The Real Deal

Dan Krzyzkowski

Description

A bankrupt publishing company blackmails a renowned novelist into publishing a bestseller under its struggling imprint.

Two years after his wife’s tragic disappearance, bestselling author John Mastenhock has quit writing and left his Georgia home to take up a life of debauchery. But what John does not know is that his life is about to be turned upside down.

After he is contacted by a bankrupt publishing company and told they hold secret information regarding the whereabouts of his missing wife, Lorry, they offer him a simple deal. John writes the struggling company a bestseller, and they hand him the info—and maybe the keys to his old life. Yet writing another book is anything but easy for a haunted man battling internal demons and a troubled past. While John works on the manuscript and searches for Lorry, he is ultimately led to a clandestine southern town and to a dead ringer for his wife who claims to have never met him. While he determines how to unravel the mystery of her identity, dark forces descend, his sordid past threatens to reemerge, and a cat-and-mouse game turns deadly. Now it is up to the sheriff and his small police force to prevent one man’s descent into madness from bringing an entire town to its knees.

In this thrilling tale, a renowned novelist blackmailed into writing a bestseller by a bankrupt publishing company is propelled down a dark path where nothing is certain, including his sanity.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Superventas
• Bestseller
• Blackmail
• Wife
• Extortion
• Deal
• Missing
• Best-seller
• Real
• Dan
• Suspense
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663251237
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Dan Krzyzkowski
Critical Mass
One-Lane Bridge
The Caller
The REAL DEAL
 
 
 
 
 
 
DAN KRZYZKOWSKI
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE REAL DEAL
 
 
Copyright © 2023 Dan Krzyzkowski.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 
 
iUniverse
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www.iuniverse.com
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5122-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5123-7 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023903623
 
iUniverse rev. date: 07/10/2023
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART I HANG TIME
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
PART II CHARLENE
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
PART III THE REAL DEAL
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
 
 
 
 
 
 
Für Elise
 
 
 
 
The novelist is, after all, God’s liar, and if he does his job well, keeps his head and his courage, he can sometimes find the truth that lives at the center of the lie.
—Stephen King, Danse Macabre
 
Take it off, sweetheart. All of it. I’m not going to tell you twice.
—Skagg “the Butcher” MacArthur
PROLOGUE
Magic Day
On May 18, 2001, John Mastenhock woke to birdsong and the buzz of traffic on Brock Street. Somewhere to the south, off Gin Mill or Sawtooth, an early-morning lawn trimmer sputtered to life. From the live oaks outside his bedroom window, fox squirrels filled the air with chatter. The sounds of high spring in southern Georgia. Edgar Porris had called them the lifeblood of inspiration. To John Mastenhock, they were sounds of pure magic.
He swung his legs out of bed and slid his feet into his morning slippers. He raised his arms to stretch. From the adjoining bath came the sound of running water. Johnny turned and saw Lorry’s shadow behind the frosted shower glass. He watched as she held her arms high to rinse her hair. She rolled a bar of Dove across her belly. She turned sideways at one point, and he caught a glimpse of her breasts rounding forth in shaded secrecy.
He turned and faced the window again. He closed his eyes and drew several deep breaths. Get up, John. The day is come.
He slipped into his pinstripe robe, went into the hall, and descended the stairs, humming beneath his breath. Into the kitchen he glided, running one hand over the granite countertop. The coffeemaker had been preset to begin brewing at 7:00 a.m., and a full pot welcomed him.
Steaming mug in hand, Johnny opened the front door and went out to the porch. The front porch was protected by an overhanging roof and ran the full width of the house. The floorboards were painted a mottled gray, like the skin of a porpoise. The porch overlooked the front yard and Brock Street beyond. Separating the front of the yard and the sidewalk that paralleled Brock Street was a perfect row of English laurel that Johnny pruned twice a year. The hedges were waist-high and home to the occasional sparrow or brown thrasher.
At the right-hand end of the porch was a two-person swing, suspended from a quartet of sturdy chains. In southern Georgia, everyone had a porch swing out front—not just John Mastenhock, who was known by most as Jonathan Dent. He moved past the swing and stood at the porch railing, mug clasped between hands, facing Ancey Mapplethorpe’s two-story Colonial, waiting for the old ways to return and wondering if they would.
He sipped coffee and sat down in the swing to wait for Lorry. Soon she appeared, wearing a white blouse and a pleated gray skirt that topped out above her knees. Tan stockings accentuated her shapely calves. Her hair poured from her shoulders in a waterfall of walnut.
She carried not a briefcase, but a brown satchel—an article she claimed was more feminine. She let the satchel rest on the porch floor as she backed into the swing to Johnny’s left.
“Morning, hon.” Lorry pecked him on the cheek.
“Morning,” he said. “You look scintillating.”
Lorry smiled. “Got your coffee, I see.”
“Yep.”
After some time, Lorry said, “So I guess this is the day, huh?”
“This is the day.”
“You’ll be careful, won’t you?” She was watching him closely with her brown, steadfast eyes.
He turned to meet them. “Dr. Matthews and I have been through it over and over.” He hesitated. “It won’t be like last time, Lorry. That’s a promise.”
She smiled, then took his hand and squeezed it in both of hers. “I love you, Johnny. I love you so much.” Her brown eyes sparkled. After a while, she asked, “Are you excited about this one?”
“Yes.” He took a slug of coffee, then smacked his lips. “Honestly, Lorry, this may be my best one yet. It’s early, but … well, the idea, the potential … It’s all there, Lorry, waiting to come out—texture, voice, characters … And this is no Gulliver Wayne novel, either. This …” He made a closed fist in the air in front of him. “It’s gonna be good, Lorry. It’s gonna be very good.”
“Johnny, I’m so happy for you.”
He turned toward her and said, “You know you don’t have to work, Lor. I long for the day when you’ll quit and stay home with me.”
She smiled and gave him the “it’s good of you to say so, but I know what’s best for me” look that she had mastered years ago, and his words seemed to die in space. That look said to him, We’ve been through this before, John, haven’t we? When Johnny had culled his first million with his breakout bestseller Trap Door , he’d pled his case that Lorry quit her job teaching insolent sixth graders at the elementary school in St. Mary’s. And she had quit, only to move on to another career. Four years after Trap Door , with the first two Gulliver Wayne novels on the shelves and two major film deals, her stance hadn’t changed. “Johnny,” she’d told him in earnest, “it doesn’t matter if you make a hundred million. It doesn’t matter if you own all the money in the world. I need to make use of my life. I refuse to sit around doing crosswords.”
After her teaching job, she’d gotten her broker’s license and been hired as an investment advisor with Merrill Lynch up in Centerville. It was a mile and a half from home, a distance she walked twice every day, rain or shine. It was her part, she said—her part in the big play. “Everybody has to play a part, Johnny.” It was from this porch swing that he would watch, five days a week, as she moved up the flagstone path with her satchel and turned right along Brock Street, ambling past the row of English laurel on her way to the office.
Though he had never completely understood it, Johnny had come to accept that there was a side of Lorry that remained stubbornly hers. She had retained her maiden name, for instance. Two summers ago, she had planted her own peach tree. The sapling had gone in the yard between Ancey Mapplethorpe’s house and theirs. Johnny had watched from the sidelines. When she’d finished, filthy from the shoulders down, Lorry had placed her hands on her hips and said with a smile, “There. It’s mine.”
It had something to do with her tree. It had something to do with her annual visit to Savannah on St. Patrick’s Day to celebrate her Irish roots when the Savannah River flowed green from all that food coloring. It had something to do with her unyielding wish to work full-time when her husband, the tried and true Jonathan Dent, was grossing ten million a year.
“You can do anything you want, Lor,” he said now. “The world is your playpen.”
She smiled, rubbing his left leg. “Yes, I know. Thank you, Johnny.”
They were interrupted by a dog’s shrill barking. Johnny turned and saw Ancey’s Yorkshire terrier standing on the grass.
“ Yike-yike! Yike-yike- yike! ”
Johnny frowned. “Someone oughta strangle that thing.”
“That dog never has liked you, has it?”
Ancey Mapplethorpe, seventy-four and widowed, appeared at the far end of her yard. She saw them on the porch swing and raised her arm in a polite wave. They waved back.
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” she called.
“Splendid,” Lorry answered. “We couldn’t ask for better.”
“Let’s go, Giggles,” Ancey said. “You’ve woken all of Brock Street. Inside.” Seconds later, both she and dog were gone, to Johnny’s relief.
He turned to Lorry again. “Hey, you think you can come home early today?”
“Whatever for, Johnny?” She was smiling in spite of herself—indeed, almost laughing.
“I thought we could make some ends meet out back.” It was his way of saying, We’ll have some glorious sex, babe, in the Lov