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    Ballads (The Rose Garden Arena Incident, Book 4)
    Ballads (The Rose Garden Arena Incident, Book 4)
    Ballads (The Rose Garden Arena Incident, Book 4)
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Ballads (The Rose Garden Arena Incident, Book 4)

    By Michael Hiebert

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    About this ebook

    Stephanie Banner is twenty years old the night Dakota Shane stands center stage while six bullets ring out through the stadium. Five deaths occur from those shots, although only four ever go on record.

    All four are women.

    It happens in Portland, Oregon, at the Rose Garden Arena. The show is a sellout. Twenty-two thousand seats gone in less than four hours.

    For the eight days leading up to the concert, a handful of disparate lives intertwine as their world unravels. Their sanity, their relationships, their work, their children, the law, and even death hangs in the balance. Among them are: the learning-disabled black kid from East St. Louis trying to move past having his little sister die in his arms when she and his Momma become collateral damage during a drive-by; the quick-witted black man who, after losing control of his car on his way to visit family in Portland, finds himself duct-taped to a chair, a hostage to a meth-addled lunatic wanted for a double homicide; the Latino son now desperately struggling to rise above his abusive father and help his mother and sister move on to a better life, while unable to let go of the tremendous guilt he bears over the fate of the other sister he once had; the slash-punk singer who manages to score her band the best gig of its career, only to learn she may not have a band left to play it; the Korean psychiatrist finally confronting how much of her life has slipped by her—how many years she lost—while focussing on far less important things; the ex-LAPD detective now working for the Portland PD finally facing the ghosts that still linger from the time of the Rodney King riots—a past that forced him to drag his family up out of LA; the bitter ex-wife of a disc jockey who still secretly listens to her ex-husband’s midnight radio show as she drinks herself into a whiskey coma; the out of control daughter having unprotected sex with strangers hoping that pregnancy might draw the attention of parents unable to see past themselves...

    And then, Dakota Shane: chart-topping superstar with a dark secret, caught in a media and tabloid frenzy full of rumor, speculation, and lies. She’s off her meds and grappling to find any semblance of herself that might still exist inside an identity forged over the past five years by an extremely successful record company’s marketing department.

    Each of these lives is a story and the stories collide with each other like silver balls bouncing off bumpers on a pinball machine.
    But in the end, The Rose Garden Arena Incident is a tale about passion, about bravery, about redemption, about fixing those things in the world that are fixable and learning to live with the things that are not—A heartbreaking story of tragedy, despair, and loss that still somehow leaves you with a glimmer of faith, love, and hope.

    The Rose Garden Arena Incident is a “serial thriller." The story takes place over seven separate books, each encompassing a full day or more leading up to the Dakota Shane concert.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Hiebert
    Release dateDec 18, 2016
    ISBN9781927600146
    Ballads (The Rose Garden Arena Incident, Book 4)
    Author

    Michael Hiebert

    I am an award-winning author of novels and short stories. My latest book, Dream With Little Angels is being published by Kensington Books and should be on shelves in the spring of 2013. I live in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada, where it’s cold and wet in the winter and warm (and sometimes also wet) in the summer. We have cougars, and bears and deer. I have a dog named Chloe, three kids, and enough books that it became no fun to move quite a long time ago. I like to write surprising stories that cross genres, and are often mysterious. I’ve been writing most of my life, but I’ve really spent the last decade perfecting my craft. My writing seems to be a blend of mystery and the fantastic. I like to find the redemption in the horrific; the surviving heart still left beating among all the sorrow; the beautiful lost somewhere in all the ugliness of the world. I won the prestigious Surrey International Writer’s Conference Storyteller’s Award twice in a row. This award is sponsored each year by New York Times bestseller Diana Gabaldon and bestseller Jack Whyte. Check out my website and blog at http://www.michaelhiebert.com and while you're there, sign up for my newsletter. Members receive terrific deals on books and other goodies!

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      Book preview

      Ballads (The Rose Garden Arena Incident, Book 4) - Michael Hiebert

      BALLADS

      THE ROSE GARDEN ARENA INCIDENT

      Book 4

      BALLADS

      THE ROSE GARDEN ARENA INCIDENT

      Book 4

      A Serial Thriller in Seven Parts

      Michael Hiebert

      Contents

      Introduction

      Previously in Rose Garden

      Monday, April 5

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Coming Up Next

      Book 5: Stalker Fan

      Sneak Preview

      Acknowledgments

      About Michael Hiebert

      BALLADS

      (THE ROSE GARDEN ARENA INCIDENT, BOOK 4)

      Copyright © 2016 by Michael Hiebert.

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Dangerbooks, British Columbia, Canada.

      No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblances to persons living or dead is coincidental.

      Edited by Dawn James Walker

      Cover Design by / © DangerBoy & DogMan, Inc.

      Cover image © Boris Ryaposov

      ISBN-13: 978-1-927600-14-6

      ISBN-10: 1-927600-14-6

      The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

      Dangerbooks Smashwords Edition

      First Printing, December 2016.

      RG4-018

      Also by Michael Hiebert

      Sometimes the Angels Weep—Short Fiction

      Nashville Beaumont (and The Hyperbole Engine)

      DOLLS

      Alvin, Alabama Mystery Novels

      Dream with Little Angels

      Close to the Broken Hearted

      A Thorn Among the Lilies

      Sticks and Stones

      Previously in The Rose Garden Arena Incident

      Mosh Pit

      Media Frenzy

      80 Proof

      Introduction

      BOOM! BOOK FOUR IS in your hands! From your point of view, I’m betting it looks like we’re rounding the halfway mark, doesn’t it? I suppose, with seven books making the story, book four has to mark half of something. And I suppose it does. The number of covers involved for one thing. The number of these introductions you’ll be seeing, that’s one more. Unfortunately, as far as story goes? We’re not really even close yet.

      See, I’ve anticipated from the beginning that the last two books are going to be bigger than the rest. So far, my original plan and estimates that I laid down before embarking on this possibly crazy project has managed to hold up pretty well. There have been a few surprises and some story twists I hadn’t seen coming back then, but for the most part, everything’s on track and about as close to being in control as I ever get. Given that, the last two books will probably be twice the size of the rest. Which makes them more like four books, instead of just two, which, I suppose, means the series is really nine books long. None books, hidden in seven.

      So why am I not just making it into nine books?

      Good question.

      It has to do with the way the different pieces of the story break out. So far, I’m sure you’ve noticed that each installment is a day of the week. That’s worked very nicely and keeps everything consistent and the books are even pretty similar in length. I think they vary by five or six pages.

      That’s all going to change soon. Book six will encompass a number of days (not quite sure how many yet), and book seven will concentrate only on one: the most important one. D-day. Saturday. The day everything goes to hell.

      But you already know that. You read the beginning of book one. You know so much. I gave so much away.

      Or . . . did I?

      In fact, one might question how much I actually knew about my ending when I wrote that beginning. One may also wonder about the facts I did provide and how reliable they are. Wait, wait. I’m not saying I would ever purposely mislead anyone with my writing. As an author who values his craft, I can tell you one of the worst things you can do is hide evidence for the sake of misleading readers. It’s a subversive tactic completely frowned upon by those of us who consider ourselves wordsmiths.

      But maybe it wasn’t me who did it. See, it’s off-side if, while writing from Stephanie’s point of view (which is what I was doing during that opening), I neglect to mention something important that she would not only know, but also be incredibly focused on during the scene. So, let’s say, for instance, Stephanie shot Brenda--that she reached into the back of her pants, pulled out a nine millimeter while they were dancing and wrapped her arm around Brenda’s head enough to peel off a round that glazed the side of Brenda’s head while purposely moving on to finally come to rest in Stephanie’s own chest. I mean, shooting herself in the process of murdering her best friend certainly takes a dump truck load of suspicion off of her right away.

      Don’t worry, that’s not what happened. And it couldn’t be what happened, because to write that story, I could not have done it from Stephanie’s point of view. At least not without disclosing a helluva lot more insidious thoughts going on in her mind than I did. No writer worth his druthers would ever write that scene unless Stephanie had dissociative identity disorder or something like that. Which, of course, she could, but you would think by now, heading into the fourth book, you would probably have seen a hint of it somewhere along the way. So you’re probably safe in assuming Stephanie is not the triggerman at the concert Saturday night.

      Remember, you’re reading this a good two months after I write it. So, for you, four books have already come to market. For me, we’re just heading toward the release of book two, Media Frenzy. The books coming out made me aware of a few things. One is that people are digging them even more than I ever dared dream. The reviews we have gotten to date are nothing short of extraordinary. Even my book, Dream with Little Angels, didn’t have such a solid response as these.

      But I noticed something else, and I noticed it in those reviews. A lot of people are asking a lot of questions. One that keeps coming up is the fact that I explicitly say at the beginning of the book that five people die but only four go on record and all four are women. Well, you know one those women going into the story, but who are the other three? And even if you figure that out, you have to ask, why them? And then there’s the whole question of the unrecorded death. How the hell does that work?

      That’s about all the questions I’ve seen in the reviews and because of that, a third thing occurred to me. There is another question nobody is asking. Nobody. And that question is: does everyone think Hiebert had any idea how this thing was going to end when he wrote those opening pages to what has become this runaway train of characters and plot lines? Maybe he just threw a bunch of shit out and hoped to God he’d be able to tie it all up when the time came. It baffles me that absolutely nobody has brought this up anywhere I’ve seen. It would have been the first question on my mind.

      Wanna know the answer?

      Wait for it . . .

      And wait some more . . .

      And more even . . .

      And even some more and more because . . . it’s not coming. I’ll never tell. When we get to the end, you decide. Could these seemingly random events spinning out of all of these character’s lives, colliding into each other and setting everyone off on different tangents actually have come to a point where they logically tie up in a way that works all by

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