Four Live Rounds (11 page)

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.”