Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch

Author:Blake Crouch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

He left Sue lying in the tall grass several hundred feet down the mountainside and headed back up toward the meadows of Beech Spring Gap carrying a flashlight he didn’t need under the blazing wattage of the moon.

He reached the gap, moved past their tent and along the trail that led to Shining Rock Mountain, the base of which stood cloaked in thickets of rhododendron that bloomed pink in the month of June.

On a walk that morning, a thousand years ago, he’d noticed a piece of red tucked back among the glossy green leaves, wondered now if that had been Donald’s tent, and how he would find the man’s camp in the middle of the night.

He walked off the trail and crouched down in the grass. Five yards ahead lay the edge of the rhododendron thicket. Roger thought he recalled that piece of red a hundred feet or so up the gentle slope, though he couldn’t be sure.

For a while, he lay on the ground, just listening.

The grass swayed, blades banging dryly against one another.

Rhododendron leaves scraped together.

Something scampered through the thicket.

This was his thirteenth summer coming to Shining Rock, and he found that most of their time here had vanished completely from memory—more impression than detail. But a few of their trips remained clear, intact.

The first time they’d come and accidentally discovered this place, the twins were only six years old, and Michelle had lost her front teeth to this gap while she and Jennifer wrestled and rolled in a meadow one sunny afternoon, cried her heart out, afraid the tooth fairy wouldn’t pay for lost teeth.

There had been the trip seven years ago where he and Sue had to fake happy faces for the girls, crying at night in their tent, while fifteen hundred miles away, in a laboratory in Minneapolis, a biopsy cut from the underside of Sue’s left breast was screened for a cancer that wasn’t there.

Three years back, he’d been anxiously awaiting news on an advertising campaign he’d pitched, which if chosen, might have netted him half a million dollars, remembered trying not to dwell on the phone call he’d make once they left these mountains, knowing if he got a yes, what that would mean for his family. He’d pulled over once they reentered cell phone coverage at an overlook outside of Asheville. Walked back toward the car a moment later, eyes locked with Sue’s, shaking his head.

But looking at the time they’d spent here as a whole, forest instead of tree, it felt a lot like his life—so many good times, some pain, and it had all raced by faster than he could’ve imagined.

Roger crawled to the thicket’s edge and started up the hill, the flashlight and the Glock shoved down the back of his fleece pants.

After five minutes, he stopped to catch his breath.

He thought he’d been making a horrible racket, dead leaves crunching under his elbows as he wriggled himself under the low branches of the rhododendron shrubs. But he assured himself it wasn’t as much noise as he thought.

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