Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch Page A

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