, but she had learned over the years that hope was always a good thing. Nikki looked at her cell phone and saw that it was ten minutes before noon. She turned to one of the gravediggers who was patting his foot in the mud and impatiently tapping the face of his watch, which was now wet from the drizzle that had begun to fall again. She picked up a handful of moist dirt, thankful that the earlier rain had not turned the dirt into mud. Nikki touched the casket and thanked the young boy for coming into her life, if even for a moment. She then spoke these often-heard words, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to dust, as she sprinkled the dirt over the warped wooden casket. Nikki turned to the gravediggers, thank them for bearing with her and gave them each a twenty-dollar bill as she slowly navigated mud holes, wooden boards and patches of dry land as she made an effort to return to the parking lot without destroying her favorite high heel shoes in the process. With each step, she repeated to herself “Nothing in life happens in a vacuum.”