The Husband (14 page)

32

S
o stealthily had the killer returned that Mitch was unaware of his presence until he heard one of the car doors click open and swing wide with the faintest creak.

The man had approached from the front of the Chrysler. Risking exposure in the brief glow of the car’s interior lights, he got in and pulled the door shut as softly as it could be closed.

If he had gotten behind the wheel, he must intend to leave the scene.

No. He wouldn’t drive away with the trunk lid open. And surely he wouldn’t leave the corpse.

Mitch waited in silence.

The gunman was silent, too.

Slowly the silence became a kind of pressure that Mitch could feel on his skin, on his eardrums, on his unblinking eyes, as if the car were descending into a watery abyss, an ever-increasing weight of ocean bearing down on it.

The gunman must be sitting in the dark, surveying the night, waiting to learn whether the throb of light had drawn attention, whether he had been seen. If his return inspired no response, what would he do next?

The desert remained breathless.

In these circumstances, the car would seem as sensitive to motion as a boat on water. If Mitch moved, the killer would be alerted to his presence.

A minute passed. Another.

Mitch pictured the smooth-faced gunman sitting up there in the car, in the gloom, at least thirty years old, maybe thirty-five, yet with such a remarkably soft smooth face, as if life had not touched him and never would.

He tried to imagine what the man with the smooth face was doing, planning. The mind behind that mask remained inaccessible to Mitch’s imagination. He might have more profitably pondered what a desert lizard believed about God or rain or jimsonweed.

After a long stillness, the gunman shifted positions, and the movement proved to be a revelation. The unnerving intimacy of the sound indicated that the man wasn’t behind the wheel of the Chrysler. He was in the backseat.

He must have been sitting forward, watchful, ever since getting into the car. When at last he leaned back, the upholstery made a sound like leather or vinyl does when stressed, and the seat springs quietly complained.

The backseat of the car formed the back wall of the trunk. He and Mitch were within a couple feet of each other.

They were almost as close to each other as they had been on the walk from the library to the car pavilion.

Lying in the trunk, Mitch thought about that walk.

The gunman made a low sound, either a stifled cough or a groan further muffled by the intervening wall of upholstery.

Perhaps he had been wounded, after all. His condition wasn’t sufficiently serious to persuade him to pack up and leave, although it might be painful enough to discourage a lot of roaming.

Clearly, he settled in the car because he hoped that eventually, in desperation, his quarry would return to it. He figured Mitch would be circumspect in his approach, thoroughly scoping out the immediate surrounding territory, but would not expect death to be waiting for him in the shadows of the backseat.

In this makeshift learning room, Mitch thought about that walk between the library and the car pavilion: the moon like a lily pad floating in the pool, the muzzle of the pistol pressed into his side, the songs of the toads, the lacy branches of the silver sheens,
the pistol pressed into his side….

A car of this vintage would not feature a fire wall or a crash panel between the trunk and the passenger compartment. The back of the rear seat might have been finished with a quarter-inch fiberboard panel or even just with cloth.

The backrest might contain six inches of padding. A bullet would meet some resistance.

The barrier wasn’t bulletproof. No one armored with a mere sofa cushion would expect to walk unscathed through a barrage of ten high-velocity rounds.

Currently Mitch half lay and half sat on his left side, facing the night through the open trunk lid.

He would need to roll onto his right side in order to bring the pistol to bear on the back wall of the trunk.

He weighed a hundred and seventy pounds. No degree in physics was required to figure out that the car would respond to that much weight shifting position.

Turn fast, open fire—and maybe he would discover that he was wrong about the partition between trunk and passenger compartment. If there was indeed a metal panel, he might not only be nailed by a ricochet but also fail to hit his target.

Then he would be wounded and out of ammunition, and the gunman would know where to find him.

A bead of sweat slipped along the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth.

The night was mild, not hot.

An urge to act pulled his nerves as taut as bowstrings.

33

A
s Mitch lay in indecision, he heard in memory Holly’s scream, and the sharp
slap
of her being hit.

A real sound refocused his attention on the present: his enemy, in the passenger compartment, stifling a series of coughs.

The noise had been so effectively muffled that it wouldn’t have been heard beyond the car. As before, the coughing lasted only a few seconds.

Maybe the gunman’s cough related to a wound. Or he was allergic to desert pollen.

When the guy coughed again, Mitch would seize the opportunity to change positions.

Beyond the open trunk, the desert seemed to darkle, brighten, darkle rhythmically, but in fact the acuity of his vision sharpened briefly with each systolic thrust of his pounding heart.

A sudden illusion of snow, however, had a basis in reality. Moonlight frosted the phosphorescent wings of swarming moths that whirled like flakes of winter across the road.

Mitch’s cuffed hands gripped the pistol so fiercely that his knuckles began to ache. His right forefinger hooked the trigger guard, rather than the trigger itself, because he feared that a nervous twitch would cause him to fire before he intended.

His teeth were clenched. He heard himself inhale, exhale. He opened his mouth to breathe more quietly.

Even though his heart raced, time ceased to be a river running and became a creeping flow of mud.

Instinct had served Mitch well in recent hours. Likewise, a sixth sense might at any moment alert the gunman that he was not alone.

A sludge of seconds filled an empty minute, filled another, and another—and then the man’s third bout of stifled coughing gave Mitch cover to roll from his left side to his right. The maneuver complete, he lay with his back to the open end of the trunk, very still.

The gunman’s silence seemed to have a quality of heightened vigilance, of suspicion. The world now came to Mitch’s five senses through a distorting lens of extreme anxiety.

What angle of fire? What pattern?

Think.

The man with the smooth face would not be sitting upright. He would slump to take full advantage of the darkness in the backseat.

In other circumstances, the assassin might have preferred a corner, where he could further ensure his invisibility. But because the raised lid of the trunk obstructed an easy view of him through the rear window of the car, he could safely sit in the center, the better to cover both front doors.

Keeping the cuff chain taut, Mitch quietly put down the pistol. He dared not risk knocking the weapon against something during the exploration he needed to perform.

Blindly reaching forward with both hands, he found the back wall of the trunk. Although firm under his fingertips, the surface had a cloth covering.

The Chrysler might not have been restored with a hundred percent fidelity. Campbell might have chosen some custom upgrades, including more refined materials in the trunk.

A pair of synchronized spiders, his hands crept left to right across the surface, testing. He pressed gently, and then a little harder.

Beneath his questing fingertips, the surface flexed slightly. Quarter-inch fiberboard, covered in cloth, might flex that way. It did not have the feel of metal.

The panel accepted his pressure in silence, but when he relaxed his hands, it returned to form with a subtle buckling noise.

From the passenger compartment came the protest of stressed upholstery, a short twist of sound and nothing more. The gunman had most likely adjusted his position for comfort—though he might have turned to listen more intently.

Mitch felt the floor, seeking the pistol, and rested his hands on it.

Lying on his side, knees drawn up, with no room to extend his arms, he was not in a good shooting position.

If he tried to move toward the open end of the trunk before firing, he would give himself away. A mere second or two of warning might be enough for the experienced gunman to roll off the backseat, onto the floor.

Mitch went through it in his mind one more time, to be sure that he had not overlooked anything. The smallest miscalculation could be the death of him.

He raised the pistol. He would shoot left to right, then right to left, a double spray, five rounds in each arc.

When he squeezed the trigger, nothing happened. Just a faint but crisp metallic
snick.

His heart was both hammer and anvil, and he had to hear
through
that roar, but he was pretty sure the gunman had not moved again, had not detected the small sound of the stubborn pistol.

Earlier he had explored the weapon and hadn’t found a safety click.

He eased off the trigger, hesitated, squeezed again.

Snick.

Before panic could seize him, serendipity fluttered against his cheek and into his open mouth: a moth, not as cold as they had looked when whirling like snowflakes.

Reflexively, he sputtered, spat out the insect, gagging, and pulled the trigger again. A stop was incorporated into the trigger—maybe
that
was the safety—through which you had to pull to fire, a double action, and because he pulled harder than before, the pistol boomed.

The recoil, exacerbated by his position, rocked him, and the crash couldn’t have been louder if it had been the door to Hell slamming behind him, and he was surprised by a blowback of debris, bits of singed cloth and flecks of fiberboard spraying his face, but he squinched his eyes shut and kept firing, left to right, the gun trying to pull up, pull wild, then right to left,
controlling
the weapon, not just shooting it, and though he had thought he would be able to count the rounds as he fired them, he lost track after two, and then the magazine was depleted.

34

I
f the gunman wasn’t dead, even if wounded, he could return fire through the backrest. The car trunk was still a potential deathtrap.

Abandoning the useless pistol, Mitch scrambled out, knocking a knee against the sill, an elbow against the bumper, dropped to his hands and knees in the road, then thrust to his feet. He ran in a crouch for ten yards, fifteen, before stopping and looking back.

The gunman hadn’t gotten out of the Chrysler. The four doors were closed.

Mitch waited, sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, off his chin.

Gone were the snowflake moths, the great horned owl, the songs of crickets, the click-shrill of the sinister something.

Under the mute moon, in the petrified desert, the Chrysler looked anachronistic, like a time machine in the early Mesozoic, sleek and gleaming two hundred million years before it was built.

When the air, as dry as salt, began to sear his throat, he stopped breathing through his mouth, and when the sweat began to dry on his face, he asked himself how long he should wait before assuming that the man was dead. He looked at his watch. He looked at the moon. He waited.

He needed the car.

He had timed the trip on the dirt track at twelve minutes. They had been making perhaps twenty-five miles per hour on that last leg of the journey. The math put him five miles from a paved road.

Even when he got that far back toward civilization, he might find himself in lonely territory without much traffic. Besides, in his current condition, dirty and rumpled and no doubt wild-eyed, no one would give him a ride, except maybe an itinerant psychopath cruising for a victim.

Finally he approached the Chrysler.

He circled the vehicle, staying as far from the sides of it as the width of the road would allow, alert for a smooth ghostly face peering from the shadows within. After arriving without incident at the trunk from which he had twice escaped, he paused and listened.

Holly was in a bad place, and if the kidnappers tried to reach Mitch, they wouldn’t have any luck because his cell phone was in that white plastic bag back at Campbell’s estate. The noon call to Anson’s house would be his only chance to reconnect with them before they decided to chop their hostage and move on to another game.

Without further hesitation, he went to the back door on the driver’s side and opened it.

Lying on the seat, eyes open, bloody but still alive, was the smooth-faced man, with his pistol aimed at the door. The muzzle looked like an eyeless socket, and the gunman looked triumphant when he said, “Die.”

He tried to pull the trigger, but the pistol wobbled in his hand, and then he lost his grip on it. The weapon dropped to the floor of the car, and the gunman’s hand dropped into his lap, and now that his one-word threat had turned out to be a prediction of his own fate, he lay there as if making an obscene proposition.

Leaving the door open, Mitch walked to the side of the road and sat on a boulder until he could be certain that, after all, he was not going to vomit.

35

S
itting on the boulder, Mitch had much to consider.

When this was finished,
if
it was ever finished, maybe the best thing would be to go to the police, tell his story of desperate self-defense, and present them with the two dead gunmen in the trunk of the Chrysler.

Julian Campbell would deny that he had employed them or at least that he had directed them to kill Mitch. Men like these two were most likely paid in cash; from Campbell’s point of view, the fewer records the better, and the gunmen hadn’t been the type to care that, if paid in cash with no tax deductions, they would eventually be denied their Social Security.

The possibility existed that no authorities were aware of the dark side to Campbell’s empire. To all appearances, he might be one of California’s most upstanding citizens.

Mitch, on the other hand, was a humble gardener already set up to take the fall for his wife’s murder in the event that he failed to ransom her. And in Corona del Mar, on the street in front of Anson’s house, the trunk of his Honda contained the body of John Knox.

Although he believed in the rule of law, Mitch didn’t for a minute believe that crime-scene investigation was as meticulous—or CSI technicians as infallible—as portrayed on TV. The more evidence that suggested his guilt, even if it was planted, the more they would find to support their suspicion, and the easier they would find it to ignore the details that might exonerate him.

Anyway, the most important thing right now was to remain free and mobile until he ransomed Holly. He
would
ransom her. Or die trying.

After he’d met Holly and fallen almost at once in love, he had realized that he’d previously been only half alive,
buried
alive in his childhood. She had opened the emotional casket in which his parents had left him, and he had risen, flourished.

His transformation had amazed him. He had thought himself fully alive, at last, when they married.

This night, however, he realized that part of him had remained asleep. He had awakened to a clarity of vision no less exhilarating than it was terrifying.

He had encountered evil of a purity that a day previously he had not thought existed, that he had been educated to deny existed. With the recognition of evil, however, came a growing awareness of more dimensions in every scene, in nearly every object, than he had seen before, greater beauty, strange promise, and mystery.

He did not know precisely what he meant by that. He only knew that it was the case, that he’d opened his eyes to a higher reality. Behind the layered and gorgeous mysteries of this new world around him, he sensed a truth that veil by veil would reveal itself.

In this state of enlightenment, funny that he should find the most urgent task before him to be the disposal of a pair of dead men.

A laugh rose in him, but he swallowed it. Sitting in the desert, near midnight, with no company but corpses, laughing at the moon did not seem to be the first step on the right path out of here.

From high in the east, a meteor slid westward like the pull-tab of a zipper, opening the black sky to reveal a glimpse of whiteness beyond, but the teeth of the zipper closed as quickly as they opened, keeping the sky clothed, and the meteor became a cinder, a vapor.

Taking the falling star as an omen to get on with his grisly work, Mitch knelt beside the scarred gunman and searched his pockets. He quickly found the two things he wanted: the handcuff key and the keys to the Chrysler Windsor.

Having freed himself of the cuffs, he threw them in the open trunk of the car. He rubbed his chafed wrists.

He dragged the body of the gunman to the south shoulder of the road, through the screening brush, and left it there.

Getting the second one out of the backseat involved unpleasant wrestling, but in two minutes the dead pair were lying side by side, faceup to the wonder of the stars.

At the car once more, Mitch found a flashlight on the front seat. He’d figured there would be one because they must have intended to bury him nearby and would have needed a light to guide them.

The car’s weak ceiling lamp had not shown him as much of the backseat as he needed to see. He examined it with the flashlight.

Because the gunman had not died instantly, he’d had time to bleed, and he’d done a thorough job of it.

Mitch counted eight holes in the backrest, rounds that punched through from the trunk. The other two had evidently been deflected or fully stopped by the structure of the seat.

In the back of the front seat were five holes; but only one bullet had drilled all the way through. A pockmark in the glove-box door indicated the end point of its trajectory.

He found the spent slug on the floor in front of the passenger’s seat. He threw it away into the night.

Once he got off the dirt track and onto paved roads, though he would be in a hurry, he would have to obey the posted speed limits. If a highway-patrol officer stopped him and got one glimpse of the blood and destruction in the backseat, Mitch would probably be eating at the expense of the state of California for a long time.

The two gunmen had not brought a shovel.

Considering their professionalism, he doubted they would have left his body to rot where hikers or off-road racers might have found it. Familiar with the area, they had known a feature of the landscape that served as a natural tomb unlikely to be discovered casually.

Searching for that burial place at night, with a flashlight, did not appeal to Mitch. Nor did the prospect of the bone collection that he might find there.

He returned to the bodies and relieved them of their wallets to make identification more difficult. He was becoming less squeamish about handling them—and his new attitude disturbed him.

After dragging the dead men farther from the road, he interred them in a tight grove of waist-high manzanita. Shrouds of leathery leaves concealed them from easy discovery.

Although the desert seems hostile to life, many species thrive in it, and a number are carrion eaters. Within an hour, the first of these would be drawn to the double treat in the manzanita.

Some were beetles like the one that the gunmen had taken care not to crush underfoot as they had led him along the car-pavilion loggia.

In the morning, the desert heat would begin to do its work as well, significantly hastening the process of decomposition.

If they were ever found, their names might never be known. And which of them suffered terrible acne scars and which had a smooth face would matter to no one, and count for nothing.

In the car pavilion, as they had been closing him into the trunk of the Chrysler, he had said
I wish we didn’t have to do this.

Well,
said the one with the smooth skin,
that’s how it is.

Another shooting star drew his attention to the deep clear sky. A brief bright scar, and then the heavens healed.

He returned to the car and closed the trunk lid.

Having gotten the best of two experienced killers, perhaps he should have felt empowered, proud, and fierce. Instead, he had been further humbled.

To spare himself the stench of blood, he rolled down the windows in all four doors of the Chrysler Windsor.

The engine started at once: a full-throated song of power. He switched on the headlights.

He was relieved to see that the fuel gauge indicated the tank was nearly three-quarters full. He didn’t want to stop at any public place, not even at a self-service station.

He had turned the car around and driven four miles on the dirt road when, topping a rise, he came upon a sight that caused him to brake to a stop.

To the south, in a shallow bowl of land, lay a lake of mercury with concentric rings of sparkling diamonds floating on it, moving slowly to the currents of a lazy whirlpool, as majestic as a spiral galaxy.

For a moment the scene was so unreal that he thought it must be a hallucination or a vision. Then he understood that it was a field of grass, perhaps squirreltail with its plumelike flower spikes and silky awns.

The moonlight silvered the spikes and struck sparkles from the high sheen of the awns. A wind eddy, the laziest of spiral breezes, pulsed around the bowl of land with such grace and consistent timing that, were there music for this dance of grass, it would be a waltz.

In mere grass was hidden meaning, but the stink of blood brought him back from the mystic to the mundane.

He continued to the end of the dirt road and turned right because he recalled that they had turned left on the way here. The paved roads were well marked, and he returned not to the Campbell estate—which he hoped he would not see again—but to the interstate.

Post-midnight traffic was light. He drove north, never faster than five miles per hour above the speed limit, an excess that the law rarely punished.

The Chrysler Windsor was a beautiful machine. Seldom do dead men return to haunt the living in such style.