A phrase came to Pellam’s mind:
If looks could kill…
# # #
Here’s Rita at the diner, her name proudly stitched on her impressive bosom.
She’s doing what she does best with diligence and polite mien, and with no tolerance for nonsense from former movie directors turned location scouts, from flirtatious poets, from killers noir at heart, from saints. Anybody. She takes waitressing seriously.
Pellam wasn’t in the mood for frozen so he’d arranged a private vehicle rental from Rudy (yes, the bile-green Gremlin, which was, he knew, a very underrated vehicle—it could beat the Pinto and VW Beetle hands down, at least with the optional four-speed Borg-Warner).
He’s finished a meatloaf dinner and orders pie with cheese. He didn’t used to like this combo but, really, who shouldn’t? It doesn’t get any better than sweet apples and savory Kraft. He’d go for a whiskey, but that’s not an option at the Overlook, so it’s coffee, which is exemplary.
He gets a call on his Motorola cell phone. The director of Paradice is ecstatic that Pellam has secured a permit to shoot in Devil’s Playground after all.
“How’d you do it?”
Put my life on the line to catch a femme fatale, he thinks, earning Sheriff Werther’s friendship and assistance in all things governmental here.
“Just pulled some strings.”
“Ah, I love string-pullers,” the director says breathily.
Pellam thinks about suggesting a new name for the film: Devil’s Playground. But he knows in his heart that the director will never buy it—he just loves his misspelled title.
Fine. It’s his movie, not mine.
As he ends the call Pellam feels eyes aimed his way. He looks up and believes that Rita is casting him a flirt, which is not by any means a bad thing.
Then he glances at her with a smile and sees she is, in fact, looking a few degrees past him. It’s toward a young man standing beside a revolving dessert display, featuring cakes that seem three feet high. He’s looking back at her. The nervous boy is handsome if pimply. He sits down at the end of the counter, isolated so he can gab a bit with her in private. He also will, Pellam knows, leave a five-dollar tip, though he can’t really afford it, on a ten-dollar tab, which will both embarrass and enthrall her.
Ain’t love grand?
The pie comes in for a landing and Pellam indulges. It’s good, no question.
His thoughts wander. He’s considering his time in Paradice, wait, no in Gurney, and he decides that, just like State Route 14, life sometimes is a switchback. You never know what’s going to happen around the next hairpin, or who’s who and what’s what.
But other times the road doesn’t curve at all. It’s straight as a ruler for miles and miles. What you see ahead is exactly what you’re going to get, no twists, no surprises. And the people you meet are just what they seem to be. The environmentalist is simply passionate about saving the earth. The hitchhiking poet is nothing more or less than a self-styled soulmate of Jack Kerouac, rambling around the country in search of who knows what. The sheriff is a hard-working pro with a conscience and a grandkid who needs particular looking after.
And the sexy cowgirl with red nails and a feather in her Stetson is exactly the bitch you pretty much knew in your heart she’d turn out to be.
Also by Jeffery Deaver
The Kill Room*
XO*/**
Carte Blanche, a James Bond Novel
Edge
The Burning Wire*
Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor)
The Watch List (The Copper Bracelet and The Chopin Manuscript) (Contributor)
Roadside Crosses**
The Bodies Left Behind
The Broken Window*
The Sleeping Doll**
More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume Two
The Cold Moon*/**
The Twelfth Card*
Garden of Beasts
Twisted: Collected Stories
The Vanished Man*
The Stone Monkey*
The Blue Nowhere
The Empty Chair*
Speaking in Tongues
The Devil’s Teardrop
The Coffin Dancer*
The Bone Collector*
A Maiden’s Grave
Praying for Sleep
The Lesson of Her Death
Mistress of Justice
Hard News
Death of a Blue Movie Star
Manhattan Is My Beat
Hell’s Kitchen
Bloody River Blues
Shallow Graves
A Century of Great Suspense Stories (Editor)
A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Introduction)
*Featuring Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs
**Featuring Kathryn Dance
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Contents
Welcome
Fast, a Kathryn Dance story
Game
Paradice, a John Pellam story
Also by Jeffery Deaver
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Gunner Publications LLC
Cover design by Elizabeth Connor. Cover photo © Julie Hagan / Shutterstock. Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-1-4555-2682-6