Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

Dance found her shield, dusted it off and slipped it into her pocket. She then returned to the roadhouse. She'd tell Bob Holly what she'd discovered but keep the news from Charles Overby until she'd done some more canvassing.

She needed as much ammunition as she could garner.

As she approached the gathered press and spectators outside the club she glanced toward a pretty woman TV reporter, in a precise suit, interviewing a Monterey County firefighter, a solid, sunburned man with a tight crew cut and massive arms. She'd seen him at several other fire and mass-disaster scenes over the past year or so.

The reporter said to the camera, "I'm talking here with Brad C. Dannon, a Monterey County fireman. Brad, you were the first on the scene last night at Solitude Creek?"

"Just happened I wasn't too far away when we got the call, that's right."

"So you saw a scene of panic? Could you describe it?"

"Panic, yeah. Everybody. Trying to get out, just throwing themselves against the door, like animals. I've been a firefighter for five years and I've never--"

Chapter 11

S een anything like this."

"Five years, really, Brad? Now tell me, it looks like the doors, the fire doors, were unlocked but they were all blocked by a truck that had parked there. A tractor trailer. We can see...there."

Antioch March lifted his eyes from his present gaze--the pillowcase of fine-weave cotton, six inches from his face--and glanced at the TV screen, across the bedroom here in the sumptuous Cedar Hills Inn in Pebble Beach. The camera from the crew outside the Solitude Creek roadhouse panned to Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse, which was all of ten miles from where March now lay.

A mouth beside his ear: "Yes, yes!" A moist whisper.

On TV, the anchor, blond as toffee, came back into high-definition view. "Brad, a number of victims and relatives of victims are accusing the driver of the truck of negligently blocking the doors, accusing him of parking there to go to the bathroom, or maybe even sneaking in to see the show last night. Do you think that's a possibility?"

"It's too early to speculate," the firefighter replied.

It's never wise to speculate, March corrected Brad, early or late. The bodybuilding firefighter, not quite as buff as March, looked smug. Wouldn't trust him to rescue me from a smoke-filled building.

Much less a stampede in a roadhouse. Brad did, however, go on to offer graphic descriptions of the "horror" of last night. They were quite accurate. Helped by Brad and images he was describing, March turned his attention back to the task at hand, lowered his head back to the pillow and thrust away energetically.

Calista gripped his earlobe between two perfectly shaped teeth. March felt the pressure of the incisors. Felt her studded nose against his smooth cheek. Felt himself deep inside her.

She grunted rhythmically. Maybe he did too.

Calista whispered, "You're so fucking handsome..."

He wished she wouldn't talk. Besides, he didn't know what to do with that sentence. Maybe she was hoping for this to be more than a couple-day thing. But he also knew that people said all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons at moments like this and he didn't sweat it.

Just wished she wouldn't talk. He wanted to hear. Wanted to see. Wanted to imagine.

Her heels banged against his tailbone, her bright crimson fingernails--the color of arterial blood--assaulted his back.

And he replayed what people often replayed at moments like now: earlier times. The Solitude Creek incident. But then, going way back: Serena, of course. He often returned to Serena, the way a top eventually spins to stillness.

Serena. She helped move him along.

Jessica he thought of too.

And, of course, Todd. Never Serena and Jessica without Todd.

He was moving more quickly now.

Again she gasped, "Yes, yes, yes..."

As she lay under him Calista's hands now eased up his spine and gripped his shoulders hard. Those GMC-finish nails pressed into his skin. He reciprocated, digging into her pale flesh. Her moaning was partly pain; the rest of the damp gusts from her lungs were from his two hundred plus pounds, little fat. Pounding.

Compressing.