Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

Donnie and Wes were hanging on Mrs Dance’s back porch, huddling in the back, along with Nathan (Neo, from the Matrix) and Vince (Vulcan — no, not the race of the dudes from Star Trek but the X-Man).

Fritos and orange juice and a little smuggled Red Bull were the hors d’oeuvres and cocktails of the hour.

‘So, what’re you? Like grounded?’ slim, pimply Vince asked.

Wes sighed. ‘My mother’s running that case, that thing at Solitude Creek, where the people got killed. And the Bay View Center?’

Nathan: ‘No shit. Where people jumped into the water and drowned. She’s doing that?’

‘And she’s like all paranoid he’s going to come around and mess with us.’

‘Get a piece, dude. Really. Waste him, the fucker shows up.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Wes said.

Vince asked, ‘How’re you gonna play the game, man? Jesus.’

Wes shrugged. ‘I gotta have rides to school and home. But I can still get away. Just have to be careful about it. Not when my mom’s here. But Jon? I can tell him I’ve got a headache or need to take a nap. Get out through my window. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.’

Donnie waved to Mrs Dance’s boyfriend, Jon, who, Donnie thought, was spying on them, though maybe not. The guy actually seemed friendly enough and sure as shit knew machines: he hacked epic code and showed Donnie how to write script for games. Donnie had this fantasy about taking the Defend and Respond Expedition Service game onto the net, making millions. Where you’d fuck with people in the virtual world.

Yeah, it could be a good game. Mucho more interesting than wasting zombies with machine-guns.

Donnie shifted on the bench and he must’ve winced. Wes noticed. ‘Yo, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, bitch. I’m fine.’

Except he wasn’t fine. His father’d noticed the missing bike and, even though he seemed to believe the lie that Donnie had lent it to a friend, he’d whacked him a half-dozen times with the branch for not asking permission to lend out a present. (‘And you know how much it cost?’) He was under orders to produce the bike tomorrow, or face even worse punishment.

And, with Donnie’s father, worse always meant worse.

Big Nathan, who didn’t take as many showers as he ought to, moved his hair out of his eyes. ‘So here.’ He flashed a picture on his Galaxy of a stop sign, uprooted and sitting in Vince’s garage. His mother never used the place. His father might have killed himself in there — that was the rumor — so nobody in the family ever went inside or did anything with it. So it had sort of become their clubhouse.

‘Can I get an amen?’ Nathan asked. ‘Team Two scores.’

Fist bumps.

‘Cool,’ said Wes. ‘How much did it weigh?’

‘Tons,’ Vince said. ‘We both had to carry it.’

‘I could have,’ Nathan said fast. ‘Just, it was long, you know. Hard to get a handle on.’

If anybody could muscle it, Neo could. He was a big fucker.

‘Nobody saw you?’ Donnie asked.

‘Naw. Maybe one kid but we looked at him, like, you say anything and you’re frigging dead.’

Nathan said ‘frig’ instead of ‘fuck’. He’d come around, Donnie thought. Wes had.

We’ll totally fuck you up...

Donnie pulled out the official Defend and Respond game score sheet, illustrated by him personally. Titans, X-Men, Fantastic Four, zombies everywhere. A couple of the hot girls from True Blood .

He wrote on the Nathan/Vince side: Challenge 5, completed.

Donnie had come up with the idea of challenging the team to steal a stop sign, not just any sign. No ‘Yield’, no ‘School X-ing’, no ‘No Parking’. But a real fucking stop sign at a four-way intersection. Copping that would mean they’d have to be at an intersection, where it’d be riskier to get caught. And then, too, a missing stop sign would mean that a car might fuck up another in a crash.

Vince grimaced. ‘Only, like a half-hour later, not even, there was another one up.’

‘That’s fucked up,’ Donnie said, disappointed.

Wes gave a sour laugh. ‘Who drives around with signs to put up?’

‘Dunno. Just was like all that work was wasted,’ Vince said.

Nathan slapped his arm. ‘Shit, dude. We got the point.’ A stab at the score sheet. ‘Am I right, ladies?’

Donnie would’ve liked a big fucking car crash but the challenge hadn’t been to keep stealing stop signs until there was a big fucking car crash; it was steal a fucking stop sign. Period.

‘Dude,’ Wes was talking to him. ‘Show ’em.’

Donnie pulled his iPhone out and displayed the Die Jew picture.

Nathan didn’t seem happy. He and Vince were down two points.

Vince said, ‘That thing, that’s Indian.’

Impatiently, Donnie said, ‘What thing? And what Indian? Like Raj?’

‘What’s Raj?’ Wes said.

His mother didn’t let Wes and his sister, Maggie, watch much TV.

Donnie scoffed. ‘Raj, man, the brainiac on Big Bang Theory . Jesus.’

‘Oh. Sure.’ Nathan seemed to have no clue.

Vince said, ‘No, what I’m saying, Indian like bows and arrows and tepees.’

‘It’s called a swastika,’ Wes said. ‘The Nazis used it.’

Donnie added, ‘The Indians did too. I saw a special. I don’t know.’

Nathan asked, ‘Is a swasti-whatever, is it like a blade you throw? I mean, are those knives on the end?’

Wes said, ‘It’s just a symbol. On their flag.’

‘The Indians?’

Wes cocked his head. ‘No, dude. The Nazis.’

‘Who were they again?’ Nathan asked.

Donnie muttered, ‘They and the Jews had a big war.’

‘Yeah?’

‘ Game of Thrones . Like that.’

Donnie’s shoulders rose and fell.‘I guess. I don’t know. Couple hundred years ago, I think.’ Then he was tired of history. He added their point to the score sheet.

Nathan said, ‘Okay. Our turn. We’re challenging Darth and Wolverine to the following dare. You know Sally Caruthers, the cheerleader? We challenge you to get some Visine in her drink at school. It gives you the runs.’

‘That’s way gross,’ Wes said.

Donnie liked the idea of the challenge and knew it wasn’t a bad idea to stop dissing Jews and blacks for a while. But he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the game’s on hold for a couple days.’

‘Yeah?’ asked Nathan, frowning.

Wes sighed. ‘The asshole, the house we tagged, perped our bikes.’

‘Put ’em in his garage. Me and Wes were talking about it, what to do.’

Wes said, ‘To get ’em back.’

Donnie nodded for Wes to continue.

‘And we need some help. Backup, you know. You up for that?’

Vince considered it. ‘We’ll help you but we get a point.’ Tapping the score sheet.

Nathan said, ‘Dude, that’s mad brilliant.’

Donnie furrowed his brow. He was, though, only pretending to debate. He didn’t care about the point. The fact was that for the plan he had in mind, which he hadn’t told Wes about, he definitely needed the others.

Finally he said, ‘All right, you ladies get a point.’ And popped the Red Bulls and passed the cans around.

They were driving along Highway One, O’Neil behind the wheel of his patrol car, Dance in the front passenger seat. In the back were Al Stemple and their confessing suspect, Congressman Daniel Nashima.

This was the condition to his confession: a drive to the scene of the crime, where he’d tell her everything she wanted to know.

He wasn’t under arrest, so no cuffs, but he had been searched for weapons. Which had amused him.

The compact man was silent, staring out of the window at the passing sights — agricultural fields of Brussels sprouts and artichokes on the right; to the west, the water side, were small businesses (souvenir shacks and restaurants) and marinas, increasingly downscale as they moved north.