The Husband (18 page)

44

T
he cut on his left ear had crusted shut, and body heat was quickly drying the blood that had trickled down his cheek and neck.

His bearish good looks had settled into harder edges, as though a genetic contagion had introduced major wolf DNA into his face. Jaws clenched so tight that his facial muscles knotted, eyes molten with rage, Anson sat in seething silence.

The wind wasn’t loud here. Avent pipe carried sighs and whispers from outside into the dryer, so it seemed as if a troubled spirit haunted that machine.

Mitch said, “You’re going to help me get Holly back alive.”

That statement elicited neither agreement nor refusal, only a glower.

“They’ll be calling in a little more than seven and a half hours with wiring instructions.”

Paradoxically, confined in the chair, restrained, Anson looked bigger than he had before. Shackles emphasized his physical power, and it seemed that, like some figure out of myth, if he attained the pinnacle of his potential rage, he would be able to snap his bonds as if they were string.

In Mitch’s absence, Anson had tried determinedly to wrench the chair free of the washing machine. The steel legs of the chair had scraped and chattered against the tile floor, leaving scars that revealed the intensity of his futile effort. Also, the washer had been pulled out of alignment with the clothes dryer.

“You said you could put it together by phone, by computer,” Mitch reminded him. “You said three hours tops.”

Anson spat on the floor between them.

“If you’ve got eight million, you can spare two for Holly. When it’s done, you and I never see each other again. You get to go back to the sewer of a life you’ve made for yourself.”

If Anson discovered that Mitch knew about Daniel and Kathy dead in the learning room, there would be no way to force his cooperation. He would think Mitch had already undone the planted evidence to focus the eye of the law on the true perpetrator.

As long as he believed those murders were not yet known, he could hope that cooperation would lead to a moment when Mitch made a mistake that reversed their fortunes.

“Campbell didn’t just let you go,” Anson said.

“No.”

“So…how?”

“Killed those two.”

“You?”

“Now I’ve got to live with that.”

“You popped Vosky and Creed?”

“I don’t know their names.”

“Those were their names, all right.”

“Because of you,” Mitch said.

“Vosky and Creed? It doesn’t compute.”

“Then Campbell must have let me go.”

“Campbell would never let you go.”

“So believe what you want.”

From under a beetled brow, Anson studied him with sour eyes. “Where did you get it—the Taser?”

“Vosky and Creed,” Mitch lied.

“You just took it away from them, huh?”

“Like I told you—I took everything away from them. Now I’m giving you a few hours to think about things.”

“You can have the money.”

“That’s not what I want you to think about.”

“You can have it, but I’ve got some conditions.”

“You don’t get to make the rules,” Mitch said.

“It’s my two million.”

“No. It’s mine now. I’ve earned it.”

“Cool down, all right?”

“If you were them, you’d screw her first.”

“Hey, you know, that’s just a thing I said.”

“If you were them, you’d kill her but screw her first.”

“It was just something to say. Anyway, I’m not them.”

“No, you’re not them. You’re the cause of them.”

“Wrong. Things happen. They just happen.”

“Without you, they wouldn’t be happening to
me.
”

“If you want to look at it that way, you will.”

“Here’s what you need to think about—who I am now.”

“You want me to think about who you are?”

“No more
fratello piccolo.
Huh? You understand?”

“But you
are
my little brother.”

“If you think of me that way, you’ll pull some dumb move I would have fallen for then, but I won’t fall for it now.”

“If we can make a deal, I’m not pulling any moves.”

“We’ve already made the deal.”

“You’ve got to cut me some slack, man.”

“So you can hang me with it?”

“How can any deal work without at least a little trust?”

“You just sit here and think about how fast you could be dead.”

Mitch switched off the lights and stepped across the threshold.

In the dark, windowless laundry room, Anson said, “What’re you doing?”

“Providing the best learning environment,” Mitch said, and pulled the door shut.

“Mickey?” Anson called.

Mickey.
After all this,
Mickey.

“Mickey, don’t do this.”

At the kitchen sink, Mitch scrubbed his hands, using a lot of soap and hot water, trying to wash away the tactile memory of John Knox’s body, which felt as if it had been imprinted on his skin.

From the refrigerator, he got a package of cheddar-cheese slices and a squeeze bottle of mustard. He found a loaf of bread and made a cold cheese sandwich.

“I hear you out there,” Anson called from the laundry room. “What are you doing, Mickey?”

Mitch put the sandwich on a plate. He added a dill pickle. From the refrigerator he got a bottle of beer.

“What’s the point of this, Mickey? We’ve already got a deal. There’s no point to this.”

Mitch tilted another kitchen chair under the knob of the laundry-room door, bracing it.

“What’s that?” Anson asked. “What’s happening?”

Mitch switched off the kitchen lights. He went upstairs to Anson’s bedroom.

After putting the pistol and the Taser on the nightstand, he sat on the bed, his back against the padded headboard.

He didn’t turn down the quilted silk bedspread. He didn’t take off his shoes.

After eating the sandwich and the pickle, and drinking the beer, he set the clock radio for 8:30
A.M.

He wanted Anson to have time to think, but he was taking this four-hour break primarily because his own thinking had been slowed by exhaustion. He needed a clear head for what was coming.

Raging across the roof, beating on the windows, speaking in the wild voice of a mob, the wind seemed to mock him, to promise that his every plan would end in chaos.

This was a Santa Ana, the dry wind that harried moisture from the vegetation in the canyons around which many southern California communities had been built, turning that dense growth into tinder. An arsonist would toss a burning rag, another would use a cigarette lighter, another would strike a match—and for days the news would be filled with fire.

The drapes were shut, and when he switched off the lamp, a coverlet of darkness fell over him. He didn’t use either of Anson’s small night-lights.

Holly’s lovely face rose into his mind, and he said aloud, “God, please give me the strength and the wisdom to help her.”

This was the first time in his life that he had spoken to God.

He made no promises of piety and charity. He didn’t think it worked that way. You could not make deals with God.

With the most important day of his life soon to dawn, he didn’t think that he could sleep, but he slept.

45

T
he nail waits.

Holly sits in the dark, listening to the wind, fingering the Saint Christopher medal.

She sets aside the can of Pepsi without drinking the last half of it. She does not want to have to use the bedpan again, at least not when the sonofabitch on duty is the sonofabitch with the white hairless hands.

The thought of him emptying her bedpan creeps her out. Just asking him to do it would create an intolerable intimacy.

As she fingers the medal in her left hand, her right hand drops to her belly. Her waist is narrow, her stomach flat. The child grows in her, a secret, as private as a dream.

They say that if you listen to classical music while pregnant, your child will have a higher IQ. As an infant, he or she will cry less and be more content.

This may be true. Life is complex and mysterious.

Cause and effect are not always clear. Quantum physicists say that sometimes effect comes before cause. She had watched a one-hour program about that on the Discovery Channel. She hadn’t made much sense of it; and the scientists describing the various phenomena admitted they could not explain them, only observe them.

She moves her hand in slow circles over her belly, thinking how fine it would be, how sweet, if the baby gave a twitch that she could feel. Of course, it is only a ball of cells at this stage, not yet capable of giving a
Hi, Mom
kick.

Even now, however, its full potential is there, a tiny person in the shell of her body, like a pearl steadily accreting in an oyster, and everything she does will affect her little passenger. No more wine with dinner. Cut way back on the coffee. Perform faithful but sensible exercise. Avoid another kidnapping.

Saint Christopher, being the protector of children, has brought her to a reconsideration of the nail as she blindly traces his image with her fingertips.

She’s probably being irrational, taking this babies-learn-in-the-womb business too far. Yet it seems that if, while pregnant, she thrusts a nail into some guy’s carotid artery or through his eye into his brain, the incident will surely have an effect on the baby.

Extremely strong emotion—again, according to the Discovery Channel—causes the brain to order the release into the blood of veritable floods of hormones or other chemicals. A homicidal frenzy would seem to qualify as a strong emotion.

If too much caffeine in the blood can put the unborn child at risk, torrents of killer-mommy enzyme can’t be desirable. She intends to use the nail on a bad guy, of course, a really bad guy, but the baby has no way of knowing the victim isn’t a good guy.

The baby won’t be born with homicidal tendencies because of a single incident of violent self-defense. Nevertheless, Holly broods about the nail.

Maybe this irrational worrying is a symptom of pregnancy, like morning sickness, which she hasn’t experienced yet, or like a craving for chocolate ice cream with pickles.

Prudence also plays a role in her rethinking of the nail scheme. When you deal with people like those who had kidnapped her, you better not strike out against them unless you are certain that you can carry through with the assault successfully.

If you try to thrust a nail through someone’s eye but instead stab him in the nose, you are going to have an angry nose-stabbed criminal psychopath on your case. Not good.

She is still fingering the Saint Christopher medal, pondering the pros and cons of fighting vicious gunmen with only a three-inch nail, when the representative of the New Mexico Tourist Board returns.

He comes behind a flashlight with a half-taped lens, as before, and still has the hands of a pianist from Hell. He kneels in front of her and puts the flashlight on the floor.

“You like the medallion,” he says, sounding pleased to see her smoothing it between her fingers as if it is a worry bead.

Instinct encourages her to play to his weirdness. “It has an interesting…feel.”

“The girl in the coffin wore a simple white dress with cheap lace tacked to the collar and cuffs. She looked so peaceful.”

He has chewed all the shreds of loose skin from his chapped lips. They are mottled red and appear to be tender, swollen.

“She wore white gardenias in her hair. When we opened the lid, the pent-up perfume of the gardenias was
intense
.”

Holly closes her eyes to avoid his.

“We took the medallion and the figurine of Cinderella to a place near Angel Fire, New Mexico, where there’s a vortex.”

Evidently he thought she knew what he meant by
vortex.

His gentle voice becomes gentler, and almost sad, when he adds, “I killed them both in their sleep.”

For a moment, she thinks this statement relates to the vortex in Angel Fire, New Mexico, and she tries to make sense of it in that context. When she realizes what he means, she opens her eyes.

“They pretended they didn’t know what happened to John Knox, but at least one of them had to know, all right, and probably both.”

In a room nearby are two dead men. She didn’t hear gunfire. Maybe he slit their throats.

She can picture his pale hairless hands wielding a straight razor with the grace of a magician rolling coins across his knuckles.

Holly has grown accustomed to the manacle on her ankle, to the chain that connects her to a ringbolt in the floor. Suddenly she is again acutely aware that she is not only imprisoned in a room with no windows but also is limited to the portion of the room that the chain permits her to reach.

He says, “I would have been next, and they would have done a two-way split.”

Five people had planned her kidnapping. Only one remains.

If he touches her, there is no one to respond to her scream. They are alone together.

“What happens now?” she asks, and at once wishes that she hadn’t.

“I’ll speak to your husband at noon, as scheduled. Anson will have fronted him the money. Then it’s up to you.”

She parses his third sentence, but it’s a dry lemon from which she can’t squeeze any juice. “What do you mean?”

Instead of answering her question, he says, “As part of a church festival, a small carnival comes to Penasco, New Mexico, in August.”

She has the crazy feeling that if she snatches off his knitted ski mask, there will be no features to his face other than the beryl-blue eyes and the mouth with yellow teeth and sore lips. No eyebrows, no nose, no ears, the skin as smooth and featureless as white vinyl.

“Just a Ferris wheel and a few other rides, a few games—and last year a fortuneteller.”

His hands swoop up to describe the shape of the Ferris wheel but then come to roost on his thighs.

“The fortuneteller calls herself Madame Tiresias, but of course that is not her real name.”

Holly is squeezing the medallion so tightly in one hand that her knuckles ache and the raised image of the saint is no doubt impressed in her palm.

“Madame Tiresias is a fraud, but the funny thing is, she has powers of which she’s unaware.”

He pauses between each statement as if what he has said is so profound that he wants her to have time to absorb it.

“She would not
have
to be a fraud if she could recognize what she really is, and I intend to show her this year.”

Speaking without a tremor in her voice requires self-control, but Holly brings him back to the question he would not answer: “What did you mean—then it will be up to me?”

When he smiles, part of his mouth disappears from the horizontal slit in the mask. This makes his smile seem sly and knowing, as if no one’s secrets are safe from him.

“You know what I mean,” he says. “You’re not Madame Tiresias. You have full knowledge of yourself.”

She senses that if she denies his assertion, she will test his patience and perhaps make him angry. His soft voice and his gentle manner are sheep’s clothing, and Holly does not want to poke the wolf beneath the fleece.

“You’ve given me so much to think about,” she says.

“I am aware of that. You’ve been living behind a curtain, and now you know there’s not just a window under it, but a whole new world beyond.”

Afraid that one wrong word will shatter the spell that the killer has cast over himself, Holly says only, “Yes.”

He rises to his feet. “You have some hours yet to decide. Do you need anything?”

A shotgun,
she thinks, but she says, “No.”

“I know what your decision will be, but you need to reach it on your own. Have you ever been to Guadalupita, New Mexico?”

“No.”

His smile curves up behind the slit in the black mask. “You will go there, and you will be amazed.”

He follows his flashlight, leaving her alone in darkness.

Gradually Holly realizes that the wind is still blowing hard. From the moment he’d told her that he killed the other kidnappers, the wind had vanished from her consciousness.

For a while she has heard only his voice. His sinuous, insidious voice.

She has not even heard her heart, but she hears it now and feels it, too, shaking the cage of ribs against which it pounds.

The baby, tiny ball of cells, is now bathed in the fight-or-flight chemicals that her brain has ordered released into her blood. Maybe that isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s even good. Maybe being marinated in that flood will make Baby Rafferty, him or her, tougher than would otherwise be the case.

This is a world that increasingly requires toughness of good people.

With the Saint Christopher medal, Holly sets diligently to work on the stubborn nail.