by Dean Koontz
“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 the
n 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.
8
Although still hours away, the approaching night pulled every shadow toward the east, away from the westbound sun. Queen-palm shadows yearned across the deep yard.
To Mitch, standing on the back porch, this place, which had previously been an island of peace, now seemed as fraught with tension as the webwork of cables supporting a suspension bridge.
At the end of the yard, beyond a board fence, lay an alleyway. On the farther side of the alley were other yards and other houses. Perhaps a sentinel at one of those second-floor windows observed him now with high-powered binoculars.
On the phone, he had told Holly that he was in the kitchen, and she had said I know. She could have known only because her captors had known.
The black Cadillac SUV had not proved to be in any dark power’s employ, imbued with menace only by his imagination. No other vehicle had followed him.
They had expected him to go home, so instead of tailing him, they had staked out his house. They were watching now.
One of the houses on the farther side of the alley might offer a good vantage point if the observer was equipped with high-tech optical gear that provided an intimate view from a distance.
His suspicion settled instead on the detached garage at the rear of this property. That structure could be accessed either from the alley or from the front street via the driveway that ran alongside the house.
The garage, which provided parking for Mitch’s truck and Holly’s Honda, featured windows on the ground floor and in the storage loft. Some were dark, and some were gilded with reflected sunlight.
No window revealed a ghostly face or a telltale movement. If someone was watching from the garage, he would not be careless. He would be glimpsed only if he wished to be seen for the purpose of intimidation.
From the roses, from the ranunculus, from the corabells, from the impatiens, slanting sunlight struck luminous color like flaring shards in stained-glass windows.
The butcher knife, wrapped in bloody clothes, had probably been buried in a flower bed.
By finding that bundle, retrieving it, and cleaning up the blood in the kitchen, he would regain some control. He’d be able to react with greater flexibility to whatever challenges were thrust upon him in the hours ahead.
If he was being watched, however, the kidnappers would not view his actions with equanimity. They had staged his wife’s murder to box him in, and they wouldn’t want the box to be deconstructed.
To punish him, they would hurt Holly.
The man on the phone had promised that she would not be touched, meaning raped. But he had no compunctions about hitting her.
Given reason, he would hit her again. Punch her. Torture her. Regarding those issues, he had made no promises.
To dress the set of the staged homicide, they had drawn her blood painlessly, with a hypodermic syringe. They had not, however, sworn to spare her forever from a knife.
As instruction in the reality of his helplessness, they might cut her. Any laceration she endured would sever the very tendons of his will to resist.
They dared not kill her. To continue controlling Mitch, they had to let him speak to her from time to time.
But they could cut to disfigure, then instruct her to describe the disfigurement to him on the phone.
Mitch was surprised by his ability to anticipate such hideous developments. Until a few hours ago, he’d had no personal experience of unalloyed evil.
The vividness of his imagination in this area suggested that on a subconscious level, or on a level deeper than the subconscious, he had known that real evil walked the world, abominations that could not be faded to gray by psychological or social analysis. Holly’s abduction had raised this willfully repressed awareness out of a hallowed darkness, into view.
The shadows of the queen palms, stretched toward the backyard fence, seemed taut to the snapping point, and the sun-brightened flowers looked as brittle as glass. Yet the tension in the scene increased.
Neither the elongated shadows nor the flowers would snap. Whatever strained toward the breaking point, it would break within Mitch. And though anxiety soured his stomach and clenched his teeth, he sensed that this coming change would not be a bad thing.
At the garage, the dark windows and the sun-fired windows mocked him. The porch furniture and the patio furniture, arranged with the expectation of the enjoyment of lazy summer evenings, mocked him.
The lush and sculpted landscaping, on which he had spent so many hours, mocked him as well. All the beauty born from his work seemed now to be superficial, and its superficiality made it ugly.
He returned to the house and closed the back door. He did not bother locking it.
The worst that could have invaded his home had already been here and had gone. What violations followed would be only embellishments on the original horror.
He crossed the kitchen and entered a short hall that served two rooms, the first of which was a den.
It contained a sofa, two chairs, and a large-screen television.
These days, they rarely watched any programs. So-called reality TV dominated the airwaves, and legal dramas and police dramas, but all of it bored because none of it resembled reality as he had known it; and now he knew it even better.
At the end of the hallway was the master bedroom. He withdrew clean underwear and socks from a bureau drawer.
For now, as impossible as every mundane task seemed in these circumstances, he could do nothing other than what he had been told to do.
The day had been warm; but a night in the middle of May was likely to be cool. At the closet, he slipped a fresh pair of jeans and a flannel shirt from hangers. He put them on the bed.
He found himself standing at Holly’s small vanity, where she daily sat on a tufted stool to brush her hair, apply her makeup, put on her lipstick.
Unconsciously, he had picked up her hand mirror. He looked into it, as if hoping, by some grace that would foretell the future, to see her fine and smiling face. His own countenance did not bear contemplation.
He shaved, showered, and dressed for the ordeal ahead.
He had no idea what they expected of him, how he could possibly raise two million dollars to ransom his wife, but he made no attempt to imagine any possible scenarios. A man on a high ledge is well advised not to spend much time studying the long drop.
As he sat on the edge of the bed, just as he finished tying his shoes, the doorbell rang.
The kidnapper had said he would call at six, not come calling. Besides, the bedside clock read 4:15.
Leaving the door unanswered was not an option. He needed to be responsive regardless of how Holly’s captors chose to contact him.
If the visitor had nothing to do with her abduction, Mitch was nevertheless obliged to answer the door in order to maintain an air of normalcy.
His truck in the driveway proved that he was home. A neighbor, getting no response to the bell, might circle to the back of the house to knock at the kitchen door.
The six-pane window in that door would provide a clear view of the kitchen floor strewn with broken dishes, the bloody hand prints on the cabinets and the refrigerator.
He should have drawn shut the blinds.