Four Live Rounds (13 page)

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.