The Husband

by Dean Koontz

  “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

  Leaning 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 f
rom 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.

  63

  Chained to the gas pipe, Holly knows what she must do, what she will do, and therefore she can pass her time only by worrying about all the ways things could go wrong or by marveling at what she can see of the uncompleted mansion.

  Thomas Turnbridge would have had one fantastic kitchen if he had lived. When all the equipment had been installed, a high-end caterer with platoons of staff could have cooked and served from here a sit-down dinner for six hundred on the terraces.

  Turnbridge had been a dot-com billionaire. The company that he founded—and that made him rich—produced no product, but it had been on the cutting edge of advertising applications for the Internet.

  By the time Forbes estimated Turnbridge’s net worth at three billion, he was buying homes on a dramatic Pacific-view bluff in an established neighborhood. He bought nine, side by side, by paying more than twice the going price. He spent over sixty million dollars on the houses and tore them down to make a single three-acre estate, a parcel with few if any equals on the southern California coast.

  A major architectural firm committed a team of thirty to the design of a three-level house encompassing eighty-five thousand square feet, a figure that excluded the massive subterranean garages and mechanical plant. It was to be in the style of an Alberto Pinto-designed residence in Brazil.

  Such elements as interior-exterior waterfalls, an underground shooting range, and an indoor ice-skating rink required heroic work of the structural, systems, and soil engineers. Two years were required for plans. During the first two years of construction, the builder worked solely on the foundation and subterranean spaces.

  No budget. Turnbridge spent whatever was required.

  Exquisite marbles and granites were purchased in matched lots. The exterior of the house would be clad in French limestone; sixty seamless limestone columns, from plinth to abacus, were fabricated at a cost of seventy thousand dollars each.

  Turnbridge had been as passionately committed to the company he had created as to the house he was building. He believed it would become one of the ten largest corporations in the world.

  He believed this even after a rapidly evolving Internet exposed flaws in his business model. From the start, he sold his shares only to finance lifestyle, not to broaden investments. When his company’s stock price fell, he borrowed to buy more shares at market. The price fell further, and he leveraged more purchases.

  When the share price never recovered and the company imploded, Turnbridge was ruined. Construction of the house came to a halt.

  Pursued by creditors, investors, and an angry ex-wife, Thomas Turnbridge came home to his unfinished house, sat in a folding chair on the master-bedroom balcony, and with a 240-degree ocean-and-city-lights view to enchant him, washed down an overdose of barbiturates with an icy bottle of Dom Perignon.

  Carrion birds found him a day before his ex-wife did.

  Although the three-acre coastal property is a plum, it has not sold after Turnbridge’s death. A snarl of lawsuits entangle it. The actual value of the land now appraises at the sixty million dollars that Turnbridge overpaid for it, which allows only a small pool of potential buyers.

  To complete this project as specified in the plans, a buyer will need to spend fifty million on the finish work, so he better like the style. If he demos existing construction and starts again, he needs to be prepared to spend five million on top of the sixty million for the land, because he will be dealing with steel-and-concrete construction meant to ride out an 8.2 quake with no damage.

  As a hope-to-be real-estate agent, Holly doesn’t dream of getting the commission for the Turnbridge house. She will be content selling properties in middle-class neighborhoods to people who are thrilled to have their own homes.

  In fact, if she could trade her modest real-estate dream for a guarantee that she and Mitch would survive the ransom exchange, she would be content to remain a secretary. She is a good secretary and a good wife; she will try hard to be a good mom, too, and she will be happy with that, with life, with love.

  But no such deal can be made; her fate remains in her own hands, literally and figuratively. She will have to act when the time comes for action. She has a plan. She is ready for the risk, the pain, the blood.

  The creep returns. He has put on a gray windbreaker and a pair of thin, supple gloves.

  She is sitting on the floor when he enters, but she gets to her feet as he approaches her.

  Violating the concept of personal space, he stands as close to Holly as a man would stand just before taking her in his arms to dance.

  “In Duvijio and Eloisa Pacheco’s house in Rio Lucio, there are two red wooden chairs in the living room, railback chairs with carved cape tops.”

  He places his right hand on her left shoulder, and she is glad that it is gloved.

  “On one red chair,” he continues, “stands a cheap ceramic figurine of Saint Anthony. On the companion chair stands a ceramic of a boy dressed for church.”

  “Who is the boy?”

  “The figurine represents their son, also named Anthony, who was run down and killed by a drunk driver when he was six. That was fifty years ago, when Duvijio and Eloisa were in their twenties.”

  Not yet a mother but hopeful of being one, she cannot imagine the pain of such a loss, the horror of its suddenness. She says, “A shrine.”

  “Yes, a shrine of red chairs. No one has sat in those chairs in fifty years. The chairs are for the two figurines.”

  “The two Anthonys,” she corrects.

  He may not recognize it as a correction.

  “Imagine,” he says, “the grief and the hope and the love and the despair that have been focused on those figurines. Half a century of intense yearning has imbued those objects with tremendous power.”

  She remembers the girl in the lace-trimmed dress, buried with the Saint Christopher medal and the Cinderella figurine.

  “I will visit Duvijio and Eloisa one day when they are not home, and take the ceramic of the boy.”

  This man is many things, including a cruel strip-miner of other people’s faith and hope
and treasured memories.

  “I have no interest in the other Anthony, the saint, but the boy is a totem of magical potential. I will take the boy to Espanola—”

  “Where your life will change again.”

  “Profoundly,” he says. “And perhaps not only my life.”

  She closes her eyes and whispers, “Red chairs,” as if she is picturing the scene.

  This seems to be encouragement enough for him right now, because after a silence, he says, “Mitch will be here in a little more than twenty minutes.”

  Her heart races at this news, but her hope is tempered by her fear, and she does not open her eyes.

  “I’ll go now to watch for him. He’ll bring the money into this room—and then it will be time to decide.”

  “In Espanola, is there a woman with two white dogs?”

  “Is that what you see?”

  “Dogs that seem to vanish in the snow.”

  “I don’t know. But if you see them, then I’m sure they must be in Espanola.”

  “I see myself laughing with her, and the dogs so white.” She opens her eyes and meets his. “You better go watch for him.”

  “Twenty minutes,” he promises, and leaves the kitchen.

  Holly stands quite still for a moment, amazed by herself.

  White dogs, indeed. Where had that come from? White dogs and a laughing woman.

  She almost laughs now at his gullibility, but there is no humor in the fact that she has gotten inside his head deep enough to know what imagery will work with him. That she could travel in his mad world at all does not seem entirely admirable.

  The shakes seize her, and she sits down. Her hands are cold, and a chill traces every turn of her bowels.

  She reaches under her sweater, between her breasts, and extracts the nail from her bra.

  Although the nail is sharp, she wishes it were sharper. She has no means to file it to a keener point.

  Using the head of the nail, she scratches industriously at the drywall until she has produced a small pile of powdered plaster.

  The time has come.

  When Holly was a little girl, for a while she feared an array of night monsters born of a good imagination: in closet, under bed, at the windows.

  Her grandmother, good Dorothy, had taught her a poem that, she claimed, would repel every monster: vaporize those in the closet, turn to dust those under the bed, and send those at the windows away to swamps and caves where they belonged.

  Years later, Holly learned that this poem, which cured her fear of monsters, was titled “A Soldier—His Prayer.” It had been written by an unknown British soldier and had been found on a slip of paper in a trench in Tunisia during the battle of El Agheila.

  Quietly but aloud, she recites it now:

  “Stay with me, God. The night is dark,