The Husband (3 page)

5

T
he dashboard clock was digital, as was Mitch’s wristwatch, but he could hear time ticking nonetheless, as rapid as the
click-click-click
of the pointer snapping against the marker pegs on a spinning wheel of fortune.

He wanted to race directly home from the crime scene. Logic argued that Holly would have been snatched at the house. They would not have grabbed her on the way to work, not on a public street.

They might unintentionally have left something behind that would suggest their identity. More likely, they would have left a message for him, further instructions.

As usual, Mitch had begun the day by picking up Iggy at his apartment in Santa Ana. Now he had to return him.

Driving north from the fabled and wealthy Orange County coastal neighborhoods where they worked, toward their humbler communities, Mitch switched from the crowded freeway to surface streets, but encountered traffic there, as well.

Iggy wanted to talk about the murder and the police. Mitch had to pretend to be as naively excited by the novelty of the experience as Iggy was, when in fact his mind remained occupied with thoughts of Holly and with worry about what might come next.

Fortunately, as usual, Iggy’s conversation soon began to loop and turn and tangle like a ball of yarn unraveled by a kitten.

Appearing to be engaged in this rambling discourse required less of Mitch than when the subject had been the dead dogwalker.

“My cousin Louis had a friend named Booger,” Iggy said. “The same thing happened to him, shot while walking a dog, except it wasn’t a rifle and it wasn’t a dog.”

“Booger?” Mitch wondered.

“Booker,” Iggy corrected. “B-o-o-k-e-r. He had a cat he called Hairball. He was walking Hairball, and he got shot.”

“People walk cats?”

“The way it was—Hairball is cozy in a travel cage, and Booker is carrying him to a vet’s office.”

Mitch repeatedly checked the rearview and side mirrors. A black Cadillac SUV had departed the freeway in their wake. Block after block, it remained behind them.

“So Booker wasn’t actually
walking
the cat,” Mitch said.

“He was walking
with
the cat, and this like twelve-year-old brat, this faucet-nosed little dismo, shot Booker with a paint-ball gun.”

“So he wasn’t killed.”

“He wasn’t quashed, no, and it was a cat instead of a dog, but Booker was totally blue.”

“Blue?”

“Blue hair, blue face. He was fully pissed.”

The Cadillac SUV reliably remained two or three vehicles behind them. Perhaps the driver hoped Mitch wouldn’t notice him.

“So Booker’s all blue. What happened to the kid?” Mitch asked.

“Booker was gonna break the little dismo’s hand off, but the kid shot him in the crotch and ran. Hey, Mitch, did you know there’s a town in Pennsylvania named Blue Balls?”

“I didn’t know.”

“It’s in Amish country. There’s another town nearby called Intercourse.”

“How about that.”

“Maybe those Amish aren’t as square as Cheez-Its, after all.”

Mitch accelerated to cross an intersection before the traffic light phased to red. Behind him, the black SUV changed lanes, sped up, and made it through on the yellow.

“Did you ever eat an Amish shoofly pie?” Iggy asked.

“No. Never did.”

“It’s full-on rich, sweeter than six Gidget movies. Like eating molasses. Treacherous, dude.”

The Cadillac dropped back, returned to Mitch’s lane. Three vehicles separated them once more.

Iggy said, “Earl Potter lost a leg eating shoofly pie.”

“Earl Potter?”

“Tim Potter’s dad. He was diabetic, but he didn’t know it, and he totally destroyed like a bucket of sweets every day. Did you ever eat a Quakertown pie?”

“What about Earl’s leg?” Mitch asked.

“Unreal, bro. One day his foot’s numb, he can’t walk right. Turns out he’s got almost no circulation down there ’cause of radical diabetes. They sawed his left leg off above the knee.”

“While he was eating shoofly pie.”

“No. He realized he had to give up sweets.”

“Good for him.”

“So the day before surgery, he had his last dessert, and he chose a whole shoofly pie with like a cow’s worth of whipped cream. Did you ever see that stylin’ Amish movie with Harrison Ford and the girl with the great knockers?”

By way of Hairball, Blue Balls, Intercourse, shoofly pie, and Harrison Ford, they arrived at Iggy’s apartment building.

Mitch stopped at the curb, and the black SUV went past without slowing. The side windows were tinted, so he couldn’t see the driver or any passengers.

Opening his door, before getting out of the truck, Iggy said, “You okay, boss?”

“I’m okay.”

“You look stomped.”

“I saw a guy shot to death,” Mitch reminded him.

“Yeah. Wasn’t that radical? I guess I know who’s gonna rule the bar at Rolling Thunder tonight. Maybe you should stop in.”

“Don’t save a stool for me.”

The Cadillac SUV dwindled westward. The afternoon sun wrapped the suspicious vehicle in glister and glare. It shimmered and seemed to vanish into the solar maw.

Iggy got out of the truck, looked back in at Mitch, and pulled a sad face. “Ball and chain.”

“Wind beneath my wings.”

“Whoa. That’s goob talk.”

“Go waste yourself.”

“I do intend to get mildly polluted,” Iggy assured him. “Dr. Ig prescribes at least a six-pack of
cerveza
for you. Tell Mrs. Mitch I think she’s an uber wahine.”

Iggy slammed the door and walked away, big and loyal and sweet and clueless.

With hands that were suddenly shaky on the wheel, Mitch piloted the truck into the street once more.

Coming north, he had been impatient to be rid of Iggy and to get home. Now his stomach turned when he considered what might wait for him there.

What he most feared was finding blood.

6

M
itch drove with the truck windows open, wanting the sounds of the streets, proof of life.

The Cadillac SUV did not reappear. No other vehicle took up the pursuit. Evidently, he had imagined the tail.

His sense of being under surveillance passed. From time to time, his eyes were drawn to the rearview mirror, but no longer with the expectation of seeing anything suspicious.

He felt alone, and worse than alone. Isolated. He almost wished that the black SUV would reappear.

Their house was in an older neighborhood of Orange, one of the oldest cities in the county. When he turned onto their street, except for the vintage of the cars and trucks, a curtain in time might have parted, welcoming him to 1945.

The bungalow—pale-yellow clapboard, white trim, a cedar-shingle roof—stood behind a picket fence on which roses twined. Some larger and some nicer houses occupied the block, but none boasted better landscaping.

He parked in the driveway beside the house, under a massive old California pepper tree, and stepped out into a breathless afternoon.

Sidewalks and yards were deserted. In this neighborhood, most families relied on two incomes; everyone was at work. At 3:04, no latchkey kids were yet home from school.

No maids, no window washers, no gardening services busy with leaf blowers. These homeowners swept their own carpets, mowed their own yards.

The pepper tree braided the sunshine in its cascading tresses, and littered the shadowed pavement with elliptical slivers of light.

Mitch opened a side gate in the picket fence. He crossed the lawn to the front steps.

The porch was deep and cool. White wicker chairs with green cushions stood beside small wicker tables with glass tops.

On Sunday afternoons, he and Holly often sat here, talking, reading the newspaper, watching hummingbirds flit from one crimson bloom to another on the trumpet vines that flourished on the porch posts.

Sometimes they unfolded a card table between the wicker chairs. She crushed him at Scrabble. He dominated the trivia games.

They didn’t spend much on entertainment. No skiing vacations, no weekends in Baja. They seldom went out to a movie. Being together on the front porch offered as much pleasure as being together in Paris.

They were saving money for things that mattered. To allow her to risk a career change from secretary to real-estate agent. To enable him to do some advertising, buy a second truck, and expand the business.

Kids, too. They were going to have kids. Two or three. On certain holidays, when they were most sentimental, even four did not seem like too many.

They didn’t want the world, and didn’t want to change it. They wanted their little corner of the world, and the chance to fill it with family and laughter.

He tried the front door. Unlocked. He pushed it inward and hesitated on the threshold.

He glanced back at the street, half expecting to see the black SUV. It wasn’t there.

After he stepped inside, he stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust. The living room was illuminated only by what tree-filtered sunlight pierced the windows.

Everything appeared to be in order. He could not detect any signs of struggle.

Mitch closed the door behind him. For a moment he needed to lean against it.

If Holly had been at home, there would have been music. She liked big-band stuff. Miller, Goodman, Ellington, Shaw. She said the music of the ’40s was suitable to the house. It suited her, too. Classic.

An archway connected the living room to the small dining room. Nothing in this second room was out of place.

On the table lay a large dead moth. It was a night-flyer, gray with black details along its scalloped wings.

The moth must have gotten in the previous evening. They had spent some time on the porch, and the door had been open.

Maybe it was alive, sleeping. If he cupped it in his hands and took it outside, it might fly into a corner of the porch ceiling and wait there for moonrise.

He hesitated, reluctant to touch the moth, for fear that no flutter was left in it. At his touch, it might dissolve into a greasy kind of dust, which moths sometimes did.

Mitch left the night-flyer untouched because he wanted to believe that it was alive.

The connecting door between the dining room and the kitchen stood ajar. Light glowed beyond.

The smell of burnt toast lingered on the air. It grew stronger when he pushed through the door into the kitchen.

Here he found signs of a struggle. One of the dinette chairs had been overturned. Broken dishes littered the floor.

Two slices of blackened bread stood in the toaster. Someone had pulled the plug. The butter had been left out on the counter, and had softened as the day grew warmer.

The intruders must have come in from the front of the house, surprising her as she was making toast.

The cabinets were painted glossy white. Blood spattered a door and two drawer fronts.

For a moment, Mitch closed his eyes. In his mind, he saw the moth flutter and fly up from the table. Something fluttered in his chest, too, and he wanted to believe that it was hope.

On the white refrigerator, a woman’s bloody hand print cried havoc as loud as any voice could have shouted. Another full hand print and a smeared partial darkened two upper cabinets.

Blood spotted the terra-cotta tiles on the floor. It seemed to be a lot of blood. It seemed to be an ocean.

The scene so terrified Mitch that he wanted to shut his eyes again. But he had the crazy idea that if he closed his eyes twice to this grim reality, he would go blind forever.

The phone rang.

7

H
e did not have to tread in blood to reach the telephone. He picked up the handset on the third ring, and heard his haunted voice say, “Yeah?”

“It’s me, baby. They’re listening.”

“Holly. What’ve they done to you?”

“I’m all right,” she said, and she sounded strong, but she did not sound all right.

“I’m in the kitchen,” he said.

“I know.”

“The blood—”

“I know. Don’t think about that now. Mitch, they said we have one minute to talk, just one minute.”

He grasped her implication:
One minute, and maybe never again.

His legs would not support him. Turning a chair away from the dinette table, collapsing into it, he said, “I’m so damn sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. Don’t beat yourself up.”

“Who are these freaks, are they deranged, what?”

“They’re vicious creeps, but they’re not crazy. They seem…professional. I don’t know. But I want you to make me a promise—”

“I’m dyin’ here.”

“Listen, baby. I want your promise. If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“If anything happens to me,” she insisted, “promise you’ll keep it together.”

“I don’t want to think about that.”

“You keep it together, damn it. You keep it together and have a life.”

“You’re my life.”

“You keep it together, mower jockey, or I’m going to be way pissed.”

“I’ll do what they want. I’ll get you back.”

“If you don’t keep it together, I’ll haunt your ass, Rafferty. It’ll be like that
Poltergeist
movie cubed.”

“God, I love you,” he said.

“I know. I love you. I want to hold you.”

“I love you so much.”

She didn’t reply.

“Holly?”

The silence electrified him, brought him up from the chair.

“Holly? You hear me?”

“I hear you, mower jockey,” said the kidnapper to whom he had spoken previously.

“You sonofabitch.”

“I understand your anger—”

“You piece of garbage.”

“—but I don’t have much patience for it.”

“If you hurt her—”

“I already
have
hurt her. And if you don’t pull this off, I’ll butcher the bitch like a side of beef.”

An acute awareness of his helplessness brought Mitch crashing down from anger to humility.

“Please. Don’t hurt her again. Don’t.”

“Chill, Rafferty. You just chill while I explain a few things.”

“Okay. All right. I need things explained. I’m lost here.”

Again his legs felt weak. Instead of sitting in the chair, he brushed a broken dish aside with one foot and knelt on the floor. For some reason, he felt more comfortable on his knees than in the chair.

“About the blood,” the kidnapper said. “I slapped her down when she tried to fight back, but I didn’t cut her.”

“All the blood…”

“That’s what I’m telling you. We put a tourniquet on her arm until a vein popped up, stuck a needle in it, and drew four vials just like your doctor does when you get a physical.”

Mitch leaned his forehead against the oven door. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate.

“We smeared blood on her hands and made those prints. Spattered some on the counters, cabinets. Dripped it on the floor. It’s stage setting, Rafferty. So it looks like she was murdered there.”

Mitch was the turtle, just leaving the
START
line, and this guy on the phone was the rabbit, already halfway through the marathon. Mitch couldn’t get up to speed. “Staged? Why?”

“If you lose your nerve and go to the cops, they’ll never buy the kidnapping story. They’ll see that kitchen and think you croaked her.”

“I didn’t tell them anything.”

“I know.”

“What you did to the dogwalker—I knew you had nothing to lose. I knew I couldn’t mess with you.”

“This is just a little extra insurance,” the kidnapper said. “We like insurance. There’s a butcher knife missing from the rack there in your kitchen.”

Mitch didn’t bother to confirm the claim.

“We wrapped it with one of your T-shirts and a pair of your blue jeans. The clothes are stained with Holly’s blood.”

They were professional, all right, just like she had said.

“That package is hidden on your property,” the kidnapper continued. “You couldn’t easily find it, but police dogs will.”

“I get the picture.”

“I knew you would. You aren’t stupid. That’s why we’ve bought ourselves so much insurance.”

“What now? Make sense of this whole thing for me.”

“Not yet. Right now you’re very emotional, Mitch. That’s not good. When you’re not in control of your emotions, you’re likely to make a mistake.”

“I’m solid,” Mitch assured him, although his heart still stormed and his blood thundered in his ears.

“You don’t have any room for a mistake, Mitch. Not one. So I want you to chill, like I said. When you’ve got your head straight, then we’ll discuss the situation. I’ll call you at six o’clock.”

Though remaining on his knees, Mitch opened his eyes, checked his watch. “That’s over two and a half hours.”

“You’re still in your work clothes. You’re dirty. Take a nice hot shower. You’ll feel better.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“Anyway, you’ll need to be more presentable. Shower, change, and then leave the house, go somewhere, anywhere. Just be sure your cell phone is fully charged.”

“I’d rather wait here.”

“That’s no good, Mitch. The house is filled with memories of Holly, everywhere you look. Your nerves will be rubbed raw. I need you to be less emotional.”

“Yeah. All right.”

“One more thing. I want you to listen to this….”

Mitch thought they were going to twist a scream of pain from Holly again, to emphasize how powerless he was to protect her. He said, “Don’t.”

Instead of Holly, he heard two taped voices, clear against a faint background hiss. The first voice was his own:

“I’ve never seen a man murdered before.”

“You don’t get used to it.”

“I guess not.”

“It’s worse when it’s a woman…a woman or a child.”

The second voice belonged to Detective Taggart.

The kidnapper said, “If you had spilled your guts to him, Mitch, Holly would be dead now.”

In the dark smoky glass of the oven door, he saw the reflection of a face that seemed to be looking out at him from a window in Hell.

“Taggart’s one of you.”

“Maybe he is. Maybe not. You should just assume that everybody is one of us, Mitch. That’ll be safer for you, and a lot safer for Holly. Everybody is one of us.”

They had built a box around him. Now they were putting on the lid.

“Mitch, I don’t want to leave you on such a dark note. I want to put you at ease about something. I want you to know that we won’t touch her.”

“You
hit
her.”

“I’ll hit her again if she doesn’t do what she’s told. But we won’t
touch
her. We aren’t rapists, Mitch.”

“Why would I believe you?”

“Obviously, I’m handling you, Mitch. Manipulating, finessing. And obviously there is a lot of stuff I won’t tell you—”

“You’re killers, but not rapists?”

“The point is that everything I
have
told you has been true. You think back over our relationship, and you’ll see I’ve been truthful and I’ve kept my word.”

Mitch wanted to kill him. Never before had he felt an urge to do serious violence to another human being, but he wanted to
destroy
this man.

He was clutching the phone so fiercely that his hand ached. He was not able to relax his grip.

“I’ve had a lot of experience working through surrogates, Mitch. You’re an instrument to me, a valuable tool, a sensitive machine.”

“Machine.”

“Hang with me a minute, okay? It makes no sense to abuse a valuable and sensitive machine. I wouldn’t buy a Ferrari and then never change the oil, never lubricate it.”

“At least I’m a Ferrari.”

“When I’m your handler, Mitch, you won’t be pressed beyond your limits. I would expect very high performance from a Ferrari, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to drive it through a brick wall.”

“I feel like I’ve already been through a brick wall.”

“You’re tougher than you think. But in the interest of getting the best performance out of you, I want you to know we’ll treat Holly with respect. If you do everything we want, then she’ll come back to you alive…and untouched.”

Holly was not weak. She would not easily be mentally broken by physical abuse. But rape was more than a violation of the body. Rape rended the mind, the heart, the spirit.

Her captor might have raised the issue with the sincere intent of putting some of Mitch’s fears to rest. But the sonofabitch had also raised it as a warning.

Mitch said, “I still don’t think you’ve answered the question. Why should I believe you?”

“Because you have to.”

That was an inescapable truth.

“You have to, Mitch. Otherwise, you might as well consider her dead right now.”

The kidnapper terminated the call.

For a while, Mitch’s sense of powerlessness kept him on his knees.

Eventually a recording, a woman with the vaguely patronizing tone of a nursery-school teacher not fully comfortable with children, requested that he hang up the phone. He put the handset on the floor instead, and a continuous beeping urged him to comply with the operator’s suggestion.

Remaining on his knees, he rested his forehead against the oven door once more, and closed his eyes.

His mind was in tumult. Images of Holly, tornadoes of memories, tormented him, fragmented and spinning, good memories, sweet, but they tormented because they might be all that he would ever have of her. Fear and anger. Regret and sorrow. He had never known loss. His life had not prepared him for loss.

He strove to clear his mind because he sensed that there was something he could do for Holly right here, now, if only he could quiet his fear and be calm, and
think
. He didn’t have to wait for orders from her kidnappers. He could do something important for her now. He could take action on her behalf. He could do something for Holly.

Humbled against the hard terra-cotta tiles, his knees began to ache. This physical discomfort gradually cleared his mind. Thoughts no longer blew through him like shatters of debris, but drifted as fallen leaves drift on a placid river.

He could do something meaningful for Holly, and the awareness of the thing that he could do was right below the surface, floating just beneath his questing reflection. The hard floor was unforgiving, and he began to feel as if he were kneeling on broken glass. He could do something for Holly. The answer eluded him.
Something.
His knees ached. He tried to ignore the pain, but then he got to his feet. The pending insight receded. He returned the telephone handset to its cradle. He would have to wait for the next call. He had never before felt so useless.