A COLD DAY IN PARADISE

Paradise, Colorado - 1999: Newswoman Christina Phillips stares at the scaffold and dangling rope, a gruesome reminder of outlaw Lance Meredith's death a hundred years ago. He was said to have been a handsome man, a Western Robin Hood; perhaps the most beloved man whose image ever stared out from a wanted poster. Hero to the common man or not, however, he had been hung on a cold day in 1899. Now on the hundredth anniversary of the dashing outlaw's execution, she makes final preparations for the television broadcast that will honor him. The clock on the old courthouse tower displays the time. Tick, tock, tick, tock. She wonders what Lance Meredith was thinking, knowing that each minute that passed brought the moment of reckoning closer and closer? A drum roll sounds mimicking the drum roll that had sounded a hundred years ago as the cameras move closer........ Lance Meredith hears a drum roll. The time has come! Ah, but he isn't ready to die. Not yet. Even so, when the handle of the gibbet is pulled the trap door will hurl him to his death. He will dangle like a side of beef for all to see. A gruesome and humiliating end. If only he could bargain for his life he would change so many things. But alas, he can not change the past thus, he resolves himself to death, hoping that God in his mercy will make his death quick. But death does not come to Lance Meredith. His execution is interrupted by the mysterious and unanticipated arrival of a woman who materializes seemingly from out of nowhere. Who is she? And can she save him from the hangman's noose?