Niceville

who was standing in the dead center of the fourteenth green, holding the flag and bellowing at him, in tones of brass,
For Christ’s sake, Thad, will you just hit the goddam—
    The fireball then shrank to a towering pillar of black smoke with a flaming core. Now the flock of crows, decimated but still a coherent mass, gathered together again, seeming to turn into a single solid entity, dense, cold, black, impenetrable, as curved as a scythe.
    This shape swooped low over the rooftops and church spires and forested blocks of Niceville, darkening the town as it passed. Then it rose up, soaring into the blue, wheeled suddenly to the northwest, and flew back to the crest of Tallulah’s Wall, where it settled into the ring of ancient trees that grew around Crater Sink, the birds clustering there in fluttering ranks, strung along the ancient branches, chittering and squawking, yellow eyes shining, sharp beaks clacking like scissors, staring down into Crater Sink.
    And there they stayed, for an unnaturally long time, until well after sundown, motionless and strangely silent, two thousand crows watching the perfect circle of cold black water with a fixed intensity, as if they were all waiting for something, finally, to come back out of Crater Sink.

Acknowledgments
    All my gratitude goes to my agent, Barney Karpfinger; my guardian angel, Cathy Jaque; and my editor, Carole Baron, all of whom made a good book infinitely better; and to Danielle Adair, Emily Stroud, Tom Macdonald, Susan Hodgins, Suzanne Hutchinson, Debbie Fowler, Barbara Wojdat, and Lisa Hong, all of whom know why.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Carsten Stroud is a seasoned writer of fiction and nonfiction, including the true-crime account
Close Pursuit
, a
New York Times
bestseller when it was published almost twenty-five years ago. His novels include
Sniper’s Moon
,
Lizardskin
,
Black Water Transit
,
Cuba Strait
and
Cobraville
. He lives in Toronto, and is currently working on his next novel.