The Husband

by Dean Koontz

  A glance at the victim dispelled any hope that first aid might sustain him until paramedics arrived. A significant portion of his skull was gone.

  Having no familiarity with real violence, only with the edited-analyzed-excused-and-defanged variety provided by TV news, and with the cartoon violence in movies, Mitch was rendered impotent by this horror. More than fear, shock immobilized him.

  More than shock, a sudden awareness of previously unsensed dimensions transfixed him. He was akin to a rat in a sealed maze, for the first time looking up from the familiar passageways and seeing a world beyond the glass lid, forms and figures, mysterious movement.

  Lying on the sidewalk near its master, the golden retriever trembled, whimpered.

  Mitch sensed that he was in the company of someone other than the dog, and felt watched, but more than watched. Studied. Attended. Pursued.

  His heart was a thundering herd, hooves on stone.

  He surveyed the day but saw no gunman. The rifle could have been fired from any house, from any rooftop or window, or from behind a parked car.

  Anyway, the presence he sensed was not that of the shooter. He did not feel watched from a distance, but from an intimate vantage point. He felt as if someone loomed over him.

  Hardly more than half a minute had passed since the dogwalker had been killed.

  The crack of the rifle had not brought anyone out of any of the beautiful houses. In this neighborhood, a gunshot would be perceived as a slammed door, dismissed even as it echoed.

  Across the street, at the client’s house, Iggy Barnes had risen from his knees to his feet. He didn’t appear to be alarmed, merely puzzled, as if he, too, had heard a door and didn’t understand the meaning of the fallen man, the grieving dog.

  Midnight Wednesday. Sixty hours. Time on fire, minutes burning. Mitch couldn’t afford to let hours turn to ashes while he was tied up with a police investigation.

  On the sidewalk, a column of marching ants changed course, crawling toward the feast within the cratered skull.

  In a mostly clear sky, a rare cloud drifted across the sun. The day paled. Shadows faded.

  Chilled, Mitch turned from the corpse, stepped off the curb, halted.

  He and Iggy couldn’t just load the unplanted impatiens into the truck and drive away. They might not be able to do so before someone came along and saw the dead man. Their indifference to the victim and their flight would suggest guilt even to the most unworldly passerby, and certainly to the police.

  The cell phone, folded shut, remained in Mitch’s hand. He looked upon it with dread.

  If you go to the cops, we’ll cut her fingers off one by one…

  The kidnappers would expect him to summon the authorities or to wait for someone else to do so. Forbidden, however, was any mention of Holly or of kidnapping, or of the fact that the dogwalker had been murdered as an example to Mitch.

  Indeed, his unknown adversaries might have put him in this predicament specifically to test his ability to keep his mouth shut at the moment when he was in the most severe state of shock and most likely to lose his self-control.

  He opened the phone. The screen brightened with an image of colorful fish in dark water.

  After keying in 9 and 1, Mitch hesitated, but then entered the final digit.

  Iggy dropped his trowel, moved toward the street.

  Only when the police operator answered on the second ring did Mitch realize that from the moment he’d seen the dead man’s shattered head, his breathing had been desperate, ragged, raw. For a moment, words wouldn’t come, and then they blew out of him in a rough voice he barely recognized.

  “A man’s been shot. I’m dead. I mean, he’s dead. He’s been shot, and he’s dead.”

  3

  Police had cordoned off both ends of the block. Squad cars, CSI vans, and a morgue wagon were scattered along the street with the insouciance of those to whom parking regulations do not apply.

  Under the unblinking gaze of the sun, windshields blazed and brightwork gleamed. No cloud remained to be a pirate’s patch, and the light was merciless.

  The cops wore sunglasses. Behind the dark lenses, perhaps they glanced suspiciously at Mitchell Rafferty, or perhaps they were indifferent to him.

  In front of his client’s house, Mitch sat on the lawn, his back against the bole of a phoenix palm.

  From time to time, he heard rats scrabbling in the top of the tree. They liked to make a high nest in a phoenix palm, between the crown and the skirt.

  The feathery shadows of the fronds provided him with no sense of diminished visibility. He felt as if he were on a stage.

  Twice in two hours, he had been questioned. Two plainclothes detectives had interviewed him the first time, only one on the second occasion.

  He thought he had acquitted himself well. Yet they had not told him that he could go.

  Thus far, Iggy had been interviewed only once. He had no wife in jeopardy, nothing to hide. Besides, Iggy had less talent for deception than did the average six-year-old, which would be evident to experienced interrogators.

  Maybe the cops’ greater interest in Mitch was a bad sign. Or maybe it meant nothing.

  More than an hour ago, Iggy had returned to the flower bed. He had nearly completed the installation of the impatiens.

  Mitch would have preferred to stay busy with the planting. This inactivity made him keenly aware of the passage of time: Two of his sixty hours were gone.

  The detectives had firmly suggested that Iggy and Mitch should remain separated because, in all innocence, if they talked together about the crime, they might unintentionally conform their memories, resulting in the loss of an important detail in one or the other’s testimony.

  That might be either the truth or malarkey. The reason for keeping them apart might be more sinister, to isolate Mitch and ensure that he remained off balance. Neither of the detectives had worn sunglasses, but Mitch had not been able to read their eyes.

  Sitting under the palm tree, he had made three phone calls, the first to his home number. An answering machine had picked up.

  After the usual beep, he said, “Holly, are you there?”

  Her abductors would not risk holding her in her own home.

  Nevertheless, Mitch said, “If you’re there, please pick up.”

  He was in denial because the situation made no sense. Kidnappers don’t target the wives of men who have to worry about the price of gasoline and groceries.

  Man, you aren’t listening. I’m a gardener.

  We know.

  I have like eleven thousand bucks in the bank.

  We know.

  They must be insane. Delusional. Their scheme was based on some mad fantasy that no rational person could understand.

  Or they had a plan that they had not yet revealed to him. Maybe they wanted him to rob a bank for them.

  He remembered a news story, a couple years back, about an innocent man who robbed a bank while wearing a collar of explosives. The criminals who necklaced him had tried to use him like a remote-control robot. When police cornered the poor bastard, his controllers detonated the bomb from a distance, decapitating him so he could never testify against them.

  One problem. No bank had two million dollars in cash on hand, in tellers’ drawers, and probably not even in the vault.

  After getting no answer when he phoned home, he had tried Holly’s cell phone but hadn’t been able to reach her at that number.

  He also had called the Realtor’s office where she worked as a secretary while she studied for her real-estate license.

  Another secretary, Nancy Farasand, had said, “She called in sick, Mitch. Didn’t you know?”

  “When I left home this morning, she was a little queasy,” he lied, “but she thought it would pass.”

  “It didn’t pass. She said it’s like a summer flu. She was so disappointed.”

  “I better call her at home,” he said, but of course he had already tried reaching her there.

  He ha
d spoken to Nancy more than ninety minutes ago, between conversations with detectives.

  Passing minutes unwind a watch spring; but they had wound Mitch tight. He felt as though something inside his head was going to pop.

  A fat bumblebee returned to him from time to time, hovering, buzzing close, perhaps attracted by his yellow T-shirt.

  Across the street, toward the end of the block, two women and a man were standing on a front lawn, watching the police: neighbors gathered for the drama. They had been there since the sirens had drawn them outside.

  Not long ago, one of them had gone into a house and had returned with a tray on which stood glasses of what might have been iced tea. The glasses sparkled in the sunlight.

  Earlier, the detectives had walked up the street to question that trio. They had interviewed them only once.

  Now the three stood sipping tea, chatting, as if unconcerned that a sniper had cut down someone who had been walking in their community. They appeared to be enjoying this interlude, as though it presented a welcome break from their usual routine, even if it came at the cost of a life.

  To Mitch, the neighbors seemed to spend more time staring toward him than at any of the police or CSI technicians. He wondered what, if anything, the detectives had asked them about him.

  None of the three used the services of Big Green. From time to time, they would have seen him in the neighborhood, however, because he took care of four properties on this street.

  He disliked these tea drinkers. He had never met them, did not know their names, but he viewed them with an almost bitter aversion.

  Mitch disliked them not because they seemed perversely to be enjoying themselves, and not because of what they might have said about him to the police. He disliked the three—could have worked up a loathing for them—because their lives were still in order, because they did not live under the threat of imminent violence against someone they loved.

  Although irrational, his animosity had a certain value. It distracted him from his fear for Holly, as did his continuous fretful analysis of the detectives’ actions.

  If he dared to give himself entirely to worry about his wife, he would go to pieces. This was no exaggeration. He was surprised at how fragile he felt, as he never had felt previously.

  Each time her face rose in his mind, he had to banish it because his eyes grew hot, his vision blurred. His heart fell into an ominous heavy rhythm.

  An emotional display, so out of proportion even to the shock of seeing a man shot, would require an explanation. He dared not reveal the truth, and he didn’t trust himself to invent an explanation that would convince the cops.

  One of the homicide detectives—Mortonson—wore dress shoes, black slacks, and a pale-blue shirt. He was tall, solid, and all business.

  The other—Lieutenant Taggart—wore white sneakers, chinos, and a red-and-tan Hawaiian shirt. He was less physically intimidating than Mortonson, less formal in his style.

  Mitch’s wariness of Taggart exceeded his concern about the more imposing Mortonson. The lieutenant’s precisely trimmed hair, his glass-smooth shave, his perfect veneered teeth, his spotless white sneakers suggested that he adopted casual dress and a relaxed demeanor to mislead and to put at ease the suspects unfortunate enough to come under his scrutiny.

  The detectives first interviewed Mitch in tandem. Later, Taggart had returned alone, supposedly to have Mitch “refine” something he had said earlier. In fact, the lieutenant repeated every question he and Mortonson had asked before, perhaps anticipating contradictions between Mitch’s answers and those that he had given previously.

  Ostensibly, Mitch was a witness. To a cop, however, when no killer had been identified, every witness also counted as a suspect.

  He had no reason to kill a stranger walking a dog. Even if they were crazy enough to think he might have done so, they would have to believe that Iggy was his accomplice; clearly Iggy did not interest them.

  More likely, though they knew he’d had no role in the shooting, their instinct told them that he was concealing something.

  Now here came Taggart yet again, his sneakers so white that they appeared to be radiant.

  As the lieutenant approached, Mitch rose to his feet, wary and sick with worry, but trying to appear merely weary and impatient.

  4

  Detective Taggart sported an island tan to match his Hawaiian shirt. By contrast with his bronze face, his teeth were as white as an arctic landscape.

  “I’m sorry for all this inconvenience, Mr. Rafferty. But I have just a couple more questions, and then you’re free to go.”

  Mitch could have replied with a shrug, a nod. But he thought that silence might seem peculiar, that a man with nothing to hide would be forthcoming.

  Following an unfortunate hesitation long enough to suggest calculation, he said, “I’m not complaining, Lieutenant. It could just as easily have been me who was shot. I’m thankful to be alive.”

  The detective strove for a casual demeanor, but he had eyes like those of a predatory bird, hawk-sharp and eagle-bold. “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, if it was a random shooting…”

  “We don’t know that it was,” said Taggart. “In fact, the evidence points to cold calculation. One shot, perfectly placed.”

  “Can’t a crazy with a gun be a skilled shooter?”

  “Absolutely. But crazies usually want to rack up as big a score as possible. A psychopath with a rifle would have popped you, too. This guy knew exactly who he wanted to shoot.”

  Irrationally, Mitch felt some responsibility for the death. This murder had been committed to ensure that he would take the kidnapper seriously and would not seek police assistance.

  Perhaps the detective had caught the scent of this unearned but persistent guilt.

  Glancing toward the cadaver across the street, around which the CSI team still worked, Mitch said, “Who’s the victim?”

  “We don’t know yet. No ID on him. No wallet. Don’t you think that’s peculiar?”

  “Going out just to walk the dog, you don’t need a wallet.”

  “It’s a habit with the average guy,” Taggart said. “Even if he’s washing the car in the driveway, he has his wallet.”

  “How will you identify him?”

  “There’s no license on the dog’s collar. But that’s almost a show-quality golden, so she might have a microchip ID implant. As soon as we get a scanner, we’ll check.”

  Having been moved to this side of the street, tied to a mailbox post, the golden retriever rested in shade, graciously receiving the attention of a steady procession of admirers.

  Taggart smiled. “Goldens are the best. Had one as a kid. Loved that dog.”

  His attention returned to Mitch. His smile remained in place, but the quality of it changed. “Those questions I mentioned. Were you in the military, Mr. Rafferty?”

  “Military? No. I was a mower jockey for another company, took some horticulture classes, and set up my own business a year out of high school.”

  “I figured you might be ex-military, the way gunfire didn’t faze you.”

  “Oh, it fazed me,” Mitch assured him.

  Taggart’s direct gaze was intended to intimidate.

  As if Mitch’s eyes were clear lenses through which his thoughts were revealed like microbes under a microscope, he felt compelled to avoid the detective’s stare, but sensed that he dared not.

  “You hear a rifle,” Taggart said, “see a man shot, yet you hurry across the street, into the line of fire.”

  “I didn’t know he was dead. Might’ve been something I could do for him.”

  “That’s commendable. Most people would scramble for cover.”

  “Hey, I’m no hero. My instincts just shoved aside my common sense.”

  “Maybe that’s what a hero is—someone who instinctively does the right thing.”

  Mitch dared to look away from Taggart, hoping that his evasion, in this context, would be interpreted as humility. “I wa
s stupid, Lieutenant, not brave. I didn’t stop to think I might be in danger.”

  “What—you thought he’d been shot accidentally?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t think anything. I didn’t think, I just reacted.”

  “But you really didn’t feel like you were in danger?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t realize it even when you saw his head wound?”

  “Maybe a little. Mostly I was sickened.”

  The questions came too fast. Mitch felt off balance. He might unwittingly reveal that he knew why the dogwalker had been killed.

  With a buzz of busy wings, the bumblebee returned. It had no interest in Taggart, but hovered near Mitch’s face, as if bearing witness to his testimony.

  “You saw the head wound,” Taggart continued, “but you still didn’t scramble for cover.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess I figured if somebody hadn’t shot me by then, they weren’t going to shoot me.”

  “So you still didn’t feel in danger.”

  “No.”

  Flipping open his small spiral-bound notebook, Taggart said, “You told the 911 operator that you were dead.”

  Surprised, Mitch met the detective’s eyes again. “That I was dead?”

  Taggart quoted from the notebook: “‘A man’s been shot. I’m dead. I mean, he’s dead. He’s been shot, and he’s dead.’”

  “Is that what I said?”

  “I’ve heard the recording. You were breathless. You sounded flat-out terrified.”

  Mitch had forgotten that 911 calls were recorded. “I guess I was more scared than I remember.”

  “Evidently, you did recognize a danger to yourself, but still you didn’t take cover.”

  Whether or not Taggart could read anything of Mitch’s thoughts, the pages of the detective’s own mind were closed, his eyes a warm but enigmatic blue.

  “‘I’m dead,’” the detective quoted again.

  “A slip of the tongue. In the confusion, the panic.”

  Taggart looked at the dog again, and again he smiled. In a voice softer than it had been previously, he said, “Is there anything more I should have asked you? Anything you would like to say?”

  In memory, Mitch heard Holly’s cry of pain.

  Kidnappers always threaten to kill their hostage if the cops are brought in. To win, you don’t have to play the game by their rules.

  The police would contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI had extensive experience in kidnapping cases.

  Because Mitch had no way to raise two million, the police would at first doubt his story. When the kidnapper called again, however, they would be convinced.