The Husband (23 page)

56

M
itch was not wounded, but he thought about John Knox self-shot in the fall from the garage loft, and he knelt worriedly beside the detective.

On the floor at Taggart’s side lay his pistol. Mitch shoved it out of reach.

Taggart shuddered as if chilled to the marrow, his hands clawed at the floor tiles, and bubbles of spit sputtered on his lips.

Faint, thin, pungent, a ribbon of smoke unraveled from Taggart’s sports jacket. The bullet had burned a hole through it.

Mitch pulled back the jacket, looking for a wound. He didn’t find one.

The relief he felt did not much buoy him. He was still guilty of assaulting a police officer.

This was the first time he had hurt an innocent person. Remorse, he found, actually had a taste: a bitterness rising at the back of the throat.

Pawing at Mitch’s arm, the detective could not close his hand into a grip. He tried to say something, but his throat must be tight, his tongue thick, his lips numb.

Mitch wanted to avoid having to Taser him a second time. He said, “I’m sorry,” and set to work.

The car key had vanished into Taggart’s jacket. Mitch found it in the second pocket he searched.

In the laundry room, having digested the gunshot and having come to a conclusion about what it might mean, Anson began shouting. Mitch ignored him.

Taking Taggart by the feet, Mitch dragged him out of the house, onto the brick patio. He left the detective’s pistol in the kitchen.

As he pulled the back door shut, he heard the doorbell ring inside. The police were at the front of the house.

As Mitch took time to lock the door to delay their exposure to Anson and his lies, he said to Taggart, “I love her too much to trust anyone else with this. I’m sorry.”

He sprinted across the courtyard, along the side of the garage, and through the open back gate into the windswept alleyway.

When no one answered the doorbell, the cops would come around the side of the house, into the courtyard, and find Taggart on the bricks. They would be in the alley seconds later.

He threw the Taser on the passenger’s seat as he got behind the wheel. Key, switch, the roar of the engine.

In the storage pocket of the door was the pistol that belonged to one of Campbell’s hired killers. Seven rounds remained in the magazine.

He wasn’t going to pull a gun on the police. His only option was to get the hell out of there.

He drove east, fully expecting that a squad car would suddenly hove across the end of the alleyway, thwarting him.

Panic is fear expressed by numbers of people simultaneously, by an audience or a mob. But Mitch had enough fear for a crowd, and
panic
seized him.

At the end of the alleyway, he turned right into the street. At the next intersection, he turned left, heading east again.

This area of Corona del Mar, itself a part of Newport Beach, was called the Village. A grid of streets, it could be sealed off with perhaps as few as three roadblocks.

He needed to get beyond those choke points. Fast.

In Julian Campbell’s library, in the trunk of the Chrysler, and in that trunk a second time, he’d known fear, but nothing as intense as this. Then he had been afraid for himself; now he was afraid for Holly.

The worst that could happen to him was that he would be captured or shot by the police. He had weighed the costs of his options and had chosen the best game. Now he didn’t care what happened to him except to the extent that if anything happened to him, Holly would stand alone.

In the Village, some of the streets were narrow. Mitch was on one of them. Vehicles were parked on both sides. With too much speed, he risked sheering a door off if somebody opened one.

Taggart could describe the Honda. In minutes, they would have the license-plate number from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He could not afford to rack up body damage that would make the car even more identifiable.

He arrived at a traffic signal at Pacific Coast Highway. Red.

Heavy traffic surged north and south on the divided highway. He couldn’t jump the light and weave into the flow without precipitating a chain reaction of collisions, with himself at the center of the ultimate snarl.

He glanced at the rearview mirror. Some kind of paneled truck or muscle van approached, still a block away. The roof appeared to be outfitted with an array of emergency beacons, like those on a police vehicle.

This was a street lined with mature trees. The dappling shadows and piercework of light rippled in veils across the moving vehicle, making it difficult to identify.

Out on northbound lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, a police car passed, parting the traffic before it with emergency beacons but not with a siren.

Behind the Honda, the worrisome vehicle cruised within half a block, at which point Mitch could read the word
AMBULANCE
on the brow above the windshield. They were in no hurry. They must be off duty or carrying the dead.

He exhaled a pent-up breath. The ambulance braked to a stop behind him, and his relief was short-lived when he wondered whether paramedics usually listened to a police scanner.

The traffic light changed to green. He crossed the southbound lanes and turned left, north on Coast Highway.

One bead of sweat chased another down the nape of his neck, under his collar, along the spillway of his spine.

He had traveled only a block on Coast Highway when a siren shrilled behind him: this time, in the rearview mirror, a police car.

Only fools led cops on a chase. They had air resources as well as a lot of iron on the ground.

Defeated, Mitch steered toward the curb. As he vacated the lane, the squad car shot past him and away.

From the curb, Mitch watched until the cruiser left the highway two blocks ahead. It turned left into the north end of the Village.

Evidently Taggart hadn’t yet sufficiently recovered his wits to give them a description of the Honda.

Mitch took a very deep breath. He took another. He wiped the back of his neck with one hand. He blotted his hands on his jeans.

He had assaulted a police officer.

Easing the Honda back into the northbound traffic, he wondered if he had lost his mind. He felt resolved, and perhaps reckless in a venturous sense, but not shortsighted. Of course, a lunatic could not recognize madness from the inside of his bubble.

57

A
fter Holly extracts the nail from the plank, she turns it over and over in her stiff sore fingers, assessing whether or not it is as lethal as she imagined when it was sheathed in wood.

Straight, more than three but less than four inches long, with a thick shank, it qualifies as a spike, all right. The point is not as sharp as, say, the wicked point of a poultry skewer, but plenty sharp enough.

While the wind sings of violence, she spends time imagining the ways the spike might be employed against the creep. Her imagination is fertile enough to disturb her.

After quickly grossing herself out, she changes the subject from the uses of the spike to the places where it might be hidden. What value it has is the value of surprise.

Although the spike probably won’t show if tucked in a pocket of her jeans, she worries that she’ll not be able to extract it quickly in a crisis. When they had transported her from her house to this place, they had bound her wrists tightly with a scarf. If he does the same when he takes her away from here, she will not be able to pull her hands apart and, therefore, might not be able to get her fingers easily into a particular pocket.

Her belt offers no possibilities, but in the dark, by touch, she considers her sneakers. She can’t carry the nail inside the shoe; it will rub and blister her foot, at the least. Maybe she can conceal it on the outside of the shoe.

She loosens the laces on her left sneaker, carefully tucks the nail between the tongue and one of the flaps, and reties the shoe.

When she gets to her feet and walks a circle around the ringbolt to which she is tethered, she quickly discovers that the rigid nail is an impediment to a smoothly flexed step. She can’t avoid limping.

Finally she pulls up her sweater and secrets the nail in her bra. She isn’t as extravagantly endowed as the average female mud wrestler, but Nature has been more than fair. To prevent the nail from slipping out between the cups, she presses the point through the elastic facing, thus pinning it in place.

She has armed herself.

With the task complete, her preparations seem pathetic.

Restless, she turns to the ringbolt, wondering if she can set herself free or at least augment her meager weaponry.

With her questing hands, she had earlier determined that the ringbolt is welded to a half-inch-thick steel plate that measures about eight inches on a side. The plate is held to the floor by what must be four countersunk screws.

She is unable to say with certainty that they are screws, for some liquid has been poured into the sink around each one and has formed a hard puddle. This denies her access to the slot in the head of each screw, if indeed they are screws.

Discouraged, she lies on her back on the air mattress, her head raised on the pillow portion.

Earlier, she had slept fitfully. Her emotional exhaustion breeds physical fatigue, and she knows that she could sleep again. But she does not want to doze off.

She is afraid that she will wake only as he falls upon her.

She lies with her eyes open, though this darkness is deeper than the one behind her eyelids, and she listens to the wind, though there is no comfort in it.

A timeless time later, when she wakes, she is still in darkness absolute, but she knows she isn’t alone. Some subtle scent alerts her or perhaps an intuitive sense of being encroached upon.

She sits up with a start, the air mattress squeaking under her, the chain rattling against the floor between manacle and ringbolt.

“It’s only me,” he assures her.

Holly’s eyes strain at the blackness because it seems that the gravity of his madness ought to condense the darkness around him into something yet darker, but he remains invisible.

“I was watching you sleep,” he says, “then after a while, I was concerned that my flashlight would wake you.”

Judging his position by his voice is not as easy as she might have expected.

“This is nice,” he says, “being with you in the numinous dark.”

To her right. No more than three feet away. Perhaps on his knees, perhaps standing.

“Are you afraid?” he asks.

“No,” she lies without hesitation.

“You would disappoint me if you were afraid. I believe you are arising into your full spirit, and one who is arising must be beyond fear.”

As he speaks, he seems to move behind her. She turns her head, listening intently.

“In El Valle, New Mexico, one night the snow came down as thick as ever it has anywhere.”

If she is correct, he has moved to her right side and stands over her, having made no sound that the wind failed to mask.

“The valley floor received six inches in four hours, and the land was eerie in the snowlight…”

Hairs quiver, flesh prickles on the back of her neck at the thought of him moving confidently in pitch-black conditions. He does not reveal himself even by eyeshine, as might a cat.

“…eerie in a way it is nowhere else in the world, the flats receding and the low hills rising as if they are just fields of mist and walls of fog, illusions of shapes and dimensions, reflections of reflections, and those reflections only reflections of a dream.”

The gentle voice is in front of her now, and Holly chooses to believe that it has not moved, that it has always been in front of her.

Startled from sleep, she should expect her senses to be at first unreliable. Such perfect darkness displaces sound, disorients.

He says, “The storm was windless at ground level, but hard wind blew at higher elevations, because when the snow abated, most of the clouds were quickly torn into rags and were flung away. Between the remaining clouds, the sky was black, festooned with ornate necklaces of stars.”

She can feel the nail between her breasts, warmed by her body heat, and tries to take comfort from it.

“The glassmaker had fireworks left over from the past July, and the woman who dreamed of dead horses offered to help him set them up and set them off.”

His stories always lead somewhere, although Holly has learned to dread their destinations.

“There were star shells, Catherine wheels, fizgigs, girandoles, twice-changing chrysanthemums, and golden palm trees….”

His voice grows softer, and he is close now. He may be leaning toward her, his face but a foot from her face.

“Red and green and sapphire-blue and gold bursts brightened the black sky, but they were also colorful and diffusely reflected on the fields of snow, soft swaths of pulsing color on the fields of snow.”

As the killer talks, Holly has the feeling that he will kiss her here in the darkness. What will his reaction be when inevitably she recoils in revulsion?

“Some last snow was falling, a few late flakes as big as silver dollars, descending in wide lazy gyres. They caught the color, too.”

She leans back and turns her head aside in fearful anticipation of the kiss. Then she thinks it might come not on her lips but on the nape of her neck.

“Shimmering with red and blue and gold fire, the flakes slowly glimmered to the ground, as if something magical were aflame high in the night, some glorious palace burning on the other side of Heaven, shedding jewel-bright embers.”

He pauses, clearly expecting a response.

As long as he is kept talking, he will not kiss.

Holly says, “It sounds so magnificent, so beautiful. I wish I’d been there.”

“
I
wish you’d been there,” he agrees.

Realizing that what she’s said might be taken as an invitation, she hurries to entreat him: “There must be more. What else happened in El Valle that night? Tell me more.”

“The woman who dreamed of dead horses had a friend who claimed to be a countess from some eastern European country. Have you ever known a countess?”

“No.”

“The countess had a problem with depression. She balanced it by taking ecstasy. She took too much ecstasy and walked into that field of snow transfigured by fireworks. Happier than she had ever been in her life, she killed herself.”

Another pause requires a response, and Holly can think of nothing she dares to say except, “How sad.”

“I
knew
you would see. Yes, sad. Sad and stupid. El Valle is a portal that makes possible a journey to great change. On that night, and in
that special moment,
transcendence was offered to everyone present. Yet there are always some who cannot see.”

“The countess.”

“Yes. The countess.”

The pressurized darkness seems to brew itself into an ever blacker reduction.

She feels his warm breath upon her brow, upon her eyes. It has no scent. And then it is gone.

Maybe she didn’t feel his breath, after all, only a draft.

She wishes to believe it was a draft, and she thinks of clean things like her husband and the baby, and the bright sun.

He says, “Do you believe in signs, Holly Rafferty?”

“Yes.”

“Omens. Portents. Harbingers, oracle owls, storm petrels, black cats and broken mirrors, mysterious lights in the sky. Have you ever seen a sign, Holly Rafferty?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you hope to see a sign?”

She knows what he wants her to say, and she is quick to say it. “Yes. I hope to see one.”

Upon her left cheek, she feels warm breath, and then upon her lips.

If this is him—and in her heart she knows there is no
if
—he remains undifferentiated from the gloom although only inches separate them.

The darkness of the room calls forth a darkness in her mind. She imagines him kneeling naked before her, his pale body decorated by arcane symbols painted with the blood of those he killed.

Struggling to keep her quickening fear from her voice, she says, “You’ve seen many signs, haven’t you?”

The breath, the breath, the breath upon her lips, but not the kiss, and then not the breath, either, as he withdraws and says, “I’ve seen scores. I have the eye for them.”

“Please tell me about one.”

He is silent. His silence is a sharp and looming weight, a sword above her head.

Perhaps he has begun to wonder if she is talking to forestall the kiss.

If at all possible, she must avoid offending him. As important as it is to leave this place without being violated, it is likewise important to leave this place without disabusing him of the strange dark romantic fantasy that appears to have him in its grip.

He seems to believe that she will eventually decide that she must go to Guadalupita, New Mexico, with him and that in Guadalupita she will “be amazed.” As long as he continues in this belief, which she has so subtly tried to reinforce without raising suspicion, she might be able to find some advantage over him when it matters most, in the moment of her greatest crisis.

When his silence begins to seem ominously long, he says, “This was just as summer became autumn that year, and everyone said the birds had left early for the south, and wolves were seen where they had not been in a decade.”

Wary in the dark, Holly sits very erect, with her arms crossed over her breasts.

“The sky had a hollow look. You felt like you could shatter it with a stone. Have you ever been to Eagle Nest, New Mexico?”

“No.”

“I was driving south from Eagle Nest, on a two-lane blacktop, at least twenty miles east of Taos. These two girls were across the highway, hitchhiking north.”

Along the roof, the wind finds a new niche or protrusion from which to strike another voice for itself, and now it imitates the ululant cry of hunting coyotes.

“They were college age but not college girls. They were serious seekers, you could see, and confident in their good hiking boots and backpacks, with their walking sticks, and all their experience.”

He pauses, perhaps for drama, perhaps savoring the memory.

“I saw the sign and knew at once that it
was
a sign. Hovering above their heads, a blackbird, its wings spread wide, not flapping, the bird riding so effortlessly on a thermal, but moving precisely no faster or slower than the girls were walking.”

She regrets having elicited this story. She closes her eyes against the images that she fears he might describe.

“Only six feet above their heads and a foot or two behind them, the bird hovered, but the girls were unaware of it. They were unaware of it, and I knew what that meant.”

Holly fears the darkness around her too much to close her eyes to it. She opens them even though she can see nothing.

“Do you know what the sign of the bird meant, Holly Rafferty?”

“Death,” she says.

“Yes, exactly right. You
are
arising into full spirit. I saw the bird and believed that death was settling on the girls, that they were not long for this world.”

“And…were they?”

“Winter came early that year. Many snows followed one another, and the cold was very hard. The spring thaw extended into summer, and when the snow melted, their bodies were found in late June, dumped in a field near Arroyo Hondo, all the way around Wheeler Peak from where I’d seen them on the road. I recognized their pictures in the paper.”

Holly says a silent prayer for the families of the unknown girls.

“Who knows what happened to them?” he continues. “They were found naked, so we can imagine some of what they endured. But though it seems to us a horrible death, and tragic because of their youth, there is always a possibility of enlightenment even in the worst of situations. If we’re seekers, we learn from everything, and grow. Perhaps any death involves moments of illuminating beauty and the potential for transcendence.”

He switches on his flashlight and is sitting immediately before her, cross-legged on the floor.

Had the light surprised her earlier in their conversation, she might have flinched. Now she is not as easily surprised, nor is she likely to flinch from any light, so welcome is it.

He wears the ski mask in which are visible only his chewed-sore lips and his beryl-blue eyes. He is neither naked nor painted with the blood of those he killed.

“It’s time to go,” he says. “You will be ransomed for a million four hundred thousand, and when I have the money, then the time will have come for decision.”