The Husband

by Dean Koontz

  rate of an inch a day, by the Wednesday-midnight deadline, she will have only an inch to go.

  In the event that Mitch has raised the ransom by that time, they will all just have to wait another day until she extracts the damn nail.

  She has always been an optimist. People have called her sunny and cheerful and buoyant and ebullient; and annoyed by her unflagging positive outlook, a sour-puss once asked her if she was the love child of Mickey Mouse and Tinkerbell.

  She could have been mean and told him the truth, that her father died in a traffic accident and her mother in childbirth, that she had been raised by a grandmother rich in love and mirth.

  Instead she told him Yes, but because Tink doesn’t have the hips for childbirth, I was carried to term by Daisy Duck.

  At the moment, uncharacteristically, she finds it difficult to keep her spirits up. Being kidnapped fractures your funny bone.

  She has two broken fingernails, and the pads of her fingers are sore. If she hadn’t wrapped them in the tail of her blouse, to pad them, while she worked on the nail, they would probably be bleeding.

  In the scheme of things, these injuries are insignificant. If her captors start cutting off her fingers like they promised Mitch, that would be something to bitch about.

  She takes a break from her work with the nail. She lies back on the air mattress in the dark.

  Although she is exhausted, she does not expect to sleep. Then she is dreaming about being in a lightless place different from the room in which the kidnappers have imprisoned her.

  In the dream, she is not tethered to a ringbolt in the floor. She is walking in darkness, carrying a bundle in her arms.

  She is not in a room but in a series of passageways. A maze of tunnels. A labyrinth.

  The bundle grows heavy. Her arms ache. She doesn’t know what she carries, but something terrible will happen if she puts it down.

  A dim glow draws her. She arrives in a chamber brightened by a single candle.

  Mitch is here. She’s so happy to see him. Her father and mother, whom she has never known except from photographs, are here, too.

  The bundle in her arms is a sleeping baby. Her sleeping baby.

  Smiling, her mother comes forward to take the baby. Holly’s arms ache, but she holds fast to the precious bundle.

  Mitch says Give us the baby, sweetheart. He should be with us. You don’t belong here.

  Her parents are dead, and so is Mitch, and when she lets go of the infant, it will not just be sleeping anymore.

  She refuses to give her son to them—and then somehow it is in her mother’s arms. Her father blows out the candle.

  Holly wakes to a howling beast that is only the wind, but beast enough, hammering the walls, shaking dust down from the roof beams.

  A soft glow, not a candle but a small flashlight, brings minimal relief from the darkness in which she has been imprisoned. It reveals the knitted black ski mask, the chapped lips, and the beryl-blue eyes of one of her keepers kneeling before her—the one who worries her.

  “I’ve brought you candy,” he says.

  He holds out to her a Mr. Goodbar.

  His fingers are long and white. His nails are bitten.

  Holly dislikes touching anything that he has touched. Hiding her distaste, she accepts the candy bar.

  “They’re asleep. This is my shift.” He puts on the floor in front of her a can of cola beaded with icy sweat. “You like Pepsi?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “Do you know Chamisal, New Mexico?” he asks.

  He has a soft, musical voice. It could almost be a woman’s voice, but not quite.

  “Chamisal?” she says. “No. I’ve never been there.”

  “I’ve had experiences there,” he says. “My life was changed.”

  Wind booms and something rattles on the roof, and she uses the noise as an excuse to look up, hoping to see a memorable detail of her prison for later testimony.

  She was brought here in a blindfold. At the end, they came up narrow steps. She thinks she might be in an attic.

  Half the lens of the small flashlight has been taped over. The ceiling remains unrevealed in gloom. The light reaches only to the nearest bare-board wall, and all else around her is lost in shadow.

  They are careful.

  “Have you been to Rio Lucio, New Mexico?” he asks.

  “No. Not there, either.”

  “In Rio Lucio, there is a small stucco house painted blue with yellow trim. Why don’t you eat your chocolate?”

  “I’m saving it for later.”

  “Who knows how much time any of us has?” he asks. “Enjoy it now. I like to watch you eat.”

  Reluctantly, she peels the wrapper off the candy bar.

  “A saintly woman named Ermina Lavato lives in the blue-and-yellow stucco house in Rio Lucio. She is seventy-two.”

  He believes that statements like this constitute conversation. His pauses suggest that obvious rejoinders are available to Holly.

  After swallowing chocolate, she says, “Is Ermina a relative?”

  “No. She’s of Hispanic origin. She makes exquisite chicken fajitas in a kitchen that looks like it came from the 1920s.”

  “I’m not much of a cook,” Holly says inanely.

  His gaze is riveted on her mouth, and she takes a bite from the Mr. Goodbar with the feeling that she’s engaged in an obscene act.

  “Ermina is very poor. The house is small but very beautiful. Each room is painted a different soothing color.”

  As he stares at her mouth, she returns the scrutiny, to the extent his mask allows. His teeth are yellow. The incisors are sharp, the canines unusually pointed.

  “Her bedroom walls hold forty-two images of the Holy Mother.”

  His lips look as if they are perpetually chapped. Sometimes he chews at the loose shreds of skin when he isn’t talking.

  “In the living room are thirty-nine images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by thorns.”

  The cracks in his lips glisten as if they might start seeping.

  “In Ermina Lavato’s backyard, I buried a treasure.”

  “As a gift for her?” Holly asks.

  “No. She would not approve of what I buried. Drink your Pepsi.”

  She does not want to drink from a can he handled. She opens it anyway, and takes a sip.

  “Do you know Penasco, New Mexico?”

  “I haven’t traveled much in New Mexico.”

  He is silent for a moment, and the wind howls into his silence, and his gaze drops to her throat as she swallows Pepsi. Then: “My life changed in Penasco.”

  “I thought that was Chamisal.”

  “My life has changed often in New Mexico. It’s a place of change and great mystery.”

  Having thought of a use for the Pepsi can, Holly sets it aside with the hope he will allow her to keep it if she hasn’t finished the cola by the time he leaves.

  “You would enjoy Chamisal, Penasco, Rodarte, so many beautiful and mysterious places.”

  She considers her words before she speaks. “Let’s hope I live to see them.”

  He meets her stare directly. His eyes are the blue of a somber sky that suggests an impending storm even in the absence of clouds.

  In a voice still softer than usual, not in a whisper but with a quiet tenderness, he says, “May I speak to you in confidence?”

  If he touches her, she will scream until she wakes the others.

  Interpreting her expression as consent, he says, “There were five of us, and now just three.”

  This is not what she has expected. She holds his gaze though it disturbs her.

  “To improve the split from five ways to four, we killed Jason.”

  She cringes inwardly at the revelation of a name. She doesn’t want to know names or see faces.

  “Now Johnny Knox has disappeared,” he says. “Johnny was running surveillance, hasn’t called in. The three of us—we didn’t agree to improve the split from four. The issue was
never raised.”

  Mitch, she thinks at once.

  Outside, the tenor of the wind changes. Ceasing to shriek, it rushes with a great shush, counseling Holly in the wisdom of silence.

  “The other two were out on errands yesterday,” he continues, “separately, at different times. Either could have killed Johnny.”

  To reward him for these revelations, she eats more chocolate.

  Watching her mouth once more, he says, “Maybe they decided on a two-way split. Or one of them may want to have it all.”

  Not wishing to appear to sow discord, she says, “They wouldn’t do that.”

  “They might,” he says. “Do you know Vallecito, New Mexico?”

  Licking chocolate from her lips, Holly says, “No.”

  “Austere,” he says. “So many of these places are austere but so beautiful. My life changed in Vallecito.”

  “How did it change?”

  Instead of answering, he says, “You should see Las Trampas, New Mexico, in the snow. A scattering of humble buildings, white fields, low hills dark with chaparral, and the sky as white as the fields.”

  “You’re something of a poet,” she says, and half means it.

  “They have no casinos in Las Vegas, New Mexico. They have life and they have mystery.”

  His white hands come together, not in contemplation, certainly not in prayer, but as though each possesses its own awareness, as if they are pleased by the feel of each other.

  “In Rio Lucio, Eloisa Sandoval has a shrine to Saint Anthony in her small adobe-walled kitchen. Twelve ceramic figures arranged in tiers, one for each child and grandchild. Candles every evening in the vespers hour.”

  She hopes that he will make new revelations about his partners, but she knows that she must appear discreetly intrigued by everything he says.

  “Ernest Sandoval drives a ’64 Chevy Impala with giant steel chain links for a steering wheel, a custom-painted dashboard, and a ceiling upholstered in red velvet.”

  The long fingers with spatulate pads smooth one another, smooth and smooth.

  “Ernest is interested in saints with whom his pious wife is unfamiliar. And he knows…amazing places.”

  The Mr. Goodbar has begun to cloy in Holly’s mouth, to stick in her throat, but she takes another bite of it.

  “Ancient spirits dwell in New Mexico, since before the existence of humanity. Are you a seeker?”

  If she encourages him too much, he will read her as insincere. “I don’t think so. Sometimes we all feel…something is missing. But that’s everyone. That’s human nature.”

  “I see a seeker in you, Holly Rafferty. A tiny seed of spirit waiting to bloom.”

  His eyes are as clear as a limpid stream, but cloaked by silt at the bottom are strange forms that she cannot identify.

  Lowering her gaze, she says demurely, “I’m afraid you see too much in me. I’m not a deep thinker.”

  “The secret is not to think. We think in words. And what lies beneath the reality we see is a truth that words can’t contain. The secret is to feel.”

  “See, to you that’s a simple concept, but even that’s too deep for me.” She laughs softly at herself. “My biggest dream is to be in real estate.”

  “You underestimate yourself,” he assures her. “Within you are…enormous possibilities.”

  His large bony wrists and long pale hands are utterly hairless, either naturally or because he uses a depilatory cream.

  40

  With hobgoblins of wind threatening at the open window in the driver’s door, Mitch cruised past Anson’s house in Corona del Mar.

  Large creamy-white flowers had been shaken from the big magnolia tree and had blown in a drift against the front door, revealed in a stoop lamp that remained on all night. Otherwise, the house was dark.

  He did not believe that Anson had come home, washed up, and gone happily to sleep almost at once after killing their parents. He must be out somewhere—and up to something.

  Mitch’s Honda no longer stood at the curb where he had left it when he had first come here at the direction of the kidnappers.

  In the next block, he parked, finished a Hershey’s bar, rolled up the window, and locked the Chrysler Windsor. Unfortunately, it drew attention to itself among the surrounding contemporary vehicles, museum grandeur in a game arcade.

  Mitch walked to the alleyway on which Anson’s garage had access. Lights blazed throughout the lower floor of the rear condo above the pair of two-car garages.

  Some people might have work that kept them busy just past three-thirty in the morning. Or insomnia.

  Standing in the alleyway, Mitch planted his feet wide to resist the rushing wind. He studied the high curtained windows.

  Since Campbell’s library, he had entered a new reality. He saw things more clearly now than he had seen them from his former perspective.

  If Anson had eight million dollars and a fully paid-off yacht, he probably owned both condos, not just one, as he had claimed. He lived in the front unit and used the back condo for the office in which he applied linguistic theory to software design, or whatever the hell he did to get rich.

  The toiler in the night, behind those curtained windows, was not a neighbor. Anson himself sat up there, bent to a computer.

  Perhaps he was plotting a course, by yacht, to a haven beyond the authority of all law.

  A service gate opened onto a narrow walkway beside the garage. Mitch followed it into the brick courtyard that separated the two condos. The courtyard lights were off.

  Bordering the brick patio were planting beds lush with nandina and a variety of ferns, plus bromeliads and anthuriums to provide a punctuation of red blooms.

  The houses to the front and back, the tall side fences, and the neighboring houses crowding close on their narrow lots all blocked the wind. Though still marked by blustering cross-currents, a more genteel version slipped down the roof slopes and danced with the courtyard greenery instead of whipping it.

  Mitch slipped under the arching fronds of a Tasmanian tree fern, which swayed, trembled. He crouched there, peering out at the patio.

  The skirt of broad, spreading, lacy fronds rose and dipped, rose and dipped, but the patio was not entirely screened from him at any time. If he remained alert, he couldn’t miss a man passing from the back condo to the front.

  In the shelter of the tree-fern canopy, he smelled rich planting soil, an inorganic fertilizer, and the vaguely musky scent of moss.

  At first this comforted him, reminded him of life when it had been simpler, just sixteen hours ago. After a few minutes, however, the melange of odors brought to mind instead the smell of blood.

  In the condo above the garages, the lights went out.

  Perhaps assisted by the windstorm, a door slammed shut. The chorus of wind voices did not entirely cover the thud of heavy hurried footsteps that descended exterior stairs to the courtyard.

  Between the fronds, Mitch glimpsed a bearish figure crossing the brick patio.

  Anson was not aware of his brother behind him, closing, and let out a strangled cry only when the Taser short-circuited his nervous system.

  When Anson staggered forward, trying to stay on his feet, Mitch remained close. The Taser delivered another fifty-thousand-volt kiss.

  Anson embraced the bricks. He rolled onto his back. His burly body twitched. His arms flopped loosely. His head rolled side to side, and he made noises that suggested he might be in danger of swallowing his tongue.

  Mitch didn’t want Anson to swallow his tongue, but he wasn’t going to take any action to prevent it from happening, either.

  41

  Apocalyptic flocks of wind beat wings against the walls and swoop the roof, and the darkness itself seems to vibrate.

  The hairless hands, white as doves, groom each other in the dim glow of the half-taped flashlight.

  The gentle voice regales her: “In El Valle, New Mexico, there is a graveyard where the grass is seldom cut. Some graves have stones, and some
do not.”

  Holly has finished the chocolate. She feels half sick. Her mouth tastes like blood. She uses Pepsi as a mouthwash.

  “A few graves without headstones are surrounded by small picket fences crafted from the slats of old fruit and vegetable crates.”

  All this is leading somewhere, but his thoughts proceed along neural pathways that can be anticipated only by a mind as bent as his.

  “Loved ones paint the pickets in pastels—robin’s-egg blue, pale green, the yellow of faded sunflowers.”

  In spite of the sharp enigmas underlying their soft color, his eyes repel her less, right now, than do his hands.

  “Under a quarter moon, hours after a new grave was closed, we did some spade work and opened the wooden casket of a child.”

  “The yellow of faded sunflowers,” Holly repeats, trying to fill her mind with that color as defense against the image of a child in a coffin.

  “She was eight, taken by cancer. They buried her with a Saint Christopher medal folded in her left hand, a porcelain figurine of Cinderella in her right because she loved that story.”

  The sunflowers will not sustain, and in her mind’s eye, Holly sees the small hands holding tight to the protection of the saint and to the promise of the poor girl who became a princess.

  “By virtue of some hours in the grave of an innocent, those objects acquired great power. They were death-washed and spirit-polished.”

  The longer she meets his eyes, the less familiar they become.

  “We took from her hands the medal and the figurine, and replaced them with…other items.”

  One white hand vanishes into a pocket of his black jacket. When it reappears, it holds the Saint Christopher medal by a silver chain.

  He says, “Here. Take it.”

  That the object comes from a grave does not repulse her, but that it has been taken from the hand of a dead child offends.

  More is happening here than he is putting into words. There is a subtext that Holly does not understand.

  She senses that to reject the medal for any reason will have terrible consequences. She holds out her right hand, and he drops the medal into it. The chain ravels in random coils on her palm.