by Dean Koontz
The night is cold: My little spark
Of courage dies. The night is long;
Be with me, God, and make me strong.”
She hesitates then, but only for a moment.
The time has come.
64
Shoes caked with mud and wet leaves, clothes rumpled and dirty, a white trash bag cradled in his arms and pressed against his chest as if it were a precious baby, eyes so bright with desperation that they might have been lamps to light his way if this had been night, Mitch hurried along the shoulder of the highway.
No officer of the law, happening to drive past, would fail to give him special scrutiny. He had the look of a fugitive or a madman, or both.
Fifty yards ahead stood a combination service station and minimart. Advertising a tire sale, scores of bright pennants snapped in the wind.
He wondered if ten thousand dollars cash would buy him a ride to the Turnbridge house. Probably not. The way he looked, most people would expect him to kill them en route.
A guy looking like a hobo, waving around ten thousand bucks, wanting to buy a ride, would make the station manager nervous. He might call the cops.
Yet buying a ride seemed to be his only option other than carjacking someone at gunpoint, which he would not do. The owner of the car might foolishly grab for the gun and be accidentally shot.
As he drew near the service station, a Cadillac Escalade angled off the highway and stopped at the outermost pumps. A tall blonde got out, clutching her purse, and strode into the minimart, leaving the driver’s door open.
The two rows of pumps were both self-service. No attendants were in sight.
Another customer was fueling a Ford Explorer. He focused on his windows, working with a squeegee.
Mitch shambled up to the Escalade and peered through the open door. The keys were in the ignition.
Leaning inside, he checked the backseat. No grandpapa, no child in a safety seat, no pit bull.
He climbed in behind the wheel, pulled the door shut, started the engine, and drove onto the highway.
Although he half expected people to run after him, waving their arms and shouting, the rearview mirror revealed no one.
The highway was divided. He considered driving over the median planter strip. The Escalade could handle it. Fate being what fate is, a patrol car would happen by at just that moment.
He sped north a few hundred yards to a turning lane, and then headed south.
When he passed the service station, no tall angry blonde had yet put in an appearance. He raced past, but with respect for the posted speed limit.
Ordinarily, he was not an impatient driver who ranted at slow or clueless motorists. During this trip, he wished upon them all kinds of plagues and hideous misfortunes.
By 1:56, he arrived in the neighborhood where Turnbridge’s folly stood incomplete. Out of sight of the mansion, he pulled to the curb.
Cursing the stubborn buttons, he stripped out of his shirt. Jimmy Null would most likely make him take it off anyway, to prove that he was not concealing a weapon.
He had been told to come unarmed. He wanted to appear to be in compliance with that demand.
From the trash bag, he retrieved the box of .45 ammunition, and from a pocket of his jeans, he withdrew the original magazine for the Springfield Champion. He added three cartridges to the seven already in the magazine.
A movie memory served him well. He pulled back the slide and inserted an eleventh round in the chamber.
The cartridges slipped in his sweaty trembling fingers, so he had time to load only two of the three spare magazines. He stashed the box of ammo and the extra magazine under the driver’s seat.
One minute till two o’clock.
He shoved the two loaded magazines in the pockets of his jeans, put the loaded pistol in the bag with the money, twisted the top of the bag but didn’t knot it, and drove to the Turnbridge place.
A long chain-link construction fence fitted with privacy panels of green plastic fabric separated the street from the big Turnbridge property. The nearby residents who had put up with this ugliness for years must wish the entrepreneur hadn’t killed himself if only so they could now torment him with lawyers and neighborly invective.
The gate was closed, draped with chain. As Jimmy Null promised, it wasn’t locked.
Mitch drove onto the property and parked with the back of the SUV facing the house. He got out and opened all five doors, hoping by this gesture to express his desire to fulfill the terms of the agreement to the best of his ability.
He closed the construction gate and draped the chain in place once more.
Carrying the trash bag, he walked to a spot between the Escalade and the house, stopped, and waited.
The day was warm, not hot, but the sun was hard. The light cut at his eyes, and the wind.
Anson’s cell phone rang.
He took the call. “This is Mitch.”
Jimmy Null said, “It’s a minute past two. Oh, now it’s two past. You’re late.”
65
The unfinished house appeared as large as a hotel. Jimmy Null could have been watching Mitch from any of scores of windows.
“You were supposed to come in your Honda,” he said.
“It broke down.”
“Where’d you get the Escalade?”
“Stole it.”
“No shit.”
“None.”
“Park it parallel to the house, so I can see straight through the front and back seats.”
Mitch did as told, leaving the doors open as he repositioned the vehicle. He stepped away from the SUV and waited with the trash bag, the phone to his ear.
He wondered if Null would shoot him dead from a distance and come take the money. He wondered why he wouldn’t do that.
“I’m disturbed you didn’t come in the Honda.”
“I told you, it broke down.”
“What happened?”
“Flat tire. You brought the swap forward an hour, so I didn’t have time to change it.”
“A stolen car—the cops could have chased your ass here.”
“No one saw me take it.”
“Where’d you learn to hot-wire a car?”
“The keys were in the ignition.”
Null considered in silence. Then: “Enter the house by the front door. Stay on the phone.”
Mitch saw that the door had been shot open. He went inside.
The entry hall was immense. Although no finish work had been done, even Julian Campbell would have been impressed.
After leaving Mitch to stew for a minute, Jimmy Null said, “Pass through the colonnade into the living room directly ahead of you.”
Mitch went into the living room, where the west windows extended floor to ceiling. Even through dusty glass, the view was so stunning that he could understand why Turnbridge had wanted to die with it.
“All right. I’m here.”
“Turn left and cross the room,” Null directed. “A wide doorway leads into a secondary drawing room.”
None of the doors were hung. Those separating these two rooms would have to be nine feet tall to fill the opening.
When Mitch reached the drawing room, which offered an equally spectacular view, Null said, “You’ll see another wide doorway across from the one you’re standing in, and a single door to your left.”
“Yes.”
“The single leads to a hallway. The hall passes other rooms and leads to the kitchen. She’s in the kitchen. But don’t go near her.”
Moving across the drawing room toward the specified doorway, Mitch said, “Why not?”
“Because I’m still making the rules. She’s chained to a pipe. I have the key. You stop just inside the kitchen.”
The hallway seemed to recede from him the farther he followed it, but he knew the telescoping effect had to be psychological. He was frantic to see Holly.
He didn’t look in any of the rooms he passed. Null might have been in one of them. It didn’t
matter.
When Mitch entered the kitchen, he saw her at once, and his heart swelled, and his mouth went dry. Everything that he had been through, every pain that he had suffered, every terrible thing that he had done was in that instant all worthwhile.
66
Because the creep arrives in the kitchen to stand beside her during the last of his phone conversation, Holly hears him give the final directions.
She holds her breath, listening for footsteps. When she hears Mitch approaching, hot tears threaten, but she blinks them back.
A moment later Mitch enters the room. He says her name so tenderly. Her husband.
She has stood with her arms crossed over her breasts, her hands fisted in her armpits. Now she lowers her arms and stands with her hands fisted at her sides.
The creep, who has drawn a wicked-looking pistol, is intently focused on Mitch. “Arms straight out like a bird.”
Mitch obeys, a white trash bag dangling from his right hand.
His clothes are filthy. His hair is windblown. His face has lost all color. He is beautiful.
The killer says, “Come slowly forward.”
As instructed, Mitch approaches, and the creep tells him to stop fifteen feet away.
As Mitch halts, the killer says, “Put the bag on the floor.”
Mitch lowers the bag to the dusty limestone. It settles but does not flop open.
Covering Mitch with the pistol, the killer says, “I want to see the money. Kneel in front of the bag.”
Holly doesn’t like to see Mitch kneeling. This is the position that executioners instruct their victims to take before the coup de grâce.
She must act, but the time feels not quite right. If she makes her move too soon, the scheme might fail. Instinct tells her to wait, though waiting with Mitch on his knees is so hard.
“Show me the money,” the killer says, and he has a two-hand grip on the pistol, finger tightened on the trigger.
Mitch opens the neck of the bag and withdraws a plastic-wrapped brick of cash. He tears off one end of the plastic, and riffles the hundred-dollar bills with his thumb.
“The bearer bonds?” the killer asks.
Mitch drops the cash into the sack.
The creep tenses, thrusting the pistol forward as Mitch reaches into the bag again, and he does not relax even when Mitch produces only a large envelope.
From the envelope, Mitch extracts half a dozen official-looking certificates. He holds one forward for the killer to read.
“All right. Put them back in the envelope.”
Mitch obeys, still on his knees.
The creep says, “Mitch, if your wife had a chance for previously undreamed-of personal fulfillment, the opportunity for enlightenment, for transcendence, surely you would want her to follow that better destiny.”
Bewildered by this turn, Mitch does not know what to say, but Holly does. The time has come.
She says, “I’ve been sent a sign, my future is New Mexico.”
Raising her hands from her sides, opening her fists, she reveals her bloody wounds.
An involuntary cry escapes Mitch, the killer glances at Holly, and her stigmata drip for his astonishment.
The nail holes are not superficial, though they don’t go all the way through her hands. She stabbed herself and worked the wounds with brutal determination.
The worst had been having to bite back every cry of pain. If he had heard her agony expressed, the killer would have come to see what she was doing.
At once, the wounds had bled too much. She had packed them with powdered plaster to stop the bleeding. Before the plaster worked, blood had dripped on the floor, but she had covered it with a quick redistribution of the thick dust.
With her hands fisted in her armpits, as Mitch entered the room, Holly had clawed the plugs of plaster from the wounds, tearing them open once more.
Blood flows now for the killer’s fascination, and Holly says, “In Espanola, where your life will change, lives a woman named Rosa Gonzales with two white dogs.”
With her left hand, she pulls down the neck of her sweater, revealing cleavage.
His gaze rises from her breasts to her eyes.
She slips her right hand between her breasts, palms the nail, and fears not being able to hold it in her slippery fingers.
The killer glances at Mitch.
She grips the nail well enough, reveals it, and rams it into the killer’s face, going for his eye, but instead pinning his mask to him, piercing the hollow of his cheek and ripping.
Screaming, tongue flailing on the nail, he reels back from her, and his pistol fires wildly, bullets thudding into walls.
She sees Mitch rising and moving fast, with a gun of his own.
67
Mitch shouted, “Holly, move,” and she was moving on the first syllable of Holly, separating herself from Jimmy Null as much as her chain allowed.
Point-blank, aiming abdomen, hitting chest, pulling down from the recoil, firing again, pulling down, firing, firing, he thought a couple of shots went wide, but saw three or four rounds tearing into the windbreaker, each roar so big booming through the big house.
Null reeled backward, off balance. His pistol had an extended magazine. It seemed to be fully automatic. Bullets stitched a wall, part of the ceiling.
Because he now had only a one-hand grip on the weapon, maybe the recoil tore it from him, maybe he lost all strength, but for whatever reason, it flew. The gun hit the wall, clattered to the limestone.
Driven backward by the impact of the .45s, rocked on his heels, Null staggered, dropped on his side, rolled onto his face.
When the echoes of the echoes of the gunfire faded, Mitch could hear Jimmy Null’s ragged wheezing. Maybe that was how you breathed when you had a fatal chest wound.
Mitch wasn’t proud of what he did next, didn’t even take any savage delight in it. In fact he almost didn’t do it, but he knew that almost would buy no dispensation when the time came to reckon for the way he lived his life.
He stepped over the wheezing man and shot him twice in the back. He would have shot him a third time, but he had expended all eleven rounds in the pistol.
Crouching defensively during the gunfire, Holly rose to meet Mitch as he turned to her.
“Anyone else?” he asked.
“Just him, just him.”
She exploded into him, threw her arms around him. He had never before been held so tight, with such sweet ferocity.
“Your hands.”
“They’re okay.”
“Your hands,” he insisted.
“They’re okay, you’re alive, they’re okay.”
He kissed every part of her face. Her mouth, her eyes, her brow, her eyes again, salty now with tears, her mouth.
The room stank of gunfire, a dead man lay on the floor, Holly was bleeding, and Mitch’s legs felt weak.
He wanted fresh air, the brisk wind, sunshine to kiss her in.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“The chain.”
A small stainless-steel padlock coupled the links around her wrist.
“He has the key,” she said.
Staring at the body, Mitch withdrew a spare magazine from a pocket of his jeans. He ejected the spent clip, replaced it with the fresh.
Pressing the muzzle against the back of the kidnapper’s head, he said, “One move, I’ll blow your brains out,” but of course he got no answer.
Nevertheless, he pressed hard on the gun and, with his free hand, was able to search the side pockets of the windbreaker. He found the key in the second one.
The chain fell away from her wrist as the dropped padlock rapped the limestone floor.
“Your hands,” he said, “your beautiful hands.”
The sight of her blood pierced him, and he thought of the staged scene in their kitchen, the bloody hand prints, but this was worse, so much worse to see her bleeding.
“What happened to your hands?”
“New Mexico. It’s no
t as bad as it looks. I’ll explain. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
He snatched the bag of ransom off the floor. She started toward a doorway, but he led her to the entrance from the hall, which was the only route he knew.
They walked with her right arm around his shoulders and his left arm around her waist, past empty rooms haunted or not, and his heart knocked no softer and no slower than when he had been in the quick of the gunfire. Maybe it would race like this for the rest of his life.
The hall was long, and in the drawing room, they could not help looking toward the vast, dust-filmed view.
As they stepped into the living room, an engine roared to life elsewhere in the house. The racket rattled room to hall to room, and chattered off the high ceilings, making it impossible to determine where it originated.
“Motorcycle,” she said.
“Bulletproof,” Mitch said. “A vest under the windbreaker.”
The impact of the slugs, especially the two in the back, jarring the spine, must have knocked Jimmy Null briefly unconscious.