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Authors: Jeffery Deaver

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General

Solitude Creek

BOOK: Solitude Creek
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Contents

 

Also by Jeffery Deaver

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

 

Frenzy: Tuesday, April 4

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

 

Baseline: Wednesday, April 5

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

 

The Get: Thursday, April 6

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

 

Precautions: Friday, April 7

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

 

Flash Mob: Saturday, April 8

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

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

 

The Secrets Club: Sunday, April 9

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

 

The Blood of All: Monday, April 10

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

 

The Last Dare: Tuesday, April 11

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

 

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jeffery Deaver
 

Mistress of Justice

The Lesson of Her Death

Praying for Sleep

Speaking in Tongues

A Maiden’s Grave

The Devil’s Teardrop

The Blue Nowhere

Garden of Beasts

The Bodies Left Behind

Edge

The October List

 

THE RUNE SERIES

Manhattan is My Beat

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Hard News

 

THE LOCATION SCOUT SERIES

Shallow Graves

Bloody River Blues

Hell’s Kitchen

 

THE LINCOLN RHYME THRILLERS

The Bone Collector

The Coffin Dancer

The Empty Chair

The Stone Monkey

The Vanished Man

The Twelfth Card

The Cold Moon

The Broken Window

The Burning Wire

The Kill Room

The Skin Collector

 

THE KATHRYN DANCE THRILLERS

The Sleeping Doll

Roadside Crosses

XO

 

A JAMES BOND NOVEL

Carte Blanche

 

SHORT STORIES

Twisted

More Twisted

Trouble in Mind

 

www.hodder.co.uk

 

First published in the United States of America in 2015 by Grand Central Publishing

 

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

 

1

 

Copyright © Gunner Publications, LLC 2015

 

The right of Jeffery Deaver to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

 

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

 

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

 

Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 75739 2

Trade paperback ISBN 9 781 444 75740 8

Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 75741 5

 

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

 

www.hodder.co.uk

To Libraries and Librarians everywhere …

Fear is the mind-killer.

– Frank Herbert,
Dune

FRENZY
 
TUESDAY, APRIL 4
 
CHAPTER
1
 

The roadhouse was comfortable, friendly, inexpensive. All good.

Safe, too. Better.

You always thought about that when you took your teenage daughter out for a night of music.

Michelle Cooper did, in any event. Safe when it came to the band and their music, the customers, the wait staff.

The club itself, too, the parking lot – well lit – and the fire doors and sprinklers.

Michelle always checked these. The teenage-daughter part again.

Solitude Creek attracted a varied clientele, young and old, male and female, white and Latino and Asian, a few African Americans, a mirror of the Monterey Bay area. Now, just after seven thirty, she looked around, noting the hundreds of patrons who’d come from this and surrounding counties, all in buoyant mood, looking forward to seeing a band on the rise. If they brought with them any cares, those troubles were tucked tightly away at the prospect of beer, whimsical cocktails, chicken wings and music.

The group had flown in from LA, a garage band turned backup turned roadhouse headliner, thanks to Twitter and YouTube and Vidster. Word of mouth, and talent, sold groups nowadays, and the six boys in Lizard Annie worked as hard on their phones as onstage. They weren’t O.A.R. or Linkin Park but were soon to be, with a bit of luck.

They certainly had Michelle and Trish’s support. In fact, the cute boy band had a pretty solid mom-daughter fan base, judging by a look around the room tonight: other parents and their teenagers – the lyrics were rated PG at the raunchiest. For this evening’s show the ages of those in the audience ranged from sixteen to forty, give or take. Okay, Michelle admitted, maybe mid-forties.

She noted the Samsung in her daughter’s grip and said, ‘Text later. Not now.’

‘Mom.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Cho.’

A nice girl from Trish’s music class.

‘Two minutes.’

The club was filling up. Solitude Creek was a forty-year-old, single-story building featuring a small, rectangular dance floor of scuffed oak, ringed with high-top tables and stools. The stage, three feet high, was at the north end; the bar was opposite. A kitchen, east, served full menus, which eliminated the age barrier of attendance: only liquor-serving venues that offered food were permitted to seat children. Three fire-exit doors were against the west wall.

On the dark-wood paneling there were posters and during-the-show photos, complete with real and fake autographs, of many of the groups that had appeared at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967: Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, Al Kooper, Country Joe. Dozens of others. In a grimy Plexiglas case there was a fragment of an electric guitar, reportedly one destroyed by Pete Townshend of The Who after the group’s performance at the event.

The tables at Solitude Creek were first come, first claimed, and all were filled – the show was only twenty minutes away now. Presently servers circulated with last-minute orders, plates of hefty burgers and wings and drinks on trays hovering atop their stable, splayed palms. From behind the stage, a miaow of tuning guitar strings and an arpeggio chord from a sax, a chunky A from a bass. Anticipation now. Those exciting moments before the music begins to seize and seduce.

The voices were loud, words indistinct, as the untabled patrons jockeyed for the best position in the standing-room area. Since the stage wasn’t high and the floor was flat, it was sometimes hard to get a good view of the acts. A bit of jostling but few hard words.

That was the Solitude Creek club. No hostility.

Safe …

However, there was one thing that Michelle Cooper didn’t care for. The claustrophobia. The ceilings in the club were low and that accentuated the closeness. The dim room was not particularly spacious, the ventilation not the best; a mix of body scent, aftershave and perfume clung, stronger even than grill and fry-tank aromas, adding to the sense of confinement. The sense that you were packed in tight as canned fish. No,
that
never sat well with Michelle Cooper.

She brushed absently at her frosted blonde hair, looked again at the exit doors – not far away – and felt reassured.

Another sip of wine.

She noted Trish checking out a boy at a table nearby. Floppy hair, narrow face, skinny hips. Good looks to kill for. He was drinking a beer so Mother vetoed Trish’s inclination instantly, if silently. Not the alcohol, the age: the drink meant he was over twenty-one and therefore completely out of bounds for her seventeen-year-old.

Then she thought wryly: At least I can try.

A glance at her diamond Rolex. Five minutes.

Michelle asked, ‘Was it “Escape”, the one that was nominated for the Grammy?’

BOOK: Solitude Creek
8.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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