Four Live Rounds

by Blake Crouch

  “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 anoth
er 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.