Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [105]
He sets five hardbacks on the counter. We are alone in this tiny bookstore of new and old mysteries, only marginally larger than a dorm room. It is dim inside the store. The floor and shelves consist of dark knotty wood. There are no windows but this is no shortcoming. Every book is a window.
"Is this all, sir?" I manage.
He nods and my hands tremble as I begin to scan his selections: a used collection of Poe’s short stories, Kafka, three mysteries from one of his contemporaries.
I listen to the rhythm of his breathing—deep comfortable inhalations. I smell the tannin of his leather jacket. His eyes roam over my head to the shelf behind the counter that displays the ten bestsellers of Murder One Books.
"One-oh-three ninety-eight," I say.
He points to the credit card that he’s already placed on the counter. I lift it, almost too urgently, and glance at the name welted upon the plastic: Vincent Carmichael.
I look up from the credit card into his eyes.
He’s staring at me.
I swipe the card, hand it back to him.
Tearing the receipt from the scanner, I lay it down on the counter with a pen and watch him sign Vincent Carmichael in wispy characters that are nothing like his true autograph.
Part of me wants to speak to him, to tell him I’ve read everything he’s ever written. But I hold my tongue, reminding myself that the rumors surrounding this man are legendary—if he knew that I knew he would end me.
So I put his five books into a plastic bag, hand him the receipt, and he walks out the open door into the cold Alaskan afternoon.
He crosses Campus Drive and sits down in bright grass in the shade of a juniper, the tangy gin-scented berries of which I can smell even from inside the store. U of A students recline all around him in the weak sun and shade of saplings scattered through the green—reading, napping, smoking between classes.
And as I stare at Andrew Thomas, a surge of adrenaline fills me and the thrill of inspiration rears its lovely head.
I’ve found my story.
5
I woke Saturday in the Yukon dawn, donned a fleece pullover, and stepped into a pair of cold Vasque Sundowners to save my sockfeet from the frozen floorboards. The Nalgene water bottle on my bedside table was capped with ice. I looked over at the hearth, saw that the fire had reduced itself to a pile of warm fine ash.
I walked out to the woodpile I’d chopped in September. It was stacked seven feet high and stretched for twenty feet between two rampike poplars that had been cooked by lightning last spring. The cold stung. My fingers tingled even through the leather gloves.
I gathered an armload of wood as the sun angled through the spruce branches and thawed the forest floor. The thermometer on the front porch read eight above.
As I reached for the door, something snapped behind me. I froze, turned slowly around, scanned the trees. Twenty yards away an enormous bull moose emerged from the spruce thicket, the branches catching in his giant rack. He walked leisurely behind the woodpile, probably headed for the pond.
Inside I placed a handful of kindling on the metal grate and stacked the logs on end around the twigs in a teepee arrangement. Then I balled up several sheets of the St. Elias Echo and stuffed these beneath the grate. There was a hot coal or two left. These ignited the newspaper which in turn lit the kindling and soon the young flames were tonguing the logs, steaming off the latent moisture, boiling the fragrant resin within.
As the quiet pandemonium of the fire filled the cabin, I walked into the kitchen and rinsed the old coffee grounds from the French press. Then I started a pot of water on the gas stove and ground a handful of French roasted coffee beans in the burr mill. While my coffee steeped, filling the cabin with the smokyrich perfume of the beans, I sat down on the hearth and read over the ten pages I’d revised last night. The new book was coming along nicely. It was the first autobiographical