The Husband (25 page)

60

T
he ride lasts about fifteen minutes, and Holly, bound and blindfolded, is too busy scheming to consider a scream.

This time when her lunatic chauffeur stops, she hears him put the van in park and apply the hand brake. He gets out, leaving his door open.

In Rio Lucio, New Mexico, a saintly woman named Ermina Something lives in a blue-and-green or maybe blue-and-yellow stucco house. She is seventy-two.

The killer returns to the van and drives it forward about twenty feet, and then gets out again.

In Ermina Something’s living room are maybe forty-two or thirty-nine images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by thorns.

This has given Holly an idea. The idea is daring. And scary. But it feels right.

When the killer returns to the van, Holly guesses that he has opened a gate to admit them to someplace, and then has closed it behind them.

In Ermina Something’s backyard, the killer buried a “treasure” of which the old woman would not approve. Holly wonders what that treasure might be, but hopes she will never know.

The van coasts forward maybe sixty feet, on an unpaved surface. Small stones crunch together and rattle under the tires.

He stops again and this time switches off the engine. “We’re here.”

“Good,” she says, for she is trying to play this not as if she is a frightened hostage but as if she is a woman whose spirit is arising to its fullness.

He unlocks the back door and helps her out of the van.

The warm wind smells vaguely of wood smoke. Maybe canyons are afire far to the east.

For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, she feels sun on her face. The sun feels so good she could cry.

Supporting her right arm, escorting her in an almost courtly fashion, he leads her across bare earth, through weeds. Then they follow a hard surface with a vague limy smell.

When they stop, a strange muffled sound is repeated three times—
thup, thup, thup
—accompanied by splintering-wood and shrieking-metal noises.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“I shot open the door.”

Now she knows what a pistol fitted with a silencer sounds like.
Thup, thup, thup.
Three shots.

He conducts her across the threshold of the place into which he has shot his way. “Not much farther.”

The echoes of their slow footsteps give her a sense of cavernous spaces. “It feels like a church.”

“In a way it is,” he says. “We are in the cathedral of excessive exuberance.”

She smells plaster and sawdust. She can still hear the wind, but the walls must be well insulated and the windows triple-pane, for the blustery voice is muted.

Eventually they come into a space that sounds smaller than those before it, with a lower ceiling.

After halting her, the killer says, “Wait here.” He lets go of her arm.

She hears a familiar sound that makes her heart sink: the rattle of a chain.

Here the scent of sawdust is not as strong as in previous spaces, but when she remembers their threat to cut off her fingers, she wonders if the room contains a table saw.

“One point four million dollars,” she says calculatedly. “That buys a lot of seeking.”

“It buys a lot of everything,” he replies.

He touches her arm again, and she does not recoil. Around her left wrist, he wraps a chain and makes some kind of connection.

“When there’s always a need to work,” she says, “there’s never really time to seek,” and though she knows this is ignorance, she hopes it is the kind of ignorance to which he relates.

“Work is a toad squatting on our lives,” he says, and she knows she has struck a chord with him.

He unties the scarf that binds her hands, and she thanks him.

When he removes her blindfold, she squints and blinks, adjusting to the light, and discovers that she’s in a house under construction.

After entering this place, he has put on his ski mask again. He is at least pretending that she can choose her husband over him and that he will let them live.

“This would have been the kitchen,” he says.

The space is enormous for a kitchen, maybe fifty feet by thirty feet, the ultimate for catering large parties. The limestone floor is adrift in dust. Finished drywall is in place, although no cabinets or appliances have been installed.

A metal pipe about two inches in diameter, perhaps a gas line, protrudes from low in a wall. The other end of her chain has been padlocked to this pipe, as it was padlocked to her wrist. The metal cap on the end of the pipe, almost a full inch wider than the pipe itself, prevents the chain from being slipped loose.

He has given her eight feet of links. She can sit, stand, and even move around a little.

“Where are we?” she wonders.

“The Turnbridge house.”

“Ah. But why? Do you have some connection with it?”

“I’ve been here a few times,” he says, “though I’ve always made a more discreet entrance than shooting out the lock. He draws me. He’s still here.”

“Who?”

“Turnbridge. He hasn’t moved on. His spirit’s here, curled up tight on itself like one of the ten thousand dead pill bugs that litter the place.”

Holly says, “I’ve been thinking about Ermina in Rio Lucio.”

“Ermina Lavato.”

“Yes,” she says, as if she had not forgotten the surname. “I can almost see the rooms of her house, each a different soothing color. I don’t know why I keep thinking of her.”

Within his knitted mask, his blue eyes regard her with feverish intensity.

Closing her eyes, standing with her arms limp at her sides and with her face tilted toward the ceiling, she speaks in a murmur. “I can see her bedroom walls covered with images of the Holy Mother.”

“Forty-two,” he says.

“And there are candles, aren’t there?” she guesses.

“Yes. Votive candles.”

“It’s a lovely room. She’s happy there.”

“She’s very poor,” he says, “but happier than any rich man.”

“And her quaint kitchen from the 1920s, the aroma of chicken fajitas.” She takes a deep breath, savoring, and lets it out.

He says nothing.

Opening her eyes, Holly says, “I’ve never been there, I’ve never met her. Why can’t I get her and her house out of my mind?”

His continued silence begins to worry her. She is afraid that she has overacted, struck a false note.

Finally he says, “Sometimes people who’ve never met can resonate with each other.”

She considers the word: “Resonate.”

“In one sense, you live far from her, but in another sense you might be neighbors.”

If Holly reads him right, she has sparked more interest than suspicion. Of course, it may be a fatal mistake to think that she can ever read him right.

“Strange,” she says, and drops the subject.

He wets his peeled lips with his tongue, licks them again, and yet again. Then: “I’ve got some preparations to make. I’m sorry for the chain. It won’t be necessary much longer.”

After he has left the kitchen, she listens to his footsteps fading through vast hollow rooms.

The cold shakes seize her. She isn’t able to get them under control, and the links of her chain sing against one another.

61

M
itch in the shuddering shade of the wind-tossed podocarpuses, squinting through windows, finally began to test the doors of the vehicles parked at the curb. When they weren’t locked, he opened them and leaned inside.

If keys weren’t in the ignition, they might be in a cup holder or tucked behind a sun visor. Each time that he didn’t find keys in those places, either, he closed the door and moved on.

Born of desperation, his boldness nevertheless surprised him. Because a police car might turn one corner or another momentarily, however, caution rather than assurance would be his downfall.

He hoped that these residents were not people with a sense of community, that they had not joined the Neighborhood Watch program. Their police mentor would have coached them to notice and report suspicious specimens exactly like him.

For laid-back southern California, for low-crime Newport Beach, a depressing percentage of these people locked their parked cars. Their paranoia gradually began to piss him off.

When he had gone over two blocks, he saw ahead a Lexus parked in a driveway, the engine idling, the driver’s door open. No one sat behind the wheel.

The garage door also stood open. He cautiously approached the car, but no one was in the garage, either. The driver had dashed back into the house for a forgotten item.

The Lexus would be reported stolen within minutes, but the cops wouldn’t be looking for it immediately. There would be a process for reporting a stolen car; a process was part of a system, a system the work of a bureaucracy, the business of bureaucracy delay.

He might have a couple of hours before the plates were on a hot sheet. He needed no more time than two hours.

Because the car faced the street, he slipped behind the wheel, dropped the trash bag on the passenger’s seat, pulled the door shut, and rolled at once out of the driveway, turning right, away from the boulevard and the gun shop.

At the corner, ignoring the stop sign, he turned right once more and went a third of a block before he heard a thin shaky voice in the backseat say, “What is your name, honey?”

An elderly man slumped in a corner. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, a hearing aid, and his pants just under his breasts. He appeared to be a hundred years old.

Time had shrunken him, though not every part in proportion to every other.

“Oh, you’re Debbie,” the old man said. “Where are we going, Debbie?”

Crime led to more crime, and here were the wages of crime: certain destruction. Mitch himself had now become a kidnapper.

“Are we going to the pie store?” the old man inquired, a note of hope in his quavery voice.

Maybe some Alzheimer’s was happening here.

“Yes,” Mitch said, “we’re going to the pie store,” and he turned right again at the next corner.

“I like pie.”

“Everybody likes pie,” Mitch agreed.

If his heart had not been knocking hard enough to hurt, if his wife’s life had not depended on his remaining free, if he had not expected to encounter roving police at any moment, and if he had not expected them to shoot first and discuss the fine points of his civil rights later, he might have found this amusing. But it wasn’t amusing; it was surreal.

“You aren’t Debbie,” the old man said. “I’m Norman, but you’re not Debbie.”

“No. You’re right. I’m not.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m just a guy who made a mistake.”

Norman thought about that until Mitch turned right at the third corner, and then he said, “You’re gonna hurt me. That’s what you’re gonna do.”

The fear in the old man’s voice inspired pity. “No, no. Nobody is gonna hurt you.”

“You’re gonna hurt me, you’re a bad man.”

“No, I just made a mistake. I’m taking you right back home,” Mitch assured him.

“Where are we? This isn’t home. We’re nowhere near home.” The voice, to this point wispy, suddenly gained volume and shrillness.
“You’re a bad sonofabitch!”

“Don’t get yourself worked up. Please don’t.” Mitch felt sorry for the old man, responsible for him. “We’re almost there. You’ll be home in a minute.”

“You’re a bad sonofabitch! You’re a bad sonofabitch!”

At the fourth corner, Mitch turned right, onto the street where he’d stolen the car.

“YOU’RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!”

In the desiccated depths of that time-ravaged body, Norman found the voice of a bellowing youth.

“YOU’RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!”

“Please, Norman. You’re gonna give yourself a heart attack.”

He had hoped to be able to pull the car into the driveway and leave it where he’d found it, with nobody the wiser. But a woman had come out of the house into the street. She spotted him turning the corner.

She looked terrified. She must have thought that Norman had gotten behind the wheel.

“YOU’RE A BAD SONOFABITCH, A BAD, BAD SONOFABITCH!”

Mitch stopped in the street near the woman, put the car in park, tramped on the emergency brake, grabbed the trash bag, and got out, leaving the door open behind him.

Fortysomething, slightly stout, she was an attractive woman with Rod Stewart hair that a beautician had painstakingly streaked with blond highlights. She wore a business suit and heels too high to be sensible for a trip to the pie store.

“Are you Debbie?” Mitch asked.

Bewildered, she said, “Am I Debbie?”

Maybe there was no Debbie.

Norman still shrieked in the car, and Mitch said, “I’m so sorry. Big mistake.”

He walked away from her, toward the first of the four corners around which he had driven Norman, and heard her say “Grandpapa? Are you all right, Grandpapa?”

When he reached the stop sign, he turned and saw the woman leaning in the car, comforting the old man.

Mitch rounded the corner and hurried out of her line of sight. Not running. Walking briskly.

A block later, as he reached the next corner, a horn blared behind him. The woman was pursuing him in the Lexus.

He could see her through the windshield: one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cell phone. She was not calling her sister in Omaha. She was not calling for a time check. She was calling 911.

62

L
eaning into the resisting wind, Mitch hurried along the sidewalk, and miraculously escaped being stung when a violent gust shook a cloud of bees out of a tree nest.

The determined woman in the Lexus stayed far enough back that she could hang a U-turn and elude him if he changed directions and sprinted toward her, but she maintained sight of him. He started to run, and she accelerated to match his pace.

Evidently she intended to keep him located until the police arrived. Mitch admired her guts even though he wanted to shoot out her tires.

The cops would be here soon. Having found his Honda, they knew that he was in the area. The attempted theft of a Lexus just a few blocks from the gun shop would ring all their bells.

The car horn blared, blared again, and then relentlessly. She hoped to alert her neighbors to the presence of a criminal in their midst. The over-the-top urgency of the horn blasts suggested Osama bin Laden was loose on the street.

Mitch left the sidewalk, crossed a yard, opened a gate, and hurried around the side of a house, hoping he wouldn’t find a pit bull in the backyard. No doubt most pit bulls were as nice as nuns, but considering the way his luck was cutting, he wouldn’t run into Sister Pit but instead would stumble over a demon dog.

The backyard proved to be shallow, encircled by a seven-foot cedar fence with pointed staves. He didn’t see a gate. After tying the twisted neck of the trash bag to his belt, he climbed into a coral tree, crossed the fence on a limb, and dropped into an alley.

Police would expect him to prefer these service alleys to streets, so he couldn’t use them.

He passed through a vacant lot, sheltered by the weeping boughs of long-untrimmed California pepper trees, which whirled and flounced like the many-layered skirts of eighteenth-century dancers in a waltz.

As he was crossing the next street in midblock, a police car swept through the intersection to the east. The shriek of its brakes told him that he had been seen.

Across a yard, over a fence, across an alley, through a gate, across a yard, across another street, very fast now, the plastic bag slapping against his leg. He worried that it would split, spilling bricks of hundred-dollar bills.

The last line of houses backed up to a small canyon, about two hundred feet deep and three hundred wide. He scaled a wrought-iron fence and was at once on a steep slope of loose eroded soil. Gravity and sliding earth carried him down.

Like a surfer chasing bliss along the treacherous face of a fully macking monolith, he tried to stay upright, but the sandy earth proved to be not as accommodating as the sea. His feet went out from under him, and on his back he slid the last ten yards, raising a wake of white dust, then thrashed feetfirst through a sudden wall of tall grass and taller weeds.

He came to a stop under a canopy of branches. From high above, the floor of the canyon had appeared to be choked with greenery, but Mitch hadn’t expected large trees. Yet in addition to some of the scrub trees and brush that he had envisioned, he found an eclectic forest.

California buckeyes were garlanded with fragrant white flowers. Bristling windmill palms thrived with California laurels and black myrobalan plums. Many of the trees were gnarled and twisted and rough, junk specimens, as though the urban-canyon soil fed mutagens to their roots, but there were acer japonicums and Tasmanian snow gums that he would have been pleased to use in any high-end landscaping job.

A few rats scattered on his arrival, and a snake slithered away through the shadows. Maybe a rattlesnake. He couldn’t be sure.

While he remained in the cover of the trees, no one could see him from the canyon rim. He no longer was at risk of immediate apprehension.

So many branches of different trees interlaced that even the raging wind could not peel back the canopy and let the sun shine in directly. The light was green and watery. Shadows trembled, swayed like sea anemones.

A shallow stream slipped through the canyon, no surprise this recently after the rainy season. The water table might be so close to the surface here that a small artesian well maintained the flow all year.

He untied the plastic trash-can liner from his belt and examined it. The bag had been punctured in three places and had sustained a one-inch tear, but nothing seemed to have fallen out of it.

Mitch fashioned a loose temporary knot in the neck of the bag and carried it against his body, in the crook of his left arm.

As he remembered the lay of the land, the canyon narrowed and the floor rose dramatically toward the west. The purling water eased lazily from that direction, and he paralleled it at a faster pace.

A damp carpet of dead leaves cushioned his step. The pleasant melange of moist earth, wet leaves, and sporing toadstools gave weight to the air.

Although the population of Orange County exceeded three million, the bottom of the canyon felt so remote that he might have been miles from civilization. Until he heard the helicopter.

He was surprised they were up in this wind.

Judging by sound alone, the chopper crossed the canyon directly over Mitch’s head. It went north and circled the neighborhood through which he’d made his run, swelling louder, fading, then louder again.

They were searching for him from the air, but in the wrong place. They didn’t know he’d descended into the canyon.

He kept moving—but then halted and cried out softly in surprise when Anson’s phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, relieved that he hadn’t lost or damaged it.

“This is Mitch.”

Jimmy Null said, “Are you feeling hopeful?”

“Yes. Let me talk to Holly.”

“Not this time. You’ll see her soon. I’m moving the meet from three to two o’clock.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I just did it.”

“What time is it now?”

“One-thirty,” Jimmy Null said.

“Hey, no, I can’t make two o’clock.”

“Why not? Anson’s place is only minutes from the Turnbridge house.”

“I’m not at Anson’s place.”

“Where are you, what are you doing?” Null asked.

Feet planted wide in wet leaves, Mitch said, “Driving around, passing time.”

“That’s stupid. You should’ve stayed at his place, been ready.”

“Make it two-thirty. I’ve got the money right here. A million four. I’ve got it with me.”

“Let me tell you something.”

Mitch waited, and when Null didn’t go on, he said, “What? Tell me what?”

“About the money. Let me tell you something about the money.”

“All right.”

“I don’t live for money. I’ve got some money. There are things that mean more to me than money.”

Something was wrong. Mitch had felt it before, when talking to Holly, when she had sounded constrained and had not told him that she loved him.

“Listen, I’ve come so far,
we’ve
come so far, it’s only right we finish this.”

“Two o’clock,” Null said. “That’s the new time. You aren’t where you need to be at two sharp, it’s over. No second chance.”

“All right.”

“Two o’clock.”

“All right.”

Jimmy Null terminated the call.

Mitch ran.