“Hello?”
“Carly?”
“Dad?”
“Baby.”
Figured she could hear the tears in his voice, but he didn’t care.
“Why are you calling? Is Mom okay?”
“She’s fine.” He turned away from the man who was going to murder him and leaned into the tinted glass. “I’m sorry, Carly. For everything. You are my—”
“Dad, I’m kind of in the middle of something…could I give you a call back in—”
“Listen to me. Please. I was wrong, Carly. So wrong.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. No. Carly, you are my princess. You always have been, and I love you beyond words. Do you hear me?”
On the other end of the line…silence.
“Carly?”
“I hear you. Dad, is everything okay?”
“Yes. I just…” He shut his eyes, tears streaming down his face. “I need you to know how I feel about you. How I’ve always felt. Those summers up in Wisconsin with you and your mother on Lake Rooney…best times of my life. I would give all the treasure in the world to go back there for a single day. I’m so proud of you, Carly.”
Now, he could hear her crying.
“Ten seconds,” the man said.
“I have to go now, sweetheart.”
“I want to see you, Dad. I’ll be in Chicago week after next.”
“I’d like that very much. I’m sorry, Carly. I’m so sorry.”
“Dad, are you sure everything’s—”
He felt the phone get snatched away from his ear.
Marquette wiped his eyes, stared for a moment across the harbor.
When he looked back at the man, he said, “I should’ve done that a long time ago.”
“But you did it. There were people in my life, now long since gone, that I can never have a conversation like that with. Count yourself lucky.”
But Marquette didn’t feel lucky. He felt devastated.
“It’s time, Reggie. Roll up the sleeve of your left arm.”
Marquette’s fingers trembled so badly that he fumbled with the button on his cuff for thirty seconds before he got it undone.
“Are you strictly a scholar or is there some real belief behind your work?” the man asked as Marquette slowly rolled up the sleeve of the cream button-down shirt his wife had given him the Christmas before last.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve studied quite a bit of Dante’s masterpiece myself. It fascinates me. I have a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“To which circle of hell will you be taken?”
Marquette stared into the man’s black eyes—such terrifying emptiness.
“The fifth circle.”
“Anger?”
“It’s the root of all my failings.”
“You’re a very honest man, Reggie.”
The rolled sleeve was above his elbow now, and the man said, “That’s fine. Turn your arm over. Let me see your veins.”
Marquette hesitated, but only for a second.
“Are you feeling the urge to resist?”
“Of course I am. This is my life you’re taking.”
“I understand that as long as you understand what’s behind the black curtain. If you want to go out screaming and in agony, the option is there.”
“I don’t want that.”
The man with long, black hair held the syringe, his finger on the plunger, and moved it toward the pale underside of Marquette’s forearm.
“Try to keep it steady.”
Marquette grabbed his wrist to keep his arm from shaking, watched the needle enter a periwinkle vein with a stinging pinch.
“Speedy travels, brother,” the man said, and his thumb depressed the plunger.
When he’d shot the full load into Marquette’s system, he tugged out the needle and leaned back in his seat.
Marquette sat with his palms on his knees.
Waiting.
Heart racing.
Lines of icy sweat trilling down his sides.
He didn’t feel anything yet.
Out the window, he saw a couple in their thirties walking along the shore with two small children.
An old man sitting on a bench twenty yards away, smoking a cigar.
A half-mile out—a sailboat gliding shoreward.
He whispered the names of his wife and his daughter, and then it hit him—like someone had dangled his beating heart over the fast lane of an interstate and a sixteen-wheeler had slammed through it at full throttle.
He heard himself gasp.
The pain of molten rock being pouring into his chest cavity. He had a faint understanding that he was thrashing about in the front passenger seat of the van, eyes bugging out, and then he was still, crumpled against the door and staring out the window one last time, the world turning into a negative of itself.
He wasn’t moving, couldn’t move, not even to close his eyes, and he thought, I’m going to die with them open, and he stared at the familiar profile of the Hancock Building, five miles away, until it ceased to mean a thing.
• • •
Wikipedia Entry for Andrew Z. Thomas
Andrew Ziegler Thomas (born November 1, 1961) is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, true crime, and thriller fiction, and a suspected serial killer. His stories have sold more than 30 million copies and have been adapted into feature films, television movies, and comic books.
Early Life
Thomas was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1961 to James and Jeanette Thomas, along with his fraternal twin brother, Orson. His father, who worked in a textile factory, died of lung cancer in 1973, when Thomas was eleven.
Education and Early Career
Thomas attended Appalachian State University with his brother beginning in 1980. He graduated with a BA in English in 1984. Orson Thomas left during their junior year for unknown reasons.
1980s Work
After finishing college in 1984, Thomas began submitting short stories to horror and suspense magazines. His first short story, “An Ocean of Pain,” was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s December 1986 issue. At this time, Thomas had already begun work on his first novel, The Killer and His Weapon, a story about a man coming to terms with his homicidal instincts. With that novel, he landed renowned literary agent Cynthia Mathis, who still handles rights to his work. The Killer and His Weapon was published in 1988. Although not a critical success, it sold over 100,000 copies in hardcover and 500,000 copies in paperback, big numbers for a first horror novel containing depictions of graphic violence.
1990s Work
Thomas’s second novel, Sunset Is the Color of a Broken Heart (1990), was a critical and commercial flop. Straying from the page-turning horror and suspense of his debut, Heart was a tender, autobiographic coming-of-age story about a young boy growing up in the piedmont of North Carolina. Following the disappointing performance of his second novel, Thomas released a string of commercial successes that were seen as a return to the thrills of his debut, while also incorporating elements of true crime. These included The Way the World Ends (1991), Blue Murder (1992), Plan of Attack (1993), Midnight: Collected Stories (1994), and The Passenger (1996). Blue Murder, Plan of Attack, and The Way the World Ends were all adapted for film, with Blue Murder becoming a box-office hit. By the time Thomas released The Scorcher in 1996, he had established himself as one of horror fiction’s rising stars and the heir apparent to Stephen King and Dean Koontz.
The Heart Surgeon Murders and the Unraveling of Thomas’s Career
On October 31, 1996, a box containing human hearts was left in Washington, DC, at the Ellipse, near the site of the national Christmas tree. Some of the bodies those hearts had been taken from would later be unearthed at Thomas’s wooded property on Lake Norman in North Carolina. It is widely believed that Thomas was responsible not only for planting the box of hearts at the Ellipse, but for the Heart Surgeon Murders as well.