FULLY LOADED

The Complete Collected Short Fiction of Blake Crouch

Copyright © 2011 by Blake Crouch

Cover art copyright © 2011 by Jeroen ten Berge

All rights reserved.

The stories in this book are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information about the author, please visit www.blakecrouch.com.

For more information about the artist, please visit www.jeroentenberge.com.

Some of the stories contained in this volume appeared previously in the following magazines and anthologies: Uncage Me, edited by Jen Jordan and published by Bleak House Books: “*69”; Thriller 2, edited by Clive Cussler and published by Mira Books: “Remaking”; Brilliance Audio edition of Abandon by Blake Crouch: “On the Good, Red Road”; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine: “Shining Rock.”Shivers VI, edited by Richard Chizmar and published by Cemetery Dance Publications: “Serial”; Hint Fiction, edited by Robert Swartwood and published by W.W. Norton: “The Newton Boys’ Last Photograph”; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine: “The Pain of Others.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

*69

Remaking

On the Good, Red Road

Shining Rock

Perfect Little Town

Serial

The Newton Boys’ Last Photograph

The Meteorologist

Unconditional

The Pain of Others

Bonus Material

An introduction to “*69”

Have you ever received an accidental phone call from someone who kept your number in their address book? I blame my old high-school buddy, Ryan McDaniels, for this story. A few years ago, over the course of several weeks, he inadvertently joggled his cell phone and called me several times. He didn’t know he had done it, and I received a handful of strange, muffled messages. Later, it occurred to me—what if my friend had accidentally called me when he was doing something terrible, and only realized after the fact that he’d unintentionally made me a witness to his brutal crime? From these questions emerged “*69.”

*69

At nine-thirty on a Thursday evening, as he lounged in bed grading the pop quizzes he’d sprung on his 11th grade honors English class, Tim West heard footsteps ascend the staircase and pad down the hallway toward the bedroom.

His wife, Laura, appeared in the open doorway.

“Tim, come here.”

He set the papers aside and climbed out of bed.

Following her down the squeaky stairs into the living room, he found immense pleasure in the architecture of her long legs and the grace with which she carried herself.  Coupled with that yellow satin teddy he loved and the floral tang of skin lotion, Tim foresaw a night of marital bliss.  Historically, Thursdays were their night.

Laura sat him down in the oversize leather chair across from the fireplace, and as she took a seat on its matching ottoman, it struck him—this fleeting premonition that she was on the verge of revealing she was pregnant with their first child, a project they’d been working on since last Christmas.  Instead, she reached over to the end table beside the chair and pressed the blinking play button on the answering machine:

Ten seconds of the static hiss of wind.

A woman’s voice breaks through, severely muffled, and mostly unintelligible except for, “…didn’t mean anything!”

A man’s voice, louder and distorted by static: “…making me do this.”

“I can explain!”

“…late for that.”

A thud, a sucking sound.

“…in my eyes.”  The man’s voice.  “Look in them!  …you can’t speak….but…listen the last minute…whore-life…be disrespected.  You lie there and think about that while…”

Thirty seconds of that horrible sucking sound, occasionally cut by the wind.

The man weeps deeply and from his core.

An electronic voice ended the message with, “Thursday, nine-sixteen, p.m.”

Tim looked at his wife.  Laura shrugged.  He reached over, played it again.

When it finished, Laura said, “There’s no way that’s what it sounds like, right?”

“There any way to know for certain?”

“Let’s just call nine-one—”

“And tell them what?  What information do we have?”

Laura rubbed her bare arms.  Tim went to the hearth and turned up the gas logs.  She came over, sat beside him on the cool brick.

“Maybe it’s just some stupid joke,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“What?  You don’t think so?”

“Remember Gene Malack?  Phys ed teacher?”

“Tall, geeky-looking guy.  Sure.”

“We hung out some last year while he was going through his divorce.  Grabbed beers, went bowling.  Nice guy, but a little quirky.  There was this one time when our phone rang, and I picked it up, said, ‘Hello?’, but no one answered.  The strange thing was that I could hear someone talking, only it was muffled, just like that message.  But I recognized Gene’s voice.  I should’ve hung up, but human nature, I stayed on, listened to him order a meal from the Wendy’s drive-through.  Apparently, he’d had our number on speed-dial in his cell.  It had gotten joggled, accidentally called our house.”

One of the straps had fallen down on Laura’s teddy.

As Tim fixed it, she said, “You just trying to scare me?  Let’s call your brother—”

“No, not yet—”

“No, you’re saying that a man, who we know well enough to be on his speed-dial list, was killing some poor woman tonight, and he accidentally…what was the word?”

“Joggled.”

“Thank you.  Joggled his phone, inadvertently calling us during the murder.  That where you’re going with this?”

“Look, maybe we’re getting a little overly—”

“Overly, shit.  I’m getting freaked out here, Tim.”

“All right.  Let’s listen once more, see if we recognize the voice.”

Tim went over to the end table, played the message a third time.

“There’s just too much wind and static,” he said as it ended.

Laura got up and walked into the kitchen, came back a moment later with a small notepad she used for grocery lists.

She returned to her spot on the hearth, pen poised over the paper, said, “Okay, who are we close enough friends with to be on their speed-dial?”

“Including family?”

“Anyone we know.”

“My parents, your parents, my brother, your brother and sister.”

“Jen.”  She scribbled on the pad.

“Chris.”

“Shanna and David.”

“Jan and Walter.”

“Dave and Anne.”

“Paul and Mo.”

“Hans and Lanette.”

“Kyle and Jason.”

“Corey and Sarah.”

This progressed for several minutes until Laura finally looked up from the pad, said, “There’s thirty names here.”

“So, I’ve got an unpleasant question.”

“What?”

“If we’re going on the assumption that what’s on that answering machine is a man we know murdering a woman, we have to ask ourselves, ‘which of our friends is capable of doing something like that?’”

“God.”

“I know.”

For a moment, their living room stood so quiet Tim could hear the second hand of his grandmother’s antique clock above the mantle and the Bose CD player spinning Bach up in their bedroom.

“I’ve got a name,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“You first.”

“Corey Mustin.”

“Oh, come on, you’re just saying that ‘cause he took me to that titty bar in Vegas, and you’ve hated him ever—”

“I hate most of your college friends, but he in particular gives me the creeps.  I could see him turning psychotic if he got jealous enough.  Woman’s intuition, Tim.  Don’t doubt it.  Your turn.”

“Your friend Anne’s husband.”

“Dave?  No, he’s so sweet.”

“I’ve never liked the guy.  We played ball in church league a couple years ago, and he was a maniac on the court.  Major temper problem.  Hard fouler.  We almost came to blows a few times.”

“So what should I do?  Put a check by their names?”

“Yeah…wait.  God, we’re so stupid.”  Tim jumped up from the hearth, rushed over to the phone.

“What are you doing?” Laura asked.

“Star sixty-nine.  Calls back the last number that called you.”

As he reached for the phone, it rang.

He flinched, looked over at Laura, her eyes covered in the bend of her arm.

“That scared the shit out of me,” she said.

“Should I answer it?”

“I don’t know.”

He picked up the phone mid-ring.

“Hello?”

“Tiiiiiimmmmm.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“How’s my baby boy?”

“I’m fine, but—”

“You know, I talked to your brother today and I’m worried—”

“Look, Mom, I’m so sorry, but this is a really bad time.  Can I call you back tomorrow?”

“Well, all right.  Love you.  Kisses and hugs to that pretty wife of yours.”

“You, too.  Bye, Mom.”  Tim hung up the phone.

Laura said, “Does that mean we can’t star sixty-nine whoever left the message?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think there’s some number you push to like, double star-sixty—”

“I don’t work for the phone company, Laura.”

“Remember, I suggested we buy the package with caller ID, but you were all, ‘No, that’s an extra five bucks a month.’  I think it’s time to call the police.”

“No, I’ll call Martin.  He’ll be off his shift in an hour.”

A few minutes shy of eleven o’clock, the doorbell rang.

Tim unlocked the deadbolt, found his brother, Martin, standing on the stoop, half-squinting in the glare of the porchlight, his uniform wrinkled, deep bags under his eyes.

“You look rough, big bro,” Tim said.

“Can I come in or you wanna chat out here in the cold?”

Tim peered around him, saw the squad car parked in the driveway, the engine ticking as it cooled.

Fog enveloped the streets and homes of Quail Ridge, one of the new subdivisions built on what had been a farmer’s treeless pasture, the houses all new and homogenous, close enough to the interstate to always bask in its distant roar.

He stepped to the side as Martin walked into his house, then closed and locked the door after them.

“Laura asleep?” he asked.

“No, she’s still up.”

They walked past the living room into the kitchen where Laura, now sporting a more modest nightgown, had put a pot of water on the stove, the steam making the lid jump and jive.

“Hey, Marty,” she said.

He kissed her on the cheek.  “My God, you smell good.  So you told him about us yet?”

“Never gets old,” Tim said.  “You think it would, but it just keeps getting funnier.”

Laura said, “Cup of tea, Marty?”

“Why not.”

Martin and Tim retired to the living room.  After Laura got the tea steeping, she joined them, plopping down in the big leather chair across from the couch.

Martin said, “Pretty fucking quaint and what not with the fire going.  So what’s up?  You guys having a little crumb-cruncher?”

Laura and Tim looked at each other, then Laura said, “No, why would you think that?”

“Yeah, Mart, typically not safe to ask if a woman’s pregnant until you actually see the head crowning.”

“So I’m not gonna be an uncle?  Why the hell else would you ask me over this late?”

“Go ahead, Laura.”

She pressed play on the answering machine.

They listened to the message, and when it finished, Martin said, “Play it again.”

After the message ended, they sat in silence, Martin with his brow furrowed, shaking his head.

He finally said, “I know you’re too much of a cheap bastard to have caller ID or anything invented in the twenty-first century, so did you star-sixty-nine it?”

“Tried, but Mom called literally the second I picked up the phone.”

Martin undid the top two buttons of his navy shirt, ran his fingers around the collar to loosen it.

“Could just be a prank,” he said.  “Maybe someone held the phone up to the television during a particular scene in a movie.”

“If that’s what it is, I don’t recognize the movie.”

Martin quickly redid the buttons on his shirt, said, “What do you think you’ve got there?”

“I think someone’s phone got jiggled at the worst possible moment, and we were on their speed dial.”

“You call nine-one-one?”

“Called you.”

Martin nodded.  “There’s gotta be a way to find that number.  You know, something you dial other than star-sixty-nine.”

Tim said, “Star-seventy?”

“I don’t know, something like that.”

“We tried to call the phone company a little while ago, but they’re closed until eight a.m. tomorrow.”

Martin looked at Laura, said, “You okay, sweetie?  You don’t look so hot.”

Tim saw it, too—something about her had changed, her face seasick yellow, hands trembling imperceptibly.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You sure?  You look like you’re about to blow chunks all over your new carpet.”

“I said I’m fine.”

Martin stood.  “I need to use the little girl’s room.”

Laura watched him walk out of the room and down the first-floor hallway, and only when the bathroom door had closed, did she look back at Tim and whisper, “You see it?”

“See what?”

“When he unbuttoned his shirt a minute ago, it exposed his white tee-shirt underneath.”

“So?”

“So I saw blood on it, and I think he saw me looking at it, because he buttoned his shirt up again real fast.”

Tim felt something constrict in his stomach.

“Why does he have blood on his shirt, Tim?”

The toilet flushed.

“Listen, when he comes back out, you say since you aren’t feeling well, you’re going to bed.”  The faucet turned on.  “Then go upstairs and wait several minutes.  I’m gonna offer Martin a drink.  We’ll sit in the kitchen, and you sneak back down and go outside, see if you can get into his squad car.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think he brought his cell phone inside with him.  He usually keeps it in a little pouch on his belt.  Probably left it in the car.  Get it, and look back over the outgoing history.  If he called our house at nine-sixteen tonight, we’ll know.”

“And then what?”

The bathroom faucet went quiet.

“I don’t know.  This is my brother for Chrissakes.”

Tim opened one of the high cabinets above the sink and took down a bottle of whiskey.

“Old Grandad?” Martin asked.

“What, too low-shelf for you?”

“That’s what Dad used to pass out to.  Let me see that.”  He grabbed the bottle out of Tim’s hands, unscrewed the cap, inhaled a whiff.  “Jesus, brings back memories.”

“You want ice or—”

“Naw, let’s just pass it back and forth like old times in the field.”

They sat at the breakfast table, taking turns with the fifth of Old Grandad.  It had been several months since the brothers had really talked.  They’d been close in high school, drifted in college, Martin only lasting three semesters.  Tim had come home two years ago when Dad’s liver finally yelled uncle, found that something had wedged itself between him and his brother, a nameless tension they’d never acknowledged outright.

And though all he could think about was the message and Laura, he forced himself to broach the subject of Mom—hostile territory—asked Martin if he thought she seemed to be thriving in the wake of Dad’s passing.

“That’s a pretty fucked-up thing to say.”

“I didn’t mean it like—”

“No, you’re saying she’s better off without him.”

Beyond the kitchen, Tim heard the middle step of the staircase creak—Laura working her way down from the bedroom—and he wondered if Martin had heard it.  The last two steps were noisy as well, and then came the front door you could hear opening from Argentina.  Nothing else to do but get him riled and noisy.

“Yeah, Martin, I guess I am saying she’s better off without him.  What’d he do these last five years but cause us all a lot of heartache?  And what’d you do but step in as Dad’s faithful apologist?”

Another creak.

“Ever heard of honor thy father, Tim?”  Martin’s cheeks had flushed with the whiskey and Tim wondered if he’d intended to raise his voice like he had.  His brother’s back was to the archway between the kitchen and the living room, and as Tim saw Laura enter the foyer and start toward the front door, he tried to avert his eyes.

“You know he beat Mom.”

“Once, Tim.  One fucking time.  And it was a total accident.  He didn’t mean to shove her as hard as he did.”  Laura turning the deadbolt now.  “And it tore him up that he did it.  You weren’t here when it happened.  Didn’t see him crying like a goddamn two-year-old, sitting in his own vomit, did you?”  Tim could hear the hinges creaking.  “No,” Martin answered his own question as the front door swung open, cold streaming in.  “You were in college.”  Laura slipped outside, eased the door closed behind her.  “Becoming a teacher.”  Any curiosity Tim had harbored concerning his brother’s opinion of his chosen profession instantly wilted.

“You’re right,” Tim said.  “Sorry.  I just…part of me’s still so pissed at him, you know?”

Martin lifted the bottle, took a long drink, wiped his mouth.

“Of course I know.”

Tim pulled Old Grandad across the table, wondering how long it would take Laura.  If the cruiser was locked, there’d be nothing she could do but come right back inside.  If it was open, might take her a minute or two of searching the front seats to find the phone, another thirty seconds to figure out how to work Martin’s cell, check his call history.

He sipped the whiskey, pushed the bottle back to Martin.

“Wish you’d come over more,” Tim said.  “Feel like I don’t see you much these days.”

“See me every Sunday at Mom’s.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Tim wanted to ask Martin if he felt that wedge between them, met his brother’s eyes across the table, but couldn’t bring himself to say the words.  They didn’t operate on that frequency.

A frigid mist fogged Laura’s glasses, and with the porchlight out, she took her time descending the steps, the soles of her slippers holding a tenuous grip on the wet brick.  The fog had thickened since Martin’s arrival, the streetlamps putting out a glow far dimmer and more diffused than their normal sharp points of illumination—now just smudges of light in the distance.

She hurried down the sidewalk that curved from the house to the driveway.

Martin had parked his police cruiser behind the old Honda Civic she’d had since her junior year of high school, over 200,000 miles on the odometer and not a glimmer of senility.

Laura walked around to the front door on the passenger side, out of the sight-line of the living room windows.  She reached to open the front passenger door, wondering if Martin’s cruiser carried an alarm.  If so, she was about to wake up everyone on the block, and had better prepare herself to explain to her brother-in-law why she’d tried to break into his car.

The door opened.  Interior lights blazing.  No screeching alarm.  The front seat filthy—Chick-Fil-A wrappers and crushed Cheerwine cans in the floorboards.

She leaned over the computer in the central console, inspected the driver seat.

No phone.

Two minutes of leafing through the myriad papers and napkins and straws and stray salt packets in the glove compartment convinced her it wasn’t there either.

She glanced back through the partition that separated the front seats from the back.

In the middle seat, on top of a Penthouse magazine, lay Martin’s black leather cell phone case.

“Yeah, I was seeing this woman for a little while.”

“But not anymore?”

Martin took another long pull from Old Grandad, shook his head.

“What happened?”

“She wanted to domesticate me, as they say.”

Tim forced a smile.  “How so?”

“Tried to drag me to church and Sunday school.  Anytime we’d be out and I’d order an alcoholic beverage—her term—she’d make this real restrained sigh, like her Southern Baptist sensibility had been scandalized.  And in bed…”

Laura opened the door behind the front passenger seat and climbed into the back of the cruiser.  Wary of the interior lights exposing her, on the chance Martin happened to glance outside, she pulled the door closed.

After a moment, the lights cut out.

She picked up the leather case, fished out Martin’s cell phone, and flipped it open, the little screen glowing in the dark.

“…I’d gotten my hopes up, figured she’s so uptight about every other fucking thing, girl must be a psychopath between the sheets.  Like it has to balance out somewhere, right?”

As he sipped the whiskey, Tim glanced around Martin toward the front door.

“Sadly, not the case.  When we finally did the deed, she just laid there, absolutely motionless, making these weird little noises.  She was terrified of sex.  I think she approached it like scooping up dogshit.  Damn, this whiskey’s running through me.”

Martin got up from the table and left the kitchen, Tim listening to his brother’s footsteps track down the hallway.

The bathroom door opened and closed.

It grew suddenly quiet.

The clock above the kitchen sink showed 11:35.

Laura stared at the cell phone screen and exhaled a long sigh.  Martin’s last call had gone out at 4:21 p.m. to Mary West, his and Tim’s mother.

She closed the cell, slipped it back into the leather case, sat there for a moment in the dark car.  She realized she’d somehow known all along, and she wondered how she’d let Tim know—maybe a shake of the head as she crept past the kitchen on her way up the stairs.  Better not to advertise to Martin that they’d suspected him.

She searched for the door handle in the dark, and kept searching and kept searching.  At least on this side, there didn’t seem to be one.  She moved to the other door, slid her hand across the vinyl.  Nothing.  Reaching forward, she touched the partition of vinyl-coated metal that separated the front and back seats, thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me.

Ten minutes later, flushed with embarrassment, Laura broke down and dialed her home number on Martin’s cell.  Even from inside the car, she could hear their telephone ringing through the living room windows.  If she could get Tim to come outside unnoticed and let her out, Martin would never have to know about any of this.

The answering machine picked up, her voice advising, “Tim and Laura aren’t here right now.  You know the drill.”

She closed Martin’s cell, opened it, hit redial—five rings, then the machine again.

The moment she put the phone away, Martin’s cell vibrated.

Laura opened the case, opened the phone—her landline calling, figured Tim had star-sixty-nined her last call.

Through the drawn shades of the living room windows, she saw his profile, pressed talk.

“Tim?”

“Thank God, Laura.”  Marty’s voice.  “Someone’s in the house.”

“What are you talking about?  Where’s Tim?”

“He ran out through the backyard.  Where are you?”

“I um…I’m outside.  Went for a late walk.”

“You on your cell?”

“Yeah.  I don’t understand what’s—”

“I’m coming out.  Meet me at the roundabout and we’ll—”

Martin’s cell beeped three times and died.

The whiskey had made Tim thirsty, and Martin was taking his sweet time in the bathroom.

Tim went over to the sink, held a glass of water under the filter attached to the faucet.

He heard the creak of wood pressure—Marty walking back into the kitchen—and still watching the water level rise, Tim said, “Let me ask you something, Marty.  You think whoever left that message knows they left it?”

“Yeah, Tim, I think they might.”

Something in Martin’s voice spun Tim around, and his first inclination was to laugh, because his brother did look ridiculous, standing just a few feet away in a pair of white socks, a shower cap hiding his short black hair, and the inexplicable choice to don the yellow satin teddy Laura had been wearing prior to his arrival.

“What the hell is this?” Tim asked, then noticed tears trailing down Martin’s face.

“She’d gone to the movies with Tyler Hodges.”

“Who are you talking—”

“Danielle.”

“Matson?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a junior in high school, man.”

“You know what she did with Tyler after the movie?”

“Marty—”

“She went to the Grove with him and they parked and the windows were steamed up when I found them.”

“Look, you can have the tape from our answering—”

“They’d trace the call,” Martin said.  “If you were to encourage them.”

“We wouldn’t.”

“I can see the wheels turning in your eyes, but I’ve thought this through quite a bit more than you have.  Played out all the scenarios, and this is—”

“Please, Marty.  I could never turn you in.”

Martin seemed to really consider this.  He said, “Where’s Laura?”

“Upstairs.”

Martin cocked his head and shifted into his right hand the paring knife he’d liberated from the cutlery block.

“Don’t fuck with me.  I was just up there.”

“You need help, Marty.”

“You think so?”

“Remember that vacation we took to Myrtle Beach?  I was twelve, you were fourteen.  We rode the Mad Mouse roller coaster eight times in a row.”

“That was a great summer.”

“I’m your brother, man.  Little Timmy.  Look at yourself.  Let me help you.”

As he spoke, Tim noticed that Martin had gone so far as to put on black glove liners, and there was something so clinical and deliberate in the act, that for the first time, he actually felt afraid, a sharp plunging coldness streaking through his core, and he grew breathless as the long-overdue shot of adrenaline swept through him, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was just standing there, leaning back against the counter, watching Marty shove the curved paring knife in and out of his abdomen—four, five, six times—and he heard the water glass he’d been holding shatter on the hardwood floor beside his feet, Martin still stabbing him, a molten glow blossoming in his stomach, and as he reached down to touch the source of this tremendous pain, Martin grabbed a handful of his hair, Tim’s head torqued back, staring at the ceiling, the phone ringing, and he felt the knifepoint enter his neck just under his jawbone, smelled the rusty stench of his blood on the blade, and Martin said as he opened his throat, “I’m so sorry, Timmy.  It’s almost over.”

The taste of metal was strong in Laura’s mouth, even before she saw the shadow emerge from the corner of the garage, the floodlights sensor triggered, Martin jogging toward the cruiser.

She ducked down behind the seats and flattened herself across the floorboards, her heart pounding under her pajama top.

The front driver side door opened.

Light flooded the interior.

Martin climbed in, shut the door, sat motionless behind the wheel until the dome light winked out.

At last, Laura heard the jingle of keys.

The engine cranked, the car backing down the driveway and tears coming, her eyes welling up with fear and something even worse—the uncertain horror of what had just happened in their home while she was locked in the back of this car.

She reached up, her fingers grazing the backseat upholstery, just touching the leather cell phone case.

When Martin spoke, it startled the hell out of her and she jerked her arm back down into her chest.

“Hey guys, it’s Marty.  Listen, I’m really concerned based on my conversation with Tim.  I’m coming over, and I hope we can talk about this.  You know, I still remember your wedding day.  Been what, eight years?  Look, everyone goes through rocky patches, but this…well, let’s talk in person when I get there.”

Laura stifled her sobs as the car slowed and made a long, gentle left turn, wondering if they were driving through the roundabout at the entrance to the subdivision.

Under his breath, Martin sighed, said, “Where the fuck are you?”

She grabbed the leather case off the seat, pried out the phone in the darkness.

The screen lit up.  She dialed 911, pressed talk.

The cruiser eased to a stop.

“Connecting…” appeared on the screen, and she held the phone to her ear.

The driver door opened and slammed, Laura’s eyes briefly stinging in the light.  She heard Martin’s footsteps trail away on the pavement and still the phone against her ear had yet to ring.

She pulled it away, read the message: “Signal Faded Call Lost.”

In the top left corner of the screen, the connectivity icon that for some reason resembled a martini glass displayed zero bars.

The footsteps returned and Martin climbed back in, put the car into gear.

The acceleration of the hearty V8 pushed Laura into the base of the backseat.

Martin chuckled.

Laura held the phone up behind Martin’s seat, glimpsed a single bar on the screen.

“Laura?”

She froze.

“You have to tell me what that skin cream is,” he said.  “Whole car smells like it.”

She didn’t move.

“Come on, I know you’re back there.  Saw you when I got out of the car a minute ago.  Now sit the fuck up or you’re gonna make me angry.”

That lonely bar on the cell phone screen had vanished.

Laura pushed up off the floorboard, climbed into the seat.

Martin watched her in the rearview mirror.

They were driving through the north end of the subdivision, the porchlights as distant as stars in the heavy, midnight fog.

Martin turned onto their street.

“What’d you do to my husband?” Laura asked, fighting tears.

The phone in her lap boasted two strong bars and very little battery.

She reached down, watched 9-1-1 appear on the screen as her fingers struggled to find the right buttons in the dark.

“What were you doing in my cruiser?” Martin asked.  “Looking for this?”

He held up his second cell phone as Laura pressed talk.

Through the tiny speaker, the phone in her hand began to ring.

She said, “When did you know?”

“When you played the message.”

Martin turned into their driveway.

“I’m really sorry about all this, Laura.  Just an honest to God…”  He stomped the brake so hard that even at that slow rate of speed, Laura slammed into the partition.  “You fucking bitch.”

Faintly: “Nine-one-one.  Where is your emergency?”

Martin jammed the shifter into park, threw open the door.

“Oh, God, send someone to—”

The rear passenger door swung open and Martin dove in, Laura crushed under his weight, his hand cupped over her mouth, the phone ripped from her hand, and then the side of her head exploded, her vision jogged into a darkness that sparked with burning stars.

Laura thought, I’m conscious.

She felt the side of her face resting against the floor, and when she tried to raise her head, her skin momentarily adhered to the hardwood.

She sat up, opened her eyes, temples throbbing.

Four feet away, slumped on the floor beside the sink, Tim lay staring at her, eyes open and vacant, a black slit yawning under his chin.

And though she sat in her own kitchen in a pool of her husband’s blood, legs burgundy below the knees, hair matted into bloody dreads like some demon Rasta, she didn’t scream or even cry.

Her yellow teddy was slathered in gore, her left breast dangling out of a tear across the front.  She held a knife in her left hand that she’d used to skin a kiwi for breakfast a thousand years ago, Tim’s .357 in her right.

The front door burst open, footsteps pounding through the foyer, male voices yelling, “Mooresville Police!”

She craned her neck, saw two cops arrive in the archway between the kitchen and the living room—a short man with a shaved head and her brother-in-law, wide-eyed and crying.

The short man said, “Go in the other room, Martin.  You don’t need to see—”

“She’s got a gun!”

“Shit.  Drop that right now!”

“Come on, Laura, please!”

“You wanna get shot?”

They were pointing their Glocks at her, screaming for her to drop the gun, and she was trying, but it had been super-glued to her hand, and she attempted to sling it across the room to break the bond, but even her pointer finger had been cemented to the trigger, the barrel of the .357 making a fleeting alignment on the policemen, and they would write in their reports that she was making her move, that deadly force had been the only option, both lawmen firing—Officer McCullar twice, Officer West four times—and when the judgment fell, both men were deemed to have acted reasonably, the hearts of the brass going out to West in particular, the man having found his little brother murdered and been forced to shoot the perpetrator, his own sister-in-law.

All things considered, a month of paid leave and weekly sessions with a therapist was the very least they could do.

An introduction to “Remaking”

“Remaking” was born in a coffee shop one afternoon. I was seated at a table toward the back, working at my laptop, when a conversation slipped into range. I looked up, saw a young boy of five or six sitting with a middle-aged man. I eavesdropped, and for some reason, something felt off. Like maybe that boy wasn’t supposed to be with that man. Was he kidnapped? A missing child? Then the boy called him “Dad” and a woman joined them. The familial vibe shone through, and that jolt of uncertainty passed. But the questions remained. What if the woman had not joined them? What if I still felt suspicious when the boy and the man got up to leave? Would I have followed them and tried to intervene? These thirty seconds of uncertainty were the origin of “Remaking,” although, as is often the case, when I began to write, I found the story held a few surprises for me, and that it wasn’t so simple or straightforward. But that was okay. In the end, those are the most fun to write.

remaking

Mitchell stared at the page in the notebook, covered in his messy scrawl, but he wasn’t reading.  He’d seen them walk into the coffeehouse fifteen minutes prior, the man short, pudgy, and smoothshaven, the boy perhaps five or six and wearing a long-sleeved Oshkoshbgosh—red with blue stripes.

Now they sat two tables away.

The boy said, “I’m hungry.”

“We’ll get something in a little while.”

“How long is a little while?”

“Until I say.”

“When are you gonna—”

“Joel, do you mind?”

The little boy’s head dropped. The man stopped typing and looked up from his laptop.

“I’m sorry.  Tell you what.  Give me five minutes so I can finish this email, and we’ll go eat breakfast.”

Mitchell sipped his espresso, snow falling beyond the storefront windows into this mountain hamlet of eight hundred souls, Miles Davis squealing through the speakers—one of the low-key numbers off Kind of Blue.

Mitchell trailed them down the frosted sidewalk.

One block up, they crossed the street and disappeared into a diner.  Having already eaten in that very establishment two hours ago, he installed himself on a bench where he could see the boy and the man sitting at a table by the front window.

Mitchell fished the cell out of his jacket and opened the phone, scrolling through ancient numbers as the snow collected in his hair.

He pressed talk.

Two rings, then, “Mitch?  Oh my God, where are you?”

He made no answer.

“Look, I’m at the office, getting ready for a big meeting.  I can’t do this right now, but will you answer if I call you back?  Please?”

Mitchell closed the phone and shut his eyes.

They emerged from the diner an hour later.

Mitchell brushed the inch of snow off his pants and stood, shivering.  He crossed the street and followed the boy and the man up the sidewalk, passing a candy shop, a grocery, a depressing bar masquerading as an old west saloon.

They left the sidewalk after another block and walked up the driveway to the Antlers Motel, disappeared into 113, the middle in a single-story row of nine rooms.  The tarp stretched over the small swimming pool sagged with snow.  In an alcove between the rooms and the office, vending machines hummed against the hush of the storm.

Ten minutes of brisk walking returned Mitchell to his motel, the Box Canyon Lodge.  He climbed into his burgundy Jetta, cranked the engine.

“Just for tonight?”

“Yes.”

“That’ll be $69.78 with tax.”

Mitchell handed the woman his credit card.

Behind the front desk, a row of Hummels stood in perfect formation atop a black and white television airing “The Price is Right.”

Mitchell signed the receipt.  “Could I have 112 or 114?”

The old woman stubbed out her cigarette in a glass ashtray and reached for the key cabinet.

Mitchell pressed his ear to the wood paneling.

A television blared through the thin wall.

His cell phone vibrated—Lisa calling again.

Flipped it open.

“Mitch?  You don’t have to say anything.  Please just listen—”

He powered off the phone and continued writing in the notebook.

Afternoon unspooled as the snow piled up in the parking lot of the Antlers Motel.  Mitchell parted the blinds and stared through the window as the first intimation of dusk began to blue the sky, the noise of the television next door droning through the walls.

He lay down on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling and whispered the Lord’s Prayer.

In the evening, he startled out of sleep to the sound of a door slamming, sat up too fast, the blood rushing to his head in a swarm of black spots.  He hadn’t intended to sleep.

Mitchell slid off the bed and walked to the window, split the blinds, heard the diminishing sound of footsteps—a single set—squeaking in the snow.

He saw the boy pass through the illumination of a streetlamp and disappear into the alcove that housed the vending machines.

The snowflakes stung Mitchell’s cheeks as he crossed the parking lot, his sneakers swallowed up in six inches of fresh powder.

The hum of the vending machines intensified, and he picked out the sound of coins dropping through a slot.

He glanced once over his shoulder at the row of rooms, the doors all closed, windows dark save slivers of electric blue from television screens sliding through the blinds.

Too dark to tell if the man was watching.

Mitchell stepped into the alcove as the boy pressed his selection on the drink machine.

The can banged into the open compartment, and the boy reached down and claimed the Sprite.

“Hi, Joel.”

The boy looked up at him, then lowered his head like a scolded dog, as though he’d been caught vandalizing the drink machine.

“No, it’s all right.  You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Mitchell squatted down on the concrete.

“Look at me, son.  Who’s that man you’re with?”

The voice so soft and high: “Daddy.”

A voice boomed across the parking lot.  “Joel?  It don’t take this long to buy a can of pop!  Make a decision and get back here.”

The door slammed.

“Joel, do you want to come with me?”

“You’re a stranger.”

“No, my name’s Mitch.  I’m a police officer actually.  Why don’t you come with me.”

“No.”

“I think you probably should.”  Mitchell figuring he had maybe thirty seconds before the father stormed out.

“Where’s your badge?”

“I’m undercover right now.  Come on, we don’t have much time.  You need to come with me.”

“I’ll get in trouble.”

“No, only way you’ll get in trouble is by not obeying a police officer when he tells you to do something.”  Mitchell noticed the boy’s hands trembling.  His were, too.  “Come on, son.”

He put his hand on the boy’s small shoulder and guided him out of the alcove toward his car, where he opened the front passenger door and motioned for Joel to get in.

Mitchell brushed the snow off the windows and the windshield, and as he climbed in and started the engine, he saw the door to 113 swing open in the rearview mirror.

“You eaten yet?”

“No.”

Main Street empty and the newly-scraped pavement already frosting again, the reflection of the high beams blinding against the wall of pouring snow.

“Are you hungry?”

“I don’t know.”

He turned right off Main, drove slow down a snow-packed side street that sloped past little Victorians, inns, and motels, Joel buckled into the passenger seat, the can of Sprite still unopened between his legs, tears rolling down his cheeks.

Mitchell unlocked the door and opened it.

“Go on in, Joel.”

The boy entered and Mitchell hit the light, closing and locking the door after them, wondering if Joel could reach the brass chain near the top.

It wasn’t much of a room—single bed, table, cabinet housing a refrigerator on one side, hangers on the other.  He’d lived out of it for the last month and it smelled like stale pizza crust and cardboard and clothes soured with sweat.

Mitchell closed the blinds.

“You wanna watch TV?”

The boy shrugged.

Mitchell picked the remote control off the bedside table and turned it on.

“Come sit on the bed, Joel.”

As the boy climbed onto the bed, Mitchell started flipping.

“You tell me to stop when you see something you wanna watch.”

Mitchell surfed through all thirty stations twice and the boy said nothing.

He settled on the Discovery Channel, set the remote control down.

“I want my Dad,” the boy said, trying not to cry.

“Calm down, Joel.”

Mitchell sat on the bed and unlaced his sneakers.  His socks were damp and cold.  He balled them up and tossed them into the open bathroom, staring now at his pale feet, toes shriveled with moisture.

Joel had settled back into one of the pillows, momentarily entranced by the television program where a man caked in mud wrestled with a crocodile.

Mitchell turned up the volume.

“You like crocodiles?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You aren’t scared of them?”

The boy shook his head.  “I got a snake.”

“Nuh uh.”

The boy looked up.  “Uh huh.”

“What kind?”

“It’s black and scaly and it lives in a glass box.”

“A terrarium?”

“Yeah.  Daddy catches mice for it.”

“It eats them?”

“Uh huh.  Slinky’s belly gets real big.”

Mitchell smiled.  “I bet that’s something to see.”

They sat watching the Discovery Channel for twenty minutes, Joel engrossed now, Mitchell with his head tilted back against the headboard, eyes closed, a half grin where none had been for twelve months.

At 8:24 p.m., the cell vibrated against Mitchell’s hip.  He opened the case and pulled out the phone.

“Hi, Lisa.”

“Mitch.”

“Listen, I want you to call me back in five minutes and do exactly what I say.”

“Okay.”

Mitchell closed the phone and slid off the bed.

The boy looked up, still half-watching the program on the world’s deadliest spiders.

He said, “I’m hungry.”

“I know, sport.  I know.  Give me just a minute here and I’ll order a pizza.”

Mitchell crossed the carpet, tracking through dirty clothes he should’ve taken to the laundry a week ago.

His suitcase lay open in the space between the dresser and the baseboard heater.  He knelt down, searching through wrinkled oxfords and blue jeans, khakis that had long since lost their creases.

It was a tiny, wool sweater—ice-blue with a magnified snowflake stitched across the front.

“Hey, Joel,” he said, “it’s getting cold in here.  I want you to put this on.”  He tossed the sweater onto the bed.

“I’m not cold.”

“You do like I tell you now.”

As the boy reached for the sweater, Mitchell undid the buttons on his plaid shirt and worked his arms out of the sleeves.  He dropped the shirt on the carpet and rifled his suitcase again until he found the badly faded T-shirt he’d bought fifteen years ago at a U2 concert.

On the way back to the bed, he stopped at the television and lifted the videotape from the top of the VCR, pushed it in.

“No, I wanna watch the—”

“We’ll turn it back on in a minute.”

He climbed under the covers beside the boy and stared at the bedside table, waiting for the phone to buzz.

“Joel, I’m gonna answer the phone.  I want you to sit here beside me and watch the television and don’t say a word until I tell you.”

“I’m hungry.”

The phone vibrated itself toward the edge of the bedside table.

“I’ll buy you anything you want if you do this right for me.”

Mitchell picked up the phone.

Lisa calling.

He closed his eyes, gave himself a moment to engage.  He’d written it all down months ago, the script in the bedside table drawer under the Gideon bible he’d taken to reading every night before bed, but he didn’t need it.

“Hi, Honey.”

“Mitch, I’m so glad you—”

“Stop.  Don’t say anything.  Just hang on a minute.”  He reached for the remote control and pressed play.  The screen lit up, halfway through the episode of Seinfeld.  He lowered the volume, said, “Lisa, I want you to say, ‘I’m almost asleep.’”

“What are you—”

“Just do it.”

A pause, then: “I’m almost asleep.”

“Say it like you really are.”

Mitchell closed his eyes.

“I’m almost asleep.”

“We’re sitting here watching Seinfeld.”  He looked down at the top of Joel’s head, his hair brown with gold highlights, just the right shade and length.  He kissed the boy’s head.  “Our little guy’s just about asleep.”

“Mitch, are you drunk—”

“Lisa, I will close this fucking phone.  Ask how our day was.  Do it.”

“How was your day?”

“You weren’t crying that night.”  He could hear her trying to gather herself.

“How was your day, Mitch?”

He closed his eyes again.  “One of those perfect ones.  We’re in Ouray, Colorado now.  This little town surrounded by huge mountains.  It started snowing around midday as we were driving down from Montrose.  If they don’t plow the roads we may not be able to get out tomorrow.”

“Mitch—”

“We had a snowball fight after dinner, and our motel has these Japanese soaking tubs out back, full of hot mineral water from the springs under the town.  Say you wish you were here.”

“That’s not what I said that night, Mitch.”

“What did you say?”

“I wish I could be there with you, but part of me’s so glad you two have this time together.”

“There aren’t many days like this, are there?”

“No.”

“Now, I just want to hear you breathing over the phone.”

He listened.  He looked at the television, then the boy’s head, then the ice-blue sweater.

Mitchell held the phone to Joel’s mouth.

“Say goodnight to Mom, Alex.”

“Goodnight.”

Mitchell brought the phone to his ear.  “Thank you, Lisa.”

“Mitch, who was that?  What have you—”

He powered off the phone and set it on the bedside table.

When the boy was finally asleep, Mitchell turned off the television.  He pulled the covers over the both of them and scooted forward until he could feel the hard ridge of the boy’s little spine press against his chest.

In the back window, through a crack in the closed blinds, he watched the snow falling through the orange illumination of a streetlamp, and his lips moved in prayer.

The knock finally came a few minutes after 3:00 a.m., and nothing timid about it—the forceful pounding of a fist against the door.

“Mitchell Griggs?”

Mitchell sat up in bed, eyes struggling to adjust in the darkness.

“Mr. Griggs?”

More pounding as his feet touched the carpet.

“Griggs!”

Mitchell made his way across dirty clothes and pizza boxes to the door, which he spoke through.

“Who is it?”

“Dennis James, Ouray County sheriff.  Need to speak with you right now.”

“Little late, isn’t it?”  He tried to make his voice sound light and unperturbed.  “Maybe I could come by your office in the—”

“What part of right now went past you?”

Mitchell glanced up, saw the chain still locked.  “What’s this about?” he asked.

“I think you know.”

“I’m sorry I don’t.”

“Six-year-old boy named Joel McIntosh went missing from the Antlers Motel this evening.  Clerk saw him getting into a burgundy Jetta just like the one you drive.”

“Well, I’m sorry.  He’s not here.”

“Then why don’t you open the door, let me confirm that so you can get back to sleep and we can quit wasting precious minutes trying to find this little boy.”

Mitchell glanced through the peephole, glimpsed the sheriff standing within a foot of the door under one of the globe lights that lit the second-floor walkway, his black parka dusted with snow, his wide-brimmed cowboy hat capped with a half-inch of powder.

Mitchell couldn’t nail down the sheriff’s age in the poor light—late sixties perhaps, seventy at most.  He held the forend stock of a pump-action shotgun in his right hand.

“I’ve got two deputies out back on the hill behind your room if you’re thinking of—”

“I’m not.”

“Just tell me if you have the boy—”

A radio squeaked outside.

The sheriff spoke in low tones, then Mitchell heard the dissipation of footsteps.

A minute limped by before the sheriff’s voice passed faintly through the door again.

“You still there, Mitch?”

“Yeah.”

“If it’s all right with you, I’m gonna sit down.  I been walking all over town since seven o’clock.”

The sheriff lowered out of sight, and through the peephole, Mitchell could only see torrents of snow dumping on the trees and houses and parked cars.

He eased down on the carpet and leaned against the door.

“I was just speaking with your wife.  Lisa’s concerned for you, Mitch.  Knows why you’re here.”

“She doesn’t know any—”

“And so do I.  You may not know this, but I helped pull you and your son out of the car.  Never forget it.  Been what, about a year?”

“To the day.”

Drafts of frigid air swept under the door, Mitchell shivering, wishing he’d brought a blanket with him from the bed.

“Mitch, Lisa’s been trying to call you.  You have your cell with you?”

“It’s turned off, on the bedside table.”

“Would you talk to her for me?”

“I don’t need to talk to her.”

“I think it might not be a bad—”

“I had a meeting the next morning in Durango.  Had brought him along, ‘cause he’d never seen the Rockies.  That storm came in overnight, and you know, I just…I almost waited.  Almost decided to stay the day in Ouray, give the plows a chance to scrape the pass.”

“I got a boy of my own.  He’s grown now, but I remember when he was your Alex’s age, can’t say I’d have survived if something like what happened to your son happened to him.  You got a gun in there, Mitch?”

In the back of Mitchell’s throat welled a sharp, acidic tang, like tasting the connectors of a nine-volt battery, but all he said was, “Yeah.”

“Is the boy all right?”

Mitchell said nothing.

“Look, I know you’re hurting, but Joel McIntosh ain’t done a thing to deserve getting dragged into this.  Boy’s probably terrified.  You thought about that, or can you not see past your own—”

“Of course I’ve thought about it.”

“Then why don’t you send him on out, and you and me can keep talking.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I just…I can’t.”

Mitchell heard footsteps outside the door.  He got up quickly, glanced through the peephole just in time to see the battering ram swing back.

He stumbled toward the bed as the door exploded off its hinges and slammed to the floor, two men standing in the threshold—the sheriff with the shotgun trained on him, a deputy with a flashlight and a handgun.

Mitchell shielded his eyes, specks of snow blowing in, luminescent where they passed through the LED beam, couldn’t see the man behind the light, but the sheriff’s eyes were hard and kind.  He could tell this even though they lived in the shadow of a Stetson.

The sheriff said, “I don’t see the boy, Wade.  Mitchell, let me see those hands.”

Mitchell took a deep, trembling breath.

“Come on, Mitch, let me see your hands.”

Mitchell shook his head.

“Goddamn, son, I won’t tell you—”

Mitchell swung his right arm behind his back, his fingers wrapping around the remote control jammed down his boxer shorts, the room fired into blue by the illumination of the television, the laugh track to Seinfeld blaring, Wade screaming the sheriff’s name as a greater light bloomed beside the lesser.

Sheriff James flicked the light, felt the breath leave him, blinking through the tears.

He leaned the shotgun against the wall and stepped inside the bathroom.

The cheap fiberglass of the tub had been lined with blankets and pillows, and the little boy was sitting up staring at the sheriff, orange earplugs protruding from his ears.

The sheriff knelt down, smiled at the boy, pulled out the earplugs.

“You okay, Joel?”

The boy said, “A noise woke me up.”

“Did he make you sleep in here?”

“Mitchell said if I was a good boy and kept my earplugs in and stayed in here all night, I could see my Daddy in the morning.”

“He did, huh?”

“Where’s my Daddy?”

“Down in the parking lot.  We’ll take you to him, but I need to ask you something first.”  The sheriff sat down on the cracked linoleum tile.  “Did Mitchell hurt you?”

“No.”

“He didn’t touch you anywhere private or make you touch him?”

“No, we just sat on the bed and watched about spiders and stuff.”

“You mean on the TV?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s that?”  The sheriff pointed to the notebook sitting on a pillow under the faucet.

“Mitchell said to give this to the people who came to get me.”

Wade walked into the bathroom, stood behind the sheriff as he lifted the spiral-bound notebook and opened the red cover to a page of handwriting in black ink.

“What is it?” Wade asked.

“It’s to his wife.”

“What’s it say?”

The sheriff closed the notebook.  “I believe that’s some of her business.”  He stood, faced his deputy, snow melting off his Stetson.  “Get this boy wrapped up in some blankets and bring him down to his dad.  I gotta go call Lisa Griggs.”

“Will do.”

“And Wade?”

“Yeah?”

“You throw a blanket over Mr. Griggs before you bring Joel out.  Don’t want so much as a strand of hair visible.  Shield the boy’s eyes if you have to, maybe even turn the lights out when you carry him through the room.”

The deputy shook his head.  “What the hell was wrong with this man?”

“You   got kids yet, Wade?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Well, just a heads up—if you ever do, this is how much they make you love them.”

An introduction to “On the Good, Red Road”

This story takes place in the universe of my third book, ABANDON, and is a companion piece to that novel. It works fine as a standalone, but will be a richer experience for those who have read ABANDON, as this one explores how Oatha Wallace came to the mining town in the autumn of 1893, delving into the doomed journey from Silverton to Abandon, which turned this pacifist into a murderous outlaw.

on the good, red road

October 1893

San Juan Mountains

Southwest Colorado

If Durango was on the road to hell, Silverton had already gotten there and staked a claim—enough whorehouses, dancehalls, and gambling halls to service a city ten times the size.

Oatha settled on one of the less rowdy saloons for his nightcap, pushing through the throng of revelers to get in line behind a man at a barstool nursing three brimming shots, the surface of the whiskies trembling from the vibration of bootstomps on floorboards.  Hands grazed his shoulders and he turned to see a toothless, blond whore in nothing but stockings and a corset grinning at him.

“Bet you could use a trim,” she said.

“Not tonight.”

She went on through the crowd, availing her services, and through the smoky lowlight, Oatha caught shards of his grimy reflection in the constellation of liquor bottles behind the bar.

He’d been waiting ten minutes for the barkeep to notice him, when a voice lifted above the din, “You gotta yell out you wanna drink in this shithole!”

Oatha glanced back, saw a pale, smoothshaven man of thirty or so waving him over, his face half-obscured by dirty, chin-length yellow hair.  At the table sat three men, and the one who’d called out to him motioned to an uncorked bottle of whiskey upon which the trio had already inflicted substantial damage.

“Happy to share.”

Oatha relinquished his place in line and threaded his way through the crowd to the table, where they’d already pushed out the last remaining chair.  Oatha sat, extended his hand across a filthy set of playing cards and a pot of tiny pokes, a few crumpled dollars, a double eagle, and a voucher for fifteen minutes with a whore called Grizzly Sow.

“Oatha Wallace.”

“Nathan Curtice.  This is Marion McClurg and Daniel Smith.”

“Boys.”

McClurg, a larded beast of a man, reached forward and pulled the pot toward his corner of the table while Dan eyed Oatha.

“Play cards?” Nathan asked.

“Not often.”

Nathan poured a whiskey, pushed the glass to Oatha, who took it up and tossed it back with a fleeting grimace.

“Two dollars gets you in on the next hand.”

“Well, I’m trying to save my money—”

“For what?”

“A horse.”

“A horse.”

“I’m traveling on to Abandon.  Got a job with the Godsend Mine.”

“No shit,” Nathan said.  “I’m headed that very direction myself to visit my brother.  He’s sheriff up there.  Maybe you heard of him…Ezekiel Curtice.”

“I haven’t.”

“Yeah, I can’t quite believe what that outlaw’s become myself.”

McClurg shuffled the cards while Dan refilled the tumblers.

“You been to Abandon?” Nathan asked.

“First time.”

“What I heard, even across lots, it’s a twenty mile ride through hard country.”

Oatha felt the cards sliding under his fingers, McClurg already dealing.

“Don’t wanna play.”

“Few hands won’t kill ye,” Nathan said.

Dan muttered, “Man bought you two drinks already.  ‘Less you some boiled shirt, least you can do is play a hand.”  Oatha looked over at Dan, the man thin as a totem, gant up and blanched like he carried some parasite.  Oatha reached into his leather pouch, selected several pieces of hard chink, and tossed the coins into the middle of the table.

Two hours later, Oatha stumbled out of the saloon, and he barely made it into an alley before spewing his supper against the clapboard.

Nathan stood chuckling behind him.  “You can’t play cards for shit.”

“Yeah,” Oatha groaned as he leaned against the wall, bracing for the next round of nausea.  “And I got barely the money for a horse now.”

“Wouldn’t fret.”

Oatha spit.  “Why’s that?”

“Like I said, me and the boys headin to Abandon in two days.  Travel with us, you want.  Dan’s got a mule you can ride.”

“A mule.”

“Mean son of a bitch name a Rusty.”

Oatha straightened, tried to center himself over his feet, the world tilting.  On the second floor of a false-fronted building across the street, a headboard smacked repeatedly into a wall and bedsprings squealed like ravenous pigs.  Against the dark, Nathan was just a silhouette.

“You sure?” Oatha asked.

“Yeah, you don’t wanna be takin that trail to Abandon on your own anyhow.  Wild country out there, bad people in it.”

“I’m obliged,” Oatha said, though he wasn’t.  Last thing he wanted was these men for extended company.

“You get yourself home?” Nathan asked.

“Believe so.”

“I’m gonna go scare up a little snatch.”

Nathan wandered off toward Blair Street, an assured elegance to his drunken gait, and Oatha sat down against the back of the saloon to let his head clear, get his bearings straight for the long stagger back to the hotel.

He woke stiff and cold some hours later, still sitting up against the back of the saloon, his

gray frockcoat glazed with a heavy frost.  The throbbing at the base of his skull was his

pulse, and it quickened as he struggled to his feet in the thin air.

The predawn sky held a deep lavender tint, the surrounding peaks stark black against it, like patches of starless space, and aside from the candleflames in the windows of the cribs, this boom town stood as still and dark as a man might hope to see it.

Oatha bought a lineback canelo from a greaser at the livery, an old saddle, and provisions for two days, including tobacco and a quart of whiskey.  Struck out of Silverton in the late afternoon, even as the sun perched on a jagged ridge of peaks in the west.

At dusk, he was three miles out of town, camped along a drowsy stream downsized to a trickle in these dry weeks of autumn.  Oatha lay smoking on his bedroll, staring up through the spruce at pieces of the night sky, moonless and starblown.  If he rode hard, he’d make Abandon by nightfall.  It all seemed like the start of something for him, a new direction.  He was fifty-one, and maybe it was time he got his life right, started walking that road his friend, Sik’is, had always talked about.

The restlessness of the horse tore him out of the dream, and Oatha sat up before his eyes opened.  It was light out, though still early, maybe an hour past dawn.  He got up, walked over to the mare and rubbed her neck.

In the near distance, a twig snapped, followed by the clink of bits and leather saddles creaking in the cold.  Oatha spotted movement through the trees.  Though he’d star-pitched fifty feet off the trail, he now realized he was still in easy eyeshot of any passersby who happened to glance in his general direction.

He counted three riders moving up the trail and was debating whether to hail them or just let them pass, none the wiser of his presence, when a voice called out, “Got breakfast ready, Oatha?”

Now Nathan was coming toward him through the trees astride an apron-faced gelding.

“Hello there, boys.”  Oatha mustering more enthusiasm than he felt, something unnerving about being in proximity to Nathan Curtice in the middle of nowhere that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Nathan, Dan, and McClurg rode up, and Nathan dismounted, walked over to Oatha, glancing at his bedroll, his horse, as if he’d caught him stepping out.

“Got yourself that new horse,” Nathan said.

Oatha nodded.

“You know you’ve hurt Rusty’s feelings.”

“Who?”

McClurg snorted.

“Oh, the mule.  Came looking for you boys yesterday,” Oatha lied, “see if you wanted to start out a day early.”  The way Nathan stared into his eyes bothered Oatha, like the man was looking through his head, reading the scrawl on the back of his skull.

“You not think we’d make fit traveling companions?” Nathan asked.

“Course not.”

“What then?”

“Just started out early is all.”

Nathan gave a nod, though it didn’t appear to be one of understanding.  He glanced back at Dan, as if to say something, but stopped himself.

“You care to ride on with us?” Nathan asked.

“I’ll probably just catch a few more winks and then—”

“How about you saddle your horse right now, come along with us like you said you was goin to.”

Oatha rode between McClurg and Dan in the early morning cold, the trail winding up a long drainage through a dense stand of spruce.  By midday, a thick cloud deck had darkened the sky, and when the men stopped to lunch at timberline, tiny flakes of snow stood out on the wool of Oatha’s coat.  They were making a leisurely go of it, no chance of reaching Abandon by nightfall at this pace, but Oatha held his tongue, even as they lounged for two hours, smoking and nipping from Nathan’s jar of whiskey, the men fair drunk by the time they finally decamped.

It was cold riding, and Oatha’s glow soon faded.

They climbed out of the trees, the snow blowing sideways over this exposed, open terrain.  The Teats, those twin promontories Oatha had been using as a guide since yesterday, had vanished in the storm.

They camped miserable, cold, and wet just below timberline in a grove of dead spruce, got a sheet of canvas strung up between the trees, a fire going underneath, but even the whiskey jar making the rounds couldn’t lift Oatha’s spirits.  He sat leaning against a spruce, watching the snow pour down and the light recede, thinking he should be in Abandon by now.

“How much you figure they keep on hand?” McClurg asked.

“Few thousand.  Ten if we’re lucky,” Nathan said.

“Enough to make it worth our trouble,” Dan said.

Oatha cut his eyes at the three men, and McClurg noticed, said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

Nathan smiled.  “Nobody told him he felled in with road agents.”

The men laughed.

“What do you do for a livin?” Nathan asked.

Oatha’s mouth had run dry.  “Been prospecting, bar mining, picking up work in the mines where I can—”

“Like honest work, do you?” Dan said.

“I guess.”

“But the question,” McClurg said, “is how you feel about dishonest work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well think on it, get back to us.”

The men laughed again and Nathan swiped the jar from Dan, tilted it back.  McClurg hoisted a log onto the fire, a spray of ashes engulfing Oatha.  He rummaged through his satchel, located the loaf of sourdough he’d bought before leaving Silverton.

“Break me off a hunk a that,” Nathan said, and Oatha tore off a piece.

“Got a round a cheese in here, too.”

“Don’t be stingy.”

They cut cheese onto the bread, set the slices on hot stones in the fire’s vicinity to let it melt.

The storm brought a premature night, and in the firelight, Oatha watched the snow fall without respite.  They played cards until the fire ran out of wood, won the last of Oatha’s money, drank up his quart of whiskey, smoked all of his tobacco.

As the other men snored, Oatha lay awake.  If it hadn’t been snowing so hard, he’d have attempted to sneak out of camp, resaddle his horse, and get the hell away from Nathan and the boys.  He didn’t want to look it in the eye, but the truth of the matter was that he’d backed himself into a bind, and if he didn’t slip away from them tomorrow, he’d probably never reach Abandon.

Oatha’s eyes opened.  As he sat up, his vision sharpened into focus and he saw the gray-white madness of the blizzard, the canvas sheet sagging to the ground at one end, the snow piled up three feet around the boundary of their little shelter.

He held his hands toward the low fire, his head throbbing again, a whiskey hangover that wouldn’t die until noon at the earliest.

Nathan looked at him, shook his head.

“My horse and yours are dead.  We’ve caught a bad piece a luck here.”

They stayed under the canvas all day, taking turns venturing out to gather wood from the abundance of rotted spruce and melting snow in the emptied whiskey jars, a tenuous proposition, the fire and ice resulting in shattered glass in two out of three attempts.

By evening, the snow had quit but the wind raged on through the night, and the sound of limbs cracking kept Oatha from the depths of restful sleep.

The second morning dawned cloudless and bright.  They saddled the two remaining horses and broke camp as the first rays of sunlight struck the Teats, Oatha clinging to

Dan, Nathan to the substantial girth of McClurg.

A quarter mile out from the shelter, Dan’s horse stopped in its tracks and refused to take another step, snow to its belly, nostrils flaring in the thin air.

“I’ll make you go!”

He dismounted, grabbed the bridle strap and fought to drag the horse forward, but it wouldn’t budge, even when Dan drew his Colt and smacked the animal across the bridge of its nose.

“Enough,” Nathan said.  “These animals ain’t built for this.”

“Maybe just one of us should take a horse, try to make Abandon,” Oatha said.

“Who, you?”

“To what end?”

“To get help.  Bring back a sled or a—”

“Snow’s too deep,” Nathan said.  “Hell, it’s just early October.  We’ll get us a warm spell in a couple days.  Good sod-soaker.”

“We’re almost out a provisions,” McClurg said.  “We’re just supposed to wait around?”

“I ain’t in control of the weather, Marion.”

Oatha climbed down from the horse, and Dan screamed at the animal, “Go on!  Get!”

“No, you dumb shit,” Nathan said.  “We need ‘em.”

“For what?”

“Hard to tell just how long we may be stuck out—”

“I ain’t eatin my horse.”

“Circumstances like this ain’t the time to make declarations a what you will and won’t

do.”

It was snowing again by nightfall, and it didn’t stop for three days, the snow accumulating higher than the canvas tarp so that the shelter more resembled a snow cave.

Oatha could tell by the brightness of the tarp that the sun was out.

McClurg snored.

Nathan stared grimly in his direction, said, “He left.”

“Who?”

“Who ain’t here?”

Oatha saw where the wall of snow had been broken through behind him, cobalt sky and fir trees powder-blown and sagging.

“Where are the horses?” Oatha asked.

“Dan took one.  The other’n keeled.”

Oatha’s head was hurting again—dehydration instead of whiskey and the beginnings of real hunger.  He’d eaten the last of his cheese and bread two nights ago.

“We botched it,” Nathan said.  “Should’ve walked out after the first storm.  Wouldn’t of been fun, might’ve froze, but we’d of had a chance.”

“You don’t think we got one now?”

They butchered the calico that had just died, cut warm, blood-colored steaks out of its haunches and grilled them over a low fire.  The smell of the meat cooking and the sounds of what little fat there was burning off gave Oatha a charge of energy, made him realize just how hungry he was.

The meat was stringy and tough, commiserate with the lean muscularity of the horse, but he ate his fill of it and slept for the rest of the day.

“Tell you what,” Nathan said two nights later as they roasted the last of McClurg’s horse.  “God’s been waitin for this, and I know he’s enjoyin ever minute of it.  You just had the misfortune a being with me when he finally caught up to my ass.”

“Wonder if Dan’s made it to Abandon or Silverton,” McClurg said.

“I hope he’s froze.  Don’t mention his name again.”

“He might come back and save us.”

“That happens, I’ll reevaluate my feelings toward the man.”

“So tell me,” Oatha said, “you boys weren’t going to Abandon for the mining opportunities, were you?”

Nathan glanced at McClurg, let slip a little smirk.  “Let me put it this way.  This horrible weather saved your life.”

“I don’t get your meaning.”

“Sure you do.  You was gonna try and take your leave of us your first chance.  If I’m wrong, you can have my portion a Barney the horse.”

“You was gonna kill me?”

“Dan would of done the honors, him bein our resident cutthroat.”

Nathan grabbed hold of the hoof, turned over the horse’s leg.

“Why?” Oatha asked.

“For whatever money you had.  For your horse.  Because the first night I saw you diddling around in that Silverton saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-eatin pelados, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take you apart.”

Oatha’s heart pounded under his coat, his windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever been in his life.

“But you had a change a heart?” he asked.

“Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a luck, we’re in it together now.”  Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife.  “Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”

Two days hence, their eleventh in the shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the task of cutting cookable portions out of the horses that had frozen straight through.  He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day wandering through snow deeper than he was tall, McClurg and Oatha waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their reentry into civilization.

Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and shivering uncontrollably.

Growled, “Not even a fire to come home to?”

“I’ll make one,” Oatha said.

“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”

The weakness and hunger made negotiating the snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded and cold.

He spent two hours fighting his way downhill under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the trees.

At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow instead.

The afternoon was almost warm, especially sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill.  Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already flushed with alpenglow.

In the dusky silence, he thought about what Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of some deep virus in the fabric of his character.

Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.

Damn if he hadn’t been right about something.

Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long dead on a Virginia hillside.

After a night of fever dreams, Oatha found himself stumbling down the well-worn hunting trail, the morning bright, the snow soft.  Sat hours in the glade, the shotgun across his lap, pulling out clumps of hair, eating snow to quench his thirst, though the ice only chilled him down and intensified the agony behind his eyes.

There passed periods of sleep, stretches of consciousness, bouts of bloody diarrhea, and he kept hearing birds fly overhead, wings beating at the air, but every time he looked up, the sky stood empty.

The next day, no one left the shelter, the men sitting around the cold fire-ring, faces grim and squandered of color.

“We’re dyin, boys,” Nathan said.

Oatha sat leaning against the spruce, staring at McClurg, whose brow had furrowed up in wonderment.

“Ya’ll hear that?”

“What?” Nathan said.

“Dan’s come back.”

Oatha cocked his head.  “I don’t hear nothing.”

“He’s callin out for me.”

“You’re hallucinatin, Marion,” Nathan said.  “Ain’t a soul out here but us.  Wasn’t gonna say nothin, but Dan’s a ways down this mountainside, settin against a tree, froze.  Saw him two days ago, figured it wouldn’t do much for morale to mention it, but there you go.”

“That’s sad,” Marion said.

“No, I’ll tell you sad, the fuckin tragedy of the situation.  Snow’s meltin so fast now, we could us probably walk into Abandon in a day or two if we wasn’t so weak.”

“Reckon it’s settled that much?” Oatha asked.

“Wouldn’t be the worst post-holin I ever done.”

Oatha lay there considering it, decided Nathan was right at least about the one thing—he barely had the strength to stand, much less walk the remaining ten or however many miles it was into Abandon.  And for the first time, lying there with the sun beating down on the dirty canvas that had served as the roof over his head for fifteen days, the prospect of dying didn’t seem so bad.

Twelve hours later, dying had advanced from a pleasant thought to an all-consuming desire, Oatha wondering how much pain a human body could stand, if he could hope to drift away the next time he went to sleep, or if he had days of this torture ahead of him—the slow wasting of his body, the slow fracturing of his mind.

When his eyes opened, Nathan was standing over him, and the day had dawned, feeble light filtering through the opaque membrane of the canvas.

“I’m goin out there,” Nathan said, his voice straining to produce a whisper, “and by God if I don’t come back with food I’m gonna enlist one a you to put my ass out a this unending misery.”

McClurg lay facing him, his obese jowls swollen to the brink of splitting, fluid pooling under the skin.  His eyes were open and glazed, and Oatha thought the man had died until he saw them manage a lethargic blink.

“You awake, Marion?” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Ask you something…you believe in God?”

“Don’t reckon.  You?”

“Sometimes.”

“How you figure you’ll come out if in fact he’s runnin this show?”

“Don’t know.  Ain’t been particularly good or bad.  Just sort a plodded my way along.  I was friends with a Navajo when I worked the Copper Queen in Bisbee.  Man named Sik’is.  He was always talking about walking on the good, red road.”

“Ain’t heard of it.  Where’s it at?”

“Ain’t a place so much as a state a mind, you know?  Way a living.  Balance and harmony—”

“This some spiritual bullshit?”

“It’s like walking the path where you’re the best version of yourself.  I don’t know.  Always sounded nice to me.  Thought one a these days, I’d seek this road out.  Start living right, you know?”

“Wouldn’t put much stock in the philosophy of a injun.  You never kilt a man, have you, Oatha?”

“Me and my brothers fought against the Federals at Malvern Hill, so yeah, I done my share.”

“I kilt five, two in fair fights.  Three was plain murder in cold blood, and you know, I been settin here thinkin on ‘em, especially one I met on a two-track outside a Miles City.  Young man.  We rode together for a spell, shared a bottle, and I knowed he was headed home to his wife and three younguns ‘cause he told me, and still when we stopped at a crik to let our horses blow and he bent down for a drink a water, I cracked open the back of his skull with a rock and held him under ‘till he quit kickin.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause he told me he had a pouch full a seventy dollars he’d made workin in a Idaho mine.”

“You ashamed of it?”

Marion seemed to reflect on the question, then he licked his dry, cracking lips and said, “I reckon.  But it’s a rough old world out there, filled with meaner hombres than the one you’re starin at.  Figure it was that young man’s time, and if it hadn’t been me, it’d a been—”

A shotgun blast exploded in the forest, trailed by a shout of unabashed joy.

Marion struggled up off the ground.  “Son of a bitch hit somethin.”

Oatha felt the excitement bloom in his gut, Marion already on his feet, lumbering out of the shelter.

Nathan hollering, “Boys, come look at this!  Shot us a elk!”

It required immense effort for Oatha to sit up, and he had to employ a spruce branch to leverage himself out of the dirt onto his feet.

Marion yelling, “I could kiss you, Nathan, tongue and all!”

Oatha limped out of the shelter as fast as he could manage into sunlight that passed blindingly sharp through the dead trees, Marion twenty yards away, moving with considerable speed though the spruce, Oatha following as fast as he could, shoots of pain riding up his legs, the muscle atrophied, already wearing away.

There was Nathan in the distance, standing with the shotgun beside a scrawny aspen, its bark chewed up, near cut in two by buckshot, Oatha scanning the woods for the fallen elk as Nathan raised his shotgun.

Marion’s head disappeared in a red mist and the rest of his body collided into a tree and pitched back as Oatha ducked behind a spruce, the trunk too small to shield him from a spray of buckshot, figuring if it came, he’d catch a pellet or two at the least.

“The hell you doin, Nathan?”

“Livin, brother.  Livin.”

“You mean to kill me, too?”

“I mean for us to eat this fat son of a bitch, get back to civilization.”

Oatha peered through the branches, saw that Nathan was still standing above Marion’s headless frame, the breech of the shotgun broken over his forearm.

“Why you reloadin then?” Oatha shouted.  He didn’t own a gun anymore, hadn’t in three decades, but Marion’s was sitting next to the snowbank inside the shelter—a Navy—and he had to bet it was loaded.

“‘Cause I don’t know if you the type a man to go along with somethin like this.”

Nathan was fishing in the pocket of his oilskin slicker, pulled out a pair of shells, Oatha thinking if there was ever a time to make a break for it, this was it.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Nathan said.  “I kilt him out a pure necessity.  Was you the fat fuck, I’d a cut your throat long ago.”

“There ain’t no level a hunger make me eat the flesh of another man.”

“I understand,” Nathan said, sliding shells into the chambers, snapping closed the breech.

Oatha started back for the shelter, his boots sinking two feet in the slushy snow with every step.

He heard the report before he registered the blood running down his back, colder than iron as it flowed under his waistband, a rush of pure animal panic flooding through him.

By the time he reached the shelter, Oatha’s shoulder was aflame and he could barely move his arm to break through the wall of snow, though with the adrenalized bolster of sudden strength, the accompanying pain was a slight distraction.

He fell through under the canvas as the crunch of Nathan’s footfalls approached, scrabbling through the dirt and snow for Marion’s revolver.

The Colt lay under a threadbare Navajo blanket, and as Oatha got his hands around the steel, he realized the vulnerability of his position, urging himself to settle down even as his hands trembled.

Nathan’s footsteps had gone silent.

Oatha sat in the dirt floor, straining to listen, no sound but the trees creaking in the wind, his pulse vibrating his ear drums.

“They’s still time,” Nathan said.  He was close, his voice passing muffled through the snowbank, Oatha unable to pinpoint his exact location.

“For what?” Oatha asked.

“You to come to your senses, see there ain’t no way out a this pinch except you help yourself to a little Marion.  You wanna live, don’t you?”

“Not to the detriment a my conscience.”

“Tell you what…the one time in your pathetic life you decide not to be a coward, and it’s gonna get you dead.”

“I ain’t always been like this, Nathan.  War does things to a man.  Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some the other way entire.”

“Guess we know which way you went, tramping through country like this without so much as a revolver.”

Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him, a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know about any of it?”

“I know I like the edge I ain’t heard ‘till now in your voice.”

Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.

“What now?” Nathan asked.  “Wanna call ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”

“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”

Through the wall of snow Oatha had broken through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into a snowbank.

Nathan called out, “Anytime you wanna do the same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”

“Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.

The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump sizzled, marbled with fat, Oatha thinking the odor couldn’t even be called unpleasant.  His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached Abandon.

“I’ve smelt this before,” he said.  “Or somethin like it.”

“You’ve et man?”

“No, in a San Francisco nosebag.”  He thought on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal.  Smells like veal.”

“Don’t it feel peculiar settin here about to—”

“If I weren’t starvin to death, maybe.  But I think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical conversation about what we’re about to do.”

They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.

Nathan flipped the ribcage.  “I believe this is ready.”

The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of knotty aspen, weak kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, three tables, presently unoccupied, and a broken-down piano.

Jocelyn Maddox stood wiping down the bar when the door opened.

“You’ve made it by the skin a your teeth,” she called out.  “Thirty seconds later, it’d a been locked.”

The man paused in the doorway, as if to appraise the vacant saloon.

“Not for nothin, but it’s twenty degrees out there, and the fire’s low.”  The barkeep motioned to the potbellied stove sitting in the corner, putting out just a modicum of heat at this closing hour.

The late customer made his way in, Jocelyn noticing that he walked like a man who’d crossed a desert on foot, limping toward her, and even though his hat was slanted at an angle to shield his face, she knew right away he was a newcomer.

As he reached the bar, half-tumbling into it, she saw that his face was deeply sunburnt, the tips of his ears and nose blackened with frostbite.

“You could use a cowboy cocktail,” she said.

The man leaned his hammer shotgun against the bar and reached into his frockcoat, pulled out two leather pouches, then another, and another, lining them up along the pine bar.

“One a these has money in it,” he said at barely a whisper, the pretty barkeep already uncorking a whiskey bottle, setting up his first shot.

“The hell happened to you?” she asked.

The man removed his slouch hat and set it on the barstool next to him.  He lifted the whiskey, drank, said, “How much for the bottle?”

The barkeep leaned forward, her big black eyes shining in the firelight.

“Yours, free a charge, you tell me what you been through.”

He hesitated, then said, “Rode out from Silverton three weeks ago.  Got waylaid by an early snowstorm.  I been walkin three days to get here.”

“Was you alone?”

He shook his head, poured another shot of whiskey.

“Where’s the rest a your party?  Where’s the men these wallets belong to?”

“They didn’t make it.”

“But you did.”

“Maybe I should just pay you for the bottle, ‘cause this line a questioning is gettin pretty old.”

“You ain’t gotta worry.  I’m on the scout myself, and this ain’t the worst town for layin low.”

“That right.”

“For a fact.  So, how’d you make it when your friends didn’t.”

“I et ‘em.”

Jocelyn threw back her head and laughed as hard as she could remember since arriving in this dying town, a fugitive in her own right, the man wondering if she was laughing because she thought he’d made a joke, or because she was crazy, and on the fence as to which reason he might prefer.

He drank the whiskey, poured himself another shot, said, “Care to hoist a glass with me?”

Jocelyn set up a tumbler for herself, and they raised their glasses, the man feeling better already.  Maybe it was the hunger and the thirst, exhaustion bordering on madness, but he felt a surge of something, and though he couldn’t name it outright, having never known it, he suspected it was peace, the embracing of a thing he’d had his back to going on thirty years.

He said, “To you—what’s your name?”

“Joss.”

“To you, Joss.”

And he made a quiet toast to himself also, to finding his good, red road, to Dan and to Marion, and to Nathan of a now crushed skull, having brained the man in his sleep with a still-warm stone from the fire-ring upon which they’d roasted Marion.

He wondered what Sik’is would’ve thought of this new thoroughfare he’d found for himself, then realized he no longer cared.

As he swallowed his whiskey, the glow spreading through his stomach, to the tips of his filthy fingers, dulling the pain in his shoulder, he was overcome by a joy that sheeted his cloudy irises with tears.  He felt thankful for every painful second of those twenty-one days in the wilderness, for the starvation and the thirst.  He regretted nothing.  If he’d never met Nathan and the boys, he’d have rolled into Abandon right on schedule, that weak, miserable fuck of a man he’d been for thirty long years since he’d watched his brothers die on Malvern Hill.

“You all right?” Jocelyn asked.

Oatha reached for the whiskey bottle.

“Strange to say, but I believe I just woke up.”

An introduction to “Shining Rock”

When I was a boy, I did a lot of backpacking with my parents and younger brother, and one of our favorite places to go was Shining Rock Wilderness in the North Carolina Mountains. One summer evening as we were setting up camp in a remote area of the wilderness called Beech Spring Gap, a gentleman came over to our camp and introduced himself. He was a burly fellow in his fifties wearing blue shorts and a vest brimming with camping accessories and various patches. He also had a machete lashed to his back and mentioned in the course of small-talk that he’d fought in Vietnam. The interaction was unsettling and more than a little awkward. I was twelve at the time but found out years later from my father that he’d been terrified, so much in fact that he and my mom had whispered in their tent late that night, debating leaving because they were afraid this man was going to come back and murder all of us while we slept. Obviously, that didn’t happen. My family struck up a friendship with the man (who turned out to be a gentle soul) and we accompanied him on future backpacking trips. But the strangeness of that initial encounter and the fear my parents must have felt never left me, and the experience inspired a short story called “Shining Rock.”

shining rock

They’d been coming to the southern Appalachians for more than a decade, and always in that first week of August, eager to escape the Midwestern midsummer heat.  Last year, it had been the entire family—Roger, Sue, Jennifer, and Michelle—but the twins were sophomores at a college in Iowa now, immersed in boyfriends, the prospect of grad school, summer internships, slowly drifting out of their parents’ gravitational field into orbits of their own making.  So for the first time, it was just Roger and Sue and a Range Rover filled with backpacking gear, heading south through Indiana, Kentucky, the northeast wedge of Tennessee, and finally up into the highlands of North Carolina.

They spent the night in Asheville at the Grove Park Inn, had dinner at the hotel’s Sunset Terrace, watching the lights of the downtown fade up through the humid dark.

At first light, they took the Blue Ridge Parkway south into the Pisgah Ranger District, the road winding through primeval forests, green valleys, past rock faces slicked with water that shimmered in early sun.  Their ears popped as the road climbed and neither spoke of how empty the car felt.

By late morning, they were pack-laden, sunscreen-slathered, and cursing as they hiked up into Shining Rock Wilderness on a bitch of a path called the Old Butt Trail.  Roger let Sue lead, enjoying the view of her muscled thighs and calves already pinked with high-altitude sun, glistening with perspiration.  He kept imagining footsteps behind him, glancing back every mile or so, half-expecting to see Jennifer and Michelle bringing up the rear.

They crested Chestnut Ridge in the early afternoon, saw that the sky looked cancerous in the west, a bank of tumor-black clouds rolling toward them, the air reeking of that attic mustiness that heralds the approach of rain.  They broke out the raingear.  The pack flies.  Huddled together in a grove of rhododendron as the storm swept over them, thunder cracking so loud and close that it shook the ground beneath their boots.

They reached Shangri-La a few hours shy of dusk.  Sue had named it on their first trip here, thirteen years ago, having taken the wrong trail and accidentally stumbled upon this highland paradise.  The maps called it Beech Spring Gap, a stretch of grassy meadows at 5,500 feet, just below the micaceous outcroppings of Shining Rock Mountain.  Even the hottest summer afternoons rarely saw temperatures exceed eighty degrees.  The nights were always cool and often clear, with the lights of Asheville twinkling forty miles to the north.  Best of all, Beech Spring Gap was largely untraveled.  They’d spent a week here four years ago and never seen a soul.

By 8:30, they were in their sleeping bags, listening to a gentle rain pattering on the tent.

‘Night girls, Roger thought.  It would be easy to fall asleep tonight.  Too easy.  He used to stay up listening to the twins talking and laughing.  Their tent would have been twenty yards away in a glade of its own, and he’d have given anything to hear their voices in the dark.

The next two days transpired like mirrors of each other.

Warm, bright mornings.  Storms in the afternoon.  Cool, clear evenings.

Roger and Sue passed the time lying in the grass, reading books, watching clouds, flying a kite off the nearby peak.

The emptiness seemed to abate, and they even laughed some.

Their fourth day in Shining Rock, as the evening cooled and the light began to wane, Roger suggested to his wife that she take a walk through the meadow with a book, find a spot to read for a half hour or so before the light went bad.

“Why do you want me out of camp all the sudden?” she asked.  “You up to something?”

When Sue returned forty minutes later, a red-and-white checkered picnic blanket lay spread out in the grass a little ways from their tent.  Roger was opening a bottle of wine, and upon two dinner plates rested a bed of steaming pasta.  There was a baguette, a block of gruyere, even two of their crystal wineglasses from home and a pair of brass candlesticks, flames motionless in the evening calm.

“You brought all this from home?” she asked.  “That’s why your pack was so heavy.”

“I’m just glad the crystal didn’t break when I fell climbing up the Old Butt.”

Roger stood, offered his arm, helped Sue down onto the picnic blanket.

“A little wine?”

“God, yes.  Honey, this is amazing.”

He didn’t know if it was the elevation or the novelty of eating food that hadn’t been freeze-dried, but the noodles and tomato sauce and bread and cheese tasted better than anything Roger had eaten in years.  It didn’t take long for the wine to set in behind his eyes, and he looked down at the mountains through a haze of intoxication, watching the light sour, bronzing the woods a thousand feet below.  First time in a long while that things had felt right, and Sue must have sensed it, because she said, “You look peaceful, Roge.”

It was so quiet he could hear the purr of the river flowing down in the gorge.

Sue set her plate aside and scooted over on the blanket.

“Is it the girls?” she asked.  “That what’s been bothering you?”

He reached his arm around her, pulled her in close.

“Let’s just think about right now,” he said.  “In this moment, I’m happy and—”

“Evening folks.”

Roger unhanded his wife and rolled over on the picnic blanket to see who was there.

A stocky man with wavy, gray hair and a white-stubbled chin smiled down at them through reflective sunglasses.  He wore well-scuffed hiking boots, tight blue shorts, and a frayed gray vest, bulging with an assortment of supplies.  His chest hair was white, skin freckled and deeply tanned.  Roger estimated him to be ten years their senior.

“Hope I’m not interrupting.  I’m camped up in the rhododendron thicket and was just on a stroll through the meadow when I saw your tent.  Wow, crystal wineglasses.  You guys went all out.”

“We just finished eating,” Sue said, “but there are leftovers if—”

“Oh, I’ve got my dinner simmering back at camp, but maybe you two would be interested in a card game later?”

“Sounds lovely,” Sue said.

“Then I’ll come back in two hours.  I’m Donald, by the way.”

“Sue.”

“I’m Roger.”

“Good to meet you both.”

Roger watched Donald march off across the meadow toward the rhododendron thicket at the base of Shining Rock Mountain, didn’t realize he was scowling until his wife said, “Oh come on, Roge, you antisocial party-poop.  It’ll be fun.”

No campfires are permitted within the boundary of Shining Rock Wilderness, but the moon would be up soon.  Roger and Sue relit the candles for ambience and sat on the picnic blanket, waiting on their guest, watching for the flare of meteors in the southern sky.

Roger never heard his footsteps.  Donald was suddenly just standing there at the edge of the red-and-white checkered blanket, grinning.

“Lovely night,” he said.

“We were just sitting here, looking for shooting stars,” Sue said.

“May I?”

“Please.”

Donald set some items in the grass and knelt to unlace his boots, stepping at last in wooly sockfeet onto the blanket, easing down across from Roger and Sue.

“I brought playing cards, an UNO deck, whatever your pleasure, and some not too shabby scotch.”

“Now we’re talking,” Roger said as Donald handed him the bottle.  “Ooh…twenty-one year Macallan?”

“Roge and I have become scotch aficionados since a trip to Scotland last year.”

Donald said, “Nothing like a good single malt in the backcountry on a quiet night.”

Roger uncorked the Macallan, offered the bottle to Sue.

“I’ll drink to that.”  She brought it to her lips, let a small mouthful slide down her throat.  “Oh my God.  Tastes more like a fifty-year.”

“Everything tastes better on the mountain,” Donald said.

Sue passed the bottle to her husband.  “So how many nights have you been up here?”

“My second.”

“You’ve been here before?”

Roger wiped his mouth.  “Goddamn that’s smooth.”

“Actually, this is my first trip to Shining Rock.”  Donald took the scotch from Roger and after a long, deliberate swallow, looked at the bottle a moment before passing it back to Sue.  “I usually do my camping up in northern Minnesota, but figured these southern highlands would be worth the drive.”

“Where’s home?” Roger asked.

“St. Paul.”

Roger and Sue glanced at each other, smiled.

“What?  No, don’t tell me the pair of you are Minnesotans.”  He drew out the “o” in stereotypical Midwestern fashion, and they all laughed.

“Eden Prairie as a matter of fact,” Sue said.

“You could make a strong case for us being neighbors,” Donald said and he looked at Roger.  “What are the chances?”

Midway through his second hand of UNO, Roger realized he’d gotten himself drunk—not a sick, topsy-turvy binge, but a tired, pleasant glow.  He hadn’t meant to, but the scotch was so smooth.  Even Sue had let it get away from her.  She was laughing louder and with greater frequency, and she kept grabbing his arm and pretending to steal glances at the twenty-plus cards in his hand.

Sue finally threw down her last card and fell over laughing on the blanket.

“Two in a row,” Donald said.  “Impressive.”

He pulled out the cork and took a slow pull of scotch, then offered the bottle to Roger.

“Oh Don, I think I’m done for the night.”

“Come on.”

“No, I’m good.”

“One more.  Bad luck to skip a nightcap.”

Roger felt the twinge of something in his gut he thought forty-eight-year-old men were impervious to.  He took the bottle and drank and passed it back to Donald.

Sue sat up.  “Say, I meant to ask why you had a machete lashed to your back?”

Donald smiled.  “Sometimes I like to get off-trail, do a little bushwhacking.  I did a few tours in Vietnam, and let me tell you, that was the only way to travel upcountry.”

“What branch of the military?” Roger asked.

“Green berets.”

“Wow.  Saw some shit, huh?”

“You could definitely say that.”

Donald suddenly tilted to one side and squelched out a noisy fart, then chuckled, “Damn mountain frogs.”

Roger thinking, Well he’s definitely a little drunk.

Donald corked the scotch, said, “You have children?”

“Twin girls,” Sue said.

“No kidding.  How old?”

“They’ll turn twenty next month.  They’re in college at Iowa.  Michelle wants to be a writer.  Jennifer, more practical of the two, is pre-law.”

“How nice.”

“Yeah, this trip has been a sea change for Roger and me.  Our family’s been coming to Shining Rock, God, forever, but this is the first time it’s just the two of us.”

“Empty nesters.”

“How about you, Don?  Any kids?”

Donald bit down softly on his bottom lip and looked away from Roger and Sue at the moon edging up behind the black mass of Cold Mountain.

“I didn’t pick twenty-one-year-old scotch to share with you two on a whim.  This whiskey,” he swirled what liquid remained in the bottle, “was put into an oak barrel to begin aging the year my little girl was born.”

He pulled out the cork, tilted up the bottle.

Sue said, “Is she in school somewhere or—”

“No, she’s dead.”

Sue gasped, and through the gale in his head, Roger sensed something attempting to piece itself together.

“I’m so sorry,” Sue said.

“Yeah.”  Donald nodding.

“What happened, if it’s not too—”

“She’ll have been gone six years this coming fall.”

“She was sixteen when…”

“Yeah.”

Roger reached for the scotch and Donald let him take it.

The bottom edge of the moon had cleared the summit ridge of Cold Mountain, and somewhere in the meadows of Beech Spring Gap, a bird chirped.

“Was it a car wreck?” Sue asked.

“Tab was a cross-country runner in high school.  Captain of her team when she was only a sophomore.  Very devoted, disciplined runner.  It was just a thing of beauty to watch her run.  She made the state championship her freshman year.”

Roger noticed Donald’s hands trembling.

His were, too.

“Morning of October third, I was on my way to work when I came to a roadblock about a mile from our house.  There were police cars, a fire truck, ambulances.  I’d heard the sirens while I was getting dressed but didn’t think anything of it.

“I was swearing up a storm ‘cause I was late for a meeting and getting ready to do a u-turn, find an alternate route, when one of the EMTs stepped out of the way.  Even from fifty yards back, I recognized Tabitha’s blue shorts, orange running shoes, her legs.

“Next thing I remember was throwing up on the side of the road.  They say I broke through the barrier, that it took two firemen and four cops to drag me away from her body.  I don’t remember seeing her broken skull.  Or the blood.  Just her legs, orange shoes, and blue running shorts, from fifty yards back in my car.”

Sue leaned across the blanket and draped her arms around Donald’s neck.

Roger heard her whisper, “I’m so sorry,” but Donald didn’t return the embrace, just stared at him instead.

Sue pulled back, said, “Someone had hit her.”

“Yeah.  But whoever did was gone by the time the police arrived.”

“No.”

“This occurred in a residential area, and in one of the nearby houses, someone had happened to look out a window, see a man standing in the street over my daughter.  But he was gone when the police showed up.”

“A hit-and-run.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my God.  What about your wife?  What—”

“We separated four years ago.”

Roger couldn’t look at him, turned instead to the summer moon, nearly full, and as large and white as he would ever see it, the Ocean of Storms clearly visible as a gray blemish two hundred thousand miles away.

Donald said, “Sometimes, I can talk about it without ripping the stitches, but not tonight, I guess.  I better go.”  He got to his feet, leaving the scotch and cards on the blanket, and walked off into the dark.

They were lying in their sleeping bags in the tent when Roger leaned over and whispered in Sue’s ear, “We have to leave right now.”

“I was almost asleep, Roge, what are you—”

“Just listen.”  The whites of her eyes appeared in the dark.  “I want you to quietly get dressed, put your boots on.  We’ll leave everything here, just take our wallets and keys.”

“Why?”

“Donald’s planning to kill us tonight.”

Sue sat up in her sleeping bag and pushed her brown hair out of her face.  “This isn’t funny, Roger.  Not even a little—”

“Do I sound like I’m joking?”

“Why are you saying this?  ‘Cause he walks around with a machete and was in Vietnam and…”  Sue covered her mouth.  “Oh, Roger, no.  Oh God, please tell me…”  Sue turned away from him and buried her face in her sleeping bag.

Roger lay beside her, whispering in her ear.

“I was late for a meeting downtown.  I turned a corner on Oak Street and the coffee spilled between my legs, burned me.  I swerved, and when I looked up…

“At first, I just sat stunned behind the wheel, like I could will the moment away, press undo on the keyboard.  I got out and saw her on the pavement, half under the front bumper.  I looked around.  No other cars coming.  No one else in the vicinity.  Just a quiet Thursday morning, the trees turning, wet red leaves on the street.  I thought about you, about Jennifer and Michelle, all the things that could be taken from me ‘cause of one stupid fucking lapse in concentration, and the next thing I knew I was on I-94.”

Sue was crying.  “That’s why you sold the Lexus.  Why you moved us to Eden Prairie.  How’d you keep this from me, Roger?  How did you—”

“Live with myself?  I don’t know.  I still don’t know.”

“Are you sure it’s him?  That Donald’s the father of the girl you hit?”

“This thing happened in early October.  Almost six years ago.  In St. Paul.”

“But what if it’s just a horrible coin—”

“I still dream about the orange shoes and blue shorts, Sue.”

“Oh God, baby.”  She turned over and pulled her husband down onto her chest, ran her fingernails across the back of his neck.  “What do you think he’s gonna try to do to us?”

“I don’t know, but he didn’t come all this way, follow us up into the middle of nowhere just to talk.”

“So we just leave?  Right now?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get us back to the trailhead in the dark?”

“I think so.  If not, we’ll just hide somewhere until morning.  What’s important is getting out of this tent and away from our camp as soon as possible.”

“But he must know where we live, Roger.”  Sue sat up, faced her husband.  “He was able to find out we were coming to North Carolina.  What keeps him from doing this when we get back to Minnesota?  Or from turning you in?”

“I don’t think this is about bringing me to justice in any legal sense of the word.”

“We can’t just run away, Roger.”

“Sure we can.  And we will.”

“He might know where our girls live.  Might decide to go after them.  We have no idea what he’s capable of.”

“So what are we supposed—”

“You wanna be free of this?”

“Of course.”

“Have it never come back to haunt you as long as you live?  Guarantee the safety of me and the girls?  Your own freedom?”

For a moment, there was no sound but the weeds brushing against the exterior of the tent.

“Jesus, Sue.  I don’t have that in me.”

“Well, you had it in you to leave a teenage girl dying in the street.  Now if that man came into this wilderness to murder us, he probably went out of his way to make sure no one knew he was coming here, which works out perfectly for us.”

He heard his wife moving in the darkness, the separating teeth of a zipper.

The leather case dropped in his lap.

“You have to take the bullets out,” she whispered.  “Wipe them down so they don’t have our prints.  You probably won’t be able to find the shell casings in the dark.”

“Sue, I can’t.”

“You’re gonna make me handle this?  Look, it breaks my heart that that man lost his daughter, and it makes me sick that it’s your fault, but I will not live the rest of my life in fear, looking over my shoulder, calling Jennifer and Michelle five times a day to make sure they’re okay.  That morning, when you drove away, you decided you weren’t gonna let a mistake you made destroy our lives.  Well, it’s too late to change course now.”

“I am telling you I can’t—”

“You don’t have a choice.  This night’s been coming ever since that October morning.  You started this six years ago.  Now go finish it.”

He left Sue lying in the tall grass several hundred feet down the mountainside and headed back up toward the meadows of Beech Spring Gap carrying a flashlight he didn’t need under the blazing wattage of the moon.

He reached the gap, moved past their tent and along the trail that led to Shining Rock Mountain, the base of which stood cloaked in thickets of rhododendron that bloomed pink in the month of June.

On a walk that morning, a thousand years ago, he’d noticed a piece of red tucked back among the glossy green leaves, wondered now if that had been Donald’s tent, and how he would find the man’s camp in the middle of the night.

He walked off the trail and crouched down in the grass.  Five yards ahead lay the edge of the rhododendron thicket.  Roger thought he recalled that piece of red a hundred feet or so up the gentle slope, though he couldn’t be sure.

For a while, he lay on the ground, just listening.

The grass swayed, blades banging dryly against one another.

Rhododendron leaves scraped together.

Something scampered through the thicket.

This was his thirteenth summer coming to Shining Rock, and he found that most of their time here had vanished completely from memory—more impression than detail.  But a few of their trips remained clear, intact.

The first time they’d come and accidentally discovered this place, the twins were only six years old, and Michelle had lost her front teeth to this gap while she and Jennifer wrestled and rolled in a meadow one sunny afternoon, cried her heart out, afraid the tooth fairy wouldn’t pay for lost teeth.

There had been the trip seven years ago where he and Sue had to fake happy faces for the girls, crying at night in their tent, while fifteen hundred miles away, in a laboratory in Minneapolis, a biopsy cut from the underside of Sue’s left breast was screened for a cancer that wasn’t there.

Three years back, he’d been anxiously awaiting news on an advertising campaign he’d pitched, which if chosen, might have netted him half a million dollars, remembered trying not to dwell on the phone call he’d make once they left these mountains, knowing if he got a yes, what that would mean for his family.  He’d pulled over once they reentered cell phone coverage at an overlook outside of Asheville.  Walked back toward the car a moment later, eyes locked with Sue’s, shaking his head.

But looking at the time they’d spent here as a whole, forest instead of tree, it felt a lot like his life—so many good times, some pain, and it had all raced by faster than he could’ve imagined.

Roger crawled to the thicket’s edge and started up the hill, the flashlight and the Glock shoved down the back of his fleece pants.

After five minutes, he stopped to catch his breath.

He thought he’d been making a horrible racket, dead leaves crunching under his elbows as he wriggled himself under the low branches of the rhododendron shrubs.  But he assured himself it wasn’t as much noise as he thought.  To anyone else, to Donald, it probably sounded like nothing more than the after-hour scavenging of a raccoon.

Roger was breathing normally again and had rolled over on his stomach to continue crawling when he spotted the outline of a tent twenty yards uphill.  The moon shone upon the rain fly, and in the lunar light, he could only tell that it was dark in color.

He pulled the gun out of his waistband.

His chest felt tight, and he had to take several deep breaths to make the lightheadedness dissolve.

Then he was crawling again, though much slower now, taking care to avoid patches of dead leaves and low-clearance branches that might drag across his jacket.

The tent stood just ahead, a one-man A-frame.  He was still hidden in shadow, but another few feet and he’d emerge from the cover of darkness, into the moonlit glade.

Roger lay beside the tent and held his breath, listening for deep breathing indicative of Donald sleeping, if in fact this was even the man’s tent.  He didn’t know how long he lay there.  Two minutes.  A quarter of an hour.  Whichever the case, it felt like ages elapsed, and he still hadn’t heard a sound from inside.

Maybe Donald wasn’t in there.  Maybe he’d already found a spot to hide and watch their tent.  Maybe he was a silent sleeper.  Maybe he’d heard Roger crawling toward him through the rhododendron and was sitting up right—

“That you out there, Roger?”

Roger jumped up and scrambled back toward the thicket.

He stopped at the edge of the glade, his gun trained on the tent, trembling in his hand.

“Would you tell me something?” Donald asked.  “Was she alive right after you hit her?  She was dead when the paramedics arrived.”

Roger had to wet the roof of his mouth with his tongue so he could speak.

“She was gone instantly,” he lied.

“You didn’t tell your wife, did you?”

“No.”

“She seemed surprised.  Does she know you came over here?  Did you discuss it with her after I left?  Tell her what you’d done?”

“What were you going to do to us?”

“Not a thing.”

“I don’t believe that.  How’d you find me?”

“When the police gave up, I spent thousands of dollars on a PI who located and investigated everyone who owned a silver Lexus in the St. Paul area.  I’ve had conversations like I had with you and Sue tonight with a half dozen other people I suspected, feeling them out, gauging their reactions.”

“You didn’t know for sure it was me?”

“Not until this moment, Roger.  Not until you crept up to my tent at one in the morning with what I imagine is that Glock, registered to Sue.  That pretty much convinces me.”

“Do you have a gun in there?”

“No.”

Roger glanced over his shoulder into the thicket, then back toward the tent.  There was a part of him dying to just slink away.

“What do you want, Donald?”

“I already got it.”

“What?”  Roger could hear Donald moving around in the tent.

“The truth.”

“So that’s it?  We just go our separate ways, pretend this night never happened.”

“No, it happened.  But it doesn’t have to end like I suspect it will.”

“How does this end, Donald?”

“Are you asking if I’m going to turn you in?”

“Are you?”

“What would you do?  If I’d hit Jennifer or Michelle, spread their brains all over the pavement?”

“Are you threat—”

“No, I’m asking you, father to father, if you knew who the man was who’d killed your daughter, what would you do?”

“I’d want to kill—”

“Not want.  What would you do?”

“I don’t know.  What do you want to do?”

“Beat you to death with my bare hands.  That’s what I want to do.  Not what I will do.”

Roger stood up, took six steps toward the tent.

Donald said, “Roger?  Where are you?”

“Right here, Donald.”

“You’re closer.”

“Listen to me,” Roger said.  “I want you to know that I am so sorry.  And I know it doesn’t do a goddamn thing to bring Tabitha back, but it’s the truth.  I was just so scared.  You understand?”

“Thank you, Roger.”

“For what?”

“Saying her name.”

Roger fired six times into the tent.

His ears ringing, gunshots still reverberating off the mountains, he said, “Donald?”

There was no answer, only wet breathing.

He went to the tent door and unzipped it and took out his flashlight and shined it inside.

Donald lay on his back, the only visible wound a hole under his left eye, and the blood looked like oil running out of it.

Roger moved the flashlight around, searching for a gun in Donald’s hand, something to mitigate what he’d done, but the only thing Donald clutched was a framed photograph of an auburn-haired teenager with a braces smile.

Three days later, seated at the same table they’d occupied a week before at the Grove Park Inn’s Sunset Terrace, they watched the waiter place their entrees before them and top off their wineglasses from a bottle of pinot noir.

The August night was cool, even here in the city, like maybe summer would end after all.

Near the bar, a tuxedoed man was at a Steinway playing Mozart, one of his beautiful concertos.

“How’s your filet?” Sue asked.

“It’s perfect.  Yours?”

“I could eat this every day.”

Roger forced a smile and took a big sip of wine.

They ate in silence.

After a while, Sue said, “Roger?”

“Yes, honey?”

“We did it right, yeah?”

It annoyed him that she would bring it up over dinner, but he was well on his way toward inebriation, a nice buffer swelling between himself and all that had come before.

“I don’t know how we could’ve been more thorough,” he said.

“I keep thinking we should’ve moved his car.”

“That would’ve been just another opportunity for us to leave evidence.  Skin cells, sweat, hair, fibers of our clothing, prints.  I thought it through, Sue.”

She reached across the table and took his hand, the karat diamond he’d given her twenty-four years ago sending out a thousand slivered facets of candlelight.

“Above all, it was for the girls.  Their safety,” she said.

“Yeah.  For the girls.”

The scent of a good cigar swept past.

“You’ll be able to go on all right?” Sue asked.  “With what…what you had to do?”

Roger was cutting into his steak, and he kept cutting, didn’t meet her eyes as he answered, “I’ve had practice, right?”

It was early October when it occurred to one of the forest rangers of the Pisgah district that the black Buick Regal with a Minnesota license plate, parked near the restrooms of the Big East Fork trailhead, had been there for a long damn time, which was particularly strange considering no one had been reported missing in the area.

Over several days, the sheriff of Haywood County spoke briefly with two estranged, living relatives and an ex-wife in Duluth, none of whom had been in contact with Donald Kennington in over a year, all of whom said he’d been on the downward spiral since his daughter’s death, that it had ruined him in every way imaginable, that he’d probably gone up into the mountains to die.

A deputy found it in the glove box—a handwritten note folded between the vehicle’s owner’s manual and a laminated map of Minnesota.

He read it aloud to the sheriff, the two of them sitting in the front seat as raindrops splattered on a windshield nearly pasted over with the violent red leaves of an oak tree that overhung the parking lot.

My name is Donald Kennington.  Please forward this message to Arthur Holland, detective with the St. Paul Police Department.

The death of my daughter, Tabitha Kennington, brings me to these mountains.  I am writing this in my car on August 5th, having followed Roger and Susan Cockrell, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to Beech Spring Gap.  I have taken their photographs with a digital camera, along with pictures of their green Range Rover and license plate.  You will find my camera containing these pictures in the trunk of my car.

At this moment, I do not know if Mr. Cockrell was responsible for killing my daughter in a hit-and-run six years ago.  I plan to meet the Cockrells tonight and find out.  To be clear, I intend no physical harm to Mr. Cockrell or his wife.  If Mr. Cockrell is responsible, however, we will see if I’m so lucky.  Does a man who runs down a young woman and leaves the scene contain it within him to murder in cold blood in order to hide his crime and his shame?

I suspect he does.

The Cockrells will be thorough in disposing of my body, tent, backpack, etc., which makes this last bit of business a little tricky.

My camp is in a small glade in the rhododendron thicket on the east slope of Shining Rock Mountain, approximately a hundred vertical feet above the meadows of Beech Spring Gap.  The glade is twenty yards across, with a large boulder in the middle.  Look for a flat, shiny rock in the grass.  My tent now stands over it, and I’ve made a tiny rip in the tent floor and dug a small, shallow hole in the ground under the rock.

Late tonight, if Mr. Cockrell admits his guilt, into this hole, sealed and safe in plastic, I will drop a tape recorder, and hopefully rebury it before he murders me.

An introduction to “Perfect Little Town”

I live in Colorado and frequently travel in the high country. It’s beautiful, which is why I live here, but I occasionally get creeped out. There are a handful of small, scenic towns in the Rockies which sit in high valleys, where the only way out of town is to drive over 12,000-foot mountain passes. These towns can actually become snowed-in during major winter storms. I was in one such town a couple years ago on a snowy night. Walking in the cold through the quaint, empty streets, I was overcome not only by the beauty, but the haunted isolation of the place. My mind starting racing—what if the passes were closed and I couldn’t leave? What if no one would rent me a hotel room? What if I’d had the misfortune of getting stranded here on the worst night possible, when this perfect little town unleashed its very dark secret?

perfect little town

-1-

They arrive midmorning, the Benz G-Class rolling down Main Street with its California tags and rear end sagging under the weight of luggage, and though the windows are tinted, we bet the occupants are smiling.  Everyone smiles when they come to our town, population 317.  It’s the mountains and fir trees, the waterfall we light up at night and the clear western sky and the perfect houses painted in brilliant colors and the picket-fenced lawns and the shoppes we spell the olde English way and the sweet smell of the river running through.

Parking spaces are plentiful in the off-season.  They choose a spot in front of the coffeehouse, climb out with their smiles intact, squinting against the high-altitude sun—a handsome couple just shy of forty, their fashionably-cut clothes and hair in league with their Mercedes SUV to make announcements of wealth that we all read loud and clear.

We serve them lattes, handmade Danishes from the pastry case, and they drop dollar bills into our tip vase, amused at the cleverness of the accompanying sign: “Don’t be chai to espresso your gratitude.”  They lounge for a half hour in oversize chairs, sipping their hot drinks and admiring the local art hanging on the walls.  As they finally rise to leave, the woman shakes her head and comments to her husband that they don’t make towns like this anymore.

-2-

They wander through the downtown, browsing our shops as the sky sheets over with leaden clouds.

From us they buy:

a half-pound of fudge

five postcards

energy bars from the hiking store

a pressed gold aspen leaf in a small frame

They tell us what a perfect little town we have and we say we know. Everywhere they go, they ask exuberant questions, and we answer with enthusiasm to match, and in turn solicit personal information under the guise of chitchat—Ron’s a plastic surgeon, Jessica a patent attorney.  They drove from Los Angeles, this being their first vacation in four years.

We ask if they’re enjoying themselves.

Oh yes, they say.  Oh yes.

-3-

They each have a camera.  They shoot everything:

The soaring, jagged mountains in the backdrop

Deer grazing the yard of a residence

The quaint old theatre

The snow that has just begun to fall and frost the pavement

They ask us to take pictures of them together and, of course, we happily oblige.

-4-

The day wears on.

The light fades.

It snows harder with each passing hour.

Up and down Main, Christmas lights wink on.

It is winter solstice, the darkest evening of the year, and when the Stahls attempt to leave town, they find the highway closed going both directions, the gates lowered across the road and padlocked, since what has become a full-blown blizzard is sure to have made high-mountain travel exceedingly dangerous.

Or so we tell them.

-5-

They approach the front desk.

“Welcome to the Lone Cone Inn.”  And we smile like we mean it from the bottom of our hearts.

Ron says, “It appears we’re stuck for the night in Lone Cone.  Could we have a—”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re booked solid.  I just sold our last room not two minutes before you walked in.”

We watch with subtle glee as they glance around the lobby, empty and quiet as a morgue, no sound but the fire burning in the hearth.

The wife chimes in with, “But we haven’t seen another tourist, and we’ve been here all day.”

“I apologize, but—”

“Is there another hotel in town?”

“There’s a motel, but it’s closed for the season.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“I’m not sure I under—”

“It’s a blizzard out there, the roads are closed, and now you’re telling us you’re the only game in town, and you’re booked?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Where are we supposed to sleep?  Our car?”

Jessica appears on the verge of tears.

We hand Ron a notepad and tell him to write down his cell phone number, promising to call if something opens up.

-6-

Ron and Jessica sit in their Mercedes, watching the snow accumulate on the windshield, piling up in the city park, a deep bluish tint settling over Lone Cone.

“Are you fucking kidding me, Ron?”

“I know.”

“Do you?  Because I thought you were the one who was supposed to call and get us room reservations.”

“We weren’t gonna stay here, Jess.  Remember?  Spend the day and drive to Aspen.”

“Well it didn’t work out that way, did it?”

“No.”

“So maybe having reservations as a backup plan might’ve been a bright idea.  Right, Ron?”  He’s been staring through the glass, his hands gripping the steering wheel, and now he glances over at his wife, into that wild-eyed, exacting glare he figures she terrorizes her firm’s paralegals and secretaries with.

“What?” he says.

“Why didn’t you take care of that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you, Ron.  I don’t want to sleep in my fucking car tonight.  That isn’t what I had in mind for my Christmas vacation while busting my ass these last—”

“I get it, Jess.”

Ron pulls the key out of the ignition.

“What are you doing?”

“Baby, let’s go get a big, hot meal, drink the best wine on the list, and forget about all this shit for a while, okay?”

Jessica pushes her short brown hair behind her ears, Ron feeling, hoping he’s cut the right wire, disarmed the bomb.

“That actually sounds nice.”  He has, and he loves this about her—how she can go from psychobitch to DEFCON 5 in two nanoseconds.

“My cell phone’s charged,” he says, “so let’s think positive thoughts.  Maybe while we’re eating, we get a call from the inn, saying they’ve had a cancellation.  This whole thing might just work out.”

Jessica’s smile makes Ron slide his hand over the console, let it work down between her blue-jeaned thighs.

“Hey now,” she warns.  “You gotta earn that, big boy.”

“You think so?”

Apparently not, because she pulls his hand into her crotch and moves her hips forward and Ron undoes the button on her jeans and pushes his fingers between cotton and skin, until he feels the warm, wet slick, wondering if that’s been there since the rage, has a hunch it has.

She moans, stretching for the button on his slacks. Pulls his hand out of her pants and leans across the console into his lap.

He reaches down and finds the right button and the seat hums back, giving Jessica more headspace between his stomach and the steering wheel.

The windshield cracks.  Flinching, Ron’s eyes shoot open and Jessica bites down and then pops off, and they both say, “What the fuck?” in unison.

-7-

Spiderwebs of splitting glass expand at right angles across the windshield as Ron zips his pants, throws the door open, and climbs out.

Standing in the pouring snow, he glimpses three shadows bolting across the park, hears the high cackle of children’s laughter.

Jessica screams, “This is a hundred thirty-thousand dollar Benz, you little shits!” as Ron lifts the fist-size rock off the hood.

“Perfect little town, huh?” Jessica says.

“Damn.”

“What’s wrong?”

Ron rubs his crotch.

“Oh, I’m sorry, babe,” Jessica says.  “Startled me when the rock hit.”

“And that’s what you do when you get startled?  Bite?” Ron tosses the rock into the snow. “Let’s go get dinner.”

“No, let’s report this to the police—”

“Look, I’m cold and hungry and my penis hurts.  Let’s go get drunk at a nice restaurant and deal with this tomorrow.  Positive thoughts, remember?”

-8-

They walk holding hands up the sidewalk of Main, snow dumping through the illumination of streetlamps.

“What time is it?” Jessica asks.

Ron glances at his watch.  “Seven-fifteen.”

“So where the fuck is everybody?  This town’s dead.”

She has a point.  Every store they visited in the afternoon has closed shop for the night, the storefronts dark, not a sound in Lone Cone save the streetlamps.

They pass a brewpub, boarded up for the winter.

A café called The Sandwich Shoppe that only opens for lunch.

A bistro that has gone out of business.

As they near the north end of Main, Jessica says, “Ron, nothing’s open.”

“Yeah, seems that way, huh?”

“I’m starving.”

Ron steps out into the middle of Main, looks up and down the street—nothing moving, not even tire tracks through the five inches of snow that has fallen since late afternoon.

“This is bad, Ron, very—”

“Wait.”

“What?”

He smiles, probably hasn’t noticed it because the lights are so dim, but one block down on the other side of the street, through the first floor windows of an old building, he spots candlelight and tables, the lowlit ambience of what can only be, of what has to be, a fine restaurant.

-9-

As they stand at the podium in Christine’s, waiting for the hostess, Jessica leans over and whispers into Ron’s ear, “Why do you have an erection darling?”

“It’s not new,” he says.  “Since you um,” he clicks his teeth together, “it won’t go down.”

“Oh.  Lovely.”

They’re shown to a table by a window with a view onto the street, where they sit waiting for their server and watching the snow fill in their tracks.

“Kind of slow, aren’t they?” Jessica says.

“Relax, babe.”

“We’re the only ones in the restaurant.”

Ron reaches across the table, holds his wife’s hand.

“Despite all the drama, it’s wonderful to be here with you.”

She smiles, eyes shining in the firelight, says, “We’ve worked hard for this trip.”

“Should’ve done this a long time ago.”

“Easier said than done for a couple of workaholics.”

“You been thinking about work?”

“Little.  You?”

“Guilty.”

“All your patients are still gonna be there when you get back, especially the ladies.  Oh, Dr. Stahl.  Fix my nose, Dr. Stahl.  Suck the fat off my legs, Dr. Stahl.”

They talk by candlelight as the storm rages on the other side of the glass, Ron in the middle of describing the book he’s brought along to read, a biography of Calvin Coolidge, when Jessica’s face suddenly darkens.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’ve been sitting here fifteen minutes, and no one’s even come over to bring us water.”

They survey the restaurant, not another table occupied, no waiters to be seen, only the faintest sound coming from swinging metal doors that presumably lead to the kitchen.

“I’ll go get someone,” Ron says, rising from his chair.

He heads toward the back of the room, his face flushed with heat—anger—and just as he reaches the doors to the kitchen, a woman in a white oxford shirt and black apron bursts through carrying a tray of waters.

Ron sidesteps, avoiding a collision.

“I was just coming back to get someone,” Ron says.  “We’ve been sitting out here for fifteen minutes and nobody’s—”

“I apologize for the delay,” the waitress says.

“No, it’s fine.  Looks like you’re slammed out here.”  Ron motions to the vacant restaurant.

The waitress laughs, just a teenager, and he feels bad for the sarcasm as he follows her back to their table and takes a seat.

“My name’s Mary-Elise, and I’ll be taking care of you.  You folks decided on dinner yet?”  She sets their water glasses on the table.

“We were only given the wine list,” Jessica says.

The waitress runs to the podium, grabs a pair of menus, hustles them back to the table.

“Any specials tonight?” Ron asks.

“I’m afraid not.”

The waitress turns to leave, but Jessica says, “No, honey.  You wait right here.  We won’t be long in deciding.”

The Stahls peruse the menu, place their orders, Ron buying a $175 bottle of Côtes du Ventoux, and everything seems temporarily better knowing food and wine is finally on the way.

-10-

The waitress presents the bottle to Ron, who holds it in his hands like a new baby and affirms that she brought the vintage he requested.

Mary-Elise finesses the corkscrew, expertly withdraws the cork, then pours a little wine into Ron’s glass.

He swirls it, sniffs, says, “No, something’s off.”

“What?” Jessica asks.

“Here, smell.”

Jessica inhales a whiff.  “Vinegar.”

Ron says, “This wine’s spoiled.  Do you have another bottle of the Côtes?”

“I’m sorry, this was our last.”

“Then just bring the Bordeaux.”

-11-

Jessica smiles when the waitress presents her entrée.

“Tell the truth,” Ron says.  “You got the chicken pot pie just because it was forty dollars.”

“It’s an intriguing price for such a simple dish.”

Outside, it still snows, impossibly harder than before, and with the waitress gone, they have the restaurant all to themselves.

“Looks good,” Ron says, pointing his fork at Jessica’s dish.

The chicken pot pie barely fits on the plate, the crust perfectly gilded, steam rising through tiny holes in the center.

“I’m so hungry,” Jessica says, piercing the crust with her fork, scooping out a bite.  “My God, worth every cent.  How’s yours?”

Ron swallows a bite of his penne pasta with scallops and clam sauce.

“Unreal.  You know, if we had to go through all this shit today just to have this meal, it might actually have been worth it.”

He lifts his glass, and as he tilts it up, wine running down his throat, eyes shut with pleasure, trying to think of a toast to make, Jessica gasps.

Ron looks across the table, sees blood pouring down his wife’s chin, two fishhooks dangling from her bottom lip.  She spits something onto the table—a half-inch black oval that he mistakes for a rock or a seedpod until it scampers away.

Other roaches crawl out of the pot pie, and Ron instinctively stands and steps back, noticing now that more than fishhooks and roaches fill the pie.  Mixed in with the carrots and potatoes and chicken, shards of glass glint in the candlelight.

Jessica vomits on the floor, and Ron feels the urge as well, his mouth watering heavily.

He helps his wife to stand and they back away from the table, Ron wondering what might be lurking in the pearl-colored clam sauce of the dish he already took two bites from, decides not to even contemplate it.

Jessica trembles, tears streaming down her face.

“Calm down, baby.  Let me look.”  In the lowlight, he sees that one of the hooks has barely lodged.  “I can get this one out right now.”

Delicately, with surgeon’s hands, he works the hook out of the corner of her lip.

“This other one’s really embedded.  I think the barb’s under the skin.”

“My tongue,” she cries.

“Let me see.”

She sticks it out, and even in the poor light, Ron can see the deep slice halfway up the right side of her tongue.

“Jesus, it’s bad.  Do you think you swallowed any glass?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, stay here.”

“Where are you going?”

“To hurt somebody.”

“No, wait.”  Her mouth has already begun to swell, blunting the sharpness of her consonants.

“Why?”

“Let’s just go find the sheriff.”

“No, fuck that.”

Ron rushes toward the back of the restaurant, his fists already clenched as he kicks open the metal doors.

The kitchen stands dark.

He says, “Anybody in here?”

-12-

They arrive at the front desk of the Lone Cone Inn, find the same stodgy clerk who they spoke with earlier in the day leaning back in a swivel chair, engrossed in a paperback romance.

“Excuse me?” Ron says, the clerk startling.

“Yes?”

“Where’s the hospital?”  He gestures to Jessica, holding a burgundy cloth napkin over her mouth.  “My wife needs medical attention.”

“I’m sorry, we only have a clinic, and it’s closed.”

“No hospital?”

“Nearest one’s thirty miles away, and as you know, the passes are closed tonight.”

“Okay, how about a sheriff?”

“Yes, but I’m sure his office is closed as well.  It’s almost nine.”

“What’s your name?”

“Carol.”

“Tell me, Carol, what do the residents of this town do when they need an officer of the fucking peace?”

“Did something happen?”

“Yeah, something happened.”

“I guess I could try Sheriff Hanson at his home.”

“Really?  I mean, I don’t want to put you out or anything just ‘cause someone put glass and hooks and roaches in my wife’s fucking dinner and almost cut her tongue in—”

“It’s not her fault, Ron.”

Carol lifts the phone, dials a number, after a moment, says, “Arthur?  Hey it’s Carol.  I’ve got the couple from out-of-town standing here at my desk, and I think they need your help…I don’t know…yeah, I think so…okay.”

She hangs up the phone.

“He’s coming down.”

“Thank you,” Ron says.  “Now we were hoping you might have some other good news for us.”

“Like what?”

“We’ve had a really rough evening, and we need a…”

She shakes her head.  “I’m sorry, we’re booked.”

“I’ll pay double.  Triple.  I don’t—”

“Sir, what do you want me to do?  Kick someone out?  I’m sorry, there’s no vacancy.”

-13-

They sit in the leather sofa by the fireplace, Ron holding Jessica, running his fingers through her hair, thinking they should be sitting in this lobby under completely different circumstances, cuddling by the fire with glasses of wine, musing on what the future has in store.  In those rare moments when his mind cleared of all the things he needed to do, he’d come close to admitting to himself that despite all the money he and Jessica were accumulating, they were sacrificing the primes of their lives—him for the superrich and the ultra-shallow, that elite class who could drop seventy-grand to buff a few dents out of their noses, Jessica for faceless pharmaceutical companies in pursuit of the next billion-dollar drug.  Between the ninety-hour workweeks and all the Saturdays in the office, even in those fleeting idle moments, he had to remind himself to look around and enjoy what he had, to tell himself how good he had it—the Lotus, the collection of ancient single malts, the four point two million dollar view of the Valley from his Mulholland mansion.

“I’m gonna need something for the pain,” Jessica whimpers.

“Soon as we talk with the sheriff, we’ll head down to the Benz.  I’ve got Lortab in my suitcase.  Jess, can you hang here on your own for just a second?”

“Why?”

“I want to go upstairs and check on something.”

“Please hurry back.”

He moves through the empty lobby, the walls adorned with stuffed, dead animals—an elk head over the hearth flanked by coyotes, a large brown bear standing on its hind legs, encased in glass, birds of prey frozen in mid-flight from wires in the ceiling.

Ron takes the steps to the second floor two at a time, emerging into a long corridor warmed by light from faux-lanterns mounted to the wall between the doors.

He walks a third of the way down the corridor and stops.

He approaches the nearest door, leans in, his ear pressed against the wood, hears only the bass throb of his heart.

Three rooms down, he drops to his knees and looks through the slit between the bottom of the door and the hardwood floor—darkness.

He stands, knocks on the door, no answer.

Goes to the next door and knocks even harder.

Pounds on the third.

“Is anyone on this floor?” he shouts.

-14-

The desk clerk glances up as Ron storms over.

“You wanna tell me what the hell’s wrong with you?”

Her eyes widen and she sets her book down spine-up and rises out of her chair.  Short, heavy, late-fiftyish, her big eyes magnified through the thick lenses.

“I don’t care for that tone of voice even a little—”

“I don’t give a fuck what you don’t care for.  I just came down from the second floor.  It’s empty.”

“No, it’s not.”

A noise like a distant explosion briefly derails Ron’s train of thought.

“The rooms are all empty and dark.”

Jessica rises from the couch, coming toward them now.

“Did it occur to you that our guests are sleeping?  Or perhaps having a late dinner out?”

“Every single one of them?  Why won’t you give us a room?  What have we done to you to—”

“I told you.  I don’t have any rooms available.”

Jessica reaches the front desk, stands beside Ron, says, “What’s going on?” with her swollen lisp.

“They’re fucking with us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Baby, I just walked up to the second floor.  There isn’t a single room occupied.”

Jessica focuses a smoldering gaze on the clerk.  “Is that right?”

“Of course not.”

“Show us.”

“Excuse me.”

Jessica leans forward, lowers the napkin so the clerk can see the fishhook still embedded in her bottom lip.

“Show us.”

“I don’t have to show you any—”

“Bitch, I am an attorney, and I will make you a solemn promise right now.  When I get back to LA, the very first thing on my agenda will be to call the top law firm in Denver, hire the meanest motherfucker on the letterhead, and sue your ass and this honkytonk piece of shit hotel for every last fucking cent.”

Ron feels so sure the desk clerk is on the brink of tears, it surprises him all the more when she leans forward and smiles at Jessica, her lips parting to speak.

The lobby doors squeak open, drawing everyone’s attention.

He wears a voluminous black parka dusted with snow, a sheriff’s star embroidered onto the lapel, smiling as he shelves his hat, clumps of snow dropping on the hardwood floor.

“Evening folks,” he says, striding toward them.

“Oh, Arthur.”  The desk clerk bursts into tears.  “They’ve been so mean to me.”

The sheriff arrives at the front desk.  “What are you talking about, Carol?”

“This woman has been verbally abusive.  Called me a cunt.  Threatened to sue—”

Jessica says, “Wait just a—”

“You’ll get your turn.”  To Carol:  “Tell me what happened.”

“I tried to explain to these folks that we don’t have any room avail—”

“She’s lying!” Ron yells.

“Ya’ll need to take a walk,” the sheriff says, motioning toward the front doors.  “Right over that way.”

Ron holds up his hands in deference, and he and Jessica backpedal toward the entrance.

The desk clerk points at Ron.  “And that gentleman went up to the second floor and started banging on the guests’ rooms, screaming so loud I could hear him from down here.  I’ve had numerous complaints.”

“And then his wife started swearing at you?”

“Him, too.”

“What’d he say?”

“I don’t remember exactly but he used the F-word a lot.  They both did.”

Ron sees the sheriff reach across the desk and squeeze Carol’s hand.  “I’m sorry, Carol.  I’ll handle this.”

“Thank you, Arthur.”

The sheriff puts on his Stetson, turns, and advances toward the Stahls, a hybrid of a sneer and a scowl overspreading his face.

He stops, the steel tips of his boots two feet from the tips of Ron’s sodden sneakers.

“Sir, did you go upstairs and disturb the guests?  Swear at—”

“I can explain—”

“No, don’t explain.  Just answer the question I asked you.  You and your wife do these things?”

“There isn’t a soul in this hotel but the four of us in the lobby, and that woman won’t sell us a room.  Please.  Just go up and look.”

Sheriff Hanson tilts his neck, vertebrae cracking, says, “Sir, you’re beginning to make me angry.”

“I’m not trying to make you angry, officer, I just—”

“Sheriff.”

“What?”

“Sheriff, not officer.”

“Look, we’ve had a terrible few hours here, Sheriff, and we’re just—”

The sheriff moves forward, a good four inches on Ron, backing him up against the wall, his breath spiced with cinnamon Altoids.

“You will answer my question.  Did you do the things Carol said you did?”

“You don’t understand, she’s—”

The sheriff pinches Ron’s nose between the nostrils, fingernails digging into the cartilage, tugging him along toward the doors, kicking them open with his right boot, Ron losing his footing, the sheriff shoving him completely across the sidewalk into the foot of snow that has piled up in the empty parking space.

He hears Jessica say, “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

“Then walk.”

She runs over and helps Ron sit up in the snow, his nose burning, both of them glaring at the sheriff who stands under the canopy of the Lone Cone Inn, smoothing the wrinkles out of his parka.

“Take a guess what’ll happen if I see either of you again tonight?”

“You’ll throw us in jail?” Jessica mocks.

“No, I’ll beat the shit out of you.  Both of you.”

Jessica scrambles to her feet and marches over to the sheriff.

“You see this?” she screams, pointing at her bottom lip.

“Yeah, you got a fishhook in your lip.”

“Your little restaurant over there—”

“I don’t give a shit.  You’ve blown through all my good will.  Now I own a blazing hot temper, and you’d do well to get out of my face right now.”

“Please, we just—”

“Right.  Now.”

Ron has rarely seen Jessica ever back down, but something in the sheriff’s tone convinces her to retreat from the sidewalk—maybe the possibility that she might get slapped or worse.

“Let’s go, Ron.”  She bends down, gives him a hand up, and he slides his arm around her waist as they start into the street.

Jessica glances back over her shoulder, yells out, “This isn’t over!  You know that, right?”

“Best keep walking!”

-15-

“How’s the pain, Jess?”

“Bad.”

They trek down the middle of Main in the single set of tire tracks.  Jessica walks ahead of Ron, crying, but he doesn’t dare attempt the distribution of comfort.  He made that mistake the last time she was passed over for partner, and like an injured animal, the fear and sadness instantly metastasized into rage.

“I’m freezing, Ron.”

“I’m thinking.”

“You’re thinking?”

“I’ve been trying, but there’s no cell service in this valley.”

“Right.”

“No place to stay for the—”

“Quit telling me shit I already know.”

“Let’s just get back to the Benz.  I have Lortab in my bag.  We’ll tilt the seats—”

“We’re sleeping in our car now?”

“Baby, when the Lortab hits, you won’t know the difference from that seat and a bed at the Waldorf-Astoria.  We’ll crank the heat, get it warm and toasty inside.”

“Jesus, Ron.”

“It’s the best I can do, Jess.  They’ll probably have the roads plowed when we wake up, and then we’ll get the fuck out of this town.”

They near the end of Main, every building dark, no light but the muted glow of the streetlamps.  A quarter mile ahead, Ron sees the gate lowered across the highway that climbs north out of town toward the pass.

Jessica says, “See that?”

On past the buildings of Main, near the city park, a bonfire shoots ribbons of flame into the sky.

They improve their pace, Ron noting a jolt of hope, thinking this could be a party of some sort, attended by people who might help them, but as he opens his mouth to suggest this to Jessica, she shrieks and starts running toward the flames.

-16-

Speechless, they stand thirty feet back, the Italian leather seats charred beyond any hope of salvation, the glass blown out, flames licking through the windows, the dashboard boiling, the scorching tires pouring black smoke up into the falling snow.  Ron’s face tingles in the warmth, and it occurs to him that frostbite might be an appropriate concern.

“Why are they doing this to us?” Jessica asks.

“I don’t know.”

And he realizes that his wife doesn’t sound angry anymore, just confused and scared, and for the first time he feels it, too—not annoyance or frustration, but real tangible fear.

He puts his hands on her shoulders, and she lets them stay for a moment, then turns and faces him, the firelight refracting off the tears in her eyes.

“Hold me.”

As he embraces her, the lamps up and down Main wink out, and the drink machines at the visitors’ center across the street go dark and quit humming, and an oppressive silence blankets the town, nothing beyond the whisper of snow collecting on their jackets and the quiet hisses and exhalations from the burning Benz.

“Something’s happening,” she says.  “Isn’t it?”

“It’s probably from the storm.”

“Do you really believe that, Ron?”

-17-

They walk up a side street lined with quaint Victorians buried under loads of powder, not a light in operation as far as they can see.

Ron opens the gate of a picket fence, and they trudge through snow to the front porch.

“What are you gonna say?” Jessica whispers.

“Tell them the truth.  We need help.”

He grasps the brass knocker, raps it three times against the door.

A moment passes.

No one comes.

“Let’s try another house,” Ron says.

They try five more on that street, three on the next one over, but despite the vehicles in the driveways, proximate tracks in the snow, and other signs of habitation, every house they approach stands vacant.

-18-

Ron’s watch beeps 11:00 p.m. as they come to the corner of Main and 12th, he and Jessica both shivering, the snow still dumping, and little to see but the impression of buildings and storefronts with the streetlamps out.

“We’re gonna die if we stay out here,” Jessica says, her teeth chattering.

Ron looks up and down the street, well over a foot of snow now on the pavement, the tire tracks completely covered, just a smooth sheet of snow across the road, the sidewalks, everything.

“Ron?”

A block down, on the outskirts of perception, he thinks he sees movement—figures draped in white.

“Ron!  I’m freezing to death standing—”

“I have an idea.”

They cross the street and start south down the sidewalk.

“I can’t feel my feet, Ron.”

“Then you’re lucky.  Mine are burning.”

Four blocks up, they cross 8th, and Ron stops under a canopy with “Out There Outfitters” in block letters stitched into the façade of the canvas, the snow having blown against the cloth, covered most of the words.

“Why are we here?” Jessica asks.

“If we don’t get out of the elements, we’re going to die.  I figure it’s better to break into a commercial space than a private residence, right, counselor?”

She stares at him like he’s lost his mind.

“Honey, you got a better idea?”

“No.”

“Then keep a lookout and pray this place doesn’t have an alarm.”

Ron lifts the chrome, cylindrical trashcan topped with a little cigarette butt-filled sand pit over his shoulder and runs at the storefront glass.  The first strike sends a hard recoil back through the trashcan, which flies out of Ron’s grasp and smashes into the snowblown sidewalk, the glass still intact, unblemished.  He lifts the trashcan and goes at it again, the next impact causing crystalline-shaped fractures to spread like a virus through the tall window.  This time, Ron steps back and hurls the twenty-pound trashcan at the cracking glass.

It punches through, the window disintegrating.

Ron and Jessica wait ten seconds, eyes locked.

She says finally, “No alarm.”

“Or maybe it’s disabled ‘cause the power’s out.”

-19-

They climb down out of the storefront and walk past the cash register.  Up ahead, a group of figures congeal Ron’s blood and he freezes, lets out a tiny gasp.

Jessica says, “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

Just a trio of mannequins outfitted in fly-fishing gear.

They move on past the display cases containing rock climbing hardware and an array of ice axes.

Against the back wall, mummy bags dangle from the ceiling, flanked by dozens of external and internal frame backpacks.

They pass through a rear doorway into a dark, narrow hall.  Jessica tries the door to the bathroom, but it’s locked.

“Damn.”

“You gotta go, babe?”

“Yeah.”

“You should squat right in front of the cash register.”

“You’re a child, Ron.”

They head back into the store.

“There it is,” Ron says.

“Where?”

The darkness makes it nearly impossible to see, but in the middle of the room, between racks of overpriced Patagonia shirts and Columbia down jackets, a diorama has been constructed—dormant campfire ring, mannequins in sandals and tank tops cooking dinner in a camp stove, their backs to a two-man tent.

Ron and Jessica untie their shoes and strip out of their wet jackets and pants and crawl into the tent, into the sleeping bags, zip themselves up.

After several minutes of intense shivering, Ron notes the return of warmth—the electricity of pins and needles in his extremities, the burn of mild frostbite on his cheeks.

“You getting warm?” he asks.

“Little by little.”

He scoots his bag toward Jessica’s until he feels her breath in his face.

“How’s the pain?”

“Quit asking.”

“Sorry, I’m a doctor, it’s in my—”

“You’re a plastic surgeon.”

“Ouch.”

“I didn’t mean that.  I’m just in a ton of pain here.”

“You think this is one of those experiences we’re gonna be able to look back on and—”

“Are you kidding?”

They lie in the dark, listening to the low moan of wind pushing through the broken glass of the storefront.

At length, Jessica sits up, says, “I can’t sleep.  I’m too thirsty, Ron.  All that wine and walking around—I just got dehydrated.”

“All right, you know that pot sitting out there in the fake campfire ring?”

“Yeah.”

“Take it out onto the sidewalk and fill it with snow.  You’ll have to pack it in really tight.  I’ll see if I can fire up the camp stove.”

-20-

Before starting his practice thirteen years ago, Ron was an avid outdoorsman, spending countless weekends in the Cascades, even squeezing in a weekend a month outdoors during the slog of med school.  As he kneels by the fire ring in the dark and fumbles with the camp stove, he realizes how much the gear has changed in over a decade, evidenced by the five minutes it costs him to unravel the mystery of attaching the red canister of white gas.

As he screws it in, he hears Jessica climbing back through the storefront, pushing her way between clothing racks.

“How’s it going?” she asks.

He strikes the match, holds it to the burner.

The stove flares up.

As the fire burns down, quickly consuming the modicum of propane, he opens the gas, the lazy orange flame transformed into a low blue roar.

“Put it right here.”

She sets the pot down on the stove.

“Why don’t you get three water bottles—I saw them by the daypacks—and fill them up.  It’s gonna take a lot of melted snow to fill this pot.”

While Jessica goes for more snow, Ron sits beside one of the mannequins, monitoring the stove, the heat cranked up to high, using a plastic spoon to stir the snow.

It takes longer than he anticipates, but soon he has half a pot of slush, which he pulls off the heat and transfers into a water bottle that formerly belonged to the cute blond mannequin in the tight pink sports bra.

He says, “Jess, what’s taking?”

Another minute crawls by.

He puts on his jacket and cold, wet shoes.

Turning down the heat, he stands and walks toward the front of the store, past the cash register, into the storefront.

Snow blows in through the shattered window.

Ron steps down onto the sidewalk.

“If you’re fucking around here, Jess, I will divorce you, ‘cause this isn’t even remotely…”

No response but the quiet patter of snowflakes on his jacket.

Ron glances down at the three water bottles lying in the snow, then the multiple sets of tracks leading up the sidewalk.

Twenty feet ahead, darkness and snow obscure everything.

His watch beeps midnight, and for a moment he feels sick with fear, sick to the point of vomiting, but he shoves it back into that long-forgotten nook in the pit of his stomach that he hasn’t needed since med school—those nights he woke in cold sweats in the dark, convinced he didn’t have the hardwiring to pass the boards.

-21-

In the cold, snowy silence, Ron walks up the sidewalk, his cheeks beginning to burn again, clutching in his right hand a wicked-looking ice ax with the price tag still dangling from the blade.

He’s slept outdoors in the desert waste of Canyonlands National Park, in the immense sweep of Denali where it got so quiet those Alaskan autumn nights (after the mosquitoes finally shut up) that he imagined he could hear the stars humming like distant generators.

The silence this winter solstice as he walks the empty streets of Lone Cone seems something else entirely—more a mask than an absence, and not a shred of peace contained within it.

The tracks turn down 3rd Street, Ron’s legs aching as the snow melts and seeps through his khaki slacks.  He wishes he’d thought to outfit himself in new, dry clothes from the hiking store, but it’s too late for that now.

Around the back of a late Nineteenth-Century brick building, he turns into an alley, and after twenty feet, arrives at a pair of doors without handles—the termination of the four sets of tracks.

He beats his fists against the doors, shouting, “Jessica!  Can you hear me?”

If she can, she makes no answer.

Ron spins around, stares at a Dumpster capped with snow, at the power lines above his head, dipping with the weight of several fragile inches that have collected on the braided wire, hears a rusty door several blocks away swaying in the wind, hinges grinding.

It occurs to him that he might be losing his mind, and he sits down against the building and buries his head between his knees and prays for the first time in many, many years.

-22-

As he rounds the corner of Main and 3rd, searching for something with which to break through the front of that brick building his wife has disappeared inside, light just ahead stops him in his tracks.

He feels certain it wasn’t there before, this soft glow of firelight flooding through windows onto the snow, and at least fifty pairs of skis leaning against the front of the building.

Ron jogs over, glancing up at “Randolph Opera House” painted in ornate red lettering that arches over the entrance, and the marquee above it which displays: “Dec. 22 - Midvinterblot.”

Through the windows that frame the doors, he glimpses an empty lobby illumined by candelabras.

The doors are unlocked, and he steps inside onto red carpeting darkened by the soles of wet shoes, sees a vacant concessions booth, coat closet, walls covered in framed posters advertising stage productions, autographed photos of musicians of modest fame who’ve played this opera house over the years.

He proceeds through the lobby into a darker corridor lined with closed doors that access the theatre, hurries through an archway on the right, and quietly ascends two flights of squeaky steps.

-23-

The balcony is sparsely peopled.

He slides into a chair in the front row, peers down through the railing, the opera house lit by three hundred points of candlelight, the lower level packed with what Ron estimates to be the entire population of Lone Cone, everyone extravagantly, ridiculously costumed as if they’ve come to a carnival or a masque—headdresses of immense proportion, the details lost in the lowlight, only profiles visible, and the room redolent of whiskey and beer and the earthy malt of marijuana smoke that seems to hover in the aisles below like mist in a hollow.

The stage is the spectacle, forested in real, potted fir trees, with a painted backdrop of the mountains enclosing Lone Cone in every season, all surrounding the strangest object in the theatre—a life-size golden bear which appears to have been forged of solid bronze.

It stands on its hind legs in a metal recess at center stage, and a line of people shuffle past, contributing pieces of firewood to the pit before returning to their seats.

This goes on for some time, while on stage left, a trio of men on guitar, fiddle, and mandolin enliven the theatre with bluegrass.

When everyone has taken their seats and the musicians abandoned their instruments, a tall man rises from the audience and takes the stage.  Clutching a long candle and costumed like a Spanish conquistador, even though his silver helmet conspires to mask his identity, Ron pegs him for the sheriff who threw him out of the Lone Cone Inn several hours ago.

The conquistador raises his arms and shouts, “Come forth!”

At stage right, the red curtains rustle, then part, and two figures emerge dressed all in white, even their hoods, each holding an arm of Jessica Stahl, and at the sight of her, the crowd roars, Ron feeling a ripple of nausea until he notices his wife smiling, thinking, Has this all been some devious game?

They escort Jessica around to the back of the golden bear, step down into the pit, and one of them lifts a hatch in the back of the beast, while the other whispers something in her ear.  She nods, accepting a clear mask attached to some kind of tank.

Jessica holds the mask to her mouth for a moment, then stumbles back, the crowd cheering, and she waves to the audience and blows kisses, the applause and whistles getting louder, long-stemmed roses spitting forth from the front rows onto the stage.

Jessica climbs into the golden bear, and the men in white close the hatch and return the way they came, vanishing through curtains off the stage.

The sheriff-conquistador raises his arms again.

The audience hushes.

He turns and approaches the golden bear, ducks down into the recess.

After a moment, he climbs back onto the stage and strides across to the left side, where he grabs a thick rope and pulls.

A trapdoor in the ceiling swings open, snowflakes drifting down onto the golden bear.

“Lights!”

A collective exhalation sweeps through the theatre, candles extinguished, the room pitch black.

Ron leans forward, squinting to raise some detail in the dark.  A moment ago, he felt a passing twinge of relief, thinking there was some reason or logic behind this bizarre, awful night, but that is falling out of orbit now.

The room becomes silent, no sound but the occasional whisper flickering down below.

At first he mistakes them for lightning bugs—motes of ascending light down where the stage should be, but the snap of boiling sap and the sudden odor of woodsmoke corrects the error.

Out of the darkness surfaces a single image—the golden bear—though it’s no longer golden but the deeper reddish hue of molten bronze, and as the flames underneath it intensify, the bear glows brighter and brighter.

Ron says, “Oh, Christ.”

The bear bellows, a high-pitched, Jessica-sounding roar, her voice channeled through a complex of tubes that curl to the right of the bear’s glowing head like a brass tumor, and words mix in with the screams, but the tubes and the pain slur them into nonsense, the bronze clanging now like a huge cymbal as Jessica desperately beats against it from inside, her juices dripping through holes in the bear’s haunches, sizzling on the stage.

Someone in the crowd shouts, “Another year of plenty!”

“No avalanches!”

“No cancer!”

“More tourists!”

And they are clapping now, down below, the applause building, stoned and drunken toasts being proffered from every corner of the theatre, fighting to be heard amid the tortured commotion emanating from the stage, the golden bear smoking as snowflakes fall through the ceiling onto the brilliant bronze, instantly vaporizing.

Somewhere in the darkness behind him, a woman weeps, and a man whispers, “Shut the fuck up!”

Ron jumps out of his seat and stumbles back down the stairwell, spewing vomit on the walls, reemerging into the dark corridor, racing toward the nearest door, throwing it open to wafts of woodsmoke and a sweeter-smelling incense that he knows is his wife, roasting inside the golden bear.

He starts into the theatre into an awful, disengaged clarity rooted in shock—people turning away from the horror onstage to see this uncostumed tourist with vomit down his jacket, barging in like he’s come to fuck up a wedding.

The screaming of the bear has become harsher, the voice inside blown out, winding down, and Ron sees those white-masked executioners break through the curtains on stage right and rush down the steps into the outer aisle.

Something inside him screams Run.

-24-

Ron crashes into the doors of the Randolph Opera House and bursts out of the theatre, back down the sidewalk, kicking up clouds of snow as he runs toward the north end of town.

After three blocks, he glances over his shoulder at the hordes of people spilling out of the theatre, a handful stepping into skis, flashlight beams arcing toward him.

He turns left onto 7th and runs so hard he can’t think about anything but the incomprehensible pressure in his lungs, sprinting past a chocolate shop, a closed hostel, the street taking a steep pitch as it descends toward a spread of ground so level, it can only be a frozen pond.

Behind him comes a whoosh—a shirtless twentysomething, her long blond hair flowing in her wake and dressed like some Viking goddess right down to the horned helmet, gliding toward him on a pair of skis, accelerating as the street steepens, five seconds away at most.

Ron digs his heels into the snow and slides to a stop and turns, the skier racing toward him, inside of ten feet.

He swings, the serrated blade punching through the side of her neck, Ron temporarily blinded by warm mist from the severed artery, the ice ax all the way through.  He tries to grip the rubber-coated handle to rip it out, but the blood has made it slippery and the Viking Goddess slides away from him, still skiing down the street, her hands trying to extract the blade.

Ron wipes the blood out of his eyes, and fifty yards up the street, sees a herd of people make a wide, sliding turn around the corner of Main and 7th, a crowd of thirty or forty tearing down the street after him, screaming, shouting, yeehawing, laughing like a throng of revelers cut loose from the world below.

He runs down to the skier who has fallen over in the snow, sticks his foot against her head for leverage, and jerks the ice ax out of her throat.

Then running again, falling, scrambling back onto his feet, veering into the yard of a private residence, a dog accosting him through a bay window, thinking if he doesn’t find some way to escape his tracks he doesn’t have the faintest hope.

Up ahead, more shapes materialize out of the dark, a dozen perhaps, and smaller, their voices high-pitched—a band of children tramping toward him through the snow.

Ron looks back, can’t see the pursuing crowd through the blizzard, but he can hear them calling out to him.

Twenty feet ahead, on the shore of that frozen pond, his eyes lock on the remnants of a recent battle—saplings thrust into the snow supporting handmade flags (Stars and Stripes vs. the Jolly Roger) and opposing snow forts, their features smoothed and hidden by the storm.

-25-

Ron crawls through a snow trench, his hands aching in the cold, somehow manages to still himself as a collection of footsteps approach.

“I’m cold.”

“Shut up, pussy, if we find him, you know how sweet Christmas will—”

“I’m not a pussy.”

“Okay, twat.  Wait, look.”

“That’s just the others.”

An adult male voice shouts, “Hey, who’s there?”

“Just us!”

“Us who?”

“Chris, Neil, Matt, Jacob—”

“What are you kids doing?”

“Helping.”

“No, you’re fucking up the tracks.  Shit.”

“What’s wrong, Dave?”

More footsteps arrive.

Ron crawls a little further through the trench, his hair, eyelashes, eyebrows snow-matted, too scared to even register the cold.

The trench leads into a small cave constructed of cantilevered bricks of packed snow, the voices muffled now.

Ron rises up shivering onto his knees.  There had been a lookout window, but it’s buried in new snow.  He reaches forward, pokes his finger through the soft powder, which all falls in at once.

He ducks down, the voices audible again.

“…little organization would go a long fucking way.”

“Hey, watch the language around the kids, bro.”

“You understand what’ll happen if—”

A woman breaks in, “You’re not thinking, Dave.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What’s his primary objective right now?”

“I don’t know…getting out of town?”

“How?  In this storm?  With his car toasted?  No, he needs to get out of this miserable weather or he’ll freeze to death.”

The voices begin to fade, Ron lifting up, peering through the window, watching the crowd move by, down toward the frozen pond.

Light passes through the window, and he prostrates himself on the floor of the snow cave, listening for some indication he’s been seen.

After a while the voices have vanished completely, and he looks out the window again, the crowd nothing but distant, restless lightbeams, barely visible in the storm.

-26-

Ron massages his bare, blistered feet to get the blood circulating, colder than he’s ever been in his life, though he doesn’t think he’s freezing to death.  This little snow fort is actually warm.

He wonders how long he’s been inside—thirty minutes, forty-five tops—and he’s spent most of it trying to convince himself this can’t possibly be happening.  He’s had “horror dreams” before—car accidents, the death of friends and family, being chased by a murderous street gang through a parking garage, life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit—but he always wakes up and the fear always leaves.

Even as he sits there, rubbing his cold, wet feet, he has a rock-solid premonition that in mere moments he will wake in that hotel in downtown Flagstaff he and Jessica checked into a little over twenty-four hours ago.  It was their first night on the road, and they dined at a gem of a pizza joint near the university, went straight to the hotel, made love, and crashed, tired and giddy with the thrill of finally being on vacation, next stop Colorado.

He tells himself, and he believes, that he still sleeps in that hotel room.  He’s really tossing in bed as he hides in this snow cave, Jessica probably kicking him under the covers, swearing at him in that sexy, sleepy voice of hers to quit moving or take his restless ass over to the sleeper sofa.

-27-

Ron inhales the scent of hotel linens and forced air from an unfamiliar central heating system, the covers soft between his legs.

He throws an arm across the mattress, feels the figure of his wife asleep beside him, her naked back rising and falling against his hand.

Later, they sit at breakfast, cream-cheesing bagels.

The light that blazes into the room washes out everything on the periphery and even the rogue strands of Jessica’s hair glow like incandescent silk.

“I had the worst dream last night,” Ron says.

“Tell me about it.”

He thinks for a moment, says, “I forgot.”

“Chilly in here.”  As Jessica rubs her arms, Ron notices her breath clouding.  He’s grown cold as well.  He reaches down to lift his bagel, and it looks like a bagel, the circumference lightly browned, the lox spread warming on the surface, but when he touches it, it crumbles in his fingers like snow, freezing to the touch.

He says, “Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“Nothing, it’s…everything’s fine.”

“I’m so glad we came on this vacation,” Jessica says, but she’s turned into the Viking Goddess, the ice ax run through her throat, blood pulsing out of the side of her neck and making a sound exactly like a lawn sprinkler.

Ron tries to stand, thinking if he can walk outside into that clear morning light and climb into his Benz, Jessica will be there.  He can make this real.

“We have to stretch this out,” he says, but the light passing through the windows has already begun to erode, the darkness encroaching so fast he can no longer see across the table, and then he’s back in the snow cave, curled up against the freezing wall, and so despairing, he believes he’s gone to hell, recalling from his collegiate reading of Dante’s Inferno (as if his subconscious has retrieved the most horribly perfect memory shard just to fuck with him) that the innermost circle of the underworld is built of ice.

-28-

Ron rises up slowly out of the trench.

It has stopped snowing, the sky blackish-cobalt, infected with stars.

He thinks he hears voices on the far side of town, but as he spins slowly around, he sees nothing but dark houses, smoke the only movement, trickling out of chimneys.

-29-

The snow comes to his knees.

He jogs through the powder, staying on the west edge of town where backyards border a stream that has all but frozen over, eyeing the dark windows of the houses he runs by.

The stream curves him back toward Main as he approaches the north edge of town, and ten minutes after striking out from the snow fort, he moves past the city park and the torched Benz, the frame of the SUV having cooled just in time to allow for the collection of a delicate half-inch of powder.

-30-

The sign reads, “Road Closed Due to Hazardous Driving Conditions.”

Ron swings a leg over, briefly straddling the yellow gate.

He falls onto the other side, engulfed by snow, stands up and brushes his clothes off as best he can, his fingers stiff, on a welcome descent from excruciating toward a beautiful numbness.

Beyond exhaustion, he sets off at the fastest walk he can manage, while in the east, the sky lightens above a skyline of jagged peaks—a warm lavender that chokes out the stars.

He trudges on through the predawn silence, crying, thinking, Jess is dead.

Passes another sign: “Aspen   23.”

The road climbs at a five percent grade, and he stops, breathless after an hour of walking, looks back, sees the valley the town rests in five hundred feet below where he stands.

He inhales a shot of cold, thin air.  The spruce trees on the left side of the road droop with snow.  Off the right shoulder, the mountainside falls away in a series of cliffs and steep forest, a thousand feet down to a frozen river.

He hears a distant growl.

The way the echo carries, it sounds like a vehicle coming down the mountain, but the lights—four of them—race up the road out of Lone Cone.

In the calm, subzero air, he studies the tone of their motors, the velocity with which they travel over the buried highway.

Snowmobiles.

He starts running, gets ten steps, then stops, looks back down the road—a narrow plane descending into Lone Cone, his tracks as clear as day.

Up ahead, the road makes a sharp left turn with the contour of the mountain.

Nothing to do but run, his arms pumping again, the momentary adrenaline charge making up for the loss of air.

The whine of the motors sounds like a swarm of giant bees closing in as he reaches the curve in the road, the noisy snowmobiles dropping into silence as he puts the mountain between them and himself.

He looks back over his shoulder trying to—

A horn screams.

He turns back to face a huge orange truck, ten feet and closing.

Ron bee-lines for the left shoulder and dives into a snowbank as the plow rushes by, burying him under sixty pounds of snow as the blade scrapes the powder off the road.

-31-

Ron lies on his back, suffocating in darkness, clawing at the snow and on the verge of losing consciousness.

His hand breaks through, fresh air flooding in, accompanied by idling snowmobiles and nearby voices.

He pulls his hand back into his chest, wondering if he’s been seen, enough of the snow on top of him pushed away to glimpse a piece of the morning sky and an overhanging fir tree.

Two helmeted figures walk into view, Ron praying he won’t have to fight, his fingers so numb he can’t even feel them holding the ice ax.

The two figures gaze up the mountainside for several minutes.

One of them shrugs.

Then they walk back into the road, out of view.

He can hear them talking, can’t pick out a single word.

After a while, the snowmobiles wind up and speed away.

-32-

By midmorning Ron has covered three miles.  It should have been easier traveling on the plowed highway, but his legs hurt so much the improvement is negligible.  The exquisite pain makes concentrating difficult, and sometimes he forgets to listen for the distant, insect-whining of the snowmobiles.

-33-

At eleven a.m. he crawls up the highway, the pavement sun-warmed under his swollen, frostbit hands that have turned the color of ripe plums.

-34-

Ron lifts his head off the road, the surrounding snow so brilliant under the midday sun, like diamonds, he can’t see a thing but brightness.

He might have been hallucinating, but he feels reasonably sure that something’s approaching, can’t tell from which direction or the size of the incoming vehicle, realizes that a part of him (gaining greater influence by the minute) no longer cares if they find him.

The next time he manages to raise his head, he’s staring into the grill of a Dodge Ram, hears the sound of a door swinging open, glimpses heavily-scuffed cowboy boots stepping down onto the road.

-35-

The exchange of light and darkness as the firs scroll by and the sun blinking at him between the trees has the same discombobulating effect as a strobe light.

Ron pulls his forehead off the glass and looks across the cab at the grizzled driver—long, gray hair, a beard as white as a sunbleached skull, black sunglasses, and beneath all that ancient hair, a face so gaunt it does more to underscore the bones beneath.

He looks over at Ron, back at the road.

Ron whispers, “Where are we going?”

“Huh?”

“Where are we going?”

“What were you doing laying in the middle of the road, son?”

Ron feels exceedingly strange, a degree of weakness worse than the recovery following the three marathons he’d run in his twenties combined.

He wants to answer the man, but with the lightheadedness, he fears he might say the wrong thing, if there is a wrong thing to be said, so he just repeats himself: “Where are we going?”

“You were in Lone Cone last night?”

Ron sits up a little straighter, strains to buckle his shoulder harness.

“Yes.  My wife and I.”

“Where’s she?”

Ron blinks through the tears that well up instantly in his eyes.

“You ain’t saying nothing,” the old man says, “but it’s plenty.”

They ride on in silence.

Another sign: “Aspen   10.”

“Used to live in Lone Cone,” the old man says.  “Beautiful place.  Moved up the road a ways fifteen years ago.  Couldn’t take another winter solstice.  I ain’t saying it’s wrong or right, or hasn’t had something to do with keeping that town like it is, but for me…I couldn’t do it no more.  Every year, there’s talk of quitting the blot altogether.  Probably happen someday.  God, I miss that town.”

-36-

The truck stops under the emergency room entrance of the Aspen Valley Hospital, and the old man shifts into park.

“I can’t go in there with you,” he says.

Ron reaches down and unbuckles his seat belt, puts his hand on the doorknob.

“Hold on there a minute, son.”  Ron looks up at the old man, who removes his shades and stares back at him through one bloodshot, jaundiced eye, one perfectly clear and perhaps a size too large—glass.  “It ain’t often someone manages to slip away.”

“I just left her.”

“Wasn’t a thing you could’ve done, so you might as well start letting that go.  But what I’m trying to tell you is this.  Twenty years ago, a woman got away.  She went to the Aspen police, told them everything that was done to her, how they murdered her husband, and you wanna know what happened?”  The old man points a long, dirty finger into Ron’s shoulder.  “She died in prison four years ago.  Convicted of drugging her husband and setting him on fire in their car while on vacation in the peaceful town of Lone Cone.  You can’t go up against a whole town, son.  You hear what I’m saying?  They’re already preparing for you to come back with law enforcement making crazy claims.  Don’t do it.  Don’t ever go back there.  You walk into that hospital and tell them you and your wife got lost in the mountains, and you barely made it out.”

“I can’t.”

“It’s the only chance you got.”

Ron opens the door, climbs down out of the enormous truck.

As he turns back to close the door, the old man reaches across the seat and slams it shut himself.

The truck’s knobby tires squeal as it roars away from the hospital.

-37-

Ron stands once more on the corner of Main and 3rd.

He squeezes his wife’s hand, says, “I’m gonna go in here for a minute.”

“I’ll walk down to Starbucks.  You’ll come meet me?”

It feels good stepping out of the maddening August heat and into the theatre—a hundred and fifty-two years old according to the plaque on the brick beside the entrance.

Ron passes through the lobby, through the archway, and climbs two flights of stairs on his tired legs.

He doubts he’s plopped himself down in the same seat he occupied that night, but the view down onto the stage looks exactly like the dreams that still plague him.

Below, a janitor emerges from underneath the balcony, pushing a mop bucket down the center aisle.

-38-

“Excuse me, sir?”

The janitor looks up from his mop bucket, says, “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

“The door was unlocked.”

As Ron arrives at the base of the stage, the janitor’s eyes fall on what remains of Ron’s left hand—everything lost to frostbite but the thumb.

Ron places the janitor around seventy, the man small and wiry.  He asks, “How long have you lived here, sir?”

“Forty-five years next month.”

“No kidding.”

“Look, I gotta finish up here.”

“Could I just ask you one little favor?”

“What’s that?”

Ron’s heart pounds under his Hawaiian shirt, his mouth gone dry.

“I want to see the golden bear.”

“What the hell are you talking—”

“The brazen bear you bring out every winter solstice.”

The janitor smiles and shakes his head, leans against the mop handle.  “You’re one of those people, huh?”

“What people?”

“Once or twice a year, some conspiracy freak comes along asking about the winter solstice celebration, and didn’t this town used to—”

“I’m not asking, and I’m not a kook.  I was here, sir, twenty-nine years ago, December twenty-second, Twenty-Aught-Four.”

“You must be con—”

“I watched from the balcony while you roasted my wife inside the golden bear.”

For a moment, the theatre stands so quiet, Ron can hear the murmur of traffic out on Main, the janitor staring him down with an oblique combination of anger and fear.

Ron says, “I didn’t come here to hurt any—”

“I told you.  I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you—”

“And I got work to do.”

The janitor turns away and pushes his mop bucket toward the far right aisle that in Ron’s dreams are always lined with white-masked executioners.

-39-

He walks slowly down the sidewalk among the throng of tourists, sweating again after half a block.

The waterfall has dried up, and the sky, so blue and pure all those years ago when he and Jessica first came to town, has faded into a pale and dirty white.

Main Street looks the same, although the two lanes have been divided into four to accommodate the tiny vehicles, and there are traffic lights and automated pedestrian crosswalks now at every intersection.  Some of the older buildings have been demolished, but most remain to be dwarfed beneath the five- and six-story apartment buildings.

The “Welcome to Lone Cone” sign boasts a population of just under nine thousand.

Ron glances at the hillsides above town, overridden with condos and trophy homes.

Above them all, a Wal-Mart sits perched on a manmade plateau, and behind it the immense gray peaks stand snowless under the brutal summer sun.

-40-

Ron waits twenty minutes in line for a cup of dark roast, then joins his wife at a table near the window.

“How’s your latte?” he asks.

“Delicious.”

Starbucks world music trickles through speakers in the ceiling like a slow-drip IV.

“Could we spend the night here, Ron?  It’s so beautiful—”

“I’d rather not.”

She reaches across the table, holds his hand.

“When we leave here, do you want to show me where you stumbled out of the mountains?  Maybe we could stop on the side of the road, say a few words for Jessica?”

“Sure, we could do that.”

“You regret coming here.”

“No, it’s not that.  I always knew I would.”

“Must feel strange after all this—”

The knock on the window startles them, and Ron glances up to see the janitor peering through from the sidewalk.

-41-

Ron and the janitor sit on a bench at the termination of 7th Street, on the bank of a filthy pond inhabited by a single mangy-looking duck.

“We thought you’d come back,” the janitor says.  “Right after, I mean.  Wise you didn’t.”

“Town’s changed,” Ron says.

“Beyond recognition.”

“Does Lone Cone still practice—”

“God, no.  People went soft, couldn’t stomach it.  Quit believing in the usefulness of such a thing.”

“Usefulness?”

“You hear about the avalanche?”

Ron shakes his head, swats away a swarm of flies that have discovered the sweat glistening on his bald scalp.

“Second winter after we quit the blot, we caught a blizzard.  Hardest we’d ever seen.  The slide came down that chute right there.”  The janitor points to a treeless corridor on a nearby peak that runs right into the town.  “Destroyed fifty homes, killed a hundred and thirty-one of us.  I still hear them, broken and screaming under the snow.”

“Some might call that divine retribution.”

“I lost my wife and two sons that night.  Almost everyone left after that.  Sold their land to developers.  Then the second homes started cropping up.  Chain stores.  Texans and Californians.”  He sweeps his hand in disgust at the bustling little city, heat shimmering off the buildings and streets.  “Until it became this.  I keep saying I’ll leave one of these days.  Nothing really left for me, you know?  Not my town anymore.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“‘Cause you at least saw this place when it was a piece of heaven.  When it was perfect.  I almost feel a kinship with you.”

“I had to quit practicing medicine,” Ron says.  “Lost everything I’d worked for.  Fucked me up for a lot of years.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“But then I met a beautiful woman.  We had three beautiful children.”

“Glad to hear that.”

Ron pushes against his legs, groaning slightly as he struggles to his feet.

“My wife’s waiting for me in the Starbucks.”

“We weren’t monsters.”

“I better get back.”

Ron starts walking toward the commotion of Main.

“They’re gone,” the janitor says, Ron stopping, looking back at the small, sad man on the bench.

“What’s gone?”

“The old ways.”

“The old ways had a dark side.”

Ron turns away from him and walks across the heat-browned grass, trying to remember what the mountains looked like without all the glass and steel.

The janitor calls after him, “So do we, Mr. Stahl, and now there’s nothing to remind us.”

-42-

We are spread across the country now, old and dying or dead already, and we have mostly acclimatized to the absurdity of daily life in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, although occasionally we regress and rant.

To journals.

Our fellow dinosaurs.

To our children who bring their children to visit us in nursing homes.

We go on about how it used to be—the extinct and glorious slowness of life and other artifacts:

The pleasure of eating real food, seeded and grown out of ground proximate to your own doorstep.

Decency.

Community.

Respect for the old traditions.

We tell all who will listen, but mostly ourselves, that we once lived in a perfect little town in a perfect little valley, where life was vivid, rich, and slow.

And once in a while, someone will ask why it can’t be that way again, and we tell them sacrifice.  There’s no sacrifice anymore.  And they nod with enlightened agreement, that special condescension reserved solely for the old, without the faintest idea of what we really mean.

An introduction to “Serial” by Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath

Since we first met at Left Coast Crime in El Paso, Texas in 2005, we’d always talked about writing something together.  Of course, talking is easier than writing, so we talked and talked and talked but never wrote anything.  Then, last year, Joe sent Blake an email:

“Now, let's consider hitchhiking.  You aren't supposed to go hitch hiking, because the driver who picks you up could be crazy.  You aren't supposed to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be crazy.  Now if we were to collaborate, I write a scene where a driver kills someone he picked up. You write a scene where a hitchhiker kills the guy who gave him a ride. Then we get these two together...”

Blake responded:

“Oooooh, I love that idea...let's do it.....should we write our initial pieces in isolation? And then bring our characters together?  I’ll write 2 pages, you write 2, back and forth, and let the ending just emerge naturally from the story.  This is gonna be fun.”

And it was.  We never could have imagined the response this story would get.  From staying #1 on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list for six weeks, to a quarter-million downloads, to a film deal, to the expanded Serial Uncut edition and Killers Uncut, this story has turned out to be the most loved, most hated, and unquestionably most-read thing either of us has written.

And if we’ve saved one potential hitch-hiker from sticking out their thumb and being brutally murdered, or one driver from picking up a hitch-hiker and being brutally murdered, then it’s all been worth it.

Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath

May, 2010

serial

-1-

The hardest thing about killing a hitchhiker was finding one to pick up.

Donaldson could remember just ten years ago, when interstates boasted a hitcher every ten miles, and a discriminating killer could pick and choose who looked the easiest, the most fun, the juiciest. These days, cops kept the expressways clear of easy marks, and Donaldson was forced to cruise off-ramps, underpasses, and rest areas, prowl back roads, take one hour coffee breaks at oases. Recreational murder was becoming more trouble than it was worth.

He’d finally found one standing in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. The kid had been obvious, leaning against the cement ashtray near the entrance, an oversize hiking pack strapped to his back. He was approaching every patron leaving the restaurant, practicing his grin between rejections.

A ripe plum, ready to pluck.

Donaldson tucked the cell phone into his pocket and got out of the car. He didn’t even have to initiate contact. He walked in to use the bathroom and strolled out with his car keys in hand, letting them jingle a bit. The kid solicited him almost immediately.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you heading up north?”

Donaldson stopped, pretending to notice the man for the first time. He was young, maybe mid-twenties. Short, reddish hair, a few freckles on his face, mostly hidden by glasses. His clothing looked worn but of good quality. Donaldson was twice his age, and damn near twice his weight.

Donaldson rubbed his chin, which he knew softened his harsh features.

“In fact I am, son.”

The boy’s eyes lit up, but he kept a lid on his excitement. Any hitcher worth his salt knew to test the waters before sealing the deal.

“I am, too. If you’d like some company, I can chip in for gas.” He hooded his eyes and quickly added, “No funny stuff. I’m just looking for a ride. I was hoping to get to Ogden by midnight. Got family up there. My name’s Brett, by the way.”

Well played, Donaldson thought. Friendly, a little desperate, making clear this wasn’t a sexual hookup and that he had people waiting for him.

As if any of that would keep him safe.

“How do I know you’re not some psycho?” Donaldson asked. He knew that was pushing it, but he liked the irony.

“There’s a gas station across the street. I can top off the tank, pay with a credit card. All gas stations have cameras these days. Credit card is a paper trail. If anything happens to you, that would link me to your car, and I’d get caught.”

Smart kid. But not that smart.

The really smart ones don’t hitchhike.

“Won’t need gas for a few hundred miles.” Donaldson took off his Cubs baseball hat, running a hand over his gray, thinning hair. Another way to disarm the victim. No one feared grandfatherly types. “Until then, if you promise not to sing any show tunes, you got yourself a ride.”

Brett smiled, hefted his pack onto his shoulders, and followed his ride into the parking lot. Donaldson unlocked the doors and the kid loaded his pack into the backseat of Donaldson’s 2006 black Honda Accord, pausing when he saw the clear plastic covers on the front seats.

“My dog, Neil, usually rides up front with me,” Donaldson said, shrugging. “I don’t like him messing up the upholstery.”

Brett flashed skepticism until he noticed the picture taped to the dash: Donaldson and a furry dachshund.

“Sheds like crazy,” Donaldson said. “If you buy a dog, stick with short-haired breeds.”

That was apparently reassurance enough, because Brett climbed in.

Donaldson heaved himself into the driver’s seat, the car bouncing on its shocks.

“Buckle up for safety.” Donaldson resisted the urge to lick his lips, then released the brake, started the car, and pulled onto the highway.

The first ten miles were awkward. Always were. Strangers tended to stay strangers. How often did a person initiate conversation on a plane or while waiting in line? People kept to themselves. It made them feel safe.

Donaldson broke the tension by asking the standard questions. Where’d you go to school? What do you do for a living? Where you headed? When’d you start hitchhiking? Invariably, the conversation turned to him.

“So what’s your name?” Brett asked.

“Donaldson.” No point in lying. Brett wouldn’t be alive long enough to tell anyone.

“What do you do, Donaldson?”

“I’m a courier.”

Donaldson sipped from the Big Gulp container in the cup holder, taking a hit of caffeinated sugar water. He offered the cup to Brett, who shook his head. Probably worried about germs. Donaldson smiled. That should have been the least of his worries.

“So you mean you deliver packages?”

“I deliver anything. Sometimes overnight delivery isn’t fast enough, and people are willing to pay a premium to get it same day.”

“What sort of things?”

“Things people need right away. Legal documents. Car parts for repairs. A diabetic forgets his insulin, guy loses his glasses and can’t drive home without them, kid needs his cello for a recital. Or a kidney needs to get to a transplant location on time. That’s the run I’m on right now.”

Donaldson jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the backseat floorboard. Brett glanced back, saw a cooler sitting there, a biohazard sticker on the lid.

“No kidding, there’s a kidney in there?”

“There will be, once I get it.” Donaldson winked at the kid. “By the way, what’s your blood type?”

The kid chuckled nervously. Donaldson joined in.

A long stretch of road approaching. No cars in either direction.

“Sounds like an interesting job,” Brett said.

“It is. Perfect for a loner like me. That’s why it’s nice to have company every so often. Gets lonely on the road.”

“What about Neil?”

“Neil?”

Brett pointed at the photograph on the dashboard. “Your dog. You said he rode with you sometimes.”

“Oh, yeah. Neil. Of course. But it isn’t the same as having a human companion. Know what I mean?”

Brett nodded, then glanced at the fuel gauge.

“You’re down to a quarter tank,” he said.

“Really? I thought I just filled up. Next place we see, I’ll take you up on that offer to pay.”

It was a bright, sunny late afternoon, clean country air blowing in through the inch of window Donaldson had open. A perfect day for a drive. The road ahead was clear, no one behind them.

“So seriously,” Donaldson asked, “What’s your blood type?”

Brett’s chuckle sounded forced this time, and Donaldson didn’t join in. Brett put his hand in his pocket. Going for a weapon, or holding one for reassurance, Donaldson figured. Not many hitchers traveled without some form of reassurance.

But Donaldson had something better than a knife, or a gun. His weapon weighed thirty-six hundred pounds and was barreling down the road at eighty miles per hour.

Checking once more for traffic, Donaldson gripped the wheel, braced himself, and stood on the brake.

The car screeched toward a skidding halt, Brett’s seatbelt popping open exactly the way Donaldson had rigged it to, and the kid launched headfirst into the dashboard. The spongy plastic, beneath the veneer, had been reinforced with unforgiving steel.

The car shuddered to a stop, the stench of scorched rubber in the air. Brett was in bad shape. With no seatbelt and one hand in his pocket, he’d banged his nose up pretty good. Donaldson grasped his hair, rammed his face into the dashboard two more times, then opened the glove compartment. He grabbed a plastic zip tie, checked again for oncoming traffic, and quickly secured the kid’s hands behind his back. In Brett’s coat pocket, he found a tiny Swiss Army knife. Donaldson barked out a laugh.

If memory served, and it usually did, there was an off ramp less than a mile ahead, and then a remote stretch of farmland. Donaldson pulled back onto the highway and headed for it, whistling as he drove.

The farm stood just where he remembered it. Donaldson pulled offroad into a cornfield and drove through the dead stalks until he could no longer see the street. He killed the engine, set the parking brake—the Accord had transmission issues—and tugged out the keys to ensure it wouldn’t roll away. Then he picked a few choice tools from his toolbox and stuck them in his pocket.

His passenger whimpered as Donaldson muscled him out of the car and dragged him into the stalks.

He whimpered even more when Donaldson jerked his pants down around his ankles, got him loosened up with an ear of corn, and then forced himself inside.

“Gonna stab me with your little knife?” he whispered in Brett’s ear between grunts. “Think that was going to save you?”

When he’d finished, Donaldson sat on the kid’s chest and tried out all the attachments on the Swiss Army knife. The tiny scissors worked well on eyelids. The nail file just reached the eardrums. The little two-inch blade was surprisingly sharp and adept at whittling the nose down to the cartilage.

Donaldson also used some tools of his own. Pliers, for cracking teeth and pulling off lips. When used in tandem with some garden shears, he was able to get Brett’s tongue out in one piece. And of course, there was the muddler.

Normally wielded by bartenders to mash fruit in the bottom of drink glasses, Donaldson had his own special use for the instrument. People usually reacted strongly to being fed parts of their own face, and even under the threat of more pain, they’d spit those parts out. Donaldson used the plastic muddler like a ram, forcing those juicy bits down their throats.

After all, it was sinful to waste all of those delectable little morsels like that.

When the fighting and screams began to wind down, the Swiss Army knife’s corkscrew attachment did a fine job on Brett’s Adam’s apple, popping it out in one piece and leaving a gaping hole that poured blood bright as a young cabernet.

Apple was a misnomer. It tasted more like a peach pit. Sweet and stringy.

He shoved another ear of corn into Brett’s neck hole, then stood up to watch.

Donaldson had killed a lot of people in a lot of different ways, but suffocation especially tickled his funny bone. When people bled to death they just got sleepy. It was tough to see their expression when they were on fire, with all the thrashing and flames. Damaging internal organs, depending on the organ, was either too fast, too slow, or too loud.

But a human being deprived of oxygen would panic for several minutes, providing quite a show. This kid lasted almost five, his eyes bulging out, wrenching his neck side to side in futile attempts to remove the cob, and turning all the colors of the rainbow before finally giving up the ghost. It got Donaldson so excited he almost raped him again. But the rest of the condoms were in the car, and befitting a man his age, once he got them and returned to the scene of death, his ardor probably would have waned.

He didn’t bother trying to take Brett’s kidney, or any of his other parts. What the heck could he do with his organs anyway? Sell them on eBay?

Cleanup was the part Donaldson hated most, but he always followed a strict procedure. First, he bagged everything associated with the crime. The rubber, the zip tie, the Swiss Army knife, and the two corn cobs, which might have his prints on them. Then he took a spray bottle of bleach solution and a roll of paper towels and cleaned the muddler, shears, and pliers, and swabbed out the interior of his car. He used baby wipes on himself, paying special attention to his fingernails. He put his tools back into his toolbox. Everything else went into the white plastic garbage bag, along with a full can of gasoline and more bleach spray.

He took the money from Brett’s wallet—forty lousy bucks—and found nothing of interest in his backpack. These went into the bag as well, and then he soaked that and the body with lighter fluid.

The fire started easily. Donaldson knew from experience that he had about five minutes before the gas can exploded. He drove out of the cornfield at a fast clip, part of him disappointed he couldn’t stay to watch the fireworks.

The final result would be a mess for anyone trying to ID the victim, gather evidence, or figure out what exactly had happened. If the body wasn’t discovered right away, and the elements and hungry animals added to the chaos, it would be a crime scene investigator’s worst nightmare.

Donaldson knew how effective this particular disposal method was, because he’d used it twenty-six times and hadn’t ever been so much as questioned by police.

He wondered if the FBI had a nickname for him, something sexy like The Roadside Burner. But he wasn’t convinced those jokers had even connected his many crimes. Donaldson’s courier route took him all across the country, over a million square miles of hunting ground. He waited at least a year before returning to any particular spot, and he was finding new places to play all the time.

Donaldson knew he would never be caught. He was smart, patient, and never compulsive. He could keep on doing this until he died or his pecker wore out, and they had pills these days to fix that.

He reached I-15 at rush hour, traffic clogging routes both in and out of Salt Lake, and he was feeling happy and immortal until some jerk in a Winnebago decided to drive ten miles under the speed limit. Irritated motorists tagged along like ducklings, many of them using their horns, and everyone taking their good sweet time getting by in the passing lane.

Seriously, they shouldn’t allow some people on the road.

Donaldson was considering passing the whole lot of them on the shoulder, and as he surveyed the route and got ready to gun it, he saw a cute chick in pink shoes standing at the cloverleaf. Short, lugging a guitar case, jutting out a hip and shaking her thumb at everyone who passed.

Two in one day? he thought. Do I have the energy?

He cranked open the window to get rid of the bleach smell, and pulled up next to her under the overpass, feeling his arousal returning.

-2-

She set the guitar case on the pavement and stuck out her thumb. The minivan shrieked by. She turned her head, watched it go—no brakelights. The disappointment blossomed hot and sharp in her gut, like a shot of iced Stoli. Despite the midmorning brilliance of the rising sun, she could feel the cold gnawing through the tips of her gloved fingers, the earflaps of her black woolen hat.

According to her Internet research, 491 (previously 666) ranked as the third least traveled highway in the Lower-Forty-Eight, with an average of four cars passing a fixed point any given hour. Less of course at night. The downside of hitchhiking these little-known thoroughfares was the waiting, but the upside paid generous dividends in privacy.

She exhaled a steaming breath and looked around. Painfully blue sky. Treeless high desert. Mountains thirty miles east. A further range to the northwest. They stood blanketed in snow, and on some level she understood that others would find them dramatic and beautiful, and she wondered what it felt like to be moved by nature.

Two hours later, she lifted her guitar case and walked up the shoulder toward the idling Subaru Outback, heard the front passenger window humming down. She mustered a faint smile as she reached the door. Two young men in the front seats stared at her. They seemed roughly her age and friendly enough, if a little hungover. Open cans of Bud in the center console drink holders had perfumed the interior with the sour stench of beer—a good omen, she thought. Might make things easier.

“Where you headed?” the driver asked. He had sandy hair and an elaborate goatee. Impressive cords of bicep strained the cotton fibers of his muscle shirt. The passenger looked native—dark hair and eyes, brown skin, a thin, implausible mustache.

“Salt Lake,” she said.

“We’re going to Tahoe. We could take you at least to I-15.”

She surveyed the rear storage compartment—crammed with two snowboards and the requisite boots, parkas, snow pants, goggles, and…she suppressed the jolt of pleasure—helmets. She hadn’t thought of that before.

A duffle bag took up the left side of the backseat. A little tight, but then she stood just five feet in her pink crocs. She could manage.

“Comfortable back there?” the driver asked.

“Yes.”

Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

“What’s your name?”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy, I’m Matt. This is Kenny. We were just about to have us a morning toke before we picked you up. Would it bother you if we did?”

“Not at all.”

“Pack that pipe, bro.”

They got high as they crossed into Utah and became talkative and philosophically confident. They offered her some pot, but she declined. It grew hot in the car and she removed her hat and unbuttoned her black trench coat, breathing the fresh air coming in through the crack at the top of the window.

“So where you going?” the Indian asked her.

“Salt Lake.”

“I already asked her that, bro.”

“No, I mean what for?”

“See some family.”

“We’re going to Tahoe. Do some snowboarding at Heavenly.”

“Already told her that, bro.”

The two men broke up into laughter.

“So you play guitar, huh?” Kenny said.

“Yes.”

“Wanna strum something for us?”

“Not just yet.”

They stopped at a filling station in Moab. Matt pumped gas and Kenny went inside the convenience store to procure the substantial list of snacks they’d been obsessing on for the last hour. When Matt walked inside to pay, she opened the guitar case and took out the syringe. The smell wafted out—not overpowering by any means, but she wondered if the boys would notice. She hadn’t had a chance to properly clean everything in awhile. Lucy reached up between the seats and tested the weight of the two Budweisers in the drink holders: each about half-full. She eyed the entrance to the store—no one coming—and shot a squirt from the syringe into the mouth of each can.

Kenny cracked a can of Bud and said, “Dude, was that shit laced?”

“What are you talking about?”

They sped through a country of red rock and buttes and waterless arroyos.

“What we smoked.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Man, I don’t feel right. Where’d you get it?”

“From Tim. Same as always.”

Lucy leaned forward and studied the double yellow line through the windshield. After Matt drifted across for a third time, she said, “Would you pull over please?”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to be sick.”

“Oh God, don’t puke on our shit.”

Matt pulled over onto the shoulder and Lucy opened her door and stumbled out. As she worked her way down a gentle embankment making fake retching sounds, she heard Matt saying, “Dude? Dude? Come on, dude! Wake up, dude!”

She waited in the bed of the arroyo for ten minutes and then started back up the hill toward the car. Matt had slumped across the center console into Kenny’s lap. The man probably weighed two hundred pounds, and it took Lucy ten minutes to shove him, millimeter by millimeter, into the passenger seat on top of Kenny. She climbed in behind the wheel and slid the seat all the way forward and cranked the engine.

She turned off of I-70 onto 24. According to her map, this stretch of highway ran forty-four miles to a nothing town called Hanksville. From her experience, it didn’t get much quieter than this barren, lifeless waste of countryside.

Ten miles south, she veered onto a dirt road and followed it the length of several football fields, until the highway was almost lost to sight. She killed the engine, stepped out. Late afternoon. Windless. Soundless. The boys would be waking soon, and she was already starting to glow. She opened the guitar case and retrieved the syringe, gave Kenny and Matt another healthy dose.

By the time she’d wrangled them out of the car into the desert, dusk had fallen and she’d drenched herself in sweat. She rolled the men onto their backs and splayed out their arms and legs so they appeared to be making snow angels in the dirt.

Lucy removed their shoes and socks. The pair of scissors was the kind used to cut raw chicken, with thick, serrated blades. She trimmed off their shirts and cut away their pants and underwear.

Kenny and Matt had returned to full, roaring consciousness by 1:15 a.m. Naked. Ankles and wrists tightly bound with deeply scuffed handcuffs, heads helmeted, staring at the small, plain hitchhiker who squatted down facing them at the back of the car, blinding them with a hand held spotlight.

“I didn’t think you were ever going to wake up,” Lucy said.

“What the hell are you doing?” Matt looked angry.

Kenny said, “These cuffs hurt. Get them off.”

She held a locking carabiner attached to a chain that ran underneath the Subaru. She clipped it onto another pair of carabiners. A rope fed through each one, and the ends of the ropes had been tied to the handcuffs on the boys’ ankles.

“Oh my God, she’s crazy, dude.”

“Lucy, please. Don’t. We’ll give you anything you want. We won’t tell anyone.”

She smiled. “That’s really sweet of you, Matt, but this is what I want. Kind of have my heart set on it.”

She stepped over the tangle of chain and rope and moved toward the driver’s door as the boys hollered after her.

She left the hatch open so she could hear them. Kept looking back as she drove slowly, so slowly, along the dirt road. They were still begging her, and occasionally yelling when they dragged over a rock or a cactus, but she got them to the shoulder of Highway 24 with only minor injuries.

The moon was up and nearly full. She could see five miles of the road in either direction, so perfectly empty and black, and she wondered if the way it touched her in this moment felt anything like how the beauty of the those mountains she’d seen this morning touched normal people.

Lucy buckled her seatbelt and glanced in the rearview mirror. Matt had climbed to his feet, and he hobbled toward the car.

“Hey, no fair!” she yelled and gave the accelerator a little gas, jerking his feet out from under him. “All right, count of three. We’ll start small with half a mile!”

She grasped the steering wheel, heart pumping. She’d done this a half dozen times but never with helmets.

“One! Two! Three!”

She reset the odometer and eased onto the accelerator. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty miles per hour, and the boys already beginning to scream. At four-tenths of a mile, she hit forty, and in the rearview mirror, Kenny’s and Matt’s pale and naked bodies writhed in full-throated agony, both trying to sit up and grab the rope and failing as they slid across the pavement on their bare backs, dragged by their cuffed ankles, the chains throwing gorgeous yellow sparks against the asphalt.

She eased off the gas and pulled over onto the shoulder. Collected the spray bottle and the artificial leech from the guitar case, unbuckled, jumped out, and went to the boys. They lay on their backs, blood pooling beneath them. Bone and muscle already showing through in many places where the skin had simply been erased, and Kenny must have rolled briefly onto his right elbow, because it had been sanded down to a sharp spire of bone.

“Please,” Matt croaked. “Oh, God, please.”

“You don’t know how beautiful you look,” she said, “but I’m gonna make you even prettier.”

She spritzed them with pure, organic lemon juice, especially their backs, which looked like raw hamburger, then knelt down with the artificial leech she’d stolen from a medical museum in Phoenix several years ago. Using it always made her think fondly of Luther and Orson.

She stuck each of them twenty times with the artificial leech, and to the heartwarming depth of their new screams, skipped back to the car and hopped in and stomped the gas, their cries rising into something like the baying of hounds, Lucy howling back. She pushed the Subaru past fifty, to sixty, to seventy-five, and in the illumination of the spotlight, the boys bounced along the pavement, on their backs, their sides, their stomachs, and with every passing second looking more and more lovely, and still making those delicious screams she could almost taste, Lucy driving with no headlights, doing eighty under the moon, and the cold winter wind rushing through the windows like the breath of God.

She made it five miles (no one had ever lasted five miles and she credited those well-made snowboarding helmets) before the skeletons finally went quiet.

Lucy ditched what was left of the boys and drove all night like she’d done six blasts of coke, arriving in Salt Lake as the sun edged up over the mountains. She checked into a Red Roof Inn and ran a hot bath and cleaned the new blood and the old blood out of the ropes and let the carabiners and the chains and the handcuffs soak in the soapy water.

In the evening she awoke, that dark weight perched on her chest again. The guitar case items had dried, and she packed them away and dressed and headed out. The motel stood along the interstate, and it came down to Applebee’s or Chili’s.

She went with the latter, because she loved their Awesome Blossom.

After dinner, she walked outside and stared at the Subaru in the parking lot, the black rot flooding back inside of her, that restless, awful energy that could never be fully sated, those seconds of release never fully quenching, like water tinged with salt. She turned away from the Subaru and walked along the frontage road until she came to a hole in the fence. Ducked through. Scrambled down to the shoulder of the interstate.

Traffic was moderate, the night cold and starry. A line of cars approached, bottled up behind a Winnebago.

She walked under the bridge, set down her guitar case, and stuck out her thumb.

-3-

Donaldson pulled over onto the shoulder and lowered the passenger window. The girl was young and tiny, wearing a wool cap despite the relative warmth.

“Where you headed?” He winked before he said it, his smile genuine.

“Missoula,” Lucy answered.

“Got a gig up there?” He pointed his chin at her guitar case.

She shrugged.

“Well, I’m going north. If you chip in for gas, and promise not to sing any show tunes, you can hop in.”

The girl seemed to consider it, then nodded. She opened the rear door and awkwardly fit the guitar case onto the backseat. Before getting in, she stared at the upholstery on the front seats.

“What’s with the plastic?” she asked, indicating Donaldson’s clear seat covers.

“Sometimes I travel with my dog.”

Lucy squinted at the picture taped to the dashboard—the portly driver holding a long-haired dachshund.

“What’s its name?”

“Scamp. Loveable little guy. Hates it when I’m away. But I’m away a lot. I’m a courier. Right now, I’m headed up to Idaho Falls to pick up a donor kidney.”

Her eyes flitted to the backseat, to a cooler with a biohazard sign on the lid.

“Don’t worry,” he said, taking off his hat and rubbing a hand through his thinning gray hair. “It’s empty for the time being.”

The girl nodded, started to get in, then stopped. “Would you mind if I sat in the back?  I don’t want to make you feel like a chauffeur, but I get nauseated riding up front unless I’m driving.”

Donaldson paused. “Normally I wouldn’t mind, Miss, but I don’t have any seat belts back there, and I insist my passengers wear one. Safety first, I always say.”

“Of course. Can’t be too careful. Cars can be dangerous.”

“Indeed they can. Indeed.”

The front passenger door squeaked open, and the girl hopped in. Donaldson watched her buckle up, and then he accelerated back onto the highway.

Grinning at her, he rubbed his chin and asked, “So what’s your name, little lady?”

“I’m Lucy.”  She looked down at the center console. A Big Gulp sweated in the drink holder. She reached into her pocket and looked at the man and smiled. “I really appreciate you picking me up. I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Donaldson. Pleased to meet you.”

“Is that really your last name, or are you one of those guys who have a last name for a first name?”

“No, that’s my first.”

They drove in silence for a mile, Donaldson glancing between the girl and the road.

“Highway’s packed this time of day. I bet we’d make better time on the county roads. Less traffic. If that’s okay with you, of course.”

“I was actually just going to suggest that,” Lucy said. “Weird.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to do anything to make you feel uncomfortable.” Donaldson glanced down at Lucy’s pocket. “Pretty young thing like yourself might get nervous driving off the main drag. In fact, you don’t see many young lady hitchers these days. I think horror movies scared them all away. Everyone’s worried about climbing into the car with a maniac.”

Donaldson chuckled.

“I love county roads,” Lucy said. “Much prettier scenery, don’t you think?”

He nodded, taking the next exit, and Lucy leaned over, almost into his lap, and glanced at the gas gauge.

“You’re running pretty low there. Your reserve light’s on. Why don’t we stop at this gas station up ahead. I’ll put twenty in the tank. I also need something to drink. This mountain air is making my throat dry.”

Donaldson shifted in his seat. “Oh, that light just came on, and I can get fifty miles on reserve. This is a Honda, you know.”

“But why push our luck? And I’m really thirsty, Donaldson.”

“Here.”  He lifted his Big Gulp. “It’s still half full.”

“No offense, but I don’t drink after strangers, and I um…this is embarrassing…I have a cold sore in my mouth.”

The gas station was coming up fast, and by all accounts it appeared to be the last stop before the county road started its climb into the mountains, into darkness.

“Who am I to say no to a lady?” Donaldson said.

He tapped the brakes and coasted into the station. It had probably been there for forty years, and hadn’t updated since then. Donaldson sidled up to an old-school pump—one with a meter where the numbers actually scrolled up, built way back when closed-circuit cameras were something out of a science fiction magazine.

Donaldson peered over Lucy, into the small store. A bored female clerk sat behind the counter, apparently asleep. White trash punching the minimum wage clock, not one to pay much attention.

“The tank’s on your side,” Donaldson said. “I don’t think these old ones take credit cards.”

“I can pay cash inside. I buy, you fly.”

Donaldson nodded. “Okay. I’m fine with doin’ the pumpin’. Twenty, you said?”

“Yeah. You want anything?”

“If they have any gum that isn’t older than I am, pick me up a pack. I’ve got an odd taste in my mouth for some reason.”

Lucy got out of the car. Donaldson opened the glove compartment and quickly shoved something into his coat pocket. Then he set the parking brake, pocketed the keys, and followed her out.

While Donaldson stood pumping gas into the Honda, Lucy walked across the oil-stained pavement and into the store. The clerk didn’t acknowledge her entrance, just sat staring at a small black-and-white television airing Jeopardy, her chin propped up in her hand and a Marlboro Red with a one-inch ash trailing smoke toward the ceiling.

Lucy walked down the aisle to the back of the store and picked a Red Bull out of the refrigerated case. At the drink fountain, she went with the smallest size—sixteen ounces—and filled the cup with ice to the brim, followed by a little Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, and Orange Fanta.

She glanced back toward the entrance and through the windows. Donaldson was still fussing with the pump. She reached into her pocket and withdrew the syringe. Uncapped the needle, shot a super-size squirt of liquid Oxycontin into the bubbling soda.

At the counter, she chose a pack of Juicy Fruit and pushed the items forward.

The clerk tore herself away from a video Daily Double and rang up the purchase.

“$24.52.”

Lucy looked up from her wallet. “How much of that is gas?”

“Twenty.”

“Shit, I told him just do fifteen. Here.”  She put a Jefferson on the filthy counter. “I’ll send him in with the balance, ’cause this is all I’ve got.”

“Don’t be trying to steal my gas.”

Donaldson was screwing on the gas cap when Lucy walked up. She said, “They still need five bucks. I’m sorry. It came to more than twenty with the drinks and gum. I’m out of cash.”

“No ATM?”

“Here? Lucky they have electricity. I’ll get you next stop.” She flashed a shy grin, sashaying her fingers through the air. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He just stared at her for a moment, then turned and started toward the store. Lucy opened the front passenger door and traded out Donaldson’s Big Gulp for the fresh drink. She tossed the bucket-size cup into a trashcan between the pumps and climbed in.

Donaldson was at the counter. Lucy glanced into the backseat at the cooler with the biohazard sign. She looked into the convenience store, back at the cooler, then spun quickly around in her seat and reached back toward the lid.

Empty. The inside a dull, stained white. She closed it again.

Donaldson’s footsteps slapped at the pavement. She settled back into her seat as he opened his door. The chassis bounced when he eased his bulk behind the wheel.

“Sorry about that,” Lucy said. “I thought I had another ten. I could swear my snowboarder friend gave me some cash.” She stuck out her lower lip, pouting. “I got you some gum. And a new drink.”

Donaldson frowned, but he took the Juicy Fruit, ran it under his nose.

“Thank you, kindly. Fresh soda too, huh?”

Lucy cracked open the Red Bull and nodded.

“Cheers. To new friends.” She took a sip. A trail of pink liquid dribbled down the corner of her mouth, hugging her chin and neck, dampening her shirt.

Donaldson shifted in his chair and reached for the cup. He sipped on the straw and made a face.

“What flavor is this?”

“I didn’t know what you liked,” Lucy said. “So I got you a little of everything.”

Donaldson chuckled his approval, then turned the key and put the car into gear.

The winding county road ahead was pitch black, like driving through ink. Donaldson sipped his soda. Lucy watched him closely, taking periodic nips at her energy drink. The cool, dry air seemed to crackle with electricity as they climbed into the mountains.

“So is that really a guitar in that case?” Donaldson asked after five miles of silence.

“What do you think?”

“I’ll be honest with you, darlin’. You’re a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve been around, but I’m not sure what to make of you.”

“How so?”

“You’re young. But you’ve heard of Vietnam, I’m guessing.”

“I loved Platoon.”

Donaldson nodded. “Well then, you were practically there in the rice paddies with me, going toe-to-toe with the Cong.”

He drank more soda. Lucy watched.

“Took some shrapnel in my hip in Ca Lu,” Donaldson said. “Nicked my sciatic nerve. Biggest nerve in the body. Pain sometimes gets so bad I can chew through a bath towel. Do you understand pain, little girl?”

“More so than you’d think.”

“So you should know, then, opiates and I are friends from way back.” Donaldson took a big pull off the soda. “So spiking my drink here hasn’t done much more than make me a little horny. Actually a lot horny.” Donaldson turned to Lucy. “You’re about as musical as I am Christian. So you want to tell me what your game is, or do I take you over my knee and spank you right now like the naughty girl you are?”

Lucy said, “It’s Oxycontin. Did they have that back in ’Nam, gramps? And you being one fat bastard, I squirted two hundred and fifty milligrams into your drink. I’m not some frat boy trying to roofie up a chunky freshman. I gave you the rhino dose.”

She tested the weight of the Styrofoam cup. “Jesus, you’ve already gone through half of it?  I’m actually more concerned you’re going to die of a drug overdose instead of the fun I have planned.”

She reached across the seat and squeezed his leg. “Look, you will be losing consciousness shortly, so we don’t have much time. Pull the car over. I’d like to take you up on that spanking.”

Donaldson stared at her, blinked hard twice, and stomped the brake pedal.

Lucy’s seatbelt released and she slammed into the metal-reinforced dashboard. Donaldson shook his head, then swiped the zip tie from his pocket. He grabbed a handful of wool cap and the hair beneath it and yanked Lucy up off the floor. She fought hard, but weight and strength won out and he cinched her hands behind her back.

Donaldson glanced through the windshield, then checked the rearview mirror. Darkness.

Lucy laughed through her shattered nose and ran her tongue along her swollen upper lip and gums—two front teeth MIA.

Donaldson blinked and shook his head again. Pulled off the road onto the shoulder.

“We’re gonna have some fun, little girl,” he said. “And two hundred and fifty milligrams is like candy to me.”

He ran a clumsy paw across her breasts, squeezing hard, then turned his attention to the backseat.

The guitar case had two clasps, one on the body, one on the neck.

Donaldson slapped the left side of his face three times and then opened the case.

A waft of foulness seeped out of the velvet-lined guitar lid, although the contents didn’t seem to be the source—a length of chain. Four pairs of handcuffs. Three carabiners. Vials of liquid Oxycontin. Cutlery shears. A creepy-looking instrument with six blades at one end. A spotlight. A small spray bottle. Two coils of climbing rope. And a snowboarding helmet.

The front passenger door squeaked open and Donaldson spun around as Lucy fell backward out of the car. He lunged into her seat, but she kicked the door. It slammed into his face, his chin crunching his mouth closed, and as the door recoiled, he saw Lucy struggling onto her feet, her wrists still bound behind her back.

She disappeared into the woods.

Donaldson took a moment, fumbling for the door handle. He found it, but paused.

He adjusted the rearview mirror, grinning to see the blood between his teeth.

“Should we let this one go, sport? Or show the little missus that there are things a lot scarier than a guitar case full of bondage shit?”

Donaldson winked at his reflection, tugged out the keys, yanked up the brake, and shoved his door open. He weaved over to the trunk, a stupid grin on his face, got the right key in on the third try.

Among the bottles of bleach solution, the rolls of paper towels, the gas cans, and the baby wipes, Donaldson grabbed the only weapon an upstanding citizen could legally carry without harassment from law enforcement.

The tire iron clenched in his hand, he bellowed at the woods.

“I’m coming for you, Lucy! And there won’t be any drugs to dull your pain!”

He stumbled into the forest after her, his erection beginning to blossom.

She crouched behind a juniper tree, the zip tie digging into her wrists. Absolute darkness in the woods, nothing to see, but everything to hear.

Donaldson yelled, “Don’t hide from me, little girl! It’ll just make me angry!”

His heavy footsteps crunched in the leaves. Lucy eased down onto her butt and leaned back, legs in the air, then slid her bound wrists up the length of them. Donaldson stumbled past her tree, invisible, less than ten feet away.

“Lucy? Where are you?” His words slurred. “I just wanna talk.”

“I’m over here, big boy! Still waiting for that spanking!”

His footsteps abruptly stopped. Dead quiet for thirty seconds, and then the footsteps started up again, heading in her general direction.

“Oh, no, please,” she moaned. “Don’t hurt me, Donaldson. I’m so afraid you’ll hurt me.”

He was close now, and she turned and started back toward the road, her hands out in front of her to prevent collision with a tree.

A glint of light up ahead—the Honda’s windshield catching a piece of moonlight.

Lucy emerged from the woods, her hands throbbing from circulation loss. She stumbled into the car and turned around to watch the treeline.

“Come on, big boy! I’m right here! You can make it!”

Donaldson staggered out of the woods holding a tire iron, and when the moon struck his eyes, they were already half-closed.

He froze.

He opened his mouth to say something, but fell over instead, dropping like an old, fat tree.

Donaldson opened his eyes and lifted his head. Dawn and freezing cold. He lay in weeds at the edge of the woods, his head resting in a padded helmet. His wrists had been cuffed, hands purple from lack of blood flow, and his ankles were similarly bound. He was naked and glazed with dew, and as the world came into focus, he saw that one of those carabiners from Lucy’s guitar case had been clipped to his ankle cuffs. A climbing rope ran from that carabiner to another carabiner, which was clipped to a chain which was wrapped around the trailer hitch of his Honda.

The driver-side door opened and Lucy got out, walked down through the weeds. She came over and sat on his chest, giving him a missing-toothed smile.

“Morning, Donaldson. You of all people will appreciate what’s about to happen.”

Donaldson yawned, then winked at her. “Aren’t you just the prettiest thing to wake up to?”

Lucy batted her eyelashes.

“Thank you. That’s sweet. Now, the helmet is so you don’t die too fast. Head injuries ruin the fun. We’ll go slow in the beginning. Barely walking speed. Then we’ll speed up a bit when we get you onto asphalt. The last ones screamed for five miles. They where skeletons when I finally pulled over. But you’re so heavy, I think you just might break that record.”

“I have some bleach spray in the trunk,” Donaldson said. “You might want to spritz me with that first, make it hurt even more.”

“I prefer lemon juice, but it’s no good until after the first half mile.”

Donaldson laughed.

“You think this is a joke?”

He shook his head. “No. But when you have the opportunity to kill, you should kill. Not talk.”

Donaldson sat up, quick for a man his size, and rammed his helmet into Lucy’s face. As she reeled back, he caught her shirt with his swollen hands and rolled on top of her, his bulk making her gasp.

“The keys,” he ordered. “Undo my hands, right now.”

Lucy tried to talk, but her lungs were crushed. Donaldson shifted and she gulped in some air.

“In...the...guitar case...”

“That’s a shame. That means you die right here. Personally, I think suffocation is the way to go. All that panic and struggle. Dragging some poor sap behind you? Where’s the fun in that? Hell, you can’t even see it without taking your eyes off the road, and that’s a dangerous way to drive, girl.”

Lucy’s eyes bulged, her face turning scarlet.

“Poc...ket.”

“Take your time. I’ll wait.”

Lucy managed to fish out the handcuff keys. Donaldson shifted again, giving her a fraction more room, and she unlocked a cuff from one of his wrists.

He winced, his face getting mean.

“Now let me tell you about the survival of the fittest, little lady. There’s a...”

The chain suddenly jerked, tugging Donaldson across the ground. He clutched Lucy.

“Where are the car keys, you stupid bitch?”

“In the ignition...”

“You didn’t set the parking brake! Give me the handcuff key!”

The car crept forward, beginning to pick up speed as it rolled quietly down the road.

The skin of Donaldson’s right leg tore against the ground, peeling off, and the girl pounded on him, fighting to get away.

“The key!” he howled, losing his grip on her. He clawed at her waist, her hips, and snagged her foot.

Lucy screamed when the cuff snicked tightly around her ankle.

“No! No no no!” She tried to sit up, to work the key into the lock, but they hit a hole and it bounced from her grasp.

They were dragged off the dirt and onto the road.

Lucy felt the pavement eating through her trench coat, Donaldson in hysterics as it chewed through the fat of his ass, and the car still accelerating down the five-percent grade.

At thirty miles per hour, the fibers of Lucy’s trench coat were sanded away, along with her camouflage panties, and just as she tugged a folding knife out of her pocket and began to hack at the flesh of her ankle, the rough county road began to grind through her coccyx.

She dropped the knife and they screamed together for two of the longest miles of their wretched lives, until the road curved and the Honda didn’t, and the car and Lucy and Donaldson all punched together through a guardrail and took the fastest route down the mountain.

An introduction to “The Newton Boys’ Last Photograph”

The introduction to this story will be longer than the story itself. That’s because “The Newton Boys’ Last Photograph” is an example of hint fiction, a term coined by writer Robert Swartwood, who edited the 2010 W.W. Norton anthology HINT FICTION, of which this story was a part.

Hint fiction is a story that hints at a larger work, a larger world. One of the most famous was Hemingway’s 6-word masterpiece: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You get the idea.

The idea for the 25-word story you’re about to read was originally encapsulated in a poem I wrote in college. When the opportunity to be a part of Mr. Swartwood’s anthology presented itself, my mind instantly returned to that poem, called “Whitewater.”

Glittering silver--

a shock of water

moves behind them

tearing down the

slender, gray-walled gorge

Three smiling

sun-burned faces

sunglasses reflecting

the burly, white-bearded hiker

holding their camera--

one last picture before putting in.

And they could not know

standing there

adrenaline showing

through their white teeth

arm in arm

shirtless

careless

that the faint grumbling

of distant thunder

hardly registered by their ears

above the screaming rapids

means a torrent of summer rain

miles upriver--

a body of living sky water

races towards them.

In Roger’s sunglasses

you can see the tail end

of the gear-laden raft--

a red cooler

a mildewed canvas tent

three fishing poles

and the enormous, waterproof

backpack they’ll find--

which will hold the camera

which holds the film

which holds this

beautiful eerie moment--

when the Fulton County

Sheriff’s Department dredges

the terminus of the

gray-walled gorge

for their bodies.

I like the poem, but it takes too long to get across the idea of how utterly oblivious we are when it comes to what our future holds. This anthology gave me the chance to revisit that idea, clarify it, and boil it down to its essence.

the newton boys’ last photograph

Their sunglasses reflect the backpack on the raft which will hold the camera, which will hold the film, which will hold this eerie, smiling moment.

An introduction to “The Meteorologist”

I’m a weather geek. Always have been. Snowstorms, hurricanes, extreme cold...I’m not sure why, but they move me in some way. I’m never happier than when watching a blizzard rage outside the window. Maybe it has something to do with the raw power of nature—I don’t know.

For years I’ve been attracted to writing a character who shared that love of weather, but who might also take that obsession to a dangerous, even self-destructive place. What if there was a man whose life’s mission was to experience weather in all its extremes, because it was the only way he could come close to feeling alive? More interesting...why was he this way, and how did he get by in the world?

“The Meteorologist” is the culmination of that idea. In some ways, this is a gentle story, the polar opposite of something like “Serial.” But it’s still very much me, brimming with emotion, and close to my heart.

the meteorologist

Summer of the year two thousand and six found him on the plains of west Kansas, veering onto the off-ramp at Exit 95. Hoxie (pop. 1200) lay sixteen miles due north of the interstate, the blaring inconsequence of the town only underscored by its station on the prairie. It was a black freckle on the roadmap, the sort of place one passes through in wonderment that people actually live there.

Peter secured permission from the owner of Hoxie’s only motel to squat in their parking lot for fifteen dollars a day. Paid for three in advance and emerged from the small office into an evening that had failed to release the preceding hours’ blistering store of heat. Across the empty parking lot, slats of sunlight glinted off the chrome hubcaps of his ’87 Winnebago Chalet. Peter considered the microwave inside and the TV dinners in the freezer, any of which he’d had twenty times before. It had been a long day behind the wheel—492 miles—and since the thought of eating dinner alone in the RV depressed the hell out of him, he started walking.

The downtown went for three blocks, and as he moved along the sidewalk, he kept glimpsing prairie—down alleys between the buildings, beyond the dirt streets lined with shabby houses. The sun struck all that grass in glancing blows, and the color changed as the wind blew across it. Green to gold, back to green again. Endless.

Where the business district stopped, he eased down onto a bench and stared sixty or seventy miles to the south at a supercell creeping silently across the plains like an atomic sunset.

Bad lighting. Jazz so easy-listening he couldn’t help but to think of that single video of soft-core he kept behind the respectable DVD collection in the RV—a bride and the best man trapped in an elevator the day of her wedding.

The waitress was wiping a table in the back, and she called out, “Sit wherever you like!”

He slid into a window booth as a trio of skateboarders rolled by, his eyes following their movement, then catching on the bulbous, powder-blue water tower that loomed behind the school. It felt good to be out of the RV. He stretched his legs under the table, let his heels rest on the cushion of the opposite seat.

Voices slipped through a cracked door in the rear wall of the restaurant, and he thought it might be a waiter calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering he was the only customer, that seemed unlikely.

He left the table and walked over to the door and nudged it open.

“B-eleven.”

“Hit.”

Peered into a private room half the size of the main dining room. A crowd of thirty or forty sat transfixed by two men on a makeshift stage, absorbed in a fierce game of Battleship.

The waitress came up behind him, ice rattling in the pitcher of water she held.

“It’s a very important match,” she whispered. “They’ve been having this tournament every Friday for the last few months. Tonight’s the championship.”

Peter chuckled. “Seems pretty intense in there. Money on the line?”

“Actually quite a lot.”

He returned to his table and let the waitress stumble through the longest description of a dinner special he’d ever endured—basically chicken-fried steak in two hundred words.

When she finished her spiel, he decided to splurge—ordered the special and a glass of Woodbridge from an unspecified vintage. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen and returned with his wine and a basket of steaming bread.

“You didn’t just move here, did you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Hmm.”

“What is it?”  She’d told him her name when she first brought the menu, but he hadn’t really been paying attention. In fact, he hadn’t even looked at her until now.

He’d be fifty-three in October, if he lasted that long, and he put the waitress in the vicinity of forty-five—short and slender with graying blond hair and thin lips conservatively colored with coral lipstick that for some reason reminded him more of an accountant. She wore a white dress shirt and black jeans and her hair had been tugged back into a ponytail.

“We don’t get many folks, revise that, any folks just passing through our little piece of prairie.”

Peter sipped his wine, the stem of the glass still warm from the dishwasher.

Notes of black cherry and dish detergent.

“No, I’ve been saving up for years to come to Hoxie. It’s the culmination of a lifelong dream.”

The waitress shot him a slanted stare. “Are you having fun with me?”

He smiled. “A little bit. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head and started her retreat toward the kitchen. “I can already tell,” she said, pointing her finger at him, “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you.”

Sudden applause issued from the banquet room, signifying what could only mean the end of one fleet admiral’s career. Peter leaned back and sipped his wine and basked in a tremor of contentment, old enough at last to know better than to analyze it, or embrace it longer than it meant to stay.

He walked back to the motel a little drunk and a lot tired. Friday night, 9:30 p.m., and Hoxie as dead as advertised—no sound but the hum of streetlamps and crickets. He climbed into the RV and sat for awhile in the dark on the foldout sofa. Staring through the window into the prairie, half-expecting to see some suggestion of residential glow out there, but not even a porchlight disrupted the gaping darkness. Around midnight, he got up and stepped into the closet-size john. Brushed the wine stain off his teeth and tried to avoid meeting the eyes in the tiny mirror. Windows to an empty house. Lobotomy eyes. He cracked a window and crawled into bed. The sound of the wind blowing across the prairie moved him like nothing had in days.

In the morning, he brought yesterday’s coffee to a fast boil in a saucepan and powered up the laptop. The forecast discussion on the National Weather Service’s Goodland, Kansas Website thrilled him—extreme thunderstorm activity expected along the Nebraska border.

Peter headed north up Highway 23 and reached the town of Cedar Bluffs at noon, the sky still clear, the heat intense and wet. He pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut, nuked a frozen dinner in the microwave, ate lunch, slept off the remnants of a three-wine headache.

He woke sweating, the sun blazing into the RV. Grabbed a bottled water from the Fridge, drained it in one long gulp.

That familiar pang of disappointment blossomed in his stomach as he read the updated forecast discussion. The NWS had, as usual, missed the boat. A line of storms were setting up, but over the eastern plains of Colorado, a hundred and seventy miles west of his position. With convection already underway and a supercell forming south of Greeley, the party would be over long before he got there.

He convinced himself on the five-block stroll from his RV to the Prairie View Café that he was going in hopes they’d reprised the chicken-fried steak and because he’d spent the entire day in his home on wheels. It had nothing to do with the waitress who probably had the night off anyway.

She stood at a booth scribbling an order onto a pad when he walked into the restaurant. The chimes that jangled over the opening door caught her attention, and she looked at Peter and raised her finger, might even have winked, though he couldn’t say that for certain in the poor light. The thought of it put knots in his stomach. She wore a blue and white dress that seemed such the epitome of her profession it reminded him more of a movie costume. With her hair down tonight and her lips a paler pink than before, perhaps their natural color, he went short of breath as she walked toward him.

“Hi, Peter.”

“Melanie.”

“You want the window booth again or a brand new experience?”

He thought about it. “I like the booth.”

She walked him over.

He slid in.

“How was your day in scenic Hoxie?” she asked, setting a menu on the table, and he almost responded as he would have to any other human being who tried to engage him, but he didn’t want to just say, “Fine,” because then she’d probably smile and leave and he wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want her to walk away yet.

“Disappointing,” he confessed.

“What happened?”

“It was supposed to storm up near the Nebraska border, but the forecast didn’t pan. Kind of a wasted day.”

She looked at him askance. “It was a beautiful day, Peter.”

“Not if you wanted a storm.”

“No, I guess not. Well, I’ll be back in a bit to tell you about the special. You want something to—”

“I’m an idiot,” he said, heat flooding his face, wondering if she noticed the color. “I should explain.”

“No, it’s—”

“I’m a storm chaser. That’s why I wanted it to—”

“You mean one of those people who photograph tornadoes?”

“Sort of.”

Her face lit up. The awkwardness retreating. “Oh my God, that is so interesting. So you’re one of those guys.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled. Strangely, genuinely impressed. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve heard of in awhile. How’d you pick Hoxie?”

“You guys got hammered a couple years back with a tornado outbreak.”

“I was here when those storms swept through. It was awful.”

“Well, I’ve been all over Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, eastern Kansas.”

“Searching for that elusive storm?”

“Something like that. This western part of Kansas is the last region I haven’t spent a ton of time in. Long range models were predicting an active couple of weeks, so I thought why not give it a shot.”

Melanie glanced over her shoulder at the two other occupied tables, then sat in the booth across from Peter.

“You ever seen a tornado?”

“I’ve seen nine of them.”

“Like in real life?”

“Yep.”

“What’s the closest you ever got?”

“A mile away.”

“What was it like?”

Like standing next to God, but he didn’t say that.

“Amazing.”

She looked at her tables. “I better get back to it.” She got up.

“Melanie?”

“Yes?”

His heart thumped in his chest.

“I’m going out again tomorrow. Now, there’s no guarantee the weather will cooperate, but—”

“I’d love to, Peter.”

“You would?”

“You must’ve read my mind. I was hoping you’d ask.”

It was like nothing he’d done in years, and he felt both joy and debilitating regret that in a moment of weakness (or strength) he’d exposed himself.

The waitress said, “Glass of red?”

His throat constricting. “Be great.”

She headed back toward the kitchen, and he stared through the windowglass, watching the prairie darken. Kept telling himself that it was still Saturday night and he was only in Kansas and his RV just five blocks away. As if that piece of news might tether him to the world he knew.

Melanie lived two miles out of town at the end of a dirt road, spruce trees forming a windbreak along the north and west boundaries of the homestead. It had seemed an idyllic farmhouse from the highway, austere on the morning prairie. Proximity destroyed the illusion. The white paint had chipped almost completely away, and the weathered boards and the rusting tin roof and smiling porch presented more of a ghost house than a livable dwelling.

Melanie emerged and spent a minute locking the door after her. Came down the bowing steps and through the weeds onto the drive as Peter leaned across the seat to open her door, the pair of coffees he’d bought at the gas station steaming into his face.

“I could barely sleep I was so excited,” she said as they rolled along the dirt road toward the highway.

“Could turn out to be a bust,” Peter warned. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“Well, it’s all about the journey, right?”

They drove west on the interstate, the sun a blood blister in the side mirrors, its light so watery and diffused you could stare it down. Adult contemporary droned through the speakers at a reasonable volume, the small talk coming just often enough to keep the stretches of silence from passing the point of no return.

They crossed the border into Colorado at a quarter past eleven and Peter pointed through the windshield. “You see that?”

“You mean those clouds?”

“The one that looks like an anvil is going to be a thunderstorm when it grows up.”

“This is good?”

“Very good. Major convection underway.”

Melanie squealed and clapped her hands, something free and childlike in her excitement.

He took the next exit and pulled over so they could track the gathering storm cells on the laptop—irregular blobs of green with nuclei of hot pinks and fuchsia.

“They’re still maturing,” he said, running his finger along the screen, tracking the loop of their northwesterly movement on the radar. “We’ll take 385. Should intercept them in about forty minutes. If we’re lucky, they’ll be booming.”

They went north. The summer sky turned dark. Peter lowered his window, let the musty air rush in. Straining to hear thunder over the engine.

They pulled onto the shoulder on the outskirts of Wray, Colorado. Peter killed the engine and glanced over at the computer, now in Melanie’s lap.

“We’re in position,” he said.

The first fat drops of rain splattered on the windshield as Peter squinted at the screen.

He opened his door, got out, crossed the road.

Melanie joined him.

Strings of lightning bent down and rain sagged from the clouds in ragged black tendrils.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said, and he wondered if she really meant it, if it touched her with even a fraction of the intensity it touched him, or if she was saying what she thought he wanted to hear. He looked up at the clouds streaming over them.

Lightning touched the plain a mile away, the blast of thunder vibrating the ground beneath their feet.

Melanie clutched his arm.

“Should we go back to the car?” she asked, and he couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. You embraced a storm by standing in the middle of the goddamn thing, feeling the rain beat down on your face, letting the wind bully you, trying not to flinch when the thunder dropped right on top of your head.

“Sure,” he said. “We can go back.”

They experienced the storm from inside the RV, everything reduced to gray through the rain-streaked glass and nothing to see beyond fifty yards as thunder detonated all around them, the Winnebago creaking and listing against the stronger gusts.

Melanie reached over and pried Peter’s right hand off the steering wheel and laced her fingers through his. Her hand was small and warm, and he was afraid if he looked at her she would kiss him.

When the storms had passed, they went on, taking backroads into Kansas, the late afternoon sky going bright and clear, Peter feeling with every passing breath like the RV was shrinking, the air being compressed from his lungs.

Thirty miles north of Hoxie, he pulled off onto the side of the road.

“Why are you stopping?” Melanie asked.

“I just need some air.”

He walked around the front of the Winnebago, the overworked engine pumping eddies of heat through the radiator. Twenty yards from the road, he stopped. The only disruption in all that prairie a grain mill several miles to the east. Peter took deep breaths until the mayhem in his head had gone quiet and he could hear the grasses scraping at his jeans.

Melanie said, “You all right, Peter?”

The sun had dipped below the western horizon.

“Yeah. You?”

“Uh huh.”

They traveled in silence for another mile.

“I mean, did I do something? Because I thought we were having a pretty good time this morning, but now—”

“No, of course not.”

“We weren’t having a good time?”

“No, I mean you didn’t do anything.”

She stared out her window.

They cruised south on Highway 23, and the quiet had grown cancerous by the time the headlights of the RV swept across the porch of Melanie’s farmhouse. He shifted into park and turned back the ignition. Melanie unbuckled her seatbelt.

“Hold on,” Peter said.

“What?”

He wanted her out of the RV. Wanted nothing more than to drive back to the motel, crawl into bed.

“This is my fault,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It was my idea. I invited you.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“I thought…”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”

Melanie put her hand on the door.

“It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching across the open space between the seats, almost touching her, letting his hand rest instead on the edge of her seat. “I just thought I was capable of doing this.”

“Of doing what? Being with me? Is it so difficult?”

“Being with anyone is, but when I saw you in the café last night…I don’t know…something shifted. I’ve said more to you in the last couple days than I have to anyone in twenty years.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“If you understood, if you could be in my head for two minutes, it would.”

The interior lights cut out.

Peter said, “This morning, you asked me where I lived, and I told you I was from Providence.”

“So?”

“That wasn’t really the truth. I lived there a long time ago, but I don’t really live anywhere now. I bought this RV in 1987. Been my home ever since.” Out Peter’s window, a lightning bug flared against the glass. “It’s the hardest thing right now for me not to ask you to get out.”

Melanie opened her door.

“I’m not saying I want you to.”

“I need some air.”

She climbed out of the Winnebago and walked across the gravel drive, easing down on the front porch steps. Peter looked at the keys dangling from the ignition. He touched them. Opened his door and stepped down into the grass.

Lightning bugs everywhere.

A lone cricket screeching maniacally.

He sat beside her on the steps. Cool and he could smell warm hay carried on the breeze.

Said, “In the winters, I seek out ice storms and blizzards. Tornadoes and hurricanes in the summertime. I was in Charleston when Hugo roared ashore in ’89. I was in Florida for Andrew in ’92. The Lower Ninth Ward last summer when the levies broke. I’ve spent winters at Paradise Lodge on the south slope of Rainier just to watch it dump nine hundred inches of snow. A couple years ago I stayed a month at the observatory on Mount Washington. Stood in a hundred and forty mile-per-hour wind that almost blew me off the mountain. I feel…dead…all the time, except when I’m in the middle of some storm, watching the clouds swirl, feeling the snow or rain pelt my face. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but this is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I came to Hoxie to do it, and then I met you, and for a minute—I don’t know why—I wanted to share it with you.”

“Do you have family, Peter?”

The question caused him to flinch. “I don’t have anyone. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you. I know that. I just want you to understand that it’s not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. The reason it turned out like it did today is ’cause I—”

“You have issues.”

“Yeah.”

“A lot of them.”

“Now why are you crying?”

“’Cause you hurt my feelings, dummy.” She wiped her face, got up, and hurried into the house, the door slamming after her. He could hear her crying through the thin walls.

Pushed himself onto his feet and climbed the two flimsy steps to the stoop, where he pulled open the screened door and knocked on the wood of the inner door.

“Melanie, come on. Can we talk please?”

The cries more distant now, lost inside the house.

“I’m coming in, all right?” He tried the door. The knob turned, hinges creaking as he let it swing open. “Melanie?”

He stepped into a foyer, the air redolent of cardboard.

There were boxes everywhere—stacked to the ceiling on either side of the hallway that ran past the stairs into the kitchen, leaving the walkway so tight he would’ve had to sidestep to pass through. At first, he thought Melanie must be in the process of moving, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it before, but then his eyes fell on the living room.

He’d never seen anything like it.

Four television sets, three DVD players, what probably would have formed a cubic yard of DVDs had they not been spread across the room.

A leather couch buried beneath stacks of National Geographic and The New Yorker.

A coffee table caved in under the weight of several full sets of encyclopedias.

Out from under the couch, a gray cat darted over a pile of clothes that still bore their price tags, disappearing into a dining room paralyzed for the stacks of newspapers, eight grills, still in their boxes, and what he estimated to be over five hundred unopened packages of plastic utensils monopolizing every square inch of table space.

He made his way through the cramped hall, and as he neared the kitchen the smell of rotting food became overpowering. He held the side of his arm across his nose and mouth, and standing in the doorway, wondered how Melanie even made use of the Fridge and the sink and the oven range what with the linoleum buried under hundreds of pounds of canned food and sacks of flour and sugar, thirty cereal boxes, and on the countertops, a component of the stench—clusters of bananas and apples and what might have been oranges, all shriveled and glazed with blue mold.

“What are you doing?”

He spun around.

Melanie stood at the foot of the stairs, her face red.

“I knocked on the door, I—”

“Did you hear me say come in?”

“No.”

“Get out.”

“Melanie—”

“Get out of my house!” Tears ran down the sides of her face and she breathed so hard he could see her chest billowing under her button-down shirt.

“All right,” he said.

He started down the hallway between the walls of cardboard boxes, Melanie backing toward the stairs as he approached the foyer. She collapsed on a lower step and buried her head between her knees, her shoulders bobbing as she wept.

At the door, Peter glanced back. Melanie hadn’t lifted her head, and that cat was slinking between her ankles in figure-eights and purring like it meant to sooth her.

He said, “For the record, I think you’re beautiful.”

She wouldn’t lift her head, and her words came spliced with tears. “Please, Peter. I just need you to leave. I can’t stand this. I can’t stand you seeing this.”

“It’s okay, Mel. You don’t have anything—”

“What?” She looked up. “To be ashamed of? Is that what you were going to—”

“No, I—”

Her eyes bugged, her face darkened into scarlet, and she sprang up off the stairs and grabbed his shirt, balling the fabric in her hands and shoving him into the doorframe.

“Do not fuck with me,” she whispered.

“I’m not. I swear.”

“No one. No one has come in here…” It felt like two concurrent slaps, both hands slamming into his cheeks, open-palmed, squeezing his face, drawing it down, her lips barely chapped, her tongue warm. She didn’t kiss him as hard as he feared, though since he hadn’t touched his lips to those of another human being’s in twenty years, three months, and eight days, a point of reference was lacking.

They broke apart, breathless.

Melanie leaned her forehead against his sternum, and Peter stared over the top of her head at the cat who watched him from midway up the stairs.

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked.

“Yes. No.”

He touched the point of her chin. Lifted her head. She stared up at him through a sheet of tears that evacuated from her eyes when she blinked. “I haven’t always lived like this.”

“Me either.”

“When you walked into the restaurant…I don’t know how to put it in—”

“You don’t have to put it any way. I know.”

“Are you lonely, Peter?”

“All the time.”

“Do you want to come upstairs with me?”

“Melanie, I haven’t…in a long time.”

“Makes two of us.”

“I’m not even sure if—”

She put her finger to his lips.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not about that.”

He came almost instantly and he told her he was sorry, that he knew this would happen and that he had tried to warn her. He lay between her legs in the dark in an upstairs bedroom, his hamstrings trembling, their chests heaving against each other.

“Peter, shut up. It’s okay.”

He pulled away but she clasped her legs around his back.

“Please,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

He rested his head on her shoulder as the bedroom flashed with electric blue. Out on the prairie it sounded like someone was moving furniture around—distant thunder.

“Do you want to leave?” she asked.

“No.”

“Is that the truth?”

“It is actually.”

He turned his head so he could see the lightning flicker across the stacks of boxes that diminished the bedroom into something the size of a walk-in closet.

“Peter?”

“Yes?”

“Why’d you leave Providence?”

“I was the head meteorologist at WPRI. Two months after...”

When he didn’t finish the sentence, she ran her fingers through his hair and said, “After what?”

“Can I just leave it at that?”

“Of course.”

“Two months after, I had a nervous breakdown on-air. You can find the footage on YouTube. Over a half-million views last time I checked. I left town, never looked back. How long have you lived here?”

“Nine years. You want to know what happened?”

“Do you want to tell me? Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I can feel your heart beating against my chest. It feels good.”

Later, they lay in bed listening to the rain on the tin roof, Peter sliding his fingers down the side of her arm as he had touched his wife in a previous life, and telling her about the time he almost died when Hurricane Bertha hit Kure Beach on the North Carolina coast. He’d ventured out to the end of a seven hundred-foot pier in the eyewall, clinging to the rail as twenty-foot waves crashed into the framework and hundred mile-per-hour rain and seaspray lacerated his face. He’d heard the outer pilings begin to crack and started the long crawl back to shore, just reaching the beach as the wind and waves tore the pier off the pilings.

He told her about the night he spent on the summit of Mount Mitchell in the ’93 Superstorm, about the time he almost killed himself when a southern blizzard didn’t pan out, about the calm and silent eye of Andrew and its perfect black circle of starry sky, about a December night in Fairbanks, Alaska, when the thermometer hit -58° F, and in the freezing fog his spit would crackle midair, striking the pavement as a blob of sleet. She laughed at that one, thought he was pulling her leg.

They didn’t belabor, as Peter had feared, the circumstances that had brought them to this moment. As she’d said, it wasn’t about that.

Exhaustion and contentment brought increasingly expansive lulls. Then they lay in silence, both facing the tall window beside Melanie’s bed. When the lightning came and the prairie flashed into existence through the heat-warped glass, Peter would catch the fleeting sense that this house and the two of them lying naked upstairs in bed was all that was left of the world.

Glass rattling in the sill wrenched Peter out of sleep and he returned to consciousness as the peal of thunder faded out.

He sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

The darkness through the window tinged with gray.

A jag of lightning split it down the middle.

Melanie moaned, half-asleep, “What are you doing?”

Peter swung his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his briefs and jeans, still conjoined on the floor.

“I need to go read the Goodland advisories.”

“It’s…five-twenty in the morning.”

“Those sound like major storms out there.”

They hurried down the front porch steps, the grasses thrashing and the air making their eyes water, filled with dust and slivers of chaff.

In the RV, Peter opened the laptop and pulled up the National Weather Service page he’d bookmarked upon his arrival in Hoxie.

“Oh, man,” he said.

“What?”

“Come look.”

BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED

TORNADO WARNING

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GOODLAND KS

517 AM MDTMONJUL 17 2006

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GOODLAND HAS ISSUED A

* TORNADO WARNING FOR...

NORTH CENTRAL SHERIDAN COUNTY IN NORTHWEST KANSAS...

* UNTIL 630 AM MDT

* AT 510 AM MDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A TORNADO 15 MILES NORTHWEST OF HOXIE...OR ABOUT 8 MILES WEST OF SELDEN...MOVING EAST AT 15 MPH.

* THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...

SELDEN AROUND 610 AM MDT...

IF YOU ARE AT HOME...SEEK SHELTER IN A BASEMENT IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE...GO TO A SMALL INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR. AVOID WINDOWS AND PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FLYING DEBRIS.

IF IN MOBILE HOMES OR VEHICLES...EVACUATE THEM ANDGET INSIDE A STURDY SHELTER. IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOWSPOTAND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS.

“I have to go,” Peter said.

“Right now?”

He closed the laptop. “Right now.”

“I want to come with you.”

“This will be dangerous, Melanie.”

“I know. But I want to see it. Just let me go change into something.”

“We don’t have time.” He jumped up from the sofa and moved into the front of the RV, sat down behind the wheel, fished the keys out of his pocket. “Bring the laptop please,” he said. “You can help me track it.”

They sped through dreaming Hoxie, the wet streets of the hamlet vacated, the houses still dark. Peter ran the single traffic light at the center of town and raced north up Highway 23, pushing the Winnebago harder than he had in years, the RPMs edging into the red.

“There it is,” Peter said.

“Where?”

He pointed out the windshield. To the northwest in the strengthening light, a thunderhead towered over the plain—concentric circles of green-tinted clouds spiraling into the upper reaches of a 60,000-foot supercell out of the bottom of which a curtain of pale gray draped to the prairie floor.

“God,” he said.

“Is this a special one?”

“You never see them like this.”

“On the radar, it looks like the storm is moving just a bit more to the north.”

“Is it still on track to hit Selden?”

“I think so.”

“Then we’ll try to intercept on Highway 9.”

They entered Selden at 5:57 a.m.

Houselights shining. Families gathered on porches to stare at the sky and listen to the eerie wail of the tornado alarm that blared through town. Peter bypassed the miniscule business district and turned onto Highway 9. They screamed east for three miles, Selden shrinking in the rearview mirror, and then he eased off the highway where it intersected with a dirt road.

“Let me see the laptop.”

He studied the radar loop for thirty seconds and handed the Mac back to Melanie.

“Are we good?” she asked.

He could feel his heart pulsing against the back of his eyes. “Perfect.”

Peter drove the RV across the intersection and onto the opposite shoulder so they faced west toward Selden and the storm. He cut the engine and opened his door and stepped down. Walked twenty feet out from the Winnie, straddled a slash of faded yellow paint in the middle of the road.

Checked his watch: 6:04.

They’d pulled over at a point of prominence on the prairie, the land falling gently away in every direction, so they could see for miles. The front passenger door slammed. He glanced back, saw Melanie walking toward him in a pair of slippers and a lavender nightgown, the thin cotton flickering in the wind.

She smiled, took hold of his hand.

At their backs, the sun crept over the horizon, and when its light hit the storm, the leading shelf cloud turned dirty pink.

It sounded like Selden was getting shelled, the tornado alarm reduced to a dial tone from this distance.

Raindrops specked the pavement.

The alarm hushed.

The swarthy clouds over Selden turned black and a substation exploded in a burst of loose electricity.

Melanie’s grip tightened around Peter’s hand.

Already you could see the counterclockwise churn of debris growing more profuse with every second, and then a black column emerged from the town, carrying pieces of Selden in its swirl which curved for several thousand feet into the sky.

Melanie said, “Oh my God.”

Pellets of hail had begun to bounce off the pavement, a breathy roar becoming audible.

“Should we go?”

He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “The twister’s going to come right down this highway. Right over this spot.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

He handed her the keys to the Winnie. “Head east as fast as you can.”

“Peter—”

“Listen to me. It’s a slow-mover, and there’s a northerly component to its trajectory, so it’ll eventually veer north of the highway.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Melanie, I’ve been trying to get myself into this position for ten years. This is a once in a lifetime kind of—”

“What position? Getting yourself killed by a tornado?”

“I don’t expect you to understand, but I am asking you to please just let me have this moment. Let me do this without interference. I think about it every day. I dream about it all the time. This is what I want. This is all I want.”

“So I just step back, let you commit suicide?”

“I could’ve shot myself years ago. This isn’t about suicide, Melanie.”

“Then what’s it about?”

The twister sounded like sustained thunder, even from three miles away, the condensation funnel widening and darkening, cluttered with all it had scoured out of Selden—cars and stoves and splinters of siding and so many airborne shingles they resembled a flock of birds and God knows what else.

“You better go.”

She shook her head.

“Goddammit, you aren’t going to change—”

She framed his face with her hands. “I’m not trying to change your mind. I honest to God want to stay with you.”

“Melanie.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t you do that. We haven’t known each other long, but I get you, and I think you get me. We aren’t here to save each other, Peter. You know that. That’s not what this is about.”

He stared at her, the wind whipping her hair across her face, pea-size hail clinking on the RV. For a second he considered what it might feel like to love her, but the attendant pain and fear was cost-prohibitive.

He swiped the keys out of her hand, started running toward the RV.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” he said, cranking the engine.

Through the windshield, Selden had vanished behind a shaggy funnel a quarter-mile across.

Peter accelerated toward it, the tornado expanding until it consumed the view west.

He said, “Christ, it’s big.”

“How far?”

“About a mile I’d say.”

He drove another quarter mile and then brought the RV to a full stop in the highway.

“What are you doing?”

“Just having one last look out in the open.”

Peter left the engine running, shoved his door open against the wind, and jumped out.

He ran down the middle of the road for thirty seconds and looked up.

A wall of rotating gray.

Godlike noise.

A thousand jet engines amplified through megaphones, and already the wind slinging roadside trash across the pavement and filling the air with dust. He counted the telephone poles that ran along the highway. After fourteen, they disappeared. The fourteenth vanished, and seconds later, the top half of number thirteen snapped off and was sucked up into the vortex in a spray of blue sparks.

He sprinted back to the Winnie and climbed up into the seat. Slammed the door. Strapped himself in. Melanie’s face was white.

“You’re sure you—”

“Yes, just go.”

Peter shifted into drive, pushed the accelerator into the floorboard.

Melanie produced a deep exhalation and grabbed the edges of her seat.

By the time they’d gone the span of four telephone poles, the oncoming roar drowned out the straining engine.

Two hundred yards from the funnel, grains of dirt and sand began to patter the sides of the RV, the sky rotting into darkness.

At a hundred yards, uprooted grass streamed sideways through the sky and he could feel the north wind in the steering wheel, muscling the side of the Winnie which had begun to rock imperceptibly on its shocks.

He glanced at Melanie, her eyes shut, knuckles blanching.

The speedometer needle trembled at eighty-five as they entered the vortex and he thought he heard Melanie scream but it was the hysterical voice of the twister.

The RV pitched and slammed onto its right side, pavement skinning metal, debris hammering the undercarriage. Peter could feel the pressure drop in his ears and his lungs, and Melanie had her legs drawn into her chest, head buried between her knees, bracing, yellow sparks firing on the other side of her window.

In the swirling gray madness, a potted plant shot past with the velocity of a cannon ball and the walls of the RV creaked and a window exploded in back.

Then the sparks disappeared and the grinding went quiet, the sudden acceleration beyond anything Peter had experienced, pressing him into the cushion of his seat, the roar escalating to a screaming hiss, now pitch black through the windshield and nothing to see but the glow of the dash.

Lightning flashed and the view out his window made him cry.

It would have been invisible but for the lightning. The RV was upright and tilted left. At an inconceivable speed, they orbited the center of the tornado—a cylinder of still, clear air with walls of rotating clouds made brilliant by the ribbons of lightning that streaked across the funnel. Inside, smaller tornadoes were constantly forming and writhing and dying away, and he glimpsed a gray thread at the base of the funnel that he realized was Highway 9, eight hundred feet below.

Peter was still squeezing the steering wheel, holding onto some illusion of control. He let go, tucked his hands under his arms, and stared through the window. Drinking it all in. Fighting to stay with the moment, this last moment, but he kept seeing their faces—clarity where for two decades there had been only blur.

Darkness again.

By the dashboard glow, Peter saw coins rising out of the drink holders.

His stomach lifted into his throat, and he had the inescapable sense that they were plunging earthward—exhilaration and fear and unbearable weightlessness.

Then the G-force struck, crushing his arms and legs, pinning his chin to his chest, and it occurred to him that he couldn’t breathe, that no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t going to be able to stop his eyes from rolling back into his head, and he wondered if he would lose consciousness before they hit the ground.

He felt no pain. He looked down at his arms resting on the seat, bits of glass caught up and glittering in the blond hairs. Wondered if he should try to raise them. If he wanted to know so soon. He decided that he did. He tried. They raised and he held his hands in front of his face and let his arms rotate at the elbows. Next, he let his neck wobble on his head. He wiggled his toes. Like an infant discovering its new body, he thought, running his tongue across his teeth, everything still intact.

He looked over at Melanie. Her eyes were closed and she had slumped against the door, her hair covered in shards of glass.

The nightgown barely swelled over her heart. She breathed.

He watched her for awhile, watched her sleep, and then begin to stir, her eyes opening, struggling to sit up, moving her fingers and toes, touching herself just as he had—a delicate evaluation of what worked and what did not.

At last she looked over at him, her face bleeding where the glass had cut, but otherwise in one piece.

She raised her eyebrows and he knew the question, shook his head.

They were sitting upright in a beat to shit RV, still buckled into their seats. Glass busted out of the passenger and driver side windows, sunlight passing in blinding shears through fractures in the windshield.

And they had not smiled like this before. Not in their lives. Like they’d borne witness to a private miracle. Been made to see. Called forth from their tombs.

There was nothing but grassland and morning sky as far as they could see, and the sound of wind moving through the tall grasses and the coolness of that wind was everywhere and upon everything.

An introduction to “Unconditional”

I’m a father. I love my son beyond words. Beyond understanding. This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve ever written. You’ll understand why afterward, but to say more would spoil the revelatory nature of how this story unfolds.

unconditional

“I’m not scared of what’s coming. Almost looking forward, you know? Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid and you been thinking about it so long, when it finally comes, it don’t feel real? Probably be like that.

“Way I figure, if it’s nothing? Great. If it’s better than this? Hell yeah. And there’s no conceivable way things can get any worse than what I lived. It’s like ever since I was fifteen, I been shot up with anesthetic. A heart pumped full of it.

“Not feeling nothing will drive you to do strange and evil things. This ain’t excuses. Just the way it is.

“You’re looking older, but I guess I am too, right? You missed it. I had a beard yesterday that I’d been growing for years. Looked like some demon prophet. But I figured I should have it cut. See my face one last time. Look, this is more than I talked to anybody in years, and still, it’s about all I got to say, so…

“What?

“Want me to read this now? While you watch?

“You’re just like all of ’em, you know that? Want to bleed me for something, and I can already guess what it is.

“Ain’t I right?

“No?

“Yeah. I am. And if you think you’re going to leave here knowing, I got some news for you.”

My son do you remember the backpacking trip we made into the Ozarks when you were eight years old? I still have a photograph of us squatting by a campfire, you looking cross in the cold with your arms wrapped ’round yourself in that green fleece jacket which last week I took down out of the attic for the first time in ages. Sat alone at the kitchen table late into the night fingering the cinder burns our campfire had made, the polyester melted into circles of plastic. The fleece still carries your scent, or at least some smell my brain has been long-programmed to associate with you.

In my bedroom hanging above the chest of drawers is a drawing you made for me twenty-seven years ago one morning when I was rushing out the door to work. Black Sharpie on orange construction paper—a tall house with too many windows. A tree. Flock of birds in the sky and in the wobbly scrawl of a five-year-old: “I love you, Papa.” I know what it does to me to look at the drawing and the photograph. I wonder what it would do to you? Are you capable of being moved by anything?

I remember teaching you how to tie a fly. How to cast. The joy in your face as you lifted your first rainbow from the current—exhilaration and pride. The other day I drove past the playing field beside the Episcopal church. A perfect October afternoon. The light golden. Leaves turning. Children playing soccer. Ruddy faces and grass-stained knees, and I thought of all the games I watched you play. I can still hear your high-voiced questions, so many of them, coming from the backseat of our car as the three of us drove home from somewhere on some night I failed to appreciate what I had.

When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper—“That man was once someone’s little boy.”

I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it is killing me.

I wanted everything for you, son.

I still do.

You never experienced the gift of children, and I hate that for you, because you won’t understand how I can still love you, how, even though you took everything from me, you’re still all that I have.

When you were a child, I didn’t tell you about the evil in the world, all that lay in wait. In the same way, let’s forget all that’s happened in the past, and let me just be your Papa for the four and a half hours you have left to live. When they strap you down, please say your piece to the families of the victims, but then find my eyes, seek out my face, and if you hold any shred of love for me, take comfort in my presence.

The night of your birth while your mother slept I walked you up and down the hospital corridor, your tiny heart racing against my chest. I sang into your ear, told you that no matter what happened, I would be your Papa.

Always.

And I stand by that still.

The young man behind the Plexiglas turns over the last page of the letter and stares into the scuffs in the table. Through the walls, you can hear metal doors closing, bolts sliding home, the distant voices of the guards. He doesn’t look anything like a monster. Rather, an IT guy. Wire-rim glasses. Scrawny and slight. Five-seven in shoes with generous heels. Five-six in the prison-issue flip-flops. He’s had a recent shave.

The old man startles when he reaches up to unshelve the phone again.

For a long time, they both just breathe into the receivers, and when he speaks, his voice is soft and southern and contains a raspy, blown-out quality, as if he spent the last four years screaming.

“That’s all you got to say to me?”

As his father nods, he can see the long, blanched line of scarring across the old man’s throat, and he feels a flicker—not remorse, not regret, just some unidentified emotional response, alien because it’s rare.

“I heard they had to cut out your voicebox.”

A nod.

“And you won’t use one of them speech enhancement devices?”

Shake.

“Hell, I wouldn’t either. I don’t want to speak for you, but I would think not having to talk to assholes has a bright side.”

His old man breaks the slightest smile.

“So you aren’t going to ask me? That’s not why you came?”

A look of recognition passes across his father’s hazel eyes like the shadow of a cloud, and the old man shakes his head.

“You just came for me. To be here for me.”

The young man is quiet for a long while. He gathers up the pages of the letter and reads them again. When he finishes, he stares at his father, feels the tremor he’s been fighting for the last two days sneaking back, and he has to sit on his right hand to stop it.

“I want to do something for you now. It ain’t much but it’s all I got to give. You remember the big Magnolia tree I used to climb in the cemetery? That’s where Mom is. Underneath it.”

A sheet of tears begins to shimmer across the surface of his father’s eyes.

“I can’t tell you why I did what I did to her. To you. So if you came to hear where I put her, now you heard, and now you can leave and quit pretending and I won’t hold it against you.”

His father lowers the phone and leans in toward the scratched-up Plexi.

Mouths, I’m not going anywhere.

An introduction to “The Pain of Others”

This one closes out the collection, because it’s probably my favorite story I’ve written to date. I’d tried half a dozen times to execute what I thought was a cool idea...what if in the course of your daily life, you accidentally intercepted a hit, a contract killing—maybe you discovered that a hitman was going to knock someone off, or you were mistakenly tasked with carrying out the hit.

I kept trying to attack this idea and kept striking out. I couldn’t get any traction, and I was starting to become really frustrated.

This was the problem (I realized in hindsight): in all my failed attempts to write this story, my everyman, the person who accidentally gets themselves involved, was a good person. Which meant that logic dictated they would simply go straight to the police, identify the bad guy, save the good guy, story over. And that’s no fun.

The breakthrough for me on this story was when I realized that my hero couldn’t go to the police. That I would have to make that impossible. So I decided to make them a thief, on probation, and to have them in the midst of committing a crime when they discover the hitman and his intentions.

Sometimes you get lucky and characters come fully-formed and ready to talk to you.

Letty Dobesh, the anti-hero of “The Pain of Others” did not disappoint. She truly wrote herself, and I had so much fun with her, I’m sure she’ll show up in something else in the not too distant.

In the meantime, this is Letty’s story. She’s a thief, yes, but she has a conscience. I love her because she made this story happen for me. I hope you’ll love her too.

the pain of others

The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity…Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Letty Dobesh, five weeks out of Fluvanna Correctional Institute on a nine-month bit for felony theft, straightened the red wig over her short brown hair, adjusted the oversize Jimmy Choo sunglasses she’d lifted out of a locker two days ago at the Asheville Racquet and Fitness Club, and handed a twenty-spot to the cabbie.

“Want change, Miss?” he asked.

“On a $9.75 fare? What does your heart tell you?”

Past the bellhop and into the Grove Park Inn carrying a small leather duffle bag, the cloudy autumn day just cool enough to warrant the fires at either end of the lobby, the fourteen-foot stone hearths sending forth drafts of intersecting warmth.

She sat down at a table on the outskirts of the lounge, noting the prickle in the tips of her ears that always started up right before. Adrenaline and fear and a shot of hope because you never knew what you might find. Better than sex on tweak.

The barkeep walked over and she ordered a San Pellegrino with lime. Checked her watch as he went back to the bar: 2:58 p.m. An older couple cuddled on a sofa by the closest fireplace with glasses of wine. A man in a navy blazer read a newspaper several tables away. Looked to her like money—top-shelf hair and skin. Must have owned a tanning bed or just returned from the Islands. Two Mexicans washed windows that overlooked the terrace. All in all, quiet for a Saturday afternoon, and she felt reasonably anonymous, though it didn’t really matter. What would be recalled when the police showed up? An attractive thirty-something with curly red hair and ridiculous sunglasses.

As her watch beeped three o’clock, she picked out the sound of approaching footsteps—the barkeep returning with her Pellegrino. He set the sweating glass on the table and pulled a napkin out of his vest pocket.

She glanced up. Smiled. Good-looking kid. Compulsive weightlifter.

“What do I owe you?”

“On the house,” he said.

She crushed the lime into the mineral water. Through the windows she could see the view from the terrace—bright trees under grey sky, downtown Asheville in the near distance, the crest of the Blue Ridge in the far, summits headless under the cloud deck. She sipped her drink and stared at the napkin the barkeep had left on the table. Four four-digit, handwritten numbers. Took her thirty seconds to memorize them, and a quick look around confirmed what she had hoped—the windowwashers and the hotel guests remained locked and absorbed in their own worlds. She lifted the napkin and slid the keycard underneath it across the glass tabletop and into her grasp. Then shredded the napkin, sprinkling the pieces into the hissing water.

One hour later, she fished her BlackBerry out of her purse as she stepped off the elevator and onto the fifth floor. The corridor plush and vacant. No housekeeping carts. An ice machine humming around the corner.

Down the north wing, Letty flushing with the satisfaction that came when things went pitch-perfect. She could have quit now and called it a great haul, her duffle bag sagging with the weight of three high-end laptops, $645 in cash, one cell phone, two iPods, and three fully-raided minibars.

Standing in front of the closed door of 5212, she dialed the front desk on her stolen BlackBerry.

“Grove Park Inn Resort and Spa. How may I direct your call?”

“Room 5212.”

“Certainly.”

Through the door, she heard the phone ringing, and she let it ring five times before ending the call and glancing once more up and down the corridor.

The master keycard unlocked the door.

5212 was the modest one of the four—a single king-size bed (unmade), tiled bathroom with a shower and garden tub, the mirror still beaded with condensation. In the sitting area, an armoire, loveseat, leather chair, and floor-to-ceiling windows with a three hundred and fifty dollar-a-night view of the Asheville skyline, the mountains, and a golf course—greens and fairways lined with pines and maple trees. A trace of expensive cologne lingered in the air, and the clothes on the bed smelled of cigar smoke.

She perused the bedside table drawer, the armoire, the dresser, the drawers under the bathroom sink, the closet, the suitcase, even under the sofa cushions, which occasionally yielded big scores from the rich too cheap or lazy to use the hotel safe.

Room 5212 was a bust—nothing but three Romeo y Julieta cigars, which she of course pocketed—bonuses for the bellhop and barkeep.

On her way out, Letty unzipped her duffle bag and opened the minibar, her BlackBerry buzzing as she reached for a 1.5 ounce bottle of Glenlivet 12 Year.

Pressed talk. “Yeah?”

“What room you in?”

“5212.”

“Get out of there. He’s coming back.”

She closed the minibar. “How long do I have?”

“I got tied up giving directions. You might not have any time.”

She hoisted the duffle bag onto her shoulder, started toward the door, but the unmistakable sound of a keycard sliding into the slot stopped her cold.

A muffled voice: “I think you’ve got it upside down.”

Letty opened the bifold closet doors and slipped in. With no doorknob on the inside, she had to pull them shut by the slats.

People entered the hotel suite. Letty let the duffle bag slide off her shoulder and onto the floor. Dug the BlackBerry out of her purse, powered it off as the door closed.

Through a ribbon of light, she watched two men walk past the closet, one in a navy blazer and khaki slacks, the other wearing a black suit, their faces obscured by the angle of the slats.

“Drink, Chase?”

“Jameson, if you’ve got it.”

She heard the minibar open.

The man who wasn’t named Chase poured the Irish whiskey into a rocks glass and cracked the cap on a bottle of beer and the men settled themselves in the sitting area. Letty drew in deep breaths, her heart slamming in her chest, her knees soft, as if her legs might buckle at any moment.

“Chase, I need to hear you say you’ve really thought this through, that you’re absolutely sure.”

“I am. I only went to Victor when I realized there was no other way. I’m really in a bind.”

“You brought the money?”

“Right here.”

“Mind if I have a look?”

Letty heard locks unclasp, what might have been a briefcase opening.

“Now, you didn’t just run down to your bank, ask for twenty-five large in hundred dollar bills?”

“I went to Victor.”

“Good. We’re still thinking tomorrow, yes?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I understand you have a son?”

“Skyler. He’s seven. From a previous marriage.”

“I want you to go out with your son tomorrow morning at ten. Buy some gas with a credit card. Go to Starbucks. Buy a coffee for yourself. A hot chocolate for Skyler. Wear a bright shirt. Flirt with the barista. Be memorable. Establish a record of you not being in your house from ten to noon.”

“And then I just go home?”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell me what you’re going to do? So I can be prepared?”

“It’d be more natural, your conversations with the police I mean, if you were truly surprised.”

“I hear you on that, but I’ll play it better if I know going in. It’s the way I’d prefer it, Arnold.”

“Where does your wife typically shower?”

“Upstairs in the master bath, right off our bedroom.”

“As you’re stepping out of the shower, is the toilet close?”

“Yeah, a few feet away.”

“You’re going to find her on the floor beside the toilet, neck broken like she’d slipped getting out of the shower. It happens all the time.”

“Okay.” Chase exhaled. “Okay, that’ll work. I like that. Then I just call the police?”

“Call Nine-one-one. Say you don’t know if she’s dead, but that she isn’t moving.”

“The police won’t suspect I did this?”

“They may initially.”

“I don’t want that.”

“Then don’t have your wife killed. It’s not a neat, easy transaction, and you shouldn’t do business with anyone who tells you it is. The husband will always be suspected at first, but please understand I am very good at what I do. There will be an autopsy, but assuming you hold it together, it’ll be ruled an accident. Now what does your wife do for a living?”

“Not really anything now. She used to be a registered nurse. Why?”

“Just a little piece of information that helps me to prepare.”

“That manila folder in the briefcase contains a recent photograph of Daphne. Address. House key. Floor plan. Everything you asked for. And I’ll make sure the third window to the right of the front door is unlocked.”

“I’ll need your help distracting her while I’m getting inside. I want you to call her at precisely 10:15 a.m. Tell her you can’t find your wallet. You got a bedside table?”

“I do.”

“You say you think you might have left it there, and would she please go check. That’ll get her upstairs, give me time to get in.”

“I should write this all down.”

“No. Don’t write anything down.” The black-suited man rose to his feet. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to grab some shut eye.”

They came toward her, and Letty realized that Chase was the tanned and moneyed specimen she’d seen in the lobby.

“Once you walk out the door, Chase, there’s no going back. You need to understand that.”

She watched them shake hands and then Arnold opened the door and saw Chase out and came back in and closed and locked the door.

He went past the closet and sat down on the end of the bed. Pulled off his shoes and his black socks, and as he sat there rubbing his feet, it occurred to her that he still wore his jacket, that he would want to hang it in the closet. Arnold stood and took off his jacket and started toward the closet.

The vibration of his phone stopped him. He flipped it open. Sighed.

“Yeah…no, it’s fine.” He unbuttoned his white Oxford shirt.

Letty’s hands trembled.

“The floral pattern, Jim.” He lay his jacket across the dresser and turned his back to the closet. “Remember we talked about this?” His pants fell to his ankles, followed by his boxer shorts. He stepped out of them, climbed onto the bed, and lay on his back, his feet hanging off the end. “No, Jim. With the daffodils.”

Already forty-five minutes late for work, Letty peered through the slats, saw Arnold’s chest rising and falling, the man otherwise motionless and perfectly silent. She’d been standing in the same spot for almost ninety minutes, and though she’d abandoned her heels, the closet didn’t afford room, with the doors closed, for her to sit down or bend her knees to a sufficient degree of relief. Her legs had been cramping for the last half hour, hamstrings quivering.

She lifted her duffle bag, and as she pushed against the closet door, a rivulet of sweat ran down into the corner of her right eye. Blinking through the saltwater sting, she felt the door give, folding in upon itself with a subtle creak.

She stepped out into the room, glanced at the bed. Arnold hadn’t moved.

At the door, she flipped back the inner lock, turned the handle as slowly as she could manage. The click of the retracting deadbolt sounded deafening. She eased the door back and stepped across the threshold.

She sat in the lobby, now noisy and crowded with the onset of cocktail hour. In her chair by the fireplace, she stared into the flames that roasted twelve-foot logs, the BlackBerry in her right hand, finger poised to press talk.

She couldn’t make the call. She’d rehearsed it three times, but it didn’t feel right. Hell, she didn’t even know Daphne’s last name or where the woman lived. Her story would require a leap of faith on the part of the investigating lawman, and when it came to credibility, she held a pair of twos. She couldn’t use her real name, and meeting face-to-face with a detective could never happen. Letty had been convicted three times. Six years of cumulative incarceration. Her fourth felony offense, she’d be labeled an habitual criminal offender and entitled to commiserate sentencing guidelines at four times the max. She’d die in a federal prison.

So seriously, all things considered, what did she care if some rich bitch got her ticket punched? If Letty hadn’t hit room 5212 when she did, she’d already be at the diner, flirting for the big tips and still glowing from the afternoon’s score. She tossed the BlackBerry back into her duffle. She should just leave. Pretend she’d never heard that conversation. She stole from people, innocent strangers, every chance she got. It never kept her up nights. Never put this torque in her gut. She’d get out of there, call in sick to work, buy two bottles of merlot, and head back to her miserable apartment. Maybe read a few chapters of that book she’d found at the thrift store—Self-Defeating Behaviors: Free Yourself from the Habits, Compulsions, Feelings, and Attitudes That Hold You Back. Pass out on the sofa again.

And you’ll wake up tomorrow morning with a headache, a sour stomach, a rotten taste in your mouth, and you’ll look at yourself in that cracked mirror and hate what you see even more.

She cursed loud enough to attract the attention of an older man who’d dolled himself up for the evening, his eyes glaring at her over the top of the Asheville Citizen-Times. She slashed him with a sardonic smile and got up, enraged at herself over this swell of weakness. She took two steps. Everything changed. The anger melted. Exhilaration flooding in to take its place. In the emotion and fear of the moment, it had completely escaped her.

Room 5212 contained the manila folder with Daphne’s photograph and address, but also a briefcase holding $25,000 in cash. Steal the money. Steal the folder. Save a life.

Even as she scrounged her purse for the master keycard, she knew she wouldn’t find it. In those first ten seconds of entry into Arnold’s room, she’d set it on the dresser, where she imagined, it still sat. She could feel the heat spreading through her face. The barkeep and the bellhop, her only contacts at the hotel, were already off-shift. There’d be no replacement keycard.

She started through the lobby, wanting to run, punch through a sheetrock wall, do something to expend the mounting rage.

She’d stopped to calm herself, leaning against one of the timber columns, her head swimming, when thirty feet away, a bell rang, two brass doors spread apart, and the man named Arnold strode off the elevator, looking casual in blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a sports jacket. She followed his progress, watching him thread his way through the crowd, finally arriving at the entrance to the Sunset Terrace. He spoke with the hostess at the podium, and without even thinking about it, Letty found herself moving toward him, wishing she’d honed her pickpocket skills during one of her stints in prison. She’d known a woman at Fluvanna who had it down so cold she’d once lifted fifty wallets during a single day in Disney World. Arnold’s back pockets were hidden under his navy jacket, no bulge visible, but people with sense didn’t keep their wallet there. Inner pocket of his jacket more likely, and she knew enough to know it took scary talent to snatch it from that location. You had to practically collide with the mark, your hands moving at light speed and with utter precision. She didn’t have the chops.

Arnold stepped away from the hostess podium, and she watched him walk across the lobby into the Great Hall Bar, where he slid onto a barstool and waited to be served.

Letty cut in front of a striking couple and elbowed her way to the bar. The stool to Arnold’s left sat unoccupied and she climbed onto it, let the duffle bag drop to her feet. She recognized the scent of his cologne, but she didn’t look at him. Watched the barkeep instead, his back to her, mixing what appeared to be a Long Island Iced Tea, pouring shots from four different liquor bottles at once into a pint glass filled with ice.

Arnold drank from a long-necked bottle of Coors Light, picking at the label between sips. Something about his hands fascinated Letty, and she kept staring at them out of the corner of her eye.

When after two minutes the barkeep hadn’t come over to take her drink order, she let slip an audible sigh, though in reality she sympathized. The lounge was crowded and she could tell the guy was doing the best he could.

She glanced over at Arnold, back at the bar, thinking he hadn’t noticed her predicament. Like everyone else, exclusively engaged in his own world.

So it startled her when he spoke.

“Bartender.”

And though the word hadn’t been shouted, something in its tone implied a command that ought not be ignored. Clearly the barkeep picked up on it, too, because he was standing in front of Arnold almost instantaneously, like he’d been summoned.

“Get you another Coors?”

“Why don’t you ask the lady what she wants?”

“Sorry, I didn’t know she was with you.”

“She’s not. Still deserves a drink before the icecaps melt, don’t you think?”

The barkeep emanated a distinct don’t-fuck-with-me vibe that gave Letty the feeling he’d probably killed a number in medium security. A hardness in the eyes she recognized. But those eyes deferred to the customer seated to her right, flashing toward her with a kind of disbelief, like they’d grazed something harder than themselves and come away scratched.

“What would you like?”

“Grey Goose martini, little dirty, with a free range olive.”

“You got it.”

Now or never. She turned toward Arnold who’d already turned toward her, anticipating the attention, the tips of her ears on fire again, and got her first good look at him. Forty years old, she would have guessed. Smoothshaven. Black hair, conservatively cropped. His collar just failing to hide the end of a tat, what might have been an erotic finger strangling his neck. Green eyes that exuded not so much hardness as an altogether otherworldly quality. She didn’t know if it was Arnold’s confidence or arrogance, but under different circumstances (and perhaps even these) she might have felt a strong attraction to the man.

“You’re a lifesaver,” she said.

He broke a slight smile. “Do what I can.”

She fell back on her break-in-case-of-emergency smile, the one that had disarmed a cop or two, that she’d used to talk her way out of a hotel room in Vegas.

“I’m Letty.”

“Arnie.”

She shook his hand.

“So’s Letty short for—”

“Letisha. I know, it’s awful.”

“No, I like it. Nothing you hear every day.”

The barkeep placed a martini in front of Letty, slid a fresh beer to Arnold.

“I got these,” Letty said, going for her purse.

“Get out of here.” Arnold reaching into his jacket.

“Actually,” the barkeep said, “these are on me. Sorry about the wait, guys.”

Letty raised her martini by the stem, clinked her glass against the neck of Arnie’s bottle.

“Cheers.”

“New friends.”

They drank.

“So where you from?” Arnie asked.

“Recently moved here.”

“Nice town.”

“S’okay.”

She could already feel the conversation beginning to strain, climbing toward a stall.

“I have a confession to make,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I shouldn’t. You’ll think I’m awful.”

“I already think you’re awful. Go for it.” He bumped his shoulder against hers as he said it, and she loved the contact.

“I’m here for a blind date.”

“What’d you do? Ditch the guy?”

“No, I’m chickening out. I don’t want to go through with it.”

“You were supposed to meet him in the lobby?”

“This bar. I got scared. Saw you sitting here. I’m a bad person, I know.”

Arnold laughed and slugged back the dregs of his first beer. “How do you know I’m not the guy?”

“Oh God, are you?”

He raised his eyebrows as if dragging out the suspense.

Finally said, “No, but this poor sap’s probably walking around trying to find you. He know what you look like?”

“General description.”

“So you want to hide out with me. Is that it?”

She dusted off her cute, pouty face. “If it’s not too much trouble. I can’t promise to be witty and engaging but I will get the next round.” She sipped her drink, staring him down over the lip of the martini glass, the salt of the olive juice and the vodka burn flaring on the sides of her tongue.

“Do you one better,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“Well, if we’re really going to sell the thing, totally throw this guy off your trail, you should probably have dinner with me.”

They told each other lies over a beautiful meal, Letty becoming a high-school English teacher and aspiring novelist. She would rise at four every morning and write for three hours before driving into work, the book already five hundred pages, single-spaced, about a man who bears a strong likeness to a movie star and uses that resemblance to storm the Broadway scene and ultimately Hollywood, to comic and tragic ends.

Arnold worked for a philanthropist based out of Tampa, Florida. Had come to Asheville to investigate and interview the CEO of a research and development think tank that had applied for funding.

“What exactly are they involved in?” Letty asked after the waiter had set down her steak and topped off her wineglass, and she’d sliced into the meat, savoring both the perfection of her medium-rare porterhouse and the impromptu train of bullshit Arnold rattled off about bioinformatics and cancer applications.

They killed two bottles of a great Bordeaux, split a chocolate lava cake, and wrapped things up with a pair of cognacs, sharing a couch by a fireplace in the lobby, Letty adding up the three martinis, her share of the wine (more than a bottle), and now this Rémy Martin which was going down way too easy. Part of her sounding the alarm—you’re letting it get away from you. The rest wondering how fast the Hispanic bellhop pulling a cart of luggage toward the elevators could score her some tweak and would Arnold be down for it if he did?

In the dull brass doors, she watched her and Arnold’s warped reflection. He kissed the back of her neck, those fascinating hands around her waist which she was too drunk to bother sucking in.

They stumbled out onto the fifth floor, and by the time she realized her mistake, there was nothing to be done, having instinctively turned down the north wing toward room 5212, as if she’d been up here before.

“I have another confession to make,” Letty said while Arnold rummaged through the minibar.

“What’s that?”

“I’m not a redhead.”

He glanced over the top of the open door as Letty tugged off her wig.

“You look upset,” she said.

He stood up, kicked the door closed with the tip of his boot, set the bottles of beer on the dresser beside the keycard Letty had left behind four hours ago.

Sauntered toward her in slow, measured steps, stopping less than an inch away, his belt buckle grazing her sternum.

“Are you upset?” she slurred.

He ran his fingers through her short, brown hair to the base of her neck. She thought she felt his hands tightening around her throat, her carotid artery pulsing against the pressure. Looked up. Green eyes. Suspicion. Lust. She swayed in her heels. He ran his hands down her waist, over the curve of her hips, moved his right hand into the small of her back and pulled her against him.

Music bled through from the next room, something mid-tempo and synthesized from the 80’s—Air Supply or worse.

They kept dancing after the music had stopped, a mutual drunken stagger, Arnold working them back toward the wall, where his hand fumbled for the light dimmer.

She woke in the middle of the night with a violent thirst, and even lying on a pillow it felt like someone had caved her skull in while she slept, the red digits of the alarm clock continually descending into place, like the endless motion of a barbershop pole. The bulk of a man snored beside her, his rank breath warming the back of her neck. She lay naked with a cover twisted between her legs. Couldn’t recall passing out. The events after returning to this room lay in shards of memory—slamming shots of Absolut out of tiny bottles. A fast, hard fuck that didn’t approach the hype. She wondered if she’d said anything to undermine the evening’s lies, and just the threat of it, considering the man whose bed she shared, broke a cold sweat across her forehead. She shut her eyes. Heard her father’s voice—all cigarette growl and whiskey-tongued—that whispered to her on nights like these, lying in the beds of strange men and the darkness spinning, or a lonely cell, cursing her back to sleep. Words that, deep in her heart, she knew were true.

Threads of light stole in around the blinds.

9:12 a.m.

A line of painful brilliance underscored the bathroom door, the shower rushing on the other side. She sat up in bed and threw back the covers and brought her palms to her temples, pressing against the vibrant ache.

Out of bed, onto her feet, listing and nauseated. Stepped into her knit cashmere dress and pulled the straps over her shoulders. Last time she’d seen that leather briefcase full of money, it was sitting on the floor beside the loveseat, but it had since been moved. She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the couch, then under the bed.

Nothing.

As she opened the closet, Arnold yelled from the shower, “Letty, you up?”

The briefcase leaned against the wall on the top shelf inside the closet, and she had to rise on the balls of her feet to grasp it.

“Letty!”

Pulled the briefcase down, walked over to the bathroom door.

“Yeah, I’m up,” she said.

“How do you feel?”

“Like death.”

She squatted down, fingering the clasps on the briefcase.

“I didn’t mention it last night,” he said, “but I’ve got this meeting to go to.”

“This morning?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Is this with the think tank?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

Her thumbs depressed two buttons. The clasps released.

“I wanted to have breakfast with you,” she said and opened the case.

“We could do dinner.”

Twenty-five thousand in cash didn’t look all that impressive—just five slim packets of hundos.

“You staying here tonight?” she asked, lifting one, flipping through the crisp, clean bills, breathing in the ink and the paper.

“I would,” he said, “if you wanted to get together again.”

The shower cut off. She heard the curtain whisk back. Tossed the packet into the briefcase, grabbed the manila folder, leafed through the contents: floor plan, house key, one page of typewritten notes, and a black-and-white photograph of a woman who couldn’t have been more than a year or two past thirty. The shot was candid, or trying to be, Daphne in the foreground, in startling focus, surrounded by clusters of blurry rhododendron. Her hair long, black, straight. Skin preternaturally pale. A remote and icy beauty.

Arnold was toweling off now.

“We could definitely meet for dinner tonight,” Letty said as she scanned the address on the page of notes: 712 Hamlet Court.

The tiny motor of an electric razor started up. She closed the briefcase. Her heels lay toppled on the carpet at the foot of the bed, and she stepped into them, slung her duffle bag onto her shoulder.

“Maybe we could grab dinner downtown,” Arnold said over the whine of his razor. “I’d like to see more of Asheville.”

“Absolutely,” she said, lifting the briefcase. “I’ll take you barhopping. I know a few good ones. We’ll hit the Westville Pub. Great beer bar.”

“Now you’re talking.”

Twelve feet to the door. To being done with all of this. Her biggest score.

She turned back the inner lock, reached down for the handle.

Arnold said something from the bathroom that she missed. Saw herself slipping out into the corridor, heard the soft click of the door shutting behind her. Felt the tension of waiting for the elevator.

Letty turned back from the door, returned the briefcase to the closet shelf. Hardest thing she’d ever done.

She set her bag down and knocked on the bathroom door. “Can I come in, Arnie?”

“Yeah.”

He turned off the razor as she opened the door, frowned when he saw her. Steam rising off his shoulders. “You’re dressed.”

“I want to go back to my apartment, get a shower there.”

“You can stay here while I go to my meeting.”

“I need to let my dog out, get some papers graded. I’ll leave my number on the bedside table.”

He stepped away from the sink, embraced her, the towel damp around his waist, said, “I can’t wait to see you tonight.”

And she kissed him like she meant it.

Letty ran through the lobby, past the front desk, out into a cool, fall morning. She forced a twenty into the bellhop’s hand, and he relinquished the car service he’d called for another guest.

“You know Hamlet Court?” she asked when the Bellhop had shut her into the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car.

The driver glanced back, a light-skinned Haitian with blue eyes. “I will find. You have street number?”

“Seven twelve.” As he punched the address into the GPS unit, Letty handed a hundred-dollar bill into the front seat. “I’m sorry, but I need you to speed.”

Through the streets of the old, southern city, the downtown architecture catching early light—City Hall, the Vance Monument, the Basilica of St. Lawrence, where a few churchgoers straggled in for morning mass—and on the outskirts of Letty’s perception, secondary to her inner frenzy, a spectrum of Appalachian color—copper hillsides, spotless blue, the Black Mountain summits enameled with rime ice. A classic autumn day in the Swannanoa Valley.

They turned onto an oak-lined boulevard, red and gold leaves plastered to the pavement.

“We’re going into Montford?” Letty asked.

“That’s what the computer says to me.”

Hamlet Court was a secluded dead end off the B&B bustle of Montford Avenue, approximately a half mile long, and home to a dozen Victorian mansions.

The entrance to 712 stood at the end of the cul-de-sac through a brick archway just spacious enough to accommodate a single car.

“Stop the car,” Letty said.

“I take you all the way up.”

“I don’t want you to take me all the way.”

She climbed out of the car at 10:04. Hurried to the end of the street and under the archway, glancing at the name on a large, black mailbox: Rochefort.

The residence sat toward the back of the property, which sloped up across a masterfully landscaped yard shaded with maples and spruce trees, dotted with stone sculptures—fountains, birdbaths, angels—and not a leaf to be seen on the pockets of lush green grass.

An engine turned over near the house. Letty stepped off the drive and crawled into a thicket of mountain laurel as a boxy Mercedes G-Class rolled past. Through the branches and tinted glass, she glimpsed Chase at the wheel, a young boy in a booster in the backseat. The car ride over had only intensified her nausea, and as the diesel engine faded away, she put her finger down her throat and retched in the leaves.

She felt instantly better. Weaker. Less drunk. But better.

Only when the Mercedes had disappeared did she climb out of the bushes. Shivering, shoulders scraped, head pounding not only with a hangover, but a new element of suffering—coffee-deprivation.

She jogged uphill to where the driveway widened and cut a roomy circle back into itself. Up the brick steps onto the covered porch, where she rang the doorbell twice, struggling to catch her breath.

10:08 by her BlackBerry as footsteps approached from the other side of the door.

When it finally opened and Daphne Rochefort stood in the threshold in a lavender terrycloth robe, Letty realized she had given no prior consideration to exactly what she might say to this woman, had thought through and executed getting here, but nothing after.

“Yes?”

“Daphne?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What can I do for you?” Though at face value the words were all southern hospitality, the delivery carried a distinct northern draft.

Letty rubbed her bare arms, figured she probably still reeked of alcohol and vomit.

“There’s a man coming here to kill you.”

“Pardon?”

“I know this must sound—”

“You smell like booze.”

“You have to listen to me.”

“I want you off my porch.”

“Please, just—”

“I’m calling the police.”

“Good, call the police.”

Daphne retreated to slam the door, but Letty darted forward, planting her right heel across the doorframe. “I’m trying to help you. Just give me two minutes.”

Letty followed Daphne past the staircase, down a hallway into an enormous kitchen full of marble and stainless steel and redolent of chopped onions and cooking eggs. Daphne went to the stove, flipped an omelet, and began to peel a banana. “What’s your name?”

“It’s not important.”

“So talk,” she said.

Letty stood across the island from her, light flooding in through the large windows behind the sink, the coffeemaker at the end of its brewing cycle, gurgling like it’d had its throat cut.

“Here’s the Clif Notes,” Letty said, “ because we don’t have much time. I went to the Grove Park Inn yesterday. Someone hooked me up with a master keycard, tipped me off to which rooms might be worth hitting.”

“You’re a thief.”

“I was in the last room of the day when the guest came back unexpectedly. I had to hide in the closet.”

“I’m failing to see—”

“Chase was with him.” Daphne stopped slicing the banana. “Your husband gave this man, Arnold, a key to your house. A photo of you. A floor plan. And twenty-five thousand dollars to murder you.”

Daphne looked up from the cutting board, her bright, black eyes leveled upon Letty like a double-barreled shotgun. Her smile exposed a row of exquisite teeth.

“I want you to leave right now.”

“You think I’m lying? I didn’t want to come here. I had a chance to steal the twenty-five thousand this morning. Could’ve gone home, had nothing more to do with any of this. You don’t know me, but this isn’t like me, this…selflessness. I’ve been to prison too many times. I can’t take another felony charge. Getting involved in this was a great risk for me.”

Daphne took up the knife again, continued cutting the banana.

Letty spotted the clock on the microwave. “I can prove it to you. It’s 10:11. In exactly four minutes, your husband will call you. He’ll tell you he can’t find his wallet. He’ll ask you to go upstairs to your bedroom and check in his bedside table. If he calls, will you believe me?”

Daphne glanced at the microwave clock, then back at Letty. Honest to God fear in her eyes for the first time. A solemn, crushing focus. She nodded. The eggs burning.

“How will he reach you?” Letty asked. “Landline? Cell?”

“My iPhone.”

“Can we take the Beamer in the driveway?”

“I’m not leaving with you.”

“You don’t understand. By the time your husband calls you, it’ll be too late. The point of the phone call is to get you upstairs so Arnold can break in.”

“You want to leave right now?”

“This second.”

Daphne moved the pan to a cold burner and turned off the gas. They walked back down the hall, past a wall adorned with family and individual portraits and a collage of photographs—grinning babies and toddlers.

In the foyer, Daphne plucked a set of keys from a ceramic bowl beside a coat rack and opened the front door. The yard brilliant with strands of light that passed through the trees and struck the lawn in splashes of green.

Ten steps from the silver Beamer, Letty grabbed Daphne’s arm and spun her around with a hard jerk.

“Ouch.”

“Back inside.”

“Why?”

“There’s a car parked halfway up your driveway behind the rhododendron.”

They went back up the steps.

“You have the house key?” Letty asked.

Crossed the porch, Daphne struggling with the keys as they arrived at the door, finally sliding the right one into the deadbolt. Back into the house and Daphne shut the wide oak door after them, relocked the deadbolt, the doorknob, the chain.

“I should check the back door,” Daphne said.

“It doesn’t matter. He has a key and Chase left a window open. You have a gun in the house?”

Daphne nodded.

“Show me.”

Daphne ran up the staircase, Letty kicking off her heels as she followed. By the top of the stairs, her pulse had become a thumping in her temples—exertion and panic. They turned down a hallway, passed an office, a bright-white studio filled with sunlight and tedious acrylic paintings of mountain scenes, then two children’s bedrooms that emanated the frozen perfection of unlived-in space. At the end of the hall, French doors opened into a master suite built in the shape of an octagon, the walls rising to a vaulted ceiling that was punctured with skylights.

Chirping crickets stopped them both. Daphne withdrew her iPhone from the pocket of her robe and forced a smile that managed to bleed through into her voice.

“Hi, Honey… …no, it’s fine… …upstairs… …sure.” Daphne stepped into a walk-in closet, hit the lights. Letty lingered in the doorway, watched her reach through a wall of suits, emerging a moment later with a pump-action shotgun.

She mouthed, “Loaded?”

Daphne nodded. “Chase, it’s not in here. Want me to check downstairs?” Letty took the gun from Daphne. “All right,” Daphne said. “You two have fun.”

Letty whispered, “Call Nine-one-one,” and while Daphne dialed, Letty flicked off the safety and racked a shell into the chamber. She peered around the corner, down the hall. The house stood silent. She moved out of the closet and into a lavish master bath the size of her apartment, the tile cool on her bare feet.

Garden tub. Immense stone shower with a chrome fixture a foot in diameter. Long countertops cut from Italian granite.

Letty opened the glass shower door and cranked the handle. Preheated water rained down. The glass steamed. She returned to the bedroom, shutting the door behind her, found Daphne standing just inside the closet.

“Why’d you run the shower?” she whispered.

“Are the police coming?”

“Yes.”

Letty killed the lights. “Go crouch down in the corner behind those dresses and turn your phone off.” As Daphne retreated into the darkness, Letty pulled the door closed and padded out into the hall, making her way between the easels in the studio to the big windows that overlooked the front yard.

The car in the driveway hadn’t moved. A black 4Runner. Empty.

She walked out into the hall, straining to pick out the whine of approaching sirens.

Had the central heat been running, it would’ve completely escaped her notice, and even in the perfect silence she still nearly missed it—just around the corner and several feet down, the faintest groan of hardwood fibers bowing under the weight of a footstep.

Letty backpedaled into the studio and stepped behind the open door.

Through the crack, she eyed the hall.

Arnold appeared without a sound, wearing blue jeans and a fleece pullover. For a second, she thought there must be something wrong with his hands, their paleness. Latex gloves. Navy socks with strips of rubber gripping kept his footfalls absolutely silent and he moved slowly and with great precision down the hall, a black pistol at his side that had been fitted with a long suppressor.

Arnold stopped in the doorway of the master suite.

Waited a full minute.

Nothing but the white noise of the shower.

In the time it took Letty to step out from behind the door and peek into the hall, Arnold had disappeared.

She held the shotgun at waist-level and started toward the master suite. The half-speed fog of her hangover was replaced with a throbbing vigilance and a metal taste in the back of her throat that had come only a handful of times in her life—fights in prison, the three occasions she’d faced a judge to be sentenced, her father’s funeral.

She entered the master suite again. Steam poured out of the bathroom and Arnold stood in the doorway with his back to her. She felt lightheaded and weak, unable to summon her voice just yet, not fully committed to the idea of being in this moment.

Arnold walked into the steamy bathroom and Letty edged farther into the room, past the unmade bed and the stair climber, the shotgun trained on Arnold’s back through the open doorway, slightly obscured in the mist.

“You have a shotgun pointed at your back.”

He flinched at the sound of her voice. “Don’t turn around. Don’t move. Drop the gun.” Arnold didn’t move, but he didn’t drop the gun either. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’ll tell you again.” It clattered on the tile. “Kick it away from you.” The gun slid across the floor, coming to rest against the cabinets under the sink. Letty closed the distance between them, now standing in the bathroom doorway, close enough to smell the remnants of his cologne. “Keep your hands out in front of you and turn around.” When he saw her, his eyes betrayed only a glimmer of surprise. “Sit down, Arnold.” He sat at the base of the shower as Letty stepped into the bathroom, clouds of mist swirling between them.

He said, “What are you, a cop?”

“I was in your room yesterday afternoon when you and Chase came in. I hid in the closet. Heard everything you said.”

“So you’re a thief. That means we can work this out.”

“How’s that?”

“Can I get something out of my pocket?”

“Slowly.”

He reached into his fleece jacket, withdrew a set of keys, let them jingle. “The 4Runner’s new. There’s a briefcase with twenty-five thousand in cash in the front seat.”

“I know about the briefcase.”

“I can just go home. That’s a good score for you Letty. Bet you never had a payday like that.”

“And you go back to doing what you do?”

He smiled, shook his head. “The people I work for…if they want someone dead, that person’s going to die. It’s their will that causes it to happen. Not mine. They pull the trigger. I’m just the bullet. The damage. And I’m not the only bullet. So really, Letty. Why get yourself tangled up in this? You’re a thief, a tweaker. You been to prison?”

“Yeah.”

“So why not stay out of the affairs of the spoiled rich? Why do you care so much to interfere? To put yourself at risk, which you’ve done?”

“Late at night, when you’re alone, do you ever feel like somewhere along the way, you crossed this line you didn’t see? Actually sold yourself out?”

Arnold just stared at her as the shower beat down on the stone.

“I thought I was completely lost, Arnie. And then I found myself hiding in that closet in your room, and I saw a chance to go back to the other side of the line.”

Letty heard the closet door swing open. Daphne came and stood beside her.

“My husband paid you to kill me?”

Arnold made no response. Daphne walked over to the sinks, bent down, picked up his gun.

“You shouldn’t touch that, Daphne. The police are coming.”

“Not yet they aren’t.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re an ex-con. I don’t want you taking any flak considering you were stealing from the guests of the Grove Park Inn when you got involved. Take his car and his money. I’ll call the police after you’re gone.”

“That’s your money, Daphne.”

“No, it’s Chase’s.” She aimed Arnold’s gun at him. “Keys.”

He tossed them to Letty.

“I don’t want to leave you here alone with him, Daphne.”

“I’ll be all right.” She took the shotgun.

“I’m not leaving you.”

“You saved my life, Letty. I’ll never forget it. Now go.”

Five days later, at 6:01 p.m., Chase Rochefort stepped off the elevator, dressed to the nines in a light grey Coppley and a cobalt Oxford, engaged with his iPhone as he breezed through the lobby of the neo-gothic Jackson Building whose twelfth floor housed his law practice—Rochefort, Bloodsworth & Sax, LLC. The stunning redhead followed him out onto the street, sprouting her umbrella against the drizzly Friday evening. Trailed him along South Pack Square to North Market, and then several blocks to the intersection with Woodfin, where Rochefort entered the Sheraton Hotel.

He sat at the corner of the chophouse bar, letting his Chilean sea bass turn cold and drinking double Powers on the rocks with twists of lemon like his life depended on it. Halfway through his sixth, the barstool beside him opened up and Letty claimed it and ordered a glass of Merlot.

While the barkeep poured her wine, Letty reached over, patted Chase’s hand, and asked with faux-empathy, “How you holding up?” Searched his face for some tell of the preceding weeks’ stress, but no indication presented aside from a darkness under his eyes that had mostly been erased with concealer and the blush of Irish whiskey.

He worked up a glassy-eyed smile, slurred, “We know each other?”

“Well, I certainly know you.”

The barkeep returned with her wine. “That’s ten dollars. Would you like to start a—”

Chase tapped his chest. “My tab.”

“Of course, Mr. Rochefort.”

Chase banged his rocks glass against Letty’s wineglass and threw back the rest of his whiskey. “Have I sued you before?” he asked, excavating the lemon from the melting cubes of ice, crunching the rind between his back molars.

“No, you haven’t sued me.”

“Good.” He grinned. “I’ve sued half the people in this town.”

The barkeep arrived with a fresh double Powers on the rocks and swapped it out for Chase’s empty glass.

“But I was curious about something,” Letty asked, letting her left knee brush against his leg.

“What’s that?”

“I’ve read the Citizen-Times cover to cover for the last five days and there’s been no mention of it.” He sipped his new drink, Letty wondering about the depth of his intoxication, how much of this was sliding past him. “I’ve called your home. Never got an answer. You and Skyler have been living out of this hotel all week, and you come down here and drink yourself into a stupor every night.”

His face paled slightly through the Powers glow. “Who are you?”

“I was there, Chase.”

“Where? What are you talking about?”

She leaned over, whispered in his ear: “Room 5212 at the Grove Park Inn when you met with Arnold LeBreck and hired him to murder your wife. I was in the closet. I heard everything.”

He drew back, the noise of the chophouse swelling—thirty separate conversations intermingled with the clink of glassware and china.

She said, “Last Sunday morning, I went to your house in Montford. I told your wife everything—”

“Oh Jesus.”

“—and when I left, she was holding a shotgun on Mr. LeBreck and on the verge of calling the police. I should never have left her…

“But as I just mentioned, nothing in the papers. No sign of Daphne. So I’m sitting here wondering what happened, but before you answer, let me tell you that I’ve written a letter to the Asheville Police Department providing a firsthand account, and it will be delivered tomorrow by a friend of mine should I become scarce.”

This last part was a lie. She’d only just thought of it.

Chase drained his whiskey in one shot and slammed the glass down on the bar.

“Why won’t you go back to your house, Chase? What did you do there on Sunday morning after I left? What did you do to your wife?”

Chase grabbed the side of the bar to steady his hands. He closed his eyes, opened them again. The barkeep set another Powers in front of him and took away his cold, untouched dinner plate.

“You have no idea what you’ve done,” he said.

“I’m going back to your house,” Letty said. “Tonight. Am I going to find her dead? Why won’t you tell me, instead of sitting here in denial, pretending none of this has happened?”

Chase stared down the length of the bar for a full minute, then rubbed his palms into his eyes, smearing a bit of eyeliner.

Another greedy sip of Powers and he said, “I met Daphne after my first wife died. Skyler was two, and my parents kept him for a week, made me take a trip. We met in Oranjestad. You know Aruba? She could be so engaging when she wanted to be.

“We’d been married a year when I caught the first glimpse of what she really was. Friend of ours had gotten divorced and Daphne was consoling her on the telephone. It was a small thing, but I suddenly realized what she was doing. My wife had this way of talking to you so you’d think she was comforting you when she was actually salting your wounds. I saw her do it again and again. Even with me. With my son. It was like the pain of others attracted her. Filled her up with this black joy. Please,” he slurred. “Don’t go back there. Just leave it alone.”

“So it turns out your wife’s a bitch after all, and you want her dead. That’s so original.” Letty had a strong desire to take the Beretta 84 pistol out of her purse and jam it into Chase’s ribs, make him come along with her, rub his face in whatever he’d done. Instead, she climbed down from the barstool, said, “Have a wonderful night of freedom, Chase. It may be your last.”

Letty parked her 4Runner in the cul-de-sac and walked up the driveway toward the Rochefort residence. The rain had further dissolved into a cold, fine mist, and all she could see of the Victorian was the lamplight that pushed through a row of tall, arched windows on the second floor. At the front door, she peered through a panel of stained glass, saw a sliver of the lowlit hallway—empty.

She knocked on the door and waited, but no one came.

The third window on the covered porch slid open. She lifted the shade, saw the living room illuminated by a sole piano lamp on the baby grand. Climbed over the back of the upholstered sofa and closed the window behind her.

“Daphne?”

The hardwood groaned under her footsteps as she moved through the living room and up the stairs. The bed in the master suite looked slept in, covers thrown back, sheets wrinkled, clothes hanging off the sides.

Letty went downstairs into the kitchen, and as she stared into a sinkful of dirty dishes, noticed the music—some soothing adagios—drifting up from a remote corner of the house.

She walked around the island to a closed door near the breakfast nook.

Opened it. The music strengthening.

Steps descended into a subterranean level of the residence, and she followed them down until she reached a checkerboard floor made of limestone composite. To the left, a washing machine and dryer stood in the utility alcove surrounded by hampers of unwashed laundry that reeked of mildew.

Letty went right, the music getting louder.

Rounded a corner and stopped.

The brick room was twenty-by-twenty feet and lined with metal wineracks, the top rows of bottles glazed with dust.

Beside an easel lay a Bose CD player, a set of Wusthof kitchen knives, and boxes of gauze and bandages. Hanging from the ceiling of the wine cellar by a chain under her arms—Letty’s eyes welled up—Daphne.

Then the lifeless body shifted and released a pitiful wail.

Letty recognized the tattoo of the strangling hands as Arnold LeBreck painfully lifted his head and fixed his eyes upon Letty, and then something behind her.

Letty’s stomach fell.

She spun around.

Daphne stood five feet away wearing a black rubber apron streaked with paint or blood and a white surgical mask, her black hair pinned up except for a few loose strands that splayed across her shoulders.

She pointed a shotgun at Letty’s face, and something in that black hole suggested the flawed philosophical underpinnings that had landed Letty in this moment. No more hating herself, no avoiding the mirror, letting her father whisper her to sleep, no books on learning to love yourself or striving to become something her DNA could not support. She was facing down a shotgun, on the verge of an awful death, not because she was an evil person, but because she wasn’t evil enough.

Letty thought fast. “Oh, thank God. You’re not hurt.”

Daphne said through the mask, “What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you’re okay. I ran into Chase—”

“What’d he tell you? I warned him to let me have a week with Arnold, and then I’d be out of his life.”

“He didn’t tell me anything, Daphne. That’s why I came over. To check on you.”

Arnold moaned and twitched, managed to get himself swinging back and forth over the wide drain in the floor like a pendulum.

“That man was going to kill me,” Daphne said.

“I know, honey. I saved you. Remember?” The smell was staggering, Letty’s eyes beginning to water, her stomach to churn. “Well, I see you’re okay, so I’ll slip out, let you—”

“You shouldn’t have come back.”

“I didn’t see anything in the papers about your husband or Arnold. I thought something had happened to you after I left last Sunday.”

Daphne just stared at her. The facemask sucking in and out. At last she said, “You think what I’m doing is—”

“No, no, no. I’m not here to…that man was going to kill you. He deserves whatever happens to him. Think of all the other people he’s murdered for money.”

“You saw my painting?”

“Um, yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“What do I think?”

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes. It’s … thought-provoking and—”

“Some parts of Arnold’s portrait are actually painted with Arnold.”

Daphne’s arms sagged with the weight of the shotgun, the barrel now aligned with Letty’s throat.

“I saved your life,” Letty said.

“And I meant what I said. I won’t ever forget it. Now go on into the wine cellar. Just push Arnold back and stand over the drain.”

“Daphne—”

“You’d be a lovely subject.”

Letty’s right hand grazed the zipper of her all-time favorite score—a Chanel quilted leather handbag she’d stolen out of the Grand Hyatt in New York City. Thirty-five hundred in Saks Fifth Avenue.

“Get your hand away from there.”

“My BlackBerry’s vibrating.”

“Give it to me.”

Letty unzipped the bag, pulled out the BlackBerry with her left hand, let her right slip inside. Any number of ways to fumble in front of a gaping shotgun barrel.

She said, “Here,” tossed the BlackBerry to Daphne, and as the device arced through the air, Letty’s right hand grasped the Beretta and thumbed off the safety.

She squeezed the trigger as Daphne caught the phone.

The shotgun blasted into the ceiling, shards of blond brick raining down and Daphne stumbling back into the wall as blood ran in a thin black line out of a hole in her throat.

Letty pulled out the pistol—no sense in doing further damage to her handbag—and shot her three times in the chest.

The shotgun and the BlackBerry hit the limestone and Daphne slid down into a sitting position against the wall. Out from under her rubber apron, blood expanded through little impulse ripples whose wavelengths increased with the fading pump of her heart. Within ten seconds, she’d lost the strength or will to clutch her throat, her eyes already beginning to empty. Letty kicked the shotgun toward the washing machine and walked to the edge of the wine cellar, breathing through her mouth; she could taste the rotten air, now tinged with cordite.

She looked at Arnold. “I’m going to call an ambulance for you.”

He nodded frantically at the pistol in Letty’s hand.

“You want me to . . . ?”

He let out a long, low moan—sad and desperate and inhuman.

Arnie,” she said, raising the Beretta, “I’m not even sure you deserve this.”

Letty walked down the long driveway toward the 4Runner. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up, a few meager stars shining in the southern sky, a night bird singing to a piece of the moon. For a fleeting moment, she felt the heart-tug of having witnessed a beautiful thing, but a crushing thought replaced the joy—there was so much beauty in the world, and in her thirty-six years, she’d brushed up against so little of it.

At the bottom of the driveway, she took her BlackBerry out of the ruined handbag, but five seconds into the search for Chase Rochefort’s number, powered off her phone. She’d done enough. So very much more than enough.

The alarm squeaked and the 4Runner’s headlights shot two brief cylinders of light through what mist still lingered in the cul-de-sac. Letty climbed in behind the wheel and fired up the engine. Sped away from that house, from lives that were no longer her problem. Felt a familiar swelling in her chest, that core of inner-strength she always seemed to locate the first night of a long bit when the loneliness in the cell was a living thing.

And she promised herself that she’d never try to be good again.

Only harder, stronger, truer, and at peace, once and forever at peace, with her beautiful, lawless self.

Read on for an interview with Blake Crouch and excerpts from all four of his books, Desert Places, Locked Doors, Abandon, and Snowbound…

Interview with Blake Crouch by Hank Wagner

Originally Published in Crimespree, July 2009

According to his website, Blake Crouch grew up in Statesville, a small town in the piedmont of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, where he studied literature and creative writing. He currently resides in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. Crouch’s first book, Desert Places, was published in 2003. Pat Conroy called it “Harrowing, terrific, a whacked-out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.” Val McDermid described it as “An ingenious, diabolical debut that calls into question all our easy moral assumptions. Desert Places is a genuine thriller that pulses with adrenaline from start to finish.”  His second novel, Locked Doors, was published in July 2005. A sequel to Desert Places, it created a similar buzz. His third novel, Abandon, was published on July 7, 2009.

HANK WAGNER: Your writing career began in college?

BLAKE CROUCH: I started writing seriously in college. I had tinkered before, but the summer after my freshman year, I decided that I wanted to try to make a living at being a writer. Spring semester of 1999, I was in an intro creative writing class and I wrote the short story (called “Ginsu Tony”) that would grow into Desert Places. Once I started my first novel, it became an obsession.

HW: Where did the original premise for Desert Places come from?

BC: The idea for Desert Places arose when two ideas crossed. I had the opening chapter already in my head... suspense writer receives an anonymous letter telling him there’s a body buried on his property, covered in his blood. I didn’t know where my protagonist was going to be taken though. Around the same time, I happened to be glancing through a scrapbook that had photographs of this backpacking trip I took in Wyoming in the mid 90’s. One of those photographs was of a road running off into the horizon in the midst of a vast desert. My brain started working. What if my protagonist is taken to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, by a psychopath? What if this cabin is in this vast desert, and he has no hope of escape? That photograph broke the whole story open for me.

HW: Why a sequel for your second book? Affection for the characters?

BC: It was actually my editor’s idea. I was perfectly happy walking away from the first book. But once she mentioned it during the editing of Desert Places, I really started to think about where the story could go, wondered how Andy might have changed after seven years in hiding, and I got excited about doing it. And I’m very glad I did, because I would’ve missed those characters. Even my psychopaths are family in some strange, twisted way.

HW: Of all the reviews and comments about your books, what was the strangest? The meanest? The nicest? The most perceptive?

BC: The strangest: This was a comment about me and the reviewer wrote something to the effect that I was either a super-talented writer with an immense imagination or one sick puppy. I think that’s open to debate. The meanest: From those [expletive deleted] at Kirkus. Now, keep in mind, this is my first taste of reviews and the reviewer absolutely savaged my book. It was so mean it was funny... although I didn’t see the humor for some time. The review ended, “Sadly, a sequel is in the works.” The nicest: That’s hard to choose from. I particularly loved the review for Locked Doors that appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal. The reviewer wrote, and this is my favorite quote thus far, “If you don’t think you’ll enjoy seeing how Crouch makes the torture and disembowelment of innocent women, children and even lax store employees into a thing of poetic beauty, maybe you should go watch Sponge Bob.” The most perceptive: The reviews that recognize that I’m trying to make a serious exploration of the human psyche, the nature of evil, and man’s depravity are the ones that please me the most.

HW: Do you strive for realism in your writing, or do you try more to entertain?

BC: First and foremost, I want to entertain. I want the reader to close the book thinking, “that was a helluva story.” Beyond that, I do strive for realism. I want the reader to identify with my characters’ emotions, whether it’s fear, sadness, or happiness. The places I write about, from the Yukon to the Outer Banks to the Colorado mountains are rendered accurately, and that’s very important to me, because I want the reader to have the benefit of visiting these beautiful places in my books.

HW: The villain in Locked Doors seems almost a force of nature, cunning, instinctively brilliant when it comes to creating mayhem. Do you worry that readers might write him off as unrealistic?

BC: I decided to approach Luther Kite a little differently than my bad guy, Orson Thomas, in Desert Places. In the first book, I tried to humanize Orson, to gin up sympathy by explaining what happened in his childhood to turn him into this monster. With Luther et al., I made a conscious decision not to delve into any of that, and for this reason I think he comes off as almost mythic, larger than life, maybe with even a tinge of the supernatural. I don’t worry that readers will find him unrealistic, because I didn’t try to make him like your typical realistic humdrum villain. What I want is for readers to fear him.

HW: What’s the most important thing a book has to do to keep YOUR attention?

BC: It’s actually very simple... a great story told through great writing. I don’t care if it’s western, horror, thriller, historical, romance, or literary. I just want to know that I’m in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing.

HW: Who are your literary heroes?

BC: I grew up on southern writers -- Walker Percy, Pat Conroy -- the fantasy of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In college I discovered Thomas Harris, Dennis Lehane, James Lee Burke, Caleb Carr, and my favorite writer, Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy just blows me away. His prose is so rich. He is unlike anyone else out there today. His 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, in my opinion, is the greatest horror novel ever written.

HW: What makes Blood Meridian “the greatest horror novel ever written?”

BC: The writing is mind blowing. The violence (which occurs frequently and in vivid detail) rises to the level of poetry in McCarthy’s hands. And the story is fascinating. It’s based on historical fact and follows a bloodthirsty gang through the Mexico-Texas Borderlands in the mid-1800’s, who have been hired by the Mexican government to collect as many Indian scalps as they can. I read Blood Meridian every year.

HW: Reading Desert Places and Locked Doors, it seems that you’re drawn to the horrific. The books are filled with horrific acts, and with terrifying set pieces, as in the descent into the Kites’ basement in Locked Doors. Did the horror genre hold any attraction to you growing up?

BC: I honestly didn’t read a lot of horror growing up, but I always loved the sensation of fear produced by a scary movie or a great book. Some of my first short fiction (written in middle school) could be classified as horror. In fact, there’s a short story on my website called “In Shock” that I wrote in the 8th grade.

HW: Might there be a sequel to Locked Doors someday?

BC: Midway through the writing of Locked Doors, it occurred to me the story might be a trilogy. I may finish out the trilogy at some point. I’m starting to miss my characters (the ones that survived), and I have a feeling that I will return to the world of Locked Doors at some point in the future to check in on them. We’ll have to see.

HW: Your latest novel, Abandon, is set in Colorado, where you’ve lived for the past six years.  Did you intend to write a novel set in that state when you moved there, or did your surroundings inspire you to?

BC: This was definitely a case of my surroundings inspiring me. Two months after we moved from North Carolina to Durango, we had some friends come out to visit. My wife and I took them on a backpacking trip into the San Juans, and it was on this trip that I first saw the ruins of a mining town—Sneffels, Colorado and the Camp Bird Mine. It made a huge impression, the idea of living in these extreme conditions, particularly in winter. The claustrophobia, the desperation, the kind of people who would subject themselves to such a life fascinated me.

HW: Did you have any particular goals in mind when you embarked on this project?  Did they change as you worked?  Do you think you met your goals?

BC: The idea of writing a “mining town thriller” was with me for a long time, as early as the summer of 2003, before Desert Places was published.  Initially, I thought it would all be set in the past, a straight historical. Then in ‘05, while on tour for Locked Doors, I had a sudden realization that this was the story I needed to write, and that it wasn’t just historical. There would be present scenes, too, and the mystery at the heart of the book would be the mass disappearance of the town. My goal was to write a book that I would want to read, and in that regard, I think I succeeded.

HW: How long did it take to prepare to write the book?  How much research was involved?  Do you research first, then write, or answer the questions that arise as you dive into the writing?

BC: I started outlining in the fall of ‘05, and finalized the book with my editor in the summer ‘07.  There were 7 drafts, and tons of research, which occurred at all stages of the writing.

HW: Was it tough striking a balance between writing a thriller and the urge to display all your newfound knowledge?  Any fascinating tidbits that didn’t go into the book that you want to share with readers?

BC: Lots of stuff got cut, and some of it was wonderful (and it still pains me to have let it go) but in the end, it was all about what advanced the story.  For instance, there was an Irishman who lived in one of the Colorado mining towns, and the love of his life had died on their wedding night some years prior. Every night, from his cabin above town, the sound of a violin would sweep down the mountain. Mournful, beautiful music. The town got used to hearing it.  One night, after the violin went silent, a single gunshot echoed from the cabin. The townsfolk went up and found him dead, with a note asking to be buried with his wife. I loved that bit, wanted to put this guy into the story, but it didn’t belong, so I had to let it go.

HW: Your first two books followed the adventures of basically the same cast of characters.  Was it a relief or was it scary to move on to a whole new set of players?

BC: Both a total relief and completely terrifying. But what’s worse than the fear of doing something new and challenging is realizing one day that you’re in a rut, that you’ve essentially written the same book again and again.

HW: Your first two books could be described as pure, relentless adrenaline.  In fact, those are your words.  Was it difficult to work on a novel taking place in two different times, switching back and forth between the two?  How about working with a larger cast?  Did that present you with any particular challenges, issues, problems?

BC: It was hard at first, but once I got into the flow of both narratives, it wasn’t such a big deal to go back and forth, which is the way I wrote it. It sounds silly, but I wrote the present in one font, the past in another, and for some reason, changing fonts helped me to get back into whatever section I was working on.  This cast of characters, which I knew was going to be big going in, was intimidating starting out. I spent a month on character studies, really getting to know each main character and their back-story before I dove into the book, and I think (I hope) that made all the difference.

HW: Has having children changed the way you look at your writing?  Your subject matter? Do you ever pause and think, I guess my kids won’t be able to read that until they’re older?

BC: Abandon was the first thing I wrote after my son was born, and being a father for the first time and that new relationship and life-altering love couldn’t help but find its way into this work. Parent-child relationships definitely constitute a significant aspect of Abandon. And yeah, there’s no way my kids will be able to read my first two books until they’re at least seven or eight (kidding).

HW: Who is your first reader?

BC: My wife.

HW: What’s your favorite procrastination technique to avoid writing?

BC: Playing my acoustic guitar.

HW: Now that you’re in the business, do you find as much time to read as before?  Do you avoid fiction for fear of unconsciously copying someone’s stories?

BC: I read more now than ever. You have to. I’ve never avoided fiction for fear of unconsciously copying someone else’s stories.  You can’t help but be influenced by the work of others. No one is unique. As Cormac McCarthy said, “The sad truth is that books are made of other books.”

HW: I happen to know you’ve written an essay about Jack Ketchum’s Off Season for the upcoming International Thrillers Writers project Thrillers: 100 Must Reads.  Was that format difficult for you?  Did the experience provide you with any special insights into your own writings, or into thrillers in general?

BC: It was the hardest thing I’d written all year. I felt like I was in college again working on a term paper. That being said, it was a great joy to delve into the life and work of Jack Ketchum. I had great editors on that project. (HW:  Full disclosure time: the editors for that worthy project are the esteemed David Morrell and yours truly.  End of plug.)

HW: Tell us a little about future projects.  You have a short story slated to appear in the ITW anthology, Thrillers 2?

BC: Yep, it’s called “Remaking” and also happens to be set in a beautiful Colorado town called Ouray.  It’s premised on a question: What would you do if you were in a coffee shop, saw a man sitting with a young boy, and suspected the boy wasn’t supposed to be with him, that maybe he’d been kidnapped.  I’m over the moon and humbled to be included in such a stellar collection of writers. Joe Konrath and I have just released a free short story as an eBook with the help of our publishers. It’s kind of groundbreaking, both in how Joe and I collaborated, and how our publishers came together to make it available everywhere. It’s called “Serial”, and is probably the most twisted thing either of us have ever written. The Abandon audiobook will have a short story that I read called “On the Good, Red Road,” and finally Jen Jordan’s new anthology, Uncage Me, publishes in July, and I have a story in that one called “*69.”

HW: Are you working on a new novel at the moment?

BC: I am.

HW: Where are you in that process?

BC: About a hundred pages in.

HW: Can you talk a little about the new book, or would that jinx things?

BC: I’m pretty sure I would deeply regret talking about it at this point. I find if I talk too much about works-in-progress, it takes the wind out of my sails.

HW: Any book recommendations?

BC: Joe Konrath just published a novel under the name Jack Kilborn. It’s called Afraid, and I think it’s one of the best pieces of horror fiction to come out in recent memory.

HW: Work uniform?

BC: A white tee-shirt and pajama bottoms with snowflakes on them. I know, it’s awful.

HW: Misconceptions about people who graduated from UNC?

BC: That if by some rip in the space-time continuum, Al-Qaeda managed to get a Division I college basketball team together, and if that team somehow made it to the NCAA tournament, and then survived March Madness, and, now here’s a real stretch, were facing Duke in the championship game on Monday night, that UNC fans would put aside their petty rivalry and root for Duke over the terrorists.

DESERT PLACES

Published in January 2004 by Thomas Dunne Books

DESCRIPTION: Andrew Z. Thomas is a successful writer of suspense thrillers, living the dream at his lake house in the piedmont of North Carolina. One afternoon in late spring, he receives a bizarre letter that eventually threatens his career, his sanity, and the lives of everyone he loves. A murderer is designing his future, and for the life of him, Andrew can’t get away.

Harrowing...terrific...a whacked out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.

PAT CONROY

[C]arried by rich, image-filled prose. Crouch will handcuff you, blindfold you, throw you in the trunk of a car, and drag you kicking and screaming through a story so intense, so emotionally packed, that you will walk away stunned.

WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL

Excerpt from Desert Places…

On a lovely May evening, I sat on my deck, watching the sun descend upon Lake Norman. So far, it had been a perfect day. I’d risen at 5:00 a.m. as I always do, put on a pot of French roast, and prepared my usual breakfast of scrambled eggs and a bowl of fresh pineapple. By six o’clock, I was writing, and I didn’t stop until noon. I fried two white crappies I’d caught the night before, and the moment I sat down for lunch, my agent called. Cynthia fields my messages when I’m close to finishing a book, and she had several for me, the only one of real importance being that the movie deal for my latest novel, Blue Murder, had closed. It was good news of course, but two other movies had been made from my books, so I was used to it by now.

I worked in my study for the remainder of the afternoon and quit at 6:30. My final edits of the new as yet untitled manuscript would be finished tomorrow. I was tired, but my new thriller, The Scorcher, would be on bookshelves within the week. I savored the exhaustion that followed a full day of work. My hands sore from typing, eyes dry and strained, I shut down the computer and rolled back from the desk in my swivel chair.

I went outside and walked up the long gravel drive toward the mailbox. It was the first time I’d been out all day, and the sharp sunlight burned my eyes as it squeezed through the tall rows of loblollies that bordered both sides of the drive. It was so quiet here. Fifteen miles south, Charlotte was still gridlocked in rush-hour traffic, and I was grateful not to be a part of that madness. As the tiny rocks crunched beneath my feet, I pictured my best friend, Walter Lancing, fuming in his Cadillac. He’d be cursingthe drone of horns and the profusion of taillights as he inched away from his suite in uptown Charlotte, leaving the quarterly nature magazine Hiker to return home to his wife and children. Not me, I thought, the solitary one.

For once, my mailbox wasn’t overflowing. Two envelopes lay inside, one a bill, the other blank except for my address typed on the outside. Fan mail.

Back inside, I mixed myself a Jack Daniel’s and Sun-Drop and took my mail and a book on criminal pathology out onto the deck. Settling into a rocking chair, I set everything but my drink on a small glass table and gazed down to the water. My backyard is narrow, and the woods flourish a quarter mile on either side, keeping my home of ten years in isolation from my closest neighbors. Spring had not come this year until mid-April, so the last of the pink and white dogwood blossoms still specked the variably green interior of the surrounding forest. Bright grass ran down to a weathered gray pier at the water’s edge, where an ancient weeping willow sagged over the bank, the tips of its branches dabbling in the surface of the water.

The lake is more than a mile wide where it touches my property, making houses on the opposite shore visible only in winter, when the blanket of leaves has been stripped from the trees. So now, in the thick of spring, branches thriving with baby greens and yellows, the lake was mine alone, and I felt like the only living soul for miles around.

I put my glass down half-empty and opened the first envelope. As expected, I found a bill from the phone company, and I scrutinized the lengthy list of calls. When I’d finished, I set it down and lifted the lighter envelope. There was no stamp, which I thought strange, and upon slicing it open, I extracted a single piece of white paper and unfolded it. In the center of the page, one paragraph had been typed in black ink:

Greetings. There is a body buried on your property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady’s name is Rita Jones. You’ve seen this missing schoolteacher’s face on the news, I’m sure. In her jeans pocket you’ll find a slip of paper with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If I have not heard from you by 8:00 p.m. tomorrow (5/17), the Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call. I’ll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas’s lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don’t have to make that call. I’ve placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property and you’ll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police, as I am always watching you.

A smile edged across my lips. I even chuckled to myself. Because my novels treat crime and violence, my fans often have a demented sense of humor. I’ve received death threats, graphic artwork, even notes from people claiming to have murdered in the same fashion as the serial killers in my books. But I’ll save this, I thought. I couldn’t remember one so original.

I read it again, but a premonitory twinge struck me the second time, particularly because the author had some knowledge regarding the layout of my property. And a paring knife was, in fact, missing from my cutlery block. Carefully refolding the letter, I

slipped it into the pocket of my khakis and walked down the steps toward the lake.

As the sun cascaded through the hazy sky, beams of light drained like spilled paint across the western horizon. Looking at the lacquered lake suffused with deep orange, garnet, and magenta, I stood by the shore for several moments, watching two sunsets collide.

Against my better judgment, I followed the shoreline south and was soon tramping through a noisy bed of leaves. I’d gone an eighth of a mile when I stopped. At my feet, amid a coppice of pink flowering mountain laurel, I saw a miniature red flag attached to a strip of rusted metal thrust into the ground. The flag fluttered in a breeze that curled off the water. This has to be a joke, I thought, and if so, it’s a damn good one.

As I brushed away the dead leaves that surrounded the marker, my heart began to pound. The dirt beneath the flag was packed, not crumbly like undisturbed soil. I even saw half a footprint when I’d swept all the leaves away.

I ran back to the house and returned with a shovel. Because the soil had previously been unearthed, I dug easily through the first foot and a half, directly below where the marker had been placed. At two feet, the head of the shovel stabbed into something soft. My heart stopped. Throwing the shovel aside, I dropped to my hands and knees and clawed through the dirt. A rotten stench enveloped me, and as the hole deepened, the smell grew more pungent.

My fingers touched flesh. I drew my hand back in horror and scrambled away from the hole. Rising to my feet, I stared down at a coffee brown ankle, barely showing through the dirt. The odor of rot overwhelmed me, so I breathed only through my mouth as I took up the shovel again.

When the corpse was completely exposed, and I saw what a month of putrefaction could do to a human face, I vomited into the leaves. I kept thinking that I should have the stomach for this because I write about it. Researching the grisly handiwork of serial killers, I’d studied countless mutilated cadavers. But I had never smelled a human being decomposing in the ground, or seen how insects teem in the moist cavities.

I composed myself, held my hand over my mouth and nose, and peered again into the hole. The face was unrecognizable, but the body was undoubtedly that of a short black female, thick in the legs, plump through the torso. She wore a formerly white shirt, now marred with blood and dirt, the fabric rent over much of the chest, primarily in the vicinity of her heart. Jean shorts covered her legs down to the knees. I got back down on all fours, held my breath, and reached for one of her pockets. Her legs were mushy and turgid, and I had great difficulty forcing my hand into the tight jeans. Finding nothing in the first pocket, I stepped across the hole and tried the other. Sticking my hand inside it, I withdrew a slip of paper from a fortune cookie and fell back into the leaves, gasping for clean lungfuls of air. On one side, I saw the phone number; on the other: “you are the only flower of meditation in the wilderness.”

In five minutes, I’d reburied the body and the marker. I took a small chunk of granite from the shore and placed it on the thicketed grave site. Then I returned to the house. It was quarter to eight, and there was hardly any light left in the sky.

Two hours later, sitting on the sofa in my living room, I dialed the number on the slip of paper. Every door to the house was locked, most of the lights turned on, and in my lap, a cold satin stainless .357 revolver.

I had not called the police for a very good reason. The claim that it was my blood on the woman was probably a lie, but the paring knife had been missing from my kitchen for weeks. Also, with the Charlotte Police Department’s search for Rita Jones dominating local news headlines, her body on my property, murdered with my knife, possibly with my fingerprints on it, would be more than sufficient evidence to indict me. I’d researched enough murder trials to know that.

As the phone rang, I stared up at the vaulted ceiling of my living room, glanced at the black baby grand piano I’d never learned to play, the marble fireplace, the odd artwork that adorned the walls. A woman named Karen, whom I’d dated for nearly two years, had convinced me to buy half a dozen pieces of art from a recently deceased minimalist from New York, a man who signed his work “Loman.” I hadn’t initially taken to Loman, but Karen had promised me I’d eventually “get” him. Now, $27,000 and one fiancee lighter, I stared at the ten-by-twelve-foot abomination that hung above the mantel: shit brown on canvas, with a basketball-size yellow sphere in the upper right-hand corner. Aside from Brown No. 2, four similar marvels of artistic genius pockmarked other walls of my home, but these I could suffer. Mounted on the wall at the foot of the staircase, it was Playtime, the twelve-thousand-dollar glass-encased heap of stuffed animals, sewn together in an orgiastic conglomeration, which reddened my face even now. But I smiled, and the knot that had been absent since late winter shot a needle of pain through my gut. My Karen ulcer. You’re still there. Still hurting me. At least it’s you.

The second ring.

I peered up the staircase that ascended to the exposed second-floor hallway, and closing my eyes, I recalled the party I’d thrown just a week ago-guests laughing, talking politics and books, filling up my silence. I saw a man and a woman upstairs, elbows resting against the oak banister, overlooking the living room, the wet bar, and the kitchen. Holding their wineglasses, they waved down to me, smiling at their host.

The third ring.

My eyes fell on a photograph of my mother-a five-by-seven in a stained-glass frame, sitting atop the obsidian piano. She was the only family member with whom I maintained regular contact. Though I had relatives in the Pacific Northwest, Florida, and a handful in the Carolinas, I saw them rarely-at reunions, weddings, or funerals that my mother shamed me into attending with her. But with my father having passed away and a brother I hadn’t seen in thirteen years, family meant little to me. My friends sustained me, and contrary to popular belief, I didn’t have the true reclusive spirit imputed to me. I did need them.

In the photograph, my mother is squatting down at my father’s grave, pruning a tuft of carmine canna lilies in the shadow of the headstone. But you can only see her strong, kind face among the blossoms, intent on tidying up her husband’s plot of earth under that magnolia he’d taught me to climb, the blur of its waxy green leaves behind her.

The fourth ring.

“Did you see the body?”

It sounded as if the man were speaking through a towel. There was no emotion or hesitation in his staccato voice.

“Yes.”

“I gutted her with your paring knife and hid the knife in your house. It has your fingerprints all over it.” He cleared his throat. “Four months ago, you had blood work done by Dr. Xu. They misplaced a vial. You remember having to go back and give more?”

“Yes.”

“I stole that vial. Some is on Rita Jones’s white T-shirt. The rest is on the others.”

“What others?”

“I make a phone call, and you spend the rest of your life in prison, possibly death row....”

“I just want you-”

“Shut your mouth. You’ll receive a plane ticket in the mail. Take the flight. Pack clothes, toiletries, nothing else. You spent last summer in Aruba. Tell your friends you’re going again.”

“How did you know that?”

“I know many things, Andrew.”

“I have a book coming out,” I pleaded. “I’ve got readings scheduled. My agent-”

“Lie to her.”

“She won’t understand me just leaving like this.”

“Fuck Cynthia Mathis. You lie to her for your safety, because if I even suspect you’ve brought someone along or that someone knows, you’ll go to jail or you’ll die. One or the other, guaranteed. And I hope you aren’t stupid enough to trace this number. I promise you it’s stolen.”

“How do I know I won’t be hurt?”

“You don’t. But if I get off the phone with you and I’m not convinced you’ll be on that flight, I’ll call the police tonight. Or I may visit you while you’re sleeping. You’ve got to put that Smith and Wesson away sometime.”

I stood up and spun around, the gun clenched in my sweaty hands. The house was silent, though chimes on the deck were clanging in a zephyr. I looked through the large living room windows at the black lake, its wind-rippled surface reflecting the pier lights. The blue light at the end of Walter’s pier shone out across the water from a distant inlet. His “Gatsby light,” we called it. My eyes scanned the grass and the edge of the trees, but it was far too dark to see anything in the woods.

“I’m not in the house,” he said. “Sit down.”

I felt something well up inside of me-anger at the fear, rage at this injustice.

“Change of plan,” I said. “I’m going to hang up, dial nine one one, and take my chances. You can go-”

“If you aren’t motivated by self-preservation, there’s an old woman named Jeanette I could-”

“I’ll kill you.”

“Sixty-five, lives alone, I think she’d love the company. What do you think? Do I have to visit your mother to show you I’m serious? What is there to consider? Tell me you’ll be on that plane, Andrew. Tell me so I don’t have to visit your mother tonight.”

“I’ll be on that plane.”

The phone clicked, and he was gone.

LOCKED DOORS

Published July 2005 by Thomas Dunne Books

DESCRIPTION: Seven years ago, suspense novelist Andrew Thomas’s life was shattered when he was framed for a series of murders. The killer’s victims were unearthed on Andrew’s lakefront property, and since he was wanted by the FBI, Andrew had no choice but to flee and to create a new identity.  Andrew does just that in a cabin tucked away in the remote wilderness near Haines Junction, Yukon. His only link to society is by e-mail, through which he learns that all the people he ever loved are being stalked and murdered. Culminating in the spooky and secluded Outer Banks of North Carolina, the paths of Andrew Thomas, a psychotic named Luther Kite, and a young female detective collide.  Locked Doors is a novel of blistering suspense that will scare you to death.

Crouch quite simply is a marvel. Locked Doors is as good as anything I’ve read all year, a stay-up-all-night thriller that will have you chewing your fingers down to the nub even as you’re reading its last paragraph. Highest possible recommendation.

BOOKREPORTER

Palpable suspense. Non-stop action. Relentless and riveting. Blake Crouch is the most exciting new thriller writer I’ve read in years.

DAVID MORRELL

Excerpt from Locked Doors…

The headline on the Arts and Leisure page read: Publisher to Reissue Five Thrillers by Alleged Murderer Andrew Z. Thomas.

All it took was seeing his name.

Karen Prescott dropped The New York Times and walked over to the window.

Morning light streamed across the clutter of her cramped office--query letters and sample chapters stacked in two piles on the floor beside the desk, a box of galleys shoved under the credenza. She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below.

Leaning against a bookcase that housed many of the hardcovers she’d guided to publication, Karen shivered. The mention of Andrew’s name always unglued her.

For two years she’d been romantically involved with the suspense novelist and had even lived with him during the writing of Blue Murder at the same lake house in North Carolina where many of his victims were found.

She considered it a latent character defect that she’d failed to notice anything sinister in Andy beyond a slight reclusive tendency.

My God, I almost married him.

She pictured Andy reading to the crowd in that Boston bookshop the first time they met. In a bathrobe writingin his office as she brought him fresh coffee (French roast, of course). Andy making love to her in a flimsy rowboat in the middle of Lake Norman.

She thought of his dead mother.

The exhumed bodies from his lakefront property.

His face on the FBI website.

They’d used his most recent jacket photo, a black-and-white of Andy in a sports jacket sitting broodingly at the end of his pier.

During the last few years she’d stopped thinking of him as Andy. He was Andrew Thomas now and embodied all the horrible images the cadence of those four syllables invoked.

There was a knock.

Scott Boylin, publisher of Ice Blink Press’s literary imprint, stood in the doorway dressed in his best bib and tucker. Karen suspected he was gussied up for the Doubleday party.

He smiled, waved with his fingers.

She crossed her arms, leveled her gaze.

God, he looked streamlined today--very tall, fit, crowned by thick black hair with dignified intimations of silver.

He made her feel little. In a good way. Because Karen stood nearly six feet tall, few men towered over her. She loved having to look up at Scott.

They’d been dating clandestinely for the last four months. She’d even given him a key to her apartment, where they spent countless Sundays in bed reading manuscripts, the coffee-stained pages scattered across the sheets.

But last night she’d seen him at a bar in SoHo with one of the cute interns. Their rendezvous did not look work-related.

“Come to the party with me,” he said. “Then we’ll go to Il Piazza. Talk this out. It’s not what you--”

“I’ve got tons of reading to catch up--”

“Don’t be like that, Karen. Come on.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to have this conversation here, so . . .”

He exhaled sharply through his nose and the door closed hard behind him.

Joe Mack was stuffing his pink round face with a gyro when his cell phone started ringing to the tune of “Staying Alive.”

He answered, cheeks exploding with food, “This Joe.”

“Hi, yes, um, I’ve got a bit of an interesting problem.”

“Whath?”

“Well, I’m in my apartment, but I can’t get the deadbolt to turn from the inside.”

Joe Mack choked down a huge mouthful, said, “So you’re locked in.”

“Exactly.”

“Which apartment?” He didn’t even try to mask the annoyance in his voice.

“Twenty-two eleven.”

“Name?”

“Um . . . I’m not the tenant. I’m Karen Prescott’s friend. She’s the--”

“Yeah, I get it. You need to leave anytime soon?”

“Well, yeah, I don’t want to--”

Joe Mack sighed, closed the cell phone, and devoured the last of the gyro.

Wiping his hands on his shirt, he heaved himself from a debilitated swivel chair and lumbered out of the office, locking the door behind him.

The lobby was quiet for midday and the elevator doors spread as soon as he pressed the button. He rode up wishing he’d bought three gyros for lunch instead of two.

The doors opened again and he walked onto the twenty-second floor, fishing the key ring containing the master from the pocket of his enormous overalls.

He belched.

It echoed down the empty corridor.

Man, was he hungry.

He stopped at 2211, knocked, yelled through the door, “It’s the super!”

No one answered.

Joe Mack inserted the master into the deadbolt. It turned easily enough.

He pushed the door open.

“Hello?” he said, standing in the threshold, admiring the apartment--roomy, flat-screen television, lush deep blue carpet, an antique desk, great view of SoHo, probably loads of food in the fridge.

“Anybody home?”

He turned the deadbolt four times. It worked perfectly.

Another door opened somewhere in the hallway and approaching footsteps reverberated off the hardwood floor. Joe Mack glanced down the corridor at the tall man with black hair in a black overcoat strolling toward him from the stairwell.

“Hey, pal, were you the one who just called me?” Joe Mack asked.

The man with black hair stopped at the open doorway of 2211.

He smelled strange, of Windex and lemons.

“Yes, I was the one.”

“Oh. You get the lock to work?”

“I’ve never been in this apartment.”

“What the fuck did you call me for--”

Glint of a blade. The man held an ivory-hilted bowie. He swept its shimmering point across Joe Mack’s swollen belly, cleaving denim, cotton, several layers of skin.

“No, wait just a second--”

The man raised his right leg and booted Joe Mack through the threshold.

The super toppled backward as the man followed him into the apartment, slammed the door, and shot the deadbolt home.

Karen left Ice Blink Press at 6:30 p.m. and emerged into a manic Manhattan evening, the sliver of sky between the buildings smoldering with dying sunlight, gilding glass and steel. It was the fourth Friday of October, the terminal brilliance of autumn full blown upon the city, and as she walked the fifteen blocks to her apartment in SoHo, Karen decided that she wouldn’t start the manuscript in her leather satchel tonight.

Instead she’d slip into satin pajamas, have a glass of that organic chardonnay she’d purchased at Whole Foods Market, and watch wonderful mindless television.

It had been a bad week.

Pampering was in order.

At 7:55 she walked out of her bedroom in black satin pajamas that rubbed coolly against her skin. Her chaotic blond hair was twisted into a bun and held up by chopsticks from the Chinese food she’d ordered. Two unopened food cartons and a bottle of wine sat on the glass coffee table between the couch and the flat-screen television. Her apartment smelled of spicy-sweet sesame beef.

She plopped down and uncorked the wine.

Ashley Chambliss’s CD Nakedsongs had ended and in the perfect stillness of her apartment Karen conceded how alone she was.

Thirty-seven.

Single again.

Childless.

But I’m not lonely, she thought, turning on the television and pouring a healthy glass of chardonnay.

I’m just alone.

There is a difference.

After watching Dirty Dancing, Karen treated herself to a soak. She’d closed the bathroom door and a Yankee candle that smelled of cookie dough sat burning in a glass jar on the sink, the projection of its restless flame flickering on the sweaty plaster walls.

Karen rubbed her long muscular legs together, slippery with bath oil. Imagining another pair of legs sliding between her own, she shut her eyes, moved her hands over her breasts, nipples swelling, then up and down her thighs.

The phone was ringing in the living room.

She wondered if Scott Boylin was calling to apologize. Wine encouraged irrational forgiveness in Karen. She even wished Scott were in the bathtub with her. She could feel the memory of his water-softened feet gliding up her smooth shinbones. Maybe she’d call and invite him over. Give him that chance to explain. He’d be back from the Doubleday party.

Now someone was knocking at the front door.

Karen sat up, blew back the bubbles that had amassed around her head.

Lifting her wineglass by the stem, she finished it off. Then she rose out of the water, took her white terrycloth bathrobe that lay draped across the toilet seat, and stepped unsteadily from the tub onto the mosaic tile. She’d nearly polished off the entire bottle of chardonnay and a warm and pleasant gale was raging in her head.

Karen crossed the living room, heading toward the front door.

She failed to notice that the cartons of steamed rice and sesame beef were gone, or that a large gray trashcan now stood between the television and the antique desk she’d inherited from her grandmother.

She peeked through the peephole.

A young man stood in the hallway holding an enormous bouquet of ruby red roses.

She smiled, turned the deadbolt, opened the door.

“I have a delivery for Karen Prescott.”

“That’s me.”

The delivery man handed over the gigantic vase.

“Wait here. I’ll get you your tip.” She slurred her words a little.

“No ma’am, it’s been taken care of.” He gave her a small salute and left.

She relocked the door and carried the roses over to the kitchen counter. They were magnificent and they burgeoned from the cut-glass vase. She plucked the small card taped to the glass and opened it. The note read simply:

Look in the coat closet

Karen giggled. Scott was one hundred percent forgiven. Maybe she’d even do that thing he always asked for tonight.

She buried her nose in a rose, inhaled the damp sweet perfume. Then she cinched the belt of her bathrobe and walked over to the closet behind the couch, pulling open the door with a big smile that instantly died.

A naked man with black hair and a pale face peered down at her. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and swallowed.

The cartons of leftover Chinese food stood between his feet.

She stared into his black eyes, a coldness spreading through her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

The man grinned, his member rising.

Karen bolted for the front door, but as she reached to unhook the chain he snatched a handful of her wet hair and swung her back into a mirror that shattered on the adjacent wall.

“Please,” she whimpered.

He punched her in the face.

Karen sank down onto the floor in bits of glass, anesthetized by wine and fear. Watching his bare feet, she wondered where her body would be found and by whom and in what condition.

He grabbed her hair into a ball with one hand and lifted her face out of the glass, the tiniest shards having already embedded themselves in her cheek.

He swung down.

She felt the dull thud of his knuckles crack her jaw, decided to feign unconsciousness.

He hit her again.

She didn’t have to.

ABANDON

Published July 2009 by Minotaur Books

DESCRIPTION: On Christmas Day in 1893, every man, woman and child in a remote mining town will disappear, belongings forsaken,  meals left to freeze in vacant cabins, and not a single bone will be found--not even the gold that was rumored to have been the pride of this town will be found either.  One hundred and thirteen years later, two backcountry guides are hired by a leading history professor and his journalist daughter to lead them into the abandoned mining town to learn what happened.  This has been done once before but the people that went in did not come out.  With them is a psychic and a paranormal photographer--the town is rumored to be haunted.  They’ve come to see a ghost town, but what they’re about to discover is that twenty miles from civilization, with a blizzard bearing down, they are not alone, and the past is very much alive....

Crouch does a great job of pacing, going back and forth between the two stories and the two time periods. The characters are authentic and interesting. He keeps up the suspense until the very end. It’s a great book. Crouch is a great writer. Go and get it.

TORONTO SUN

In Abandon, Crouch blends elements of modern-day Colorado with its violent and storied past to create a tapestry of love, greed and revenge…unforgettable.

JOHN HART

Excerpt from Abandon…

Thursday, December 28, 1893

Wind rips through the crags a thousand feet above, nothing moving in this godforsaken town, and the muleskinner knows that something is wrong.  Two miles south stands Bartholomew Packer’s mine, the Godsend, a twenty-stamp mill that should be filling this box canyon with the thudding racket of the rock-crushers pulverizing ore.  The sound of the stamps in operation is the sound of money being made, and only two things will stop them—Christmas and tragedy.

He dismounts his albino steed, the horse’s pinked nostrils flaring, dirty mane matted with ice.  The single-rig saddle is snow-crusted as well, its leather and cloth components—the mochila and shabrack—frozen stiff.  He rubs George the horse’s neck, speaking in soft, low tones he knows will calm the animal, telling him he did a good day’s work and that a warm stable awaits with feed and fresh water.

The muleskinner opens his wallet, collects the pint of busthead he bought at a bodega in Silverton, and swallows the remaining mouthful, whiskey crashing into his empty stomach like iced fire.

He wades through waist-deep snow to the mercantile, bangs his shop-mades on the doorframe.  Inside, the lamps have been extinguished and the big stove squats dormant in the corner, unattended by the usual constellation of miners jawboning over coffee and tobacco.  He calls for the owner as he crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour.

“Jessup?  It’s Brady!  You in back?”

The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc.  He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year.

“What the hell?” he whispers.

When he delivered supplies two weeks ago, this little mining town was bustling.  Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see.

The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean.

Brady is a man at home in solitude, often days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong—a lie.  He feels menaced by it, and with each passing moment, more certain that something has happened here.

A wall of dark clouds scrapes over the peaks and snowflakes begin to speck the sleeves of his slicker.  Here comes the wind.  Chimes clang together over the doorway of the merc.  It will be night soon.

He makes his way up the street into the saloon, still half-expecting Joss Maddox, the beautiful barkeep, to assault him with some gloriously profane greeting.  No one’s there.  Not the mute piano player, not a single customer, and again, no light from the kerosene lamps, no warmth from the potbellied stove, just a half-filled glass on the pine bar, the beer frozen through.

The path to the nearest cabin lies beneath untrodden snow, and without webs, it takes five minutes to cover a hundred yards.

He pounds his gloved fist against the door, counts to sixty.  The latch string hasn’t been pulled in, and despite the circumstance, he still feels like a trespasser as he steps inside uninvited.

In the dark, his eyes strain to adjust.

Around the base of a potted spruce tree, crumpled pages of newspaper clutters the dirt floor—remnants of Christmas.

Food sits untouched on a rustic table, far too lavish to be any ordinary meal for the occupants of this cramped, one-room cabin.  This was Christmas dinner.

He removes a glove, touches the ham—cold and hard as ore.  A pot of beans have frozen in their broth.  The cake feels more like pumice than sponge, and two jagged glass stems still stand upright, the wine having frozen and shattered the crystal cups.

Outside again, back with his pack train, he shouts, turning slowly in the middle of the street so the words carry in all directions.

“Anyone here?”

His voice and the fading echo of it sound so small rising against the vast, indifferent sweep of wilderness.  The sky dims.  Snow falls harder.  The church at the north end of town disappears in the storm.

It’s twenty miles back to Silverton, and the pack train has been on the trail since before first light.  They need rest.  Having skinned mules the last sixteen hours, he needs it, too, though the prospect of spending the night in Abandon, in this awful silence, unnerves him.

As he slips a boot into the stirrup, ready to drive the burros down to the stables, he notices something beyond the cribs at the south end of town.  He puts George forward, trots through deep powder between the false-fronted buildings, and when he sees what caught his eye, whispers, “You old fool.”

Just a snowman scowling at him, spindly arms made of spruce branches.  Pinecones for teeth and eyes.  Garland for a crown.

He tugs the reins, turning George back toward town, and the jolt of seeing her provokes, “Lord God Amighty.”

He drops his head, tries to allay the thumping of his heart in the thin air.  When he looks up again, the young girl is still there, perhaps six or seven, apparition-pale and just ten feet away, with locomotive-black curls and coal eyes to match—so dark and with such scant delineation between iris and pupil, they more resemble wet stones.

“You put a fright in me,” he says.  “What are you doin out here all alone?”

She backpedals.

“Don’t be scart.  I ain’t the bogeyman.”  Brady alights, wades toward her through the snow.  With the young girl in webs sunk only a foot in powder, and the muleskinner to his waist, he thinks it odd to stand eye to eye with a child.

“You all right?” he asks.  “I didn’t think there was nobody here.”

The snowflakes stand out like white confetti in the child’s hair.

“They’re all gone,” she says, no emotion, no tears, just an unaffected statement of fact.

“Even your Ma and Pa?”

She nods.

“Where’d they all go to?  Can you show me?”

She takes another step back, reaches into her gray woolen cloak.  The single-action Army is a heavy sidearm, and it sags comically in the child’s hand so she holds it like a rifle, Brady too surprised to do a thing but watch as she struggles with the hammer.

“Okay, I’ll show you,” she says, the hammer locked back, sighting him up, her small finger already in the trigger guard.

“Now hold on, wait just a—”

“Stay still.”

“That ain’t no toy to point in someone’s direction.  It’s for—”

“Killin.  I know.  You’ll feel better directly.”

As Brady scrambles for a way to rib up this young girl to hand him the gun, he hears the report ricocheting through the canyon, finds himself lying on his back, surrounded by a wall of snow.

In the oval of gray winter sky, the child’s face appears, looking down at him.

What in God’s—

“It made a hole in your neck.”

He attempts to tell her to stable George and the burros, see that they’re fed and watered.  After all the work they put in today, they deserve at least that.  Only gurgles emerge, and when he tries to breathe, his throat whistles.

She points the Army at his face again, one eye closed, the barrel slightly quivering, a parody of aiming.

He stares up into the deluge of snowflakes, the sky already immersed in bluish dusk that seems to deepen before his eyes, and he wonders, Is the day really fading that fast, or am I?

SNOWBOUND

Published June 2010 by Minotaur Books

DESCRIPTION: For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her death, Will took his daughter and fled.

Now, Will and Devlin live under different names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family.

When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she hasn’t come to arrest Will. “I know you’re innocent,” she tells him, “because Rachael wasn’t the first…or the last.” Desperate for answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of Alaska , heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the truth is infinitely worse than they ever imagined.

Excerpt from Snowbound…

1

In the evening of the last good day either of them would know for years to come, the girl pushed open the sliding glass door and stepped through onto the back porch.

“Daddy?”

Will Innis set the legal pad aside and made room for Devlin to climb into his lap.  His daughter was small for eleven, felt like the shell of a child in his arms.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked and in her scratchy voice he could hear the remnants of her last respiratory infection like gravel in her lungs.

“Working up a closing for my trial in the morning.”

“Is your client the bad guy again?”

Will smiled.  “You and your mother.  I’m not really supposed to think of it that way, sweetheart.”

“What’d he do?”  His little girl’s face had turned ruddy in the sunset and the fading light brought out threads of platinum in her otherwise midnight hair.

“He allegedly—”

“What’s that mean?”

“Allegedly?”

“Yeah.”

“Means it’s not been proven.  He’s suspected of selling drugs.”

“Like what I take?”

“No, your drugs are good.  They help you.  He was selling, allegedly selling, bad drugs to people.”

“Why are they bad?”

“Because they make you lose control.”

“Why do people take them?”

“They like how it makes them feel.”

“How does it make them feel?”

He kissed her forehead and looked at his watch.  “It’s after eight, Devi.  Let’s go bang on those lungs.”

She sighed but she didn’t argue.  She never tried to get out of it.

He stood up cradling his daughter and walked over to the redwood railing.

They stared into the wilderness that bordered Oasis Hills, their subdivision.  The houses on No-Water Lane had the Sonoran Desert for a backyard.

“Look,” he said.  “See them?”  A half mile away, specks filed out of an arroyo and trotted across the desert toward a shadeless forest of giant saguaro cacti that looked vaguely sinister profiled against the horizon.

“What are they?” she asked.

“Coyotes.  What do you bet they start yapping when the sun goes down?”

After supper, he read to Devlin from A Wrinkle in Time.  They’d been working their way through the penultimate chapter, “Aunt Beast,” but Devlin was exhausted and drifted off before Will had finished the second page.

He closed the book and set it on the carpet and turned out the light.  Cool desert air flowed in through an open window.  A sprinkler whispered in the next door neighbor’s yard.  Devlin yawned, made a cooing sound that reminded him of rocking her to sleep as a newborn.  Her eyes fluttered and she said very softly, “Mom?”

“She’s working late at the clinic, sweetheart.”

“When’s she coming back?”

“Few hours.”

“Tell her to come in and kiss me?”

“I will.”

He was nowhere near ready for court in the morning but he stayed, running his fingers through Devlin’s hair until she’d fallen back to sleep.  Finally, he slid carefully off the bed and walked out onto the deck to gather up his books and legal pads.  He had a late night ahead of him.  A pot of strong coffee would help.

Next door, the sprinklers had gone quiet.

A lone cricket chirped in the desert.

Thunderless lightning sparked somewhere over Mexico, and the coyotes began to scream.

2

The thunderstorm caught up with Rachael Innis thirty miles north of the Mexican border.  It was 9:30 p.m., and it had been a long day at the free clinic in Sonoyta, where she volunteered her time and services once a week as a bilingual psychologist.  The windshield wipers whipped back and forth.  High beams lit the steam rising off the pavement, and in the rearview mirror, Rachael saw the pair of headlights a quarter of a mile back that had been with her for the last ten minutes.

Glowing beads suddenly appeared on the shoulder just ahead.  She jammed her foot into the brake pedal, the Grand Cherokee fishtailing into the oncoming lane before skidding to a stop.  A doe and her fawn ventured into the middle of the road, mesmerized by the headlights.  Rachael let her forehead fall onto the steering wheel, closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath.

The deer moved on.  She accelerated the Cherokee, another dark mile passing as pellets of hail hammered the hood.

The Cherokee veered sharply toward the shoulder and she nearly lost control again, trying to correct her bearing, but the steering wheel wouldn’t straighten out.  Rachael lifted her foot off the gas pedal and eased over onto the side of the road.

When she killed the ignition all she could hear was the rain and hail drumming on the roof.  The car that had been following her shot by.  She set her glasses in the passenger seat, opened the door, and stepped down into a puddle that engulfed her pumps.  The downpour soaked through her black suit.  She shivered.  It was pitch-black between lightning strikes and she moved forward carefully, feeling her way along the warm metal of the hood.

A slash of lightning hit the desert just a few hundred yards out.  It set her body tingling, her ears ringing.  I’m going to be electrocuted.  There came a train of earsplitting strikes, flashbulbs of electricity that lit the sky just long enough for her to see that the tires on the driver side were still intact.

Her hands trembled now.  A tall saguaro stood burning like a cross in the desert.  She groped her way over to the passenger side as marble-size hail collected in her hair.  The desert was electrified again, spreading wide and empty all around her.

In the eerie blue light she saw that the front tire on the passenger side was flat.

Back inside the Cherokee, Rachael sat behind the steering wheel, mascara trailing down her cheeks like sable tears.  She wrung out her long black hair and massaged the headache building between her temples.  Her purse lay in the passenger floorboard.  She dragged it into her lap and shoved her hand inside, rummaging for the cell phone.  She found it, tried her husband’s number, but there was no service in the storm.

Rachael looked into the back of the Cherokee at the spare.  She had no way of contacting AAA and passing cars would be few and far between on this remote highway at this hour of the night.  I’ll just wait and try Will again when the storm has passed.

Squeezing the steering wheel, she stared through the windshield into the stormy darkness, somewhere north of the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  Middle of nowhere.

There was a brilliant streak of lightning.  In the split second illumination she saw a black Escalade parked a hundred yards up the shoulder.

Thunder rattled the windows.  Five seconds elapsed.  When the sky exploded again, Rachael felt a strange, unnerving pull to look through the driver side window.

A man swung a crowbar through the glass.

3

Will startled back into consciousness, disoriented and thirsty.  It was so quiet—just the discreet drone of a computer fan and the second hand of the clock ticking in the adjacent bedroom.  He found himself slouched in the leather chair at the desk in his small home office, the CPU still purring, the monitor switched into sleep mode.

As he yawned, everything rushed back in a torrent of anxiety.  He’d been hammering out notes for his closing argument and hit a wall at ten o’clock.  The evidence was damning.  He was going to lose.  He’d only closed his eyes for a moment to clear his head.

He reached for the mug of coffee and took a sip.  Winced.  It was cold and bitter.  He jostled the mouse.  When the screen restored, he looked at the clock and realized he wouldn’t be sleeping anymore tonight.  It was 4:09 a.m.  He was due in court in less than five hours.

First things first—he needed an immediate and potent infusion of caffeine.

His office adjoined the master bedroom at the west end of the house, and passing through on his way to the kitchen, he noticed a peculiar thing.  He’d expected to see his wife buried under the myriad quilts and blankets on their bed, but she wasn’t there.  The comforter was smooth and taut, undisturbed since they’d made it up yesterday morning.

He walked through the living room into the den and down the hallway toward the east end of the house.  Rachael had probably come home, seen him asleep at his desk, and gone in to kiss Devlin.  She’d have been exhausted from working all day at the clinic.  She’d probably fallen asleep in there.  He could picture the nightlight glow on their faces as he reached his daughter’s door.

It was cracked, exactly as he’d left it seven hours ago when he’d put Devlin to bed.

He eased the door open.  Rachael wasn’t with her.

Will wide awake now, closing Devlin’s door, heading back into the den.

“Rachael?  You here, hon?”

He went to the front door, turned the deadbolt, stepped outside.

Dark houses.  Porchlights.  Streets still wet from the thunderstorms that blew through several hours ago.  No wind, the sky clearing, bright with stars.

When he saw them in the driveway, his knees gave out and he sat down on the steps and tried to remember how to breathe.  One Beamer, no Jeep Cherokee, and a pair of patrol cars, two uniformed officers coming toward him, their hats shelved under their arms.

The patrolmen sat in the living room on the couch, Will facing them in a chair.  The smell of new paint was still strong.  He and Rachael had redone the walls and the vaulted ceiling in terracotta last weekend.  Most of the black and white desert photographs that adorned the room still leaned against the antique chest of drawers, waiting to be re-hung.

The lawmen were businesslike in their delivery, taking turns with the details, as if they’d rehearsed who would say what, their voices so terribly measured and calm.

There wasn’t much information yet.  Rachael’s Cherokee had been found on the shoulder of Arizona 85 in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.  Right front tire flat, punctured with a nail to cause a slow and steady loss of air pressure.  Driver side window busted out.

No Rachael.  No blood.

They asked Will a few questions.  They tried to sympathize.  They said how sorry they were, Will just shaking his head and staring at the floor, a tightness in his chest, constricting his windpipe in a slow strangulation.

He happened to look up at some point, saw Devlin standing in the hall in a plain pink tee-shirt that fell all the way to the carpet, the tattered blanket she’d slept with every night since her birth draped over her left arm.  And he could see in her eyes that she’d heard every word the patrolmen had said about her mother, because they were filling up with tears.

4

Rachael Innis was strapped upright with two-inch webbing to the leather seat behind the driver.  She stared at the console lights.  The digital clock read 4:32 a.m.  She remembered the crowbar through the window and nothing after.

Bach’s Four Lute Suites blared from the Bose stereo system, John Williams playing the classical guitar.  Beyond the windshield, the headlights cut a feeble swath of light through the darkness, and even though she was riding in a luxury SUV, the shocks did little to ease the violent jarring from whatever primitive road they traveled.

Her wrists and ankles were comfortably but securely bound with nylon restraints.  Her mouth wasn’t gagged.  From her vantage point, she could only see the back of the driver’s head and occasionally the side of his face by the cherry glow of his cigarette.  He was smooth-shaven, his hair was dark, and he smelled of a subtle, spicy cologne.

It occurred to her that he didn’t know she was awake, but the thought wasn’t two seconds old when she caught his eyes in the rearview mirror.  They registered her consciousness, turned back to the road.

They drove on.  An endless stream of rodents darted across the road ahead and a thought kept needling her—at some point, he was going to stop the car and do whatever he was driving her out in the desert to do.

“Have you urinated on my seat?”  She thought she detected the faintest accent.

“No.”

“You tell me if you have to urinate.  I’ll stop the car.”

“Okay.  Where are you—”

“No talking.  Unless you have to urinate.”

“I just—”

“You want your mouth taped?  You have a cold.  That would make breathing difficult.”

Devlin was the only thing she’d ever prayed for and that was years ago, but as she watched the passing sagebrush and cactus through the deeply tinted windows, she pleaded with God again.

Now the Escalade was slowing.  It came to a stop.  He turned off the engine and stepped outside and shut the door.  Her door opened.  He stood watching her.  He was very handsome, with flawless, brown skin (save for an indentation in the bridge of his nose), liquid blue eyes, and black hair greased back from his face.  His pretty teeth seemed to gleam in the night.  Rachael’s chest heaved against the strap of webbing.

He said, “Calm down, Rachael.”  Her name sounded like a foreign word on his lips.  He took out a syringe from his black leather jacket and uncapped the needle.

“What is that?” she asked.

“You have nice veins.”  He ducked into the Escalade and turned her arm over.  When the needle entered, she gasped.

“Please listen.  If this is some kind of ransom thing—”

“No, no.  You’ve already been purchased.  In fact, right now, there isn’t a safer place in the world for you to be than in my possession.”

A gang of coyotes erupted in demonic howls somewhere out in that empty dark and Rachael thought they sounded like a woman burning alive, and she began to scream until the drug took her.

BLAKE CROUCH is the author of DESERT PLACES, LOCKED DOORS, and ABANDON, which was an IndieBound Notable Selection last summer, all published by St. Martin’s Press. His newest thriller, SNOWBOUND, also from St. Martin’s, was released in 2010. His short fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Thriller 2, and other anthologies, including the new SHIVER VI anthology from Cemetery Dance. In 2009, he co-wrote “Serial” with J.A. Konrath, which has been downloaded over 250,000 times and topped the Kindle bestseller list for 4 weeks. That story and DESERT PLACES have also been optioned for film. Blake lives in Durango, Colorado. His website is www.blakecrouch.com.

Blake Crouch’s Works Available on Kindle

Andrew Z. Thomas thrillers

Desert Places

Locked Doors

Other works

Draculas with J.A. Konrath, Jeff Strand and F. Paul Wilson

Abandon

Snowbound

Luminous Blue

Perfect Little Town (horror novella)

Serial Uncut with J.A. Konrath and Jack Kilborn

Bad Girl (short story)

Four Live Rounds (collected stories)

Shining Rock (short story)

*69 (short story)

On the Good, Red Road (short story)

Remaking (short story)

The Meteorologist (short story)

The Pain of Others (novella)

Six in the Cylinder (collected stories)

Coming soon...

Break You

Killers (with J.A. Konrath)

Killers Uncut (with J.A. Konrath)

Serial Killers Uncut (with J.A. Konrath)

Stirred (with J.A. Konrath)

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Table of Contents

*69

Remaking

On the Good, Red Road

Shining Rock

Perfect Little Town

Serial

The Newton Boys’ Last Photograph

The Meteorologist

Unconditional

The Pain of Others

Bonus Material