The Husband (12 page)

28

H
olly lies in darkness, praying that Mitch will live.

She fears less for herself than for him. Her captors at all times wear ski masks in her presence, and she assumes they would not bother to conceal their faces if they intended to kill her.

They aren’t just wearing them as a fashion statement. No one looks good in a ski mask.

If you were hideously disfigured, like the Phantom of the Opera, maybe you would want to wear a ski mask. But it defied reason that all four of these men would be hideously disfigured.

Of course, even if they hoped not to harm her, something could go awry with their plans. In a moment of crisis, she might be shot accidentally. Or events could change the kidnappers’ intentions toward her.

Always an optimist, having believed since childhood that every life has meaning and that hers will not pass before she finds its purpose, Holly does not dwell on what might go wrong, but envisions herself released, unharmed.

She believes envisioning the future helps shape it. Not that she could become a famous actress merely by envisioning herself accepting an Academy Award. Hard work, not wishes, builds careers.

Anyway, she doesn’t want to be a famous actress. She would have to spend a lot of time with famous actors, and most of the current crop creep her out.

Free again, she will eat marzipan and chocolate peanut-butter ice cream and potato chips until she either embarrasses herself or makes herself sick. She hasn’t thrown up since childhood, but even vomiting is an affirmation of life.

Free, she will celebrate by going to Baby Style, that store in the mall, and buying the huge stuffed bear she saw in their window when she passed by recently. It was fluffy and white and so cute.

Even as a teenage girl, she liked teddy bears. Now she needs one anyway.

Free, she will make love to Mitch. When she is done with him, he’ll feel as if he’s been hit by a train.

Well, that isn’t a particularly satisfying romantic image. It’s not the kind of thing that sells millions of Nicholas Sparks novels.

She made love to him with every fiber of her being, body and soul, and when at last their passion passed, he was splattered all over the room as if he had thrown himself in front of a locomotive.

Envisioning herself as a best-selling novelist would be a waste of effort. Fortunately, her goal is to be a real-estate agent.

So she prays that her beautiful husband will live through this terror. He
is
physically beautiful, but the most beautiful thing about him is his gentle heart.

Holly loves him for his gentle heart, for his sweetness, but she worries that certain aspects of his gentleness, such as his tendency toward passive acceptance, will get him killed.

He possesses a deep and quiet strength, too, a spine of steel, which is revealed in subtle ways. Without that, he would have been broken by his freak-show parents. Without that, Holly would not have led him on a chase all the way to the altar.

So she prays for him to stay strong, to stay alive.

During her prayers, during her ruminations about kidnappers’ fashions and gluttony and vomiting and big fluffy teddy bears, she works steadily at the nail in the floorboard. She has always been an excellent multitasker.

The wood floor is rough. She suspects that the planks are thick enough to have required heavier than usual flooring nails.

The nail that interests her has a large flat head. The size of the head suggests that this nail may be large enough to qualify as a spike.

In a crisis, a spike might serve as a weapon.

The flat head of the nail is not snug to the wood. It is raised maybe a sixteenth of an inch. This gap gives her a little leverage, a grip with which to work the nail back and forth.

Though the nail isn’t loose, one of her virtues is perseverance. She will keep working at the nail, and she will
envision
it loose, and eventually she will extract it from the plank.

She wishes she had acrylic fingernails. They look nice; and when she’s a real-estate agent, she’ll certainly need to have them. Good acrylic fingernails might give her an advantage with the spike.

On the other hand, they might break and split easier than her real fingernails. If she had them, they might prove to be a terrible disadvantage.

Ideally, when she had been kidnapped, she would have had acrylic nails on her left hand and none on her right. And two steel teeth set with a gap in the front of her mouth.

An ankle cuff and a length of chain shackle her right leg to a ringbolt in the floor. This leaves both of her hands free to work on the not-yet-loose nail.

The kidnappers have made some considerations for her comfort. They have provided her with an air mattress to lie on, a six-pack of bottled water, and a bedpan. Earlier they had given her half of a cheese-and-pepperoni pizza.

This is not to suggest that they are nice people. They are not nice people.

When they needed her to scream for Mitch, they hit her. When they needed her to scream for Anson, they pulled her hair suddenly, sharply, and so hard that she thought her scalp was coming off.

Although these are not people you would ever meet in church, they are not cruel sheerly for the fun of it. They are evil, but they have a business goal, so to speak, on which they remain focused.

One of them is evil
and
crazy.

He’s the one who worries her.

They have not made her privy to their scheme, but Holly vaguely understands that they are imprisoning her in order to use Mitch to manipulate Anson.

She doesn’t know why or how they think Anson can tap a fortune to ransom her for Mitch, but she is not surprised that he stands at the center of the whirlwind. She has long felt that Anson is not only what he pretends to be.

Now and then she has caught him staring at her in a way that the loving brother of her husband should never stare. When he realizes he has been caught, the predatory lust in his eyes and the hungry cast of his face vanish under his usual charm so instantaneously that it’s easy to believe you must have imagined the glint of savage interest.

Sometimes when he laughs, his mirth sounds manufactured to her. She seems to be alone in this perception. Everyone else finds Anson’s laugh infectious.

She has never shared her doubts about Anson. Until she met Mitch, all that he had were his sisters—who had fled to far points of the compass—his brother, and his passion for working in fertile earth, for making green things grow. Her hope has always been to enrich his life, not to subtract anything from it.

She can put her life in Mitch’s strong hands and fall at once into a dreamless sleep. In a sense, that is what marriage is about—a good marriage—a total trusting with your heart, your mind, your life.

But with her fate in Anson’s hands, as well, she might not sleep at all, and if she sleeps, there will be nightmares.

She worries, worries, worries the nail until her fingers ache. Then she uses two different fingers.

As the dark silent minutes pass, she tries not to brood about how a day that began with such joy could spiral into these desperate circumstances. After Mitch had gone to work and before the masked men had burst into her kitchen, she had used the kit that she’d bought the previous day but that she’d been too nervous to consult until this morning. Her period is nine days overdue, and according to the pregnancy test, she is going to have a baby.

For a year, she and Mitch have been hoping for this. Now here it is, on this of all days.

The kidnappers are unaware that
two
lives are at their mercy, and Mitch is unaware that not only his wife but also his child depend upon his cunning and his courage, but
Holly
knows. This knowledge is at once a joy and an anguish.

She envisions a child of three—sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy—at play in their backyard, and laughing. She envisions it more vividly than she has envisioned anything before, in the hope that she can make it come to pass.

She tells herself that she will be strong, that she will not cry. She does not sob or otherwise disturb the stillness, but sometimes tears come.

To shut off that hot flow, she works more aggressively at the nail, the stubborn damn nail, in the blinding dark.

After a long period of silence, she hears a solid thud with a hollow metallic quality:
ca-chunk.

Alert, wary, she waits, but the thud does not repeat. No other noise follows it.

The sound is tantalizingly familiar. A mundane noise—and yet her instinct tells her that her fate hangs on that
ca-chunk.

She is able to replay the sound in her memory, but she is not at first able to connect it to a cause.

After a while, Holly begins to suspect that the sound was imagined rather than real. More accurately, that it occurred in her head, not beyond the walls of this room. This is a peculiar notion, but it persists.

Then she recognizes the source, something she has heard perhaps hundreds of times, and although it has no ominous associations for her, she is chilled. The
ca-chunk
is the sound of a lid slamming shut on a car trunk.

Just the lid slamming shut on a car trunk, whether imagined or actually heard, should not cause crystals of creeping frost to form in the hollows of her bones. She sits very erect, the nail forgotten for the moment, breathing not at all, then shallowly, quietly.

29

I
n the late 1940s, if you owned a car like a Chrysler Windsor, you knew the engine was big because it made a big sound. It had the throb of a bull’s heart, low fierce snort and heavy stamp of hooves.

The war was over, you were a survivor, large swaths of Europe lay in ruin, but the homeland was untouched, and you wanted to feel
alive
. You didn’t want a soundproofed engine compartment. You didn’t want noise-control technology. You wanted power, balanced weight, and speed.

The car’s dark trunk reverberated with engine knock and rumble transferred along the drive shaft, through the body and the frame. The thrum and stutter of road noise rose and fell in direct relation to the tempo of the turning wheels.

Mitch smelled faint traces of exhaust gases, perhaps from a leak in the muffler, but he was in no danger of being overcome by carbon monoxide. Stronger were the rubbery scent of the mat on which he lay and the acidity of his own fear sweat.

Although as dark as the chamber in his parents’ house, this mobile learning room otherwise failed to impose sensory deprivation. Yet one of the greatest lessons of his life was being driven home to him mile by mile.

His father says there is no tao, no natural law we are born to understand. In his materialist view, we should conduct ourselves not according to any code, only according to self-interest.

Rationality is always in a man’s self-interest, Daniel says. Therefore, any act that is rational is right and good and admirable.

Evil does not exist in Daniel’s philosophy. Stealing, rape, murder of the innocent—these and other crimes are merely
irrational
because they put he who commits them in jeopardy of his freedom.

Daniel does acknowledge that the degree of irrationality depends on the criminal’s chances of escaping punishment. Therefore, those irrational acts that succeed and have only positive consequences for the perpetrator may be right and admirable, if not good for society.

Thieves, rapists, murderers, and their ilk might benefit from therapy and rehabilitation, or they might not. In either case, Daniel says, they are not evil; they are recovering—or irredeemable—irrationalists, only that and nothing more.

Mitch had thought that these teachings had not penetrated him, that he’d not been singed by the fire of a Daniel Rafferty education. But fire produced fumes; he’d been smoked in his father’s fanaticism so long that some of what steeped into him had stayed.

He could see, but he had been blind. He could hear, but he had been deaf.

This day, this night, Mitch had come face-to-face with evil. It was as real as stone.

Although an irrational man should be met with compassion and therapy, an evil man was owed nothing more or less than resistance and retribution, the fury of a righteous justice.

In Julian Campbell’s library, when the gunman had produced the handcuffs, Mitch had at once held out his hands. He had not waited for instructions.

If he had not appeared worn down, had not seemed meek and resigned to his fate, they might have cuffed his hands behind him. Reaching the revolver in his ankle holster would have been more difficult; using it with accuracy would have been impossible.

Campbell had even commented on Mitch’s weariness, by which he had meant primarily the weariness of mind and heart.

They thought they knew the kind of man he was, and maybe they did. But they didn’t know the kind of man he could become when the life of his wife was in the balance.

Amused by his lack of familiarity with the pistol that they had confiscated, they had not imagined he would have a second weapon. Not only good men are disadvantaged by their expectations.

Mitch pulled up the leg of his jeans and retrieved the revolver. He unstrapped the holster and discarded it.

Earlier, he had examined the weapon and had not found a safety. In movies, only some pistols had safeties, never revolvers.

If he lived through the next two days and got Holly back alive, he would never again allow himself to be put in a position where he had to rely on Tinseltown’s grasp of reality for his or his family’s survival.

When he had first swung open the cylinder, he had discovered five rounds in five chambers, where he expected six.

He would have to score two hits out of five rounds. Direct hits, not just wing shots.

Perhaps one of the gunmen would open the trunk. It would be better if the two were there, giving him the advantage of surprise with both.

Both would have their weapons drawn—or only one. If one, Mitch must be quick enough to target his armed adversary first.

A peaceable man, planning violence, was plagued by thoughts that were not helpful:
As a teenager, cursed by the explosions of acne that had left his face a moonscape, the scarred gunman must have suffered much humiliation.

Sympathy for the devil was a kind of masochism at best, a death wish at worst.

For a while, rocking to the rhythms of road and rubber, and of internal combustion, Mitch tried to imagine all the ways that the violence might go down when the trunk lid went up. Then he tried
not
to imagine.

According to his radiant watch, they traveled more than half an hour and then, slowing, changed from blacktop to an unpaved road. Small stones rattled through the undercarriage, rapped hard against the floor pan.

He smelled dust and licked the alkaline taste of it from his lips, but the air never became foul enough to choke him.

After twelve minutes at an easy speed, on the dirt road, the car came slowly to a stop. The engine idled for half a minute, and then the driver switched it off.

After forty-five minutes of drone and drum, the silence was like a sudden deafness.

One door opened, then the other.

They were coming.

Facing the back of the car, Mitch splayed his legs, bracing his feet in opposite corners of the space. He could not sit erect until the lid raised, but he waited with his back partly off the floor of the trunk, as if in the middle of doing a series of stomach crunches at the gym.

The cuffs all but required that he hold the revolver in a two-hand grip, which was probably better anyway.

He didn’t hear footsteps, just the gallop of his heart, but then he heard the key in the trunk lock.

Through his mind’s eye blinked an image of Jason Osteen being shot in the head, blinked and blinked, repeating like a film loop, Jason slammed by the bullet, skull exploding, slammed by the bullet, skull exploding….

As the lid lifted, Mitch realized that the trunk did not have a convenience light, and he began to sit up, thrusting the revolver forward.

The full-pitcher moon spilled its milk, backlighting the two gunmen.

Mitch’s eyes were adapted to absolute blackness, and theirs were not. He sat in darkness, and they stood in moonlight. They thought he was a meek and broken and helpless man, and he was not.

He didn’t consciously squeeze off the first shot, but felt the hard recoil and saw the muzzle flash and heard the crash, and then he was aware of squeezing the trigger the second time.

Two point-blank rounds knocked one silhouette down out of the moon-soaked night.

The second silhouette backed away from the car, and Mitch sat all the way up, squeezing off one, two, three more rounds.

The hammer clicked, and there was just the quiet of the moon, and the hammer clicked, and he reminded himself
Only five, only five!

He had to get out of the trunk. With no ammunition, he was a fish in a barrel. Out. Out of the trunk.