Broken Promise: A Solomon Creed Novella
One secret could destroy a family. One lie could save them.The brilliant prequel to The Boy Who Saw, a gripping thriller from Sunday Times bestseller Simon Toyne, featuring the enigmatic Solomon Creed.A strangerSolomon Creed is an outsider with an unknown past, travelling through a remote part of Texas. He doesn’t look for trouble – but trouble finds him.A familyAt a roadside diner, he runs into a worn-down family whose ancestral land and home is about to be auctioned. But when Solomon suspects it’s worth a lot more than they think he decides to take things into his own hands.A secretAs Solomon races to find hard evidence of the land’s true value, he uncovers a dark truth – hidden for generations – that changes everything. But how far is he willing to go to save a family from potential ruin? And how far will others go to stop him?
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BROKEN PROMISE
FEATURING SOLOMON CREED
Simon Toyne
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Simon Toyne 2018
Simon Toyne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photographs:
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780008300807
Version 2018-03-07
This is for my readers.
Without you I’m just a crazy person sitting alone in a room.
Table of Contents
Solomon Creed walked east, away from Arizona and all the complications that spilt blood tends to bring. He kept to the minor roads and travelled mostly at night, dodging the traffic and the sledgehammer sun, sipping water from a plastic gallon jug he’d found crumpled in a roadside ditch outside Bisbee.
He tipped it up now and drank the blood-warm water until the jug was empty. He could fill it again at the next gas station, or diner, or truck stop. Water was not a problem. You could pick up water for free if you stuck to the roads. But not food. Food you had to pay for, or take what you could find, baked and rancid by the side of the road.
On day one it had been a cottontail that had been clipped by a car then limped off to die in the shade of an ephedra bush. He’d skinned and gutted it using the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle then roasted it over a small fire coaxed from mesquite straw using the same bottle and the sun’s fierce rays. Day two was a rattlesnake he’d disturbed in a storm drain while taking shelter from the rising heat. It had struck from the shadows, the rattle coming at the same time as the fangs. Solomon had felt the minute shift in air pressure and twitched out of the way, catching it behind the head, grabbing its tail then cracking it like a bullwhip, so sharp that it snapped the head clean off. He had drunk its blood, the bitter warmth soaking life back into his tired muscles, then gutted it and chewed slowly on its cooling flesh. He had a fleeting memory of doing something similar in a different desert, but like most memories regarding himself, it was gone before he could catch a hold of it. He had sat cross-legged, in the dusty dark, licking snake blood from his fingers and sucking the warm, viscous contents of the leathery eggs the mother had been laying. That had been thirty-six hours ago now. The only things that had passed his lips since were air and water so hot from the jug you could brew tea with it. But there was something up ahead, something carried on the wind and getting stronger with each step he took. It was the smell of hot grease and salt, fried potatoes and ham, eggs and coffee, and his stomach rumbled in response whenever the wind shifted. He had smelled similar at every greasy-windowed truck stop he’d passed along the way and had always got no further than the parking lot, the need to catch another ride and put distance between himself and Arizona stronger than his hunger. But Arizona was four days, hundreds of miles and a state and a half behind him now. And his legs ached and his stomach growled and the thought of another road-kill meal washed down with plastic-tasting water made him feel sick to his empty stomach. The problem was no longer urgency, it was economic. Because a sit-down meal with seasoning and sauces, and iced-water on the side, would cost money and the only coin he had to his name was a single, worn-down quarter he’d found by a city limits sign a hundred miles or more back.
He reached into the pocket of the pale suit jacket he wore and palmed the quarter, rolling it over his knuckles as smoothly as he rolled the problem of his poverty over and over in his mind until he saw a skinny tower rise up ahead on the eastbound side of the I-10. Red neon letters burned on the side spelling out
