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He worked an hour or two at a time. The writing came on top of his other responsibilities, most notably the mounting medical bills he had to navigate. He helped Carol plan for her future, telling her she needed to chart a clear course for her life. Only when he started the morphine did he lose some short-term memory.

"Who are you?" Carol would ask. "Why are you here? What do you do? You're writing a book. You need to finish it."

Right up to the end they worked on Freedom Land. Carol typed as Martin dictated his changes on a second draft and then the final draft. They'd work whenever he could find the strength. Sometimes they'd spend a half-hour scouring the manuscript for a single word that could be improved. They'd sit in front of the computer, his hand on the mouse that Carol moved for him. Sometimes he'd just sit there for long stretches of time -- ten or twenty minutes without saying a word -- staring at the computer screen.

"What are you doing, Martin?" Carol would ask finally.

"I'm thinking," he'd whisper in his fading voice. "We're writing."

Martin finished the book. A publication date was set, a month or so away. There was enough time left, he hoped, to start work on a second book, a memoir of his disease. But he didn't have much time left at all. On the last day of his life -- December 22, 2002 -- Martin discovered he could no longer speak. All he could do was blink his eyelids. There was no way to write. There was nothing he could do but lie in his bed.

"You could just tell he gave up the minute he knew he couldn't talk anymore," says Carol.

As he lay motionless in bed, Carol curled beside him, stroking his hair. She thought about their nearly fourteen years together, five with the disease. She thought about how his arms and legs had looked so strong when he glided across tennis courts. She thought about what he'd just accomplished -- writing and publishing a novel as his body collapsed. How many people say they're going to write a book? How many actually do? She stroked the skin of Martin's cheek. Until the moment he stopped breathing, she whispered in his ear. "You're an author," she said softly. "You're an author."

Martin's ashes were scattered across the back stretch at Calder Race Course. His sisters, the track chaplain, and friends from Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia joined Carol in the winner's circle. Before the ceremony, Carol ran her fingers through the bag of ashes, assessing the material's odd texture. A friend was taking pictures on his cell phone. Carol held up the bag for him, saying it would make a great Christmas card. "Happy Holidays from Carol and Martin."

"When somebody passes away, people tend to idolize him -- all of a sudden he becomes perfect," says Alexandra Scott, the friend from L.A. "Well, no one's perfect. He just was a very special human being because of his drive. None of us should get to a point in life that you're dying, but he knew and he never gave up. That's so admirable."

Carol immediately cleaned out the bedroom, which to her seemed more like a hospital room. She got rid of the huge adjustable bed. She cleared out all the medicines and the wheelchair and all the things Martin needed to make his last days bearable. The caregivers who'd marched in and out no longer visited. When something interesting happened during her day, she had no one to tell.

"I was working late one night, about 11:00, trying to get ready for the book, which was due to come out," she says. "I had promotional material to prepare. I had bookstores to contact. I had a lot that was keeping me busy. And that night, as I was sitting there, it came to me: Did Martin ever exist? Was he real?"

A month after Martin died, Carol received a box of books at the apartment. She picked up one copy of Freedom Land and held it. Flecks of freshly cut paper tickled her nose. She turned over the novel in her hands, assessing the cover, the spine, the excerpt quoted on the back. She opened to the dedication, which was to her.

"I wanted to say, 'Martin, look what we've done. Look what you've done -- forget about me -- what you've done.'" It's one thing to share something with your best friend, she thought. It's another to share with the person who was in the trenches with you.

One review, in Publisher's Weekly, called Freedom Land "riveting" and "remarkably well crafted." Wrote the reviewer: "Marcus gives us sharply defined characters and weaves an intricate narrative of conspiracy, subterfuge, and vivid, bloody action. Historical-adventure fans will eat it up -- and anxiously await this talented rookie's next work."

When the Toronto Globe and Mail asked Miami author Edna Buchanan to name three books that explain the allure of Florida, she offered up T.D. Allman's classic 1987 analysis Miami, City of the Future, Marjory Stoneman Douglas's Everglades masterpiece River of Grass, and Freedom Land. Buchanan called Marcus's "meticulously researched" book a "passionate first novel, alive with the heart-stopping action of its vibrant and doomed real-life characters."

The Little River branch of the Miami-Dade County Library. It's a rainy Saturday afternoon. On a television in the center of the main room, kids watch a video of Disney's Lady and the Tramp. It's the moment in the film when the two lead dogs fall in love over a shared platter of spaghetti, a rather touching scene for a cartoon. Instead of watching, a trio of the more hyperactive patrons commence a track meet around a pair of circular tables littered with children's books.

"Excuse me, sirs, please sit down!" shouts a woman at the checkout desk. "Please sit down right now!"

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