The Husband

by Dean Koontz

  his jeans. He slid the pistol under the driver’s seat.

  From the glove box, he retrieved John Knox’s wallet. Using the dead man’s money pricked his conscience, but he had no choice. His own wallet had been taken from him in Julian Campbell’s library. He took the entire $585 and returned the wallet to the glove box.

  He got out into the wind, locked the car, and went into the gun shop. The word shop seemed inadequate for such a large store. There were aisles and aisles of gun-related paraphernalia.

  At the long cashier’s counter, he got help from a large man with a walrus mustache. His name tag identified him as ROLAND.

  “A Springfield Champion,” Roland said. “That’s a stainless-steel version of a Colt Commander, isn’t it?”

  Mitch had no clue if it was or not, but he suspected that Roland knew his stuff. “That’s right.”

  “Beveled magazine well, throated barrel, a lowered and flared ejection port all come standard.”

  “It’s a sweet gun,” Mitch said, hoping people actually talked that way. “I want three extra magazines. For target shooting.”

  He added the last three words because it seemed that most people wouldn’t have a use for spare magazines unless they were planning to knock over a bank or take potshots at people from a clock tower.

  Roland appeared not in the least suspicious. “Did you go for Springfield’s whole Super Tuned package?”

  Remembering the words engraved near the muzzle, Mitch said, “Yes. The whole package.”

  “Any further customization?”

  “No,” Mitch guessed.

  “You didn’t bring the gun? I’d feel better if I could see it.”

  Incorrectly, Mitch had thought if he carried a pistol into the store, he’d look like a shoplifter or a stickup artist or something.

  “I’ve got this.” He put the magazine on the counter.

  “I’d rather have the gun, but let’s see if we can work with this.”

  Five minutes later, Mitch had paid for three magazines and a box of one hundred .45 ACP cartridges.

  Throughout the transaction, he had expected alarm bells to go off. He felt suspected, watched, and known for what he was. Clearly, his nerves didn’t have the tensile strength required of a fugitive from the law.

  As he was about to leave the shop, he looked through the glass door and saw a police cruiser in the parking lot, blocking his car. A cop stood at the driver’s door, peering into the locked Honda.

  59

  On second look, Mitch realized that the driver’s door of the cruiser wasn’t emblazoned with the seal of a city but with the name—First Enforcement—and ornate logo of a private-security firm. The uniformed man at the Honda must be a security guard, not a police officer.

  Nevertheless, the Honda would be of interest to him only if he knew an all-points bulletin had been put out for it. Evidently this guy did listen to a police scanner.

  The guard left his car athwart the Honda and approached the gun shop. He appeared purposeful.

  He had most likely stopped to do some personal business and had lucked onto the Honda. Now he was psyched up for a citizen’s arrest and a taste of glory.

  A real cop would have called for backup before coming into the store. Mitch supposed he should be grateful for getting even that much of a break.

  The parking lot wrapped two sides of the freestanding building, and there were two entrances. Mitch backed away from this door and headed quickly for the other.

  He left by the side exit and hurried to the front of the store. The security guard had gone inside.

  Mitch was alone in the wind. Not for long. He sprinted to the Honda.

  The First Enforcement car trapped him. The back of the parking space featured a steel-pipe safety barrier atop a six-inch concrete curb because, from the lot, the land sloped steeply down six feet to a sidewalk.

  No good. No way out. He would have to abandon the Honda.

  He unlocked the driver’s door and retrieved the Springfield Champion .45 from under the seat.

  As he closed the car door, somebody coming out of the gun shop drew his attention. Not the security guard.

  He popped the trunk and snatched the white plastic trash bag from the wheel well. He put the pistol and the gun-shop purchases with the money, twisted the neck of the bag, closed the trunk, and walked away.

  After passing behind five parked vehicles, he stepped between two SUVs. He peered in each, hoping one of the drivers had left the keys in the ignition, but he wasn’t lucky.

  He walked briskly—did not run—diagonally across the blacktop, toward the side of the building from which he had recently exited.

  As he reached the corner, his peripheral vision caught movement at the front door of the gun shop. When he glanced along the covered boardwalk, he glimpsed the security guard coming out of the store.

  He did not think that the guard had seen him, and then he was out of sight, past the corner.

  The side parking lot ended at a low concrete-block wall. He vaulted it, onto a property belonging to a fast-food franchise.

  Cautioning himself not to run like a fugitive, he crossed the parking lot, passed a queue of vehicles waiting in line for takeout, the air redolent of exhaust fumes and greasy French fries, rounded the back of the restaurant, came to another low wall, vaulted it.

  Ahead lay a small strip center with six or eight stores. He slowed down, looking in the windows as he passed, just a guy out on an errand, with one point four million to spend.

  As he came to the end of the block, a squad car went by on the main boulevard, emergency beacons flashing red-blue, red-blue, red-blue, heading in the direction of the gun shop. And immediately behind it sped another one.

  Mitch turned left on the small cross street, away from the boulevard. He picked up his pace again.

  The commercial zone was only one lot wide, facing the boulevard. Behind lay a residential neighborhood.

  In the first block were condos and apartment houses. After that he found single-family homes, most of them two stories, occasionally a bungalow.

  The street trees were huge old podocarpuses that cast a lot of shade. Most lawns were green, trimmed, shrubs well kept. But every community has landscape slobs eager to exert their rights to be bad neighbors.

  When the police didn’t find him at the gun shop, they would search surrounding neighborhoods. In a few minutes, they could have half a dozen or more units cruising the area.

  He had assaulted a police officer. They tended to put his kind at the top of their priority list.

  Most of the vehicles parked on this residential street were SUVs. He slowed down, squinting through the passenger-door windows at the ignitions, hoping to spot a key.

  When he glanced at his watch, he saw the time was 1:14. The exchange was set for 3:00, and now he didn’t have wheels.

  60

  The 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. S
mall 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

  Mitch 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.”