The Husband

by Dean Koontz

  Mitch maintained eye contact. Everything was on the line now, and he could not hold back too much and expect cooperation. He said, “Some things went wrong for them.”

  “Sweet Jesus, Mitch.”

  “So I came back to see my brother.”

  “Must’ve been some reunion.”

  “No champagne, but he had second thoughts about helping me.”

  “He gave you the money?”

  “He did.”

  “Where is your brother now?”

  “Alive but restrained. The swap is at three o’clock, and I’ve got reason to believe one of the kidnappers popped the others. Jimmy Null. Now it’s just him holding Holly.”

  “How much have you left out?”

  “Most of it,” Mitch said truthfully.

  The detective stared through the windshield at the alley.

  From a coat pocket, he withdrew a roll of hard-caramel candies. He peeled the end of the roll, extracted a candy. He held the sweet circlet between his teeth while he folded shut the roll. As he returned the roll to his pocket, his tongue took the caramel from between his teeth. This procedure had the quality of a ritual.

  “So?” Mitch said. “You believe me?”

  “I’ve got a bullshit detector even bigger than my prostate,” said Taggart. “And it isn’t ringing.”

  Mitch didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

  If he went alone to ransom Holly, and if they were both killed, at least he would not have to live with the knowledge that he had failed her.

  If the authorities took it out of his hands, however, and if then Holly was killed but he lived, the responsibility would be a burden of intolerable weight.

  He had to acknowledge that no possible scenario would put him in control, that inevitably fate was his partner in this. He must do what seemed right for Holly, and hope that what seemed right turned out to be right.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Mitch, kidnapping is a federal offense. We have to notify the FBI.”

  “I’m afraid of the complication.”

  “They’re good. Nobody’s more experienced with this kind of crime. Anyway, because we have only two hours, they won’t be able to get a specialty team in place. They’ll probably want us to take the lead.”

  “How should I feel about that?”

  “We’re good. Our SWAT’s first-rate. We have an experienced hostage negotiator.”

  “So many people,” Mitch worried.

  “I’ll be running this. You think I’m trigger-happy?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think I’m a dog for details?” Taggart asked.

  “I think maybe you’re best of show.”

  The detective grinned. “Okay. So we’ll get your wife back.”

  Then he reached across the console and plucked the car key from the ignition.

  Startled, Mitch said, “Why’d you do that?”

  “I don’t want you having second thoughts, bolting off on your own, after all. That isn’t what’s best for her, Mitch.”

  “I’ve made the decision. I need your help. You can trust me with the keys.”

  “In a little while. I’m only looking out for you here, for you and Holly. I’ve got a wife I love, too, and two daughters—I told you about the daughters—so I know where you are right now, in your head. I know where you are. Trust me.”

  The keys disappeared into a jacket pocket. From another pocket, the detective withdrew a cell phone.

  As he switched on the phone, Taggart crunched what remained of the circlet of candy. A caramel aroma sweetened the air.

  Mitch watched the detective speed-dial a number. A part of him felt that with the contact of that finger to that button, not only a call had been placed but also Holly’s fate had been sealed.

  As Taggart spoke police code to a dispatcher and gave Anson’s address, Mitch looked for another sun-silvered jet high above. The sky was empty.

  Terminating the call, pocketing the phone, Taggart said, “So your brother’s back there in the house?”

  Mitch could no longer pretend Anson was in Vegas. “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “In the laundry room.”

  “Let’s go talk to him.”

  “Why?”

  “He pulled some sort of job with this Jimmy Null, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So he must know him well. If we’re going to get Holly out of Null’s hands smooth and easy, nice and safe, we need to know every damn thing about him we can learn.”

  When Taggart opened the passenger’s door to get out, a clear wind blasted into the Honda, bringing neither dust nor litter, but the promise of chaos.

  For better or worse, the situation was spinning out of Mitch’s control. He didn’t think it would be for the better.

  Taggart slammed the passenger’s door, but Mitch sat behind the wheel for a moment, his thoughts spinning, tumbling, his mind busy, and not just his mind, and then he got out into the whipping wind.

  55

  The polished sky and the sharp light and the flaying wind, and from the overhead power lines, a keening like an animal in mourning.

  Mitch led the detective to the painted wooden service gate. The wind tore it from his hand as he slipped the latch, and banged it against the garage wall.

  Undoubtedly, Julian Campbell was sending men here, but they were no threat now, because they would not arrive before the police. The police were only minutes away.

  Following the narrow brick walkway, which was sheltered from the worst of the wind, Mitch came upon a collection of dead beetles. Two were as big as quarters, one the diameter of a dime. On the under-side they were yellow with stiff black legs. They were on their backs, balanced on curved shells, and a gentle eddy of wind spun them in slow circles.

  Cuffed to a chair, sitting in urine, Anson would make a pathetic figure, and he would play the victim convincingly, with the skill of a cunning sociopath.

  Even though Taggart had implied that he heard truth in Mitch’s story, he might wonder at the hard treatment Anson had received. With no experience of Anson, having heard only the condensed version of events, the detective might think the treatment had been worse than hard, had been cruel.

  Crossing the courtyard, where the wind badgered again, Mitch was aware of the detective close behind him. Although they were in the open, he felt crowded, pinched by claustrophobia.

  He could hear Anson’s voice in his mind: He told me that he killed our mom and dad. He stabbed them with garden tools. He said he’d come back to kill me, too.

  At the back door, Mitch’s hands were shaking so much that he had trouble fitting the key in the lock.

  He killed Holly, Detective Taggart. He made up a story about her being kidnapped, and he came to me for money, but then he admitted killing her.

  Taggart knew that Jason Osteen hadn’t earned an honest living. He knew from Leelee Morheim that Jason had done a job with Anson and had been cheated. So he knew Anson was bent.

  Nevertheless, when Anson told a story conflicting with Mitch’s, Taggart would consider it. Cops were always presented with competing stories. Surely the truth most often lay somewhere between them.

  Finding the truth will take time, and time is a rat gnawing at Mitch’s nerves. Time is a trapdoor under Holly, and time is a noose tightening around her neck.

  The key found the keyway. The deadbolt clacked open.

  Standing on the threshold, Mitch switched on the lights. At once he saw on the floor a long blood smear that hadn’t concerned him before, but which alarmed him now.

  When Anson had been clubbed alongside the head, his ear had torn. As he’d been dragged to the laundry room, he’d left a trail.

  The wound had been minor. The smears on the floor suggested something worse than a bleeding ear.

  By such misleading evidence were doubts raised and suspicions sharpened.

  Trapdoor, noose, and gnawing rat, time sprung a coiled spring in Mitch, and as h
e entered the kitchen, he slipped open a button on his shirt, reached inside, and withdrew the Taser that was tucked under his belt, against his abdomen. As he’d delayed getting out of the Honda, he had retrieved the weapon from the storage pocket in the driver’s door.

  “The laundry room is this way,” Mitch said, leading Taggart a few steps forward before turning suddenly with the Taser.

  The detective wasn’t following as close as Mitch had thought. He was a prudent two steps back.

  Some Tasers fire darts trailing wires, which deliver a disabling shock from a moderate distance. Others require that the business end be thrust against the target, resulting in an intimacy equal to that of an assault with a knife.

  This was the second Taser model, and Mitch had to get in close, get in fast.

  As Mitch thrust with his right arm, Taggart blocked with his left. The Taser was almost knocked out of Mitch’s hand.

  Retreating, the detective reached cross-body, under his sports jacket, with his right hand, surely going for a weapon in a shoulder holster.

  Taggart backed into a counter, Mitch feinted left, thrust right, and here came the gun hand from under the jacket. Mitch wanted bare skin, didn’t want to risk fabric providing partial insulation against the shock, and he got the detective in the throat.

  Eyes rolling back in his head, jaw sagging, Taggart fired one round, his knees folded, and he dropped.

  The shot seemed unusually loud. The shot shook the room.

  56

  Mitch was not wounded, but he thought about John Knox self-shot in the fall from the garage loft, and he knelt worriedly beside the detective.

  On the floor at Taggart’s side lay his pistol. Mitch shoved it out of reach.

  Taggart shuddered as if chilled to the marrow, his hands clawed at the floor tiles, and bubbles of spit sputtered on his lips.

  Faint, thin, pungent, a ribbon of smoke unraveled from Taggart’s sports jacket. The bullet had burned a hole through it.

  Mitch pulled back the jacket, looking for a wound. He didn’t find one.

  The relief he felt did not much buoy him. He was still guilty of assaulting a police officer.

  This was the first time he had hurt an innocent person. Remorse, he found, actually had a taste: a bitterness rising at the back of the throat.

  Pawing at Mitch’s arm, the detective could not close his hand into a grip. He tried to say something, but his throat must be tight, his tongue thick, his lips numb.

  Mitch wanted to avoid having to Taser him a second time. He said, “I’m sorry,” and set to work.

  The car key had vanished into Taggart’s jacket. Mitch found it in the second pocket he searched.

  In the laundry room, having digested the gunshot and having come to a conclusion about what it might mean, Anson began shouting. Mitch ignored him.

  Taking Taggart by the feet, Mitch dragged him out of the house, onto the brick patio. He left the detective’s pistol in the kitchen.

  As he pulled the back door shut, he heard the doorbell ring inside. The police were at the front of the house.

  As Mitch took time to lock the door to delay their exposure to Anson and his lies, he said to Taggart, “I love her too much to trust anyone else with this. I’m sorry.”

  He sprinted across the courtyard, along the side of the garage, and through the open back gate into the windswept alleyway.

  When no one answered the doorbell, the cops would come around the side of the house, into the courtyard, and find Taggart on the bricks. They would be in the alley seconds later.

  He threw the Taser on the passenger’s seat as he got behind the wheel. Key, switch, the roar of the engine.

  In the storage pocket of the door was the pistol that belonged to one of Campbell’s hired killers. Seven rounds remained in the magazine.

  He wasn’t going to pull a gun on the police. His only option was to get the hell out of there.

  He drove east, fully expecting that a squad car would suddenly hove across the end of the alleyway, thwarting him.

  Panic is fear expressed by numbers of people simultaneously, by an audience or a mob. But Mitch had enough fear for a crowd, and panic seized him.

  At the end of the alleyway, he turned right into the street. At the next intersection, he turned left, heading east again.

  This area of Corona del Mar, itself a part of Newport Beach, was called the Village. A grid of streets, it could be sealed off with perhaps as few as three roadblocks.

  He needed to get beyond those choke points. Fast.

  In Julian Campbell’s library, in the trunk of the Chrysler, and in that trunk a second time, he’d known fear, but nothing as intense as this. Then he had been afraid for himself; now he was afraid for Holly.

  The worst that could happen to him was that he would be captured or shot by the police. He had weighed the costs of his options and had chosen the best game. Now he didn’t care what happened to him except to the extent that if anything happened to him, Holly would stand alone.

  In the Village, some of the streets were narrow. Mitch was on one of them. Vehicles were parked on both sides. With too much speed, he risked sheering a door off if somebody opened one.

  Taggart could describe the Honda. In minutes, they would have the license-plate number from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He could not afford to rack up body damage that would make the car even more identifiable.

  He arrived at a traffic signal at Pacific Coast Highway. Red.

  Heavy traffic surged north and south on the divided highway. He couldn’t jump the light and weave into the flow without precipitating a chain reaction of collisions, with himself at the center of the ultimate snarl.

  He glanced at the rearview mirror. Some kind of paneled truck or muscle van approached, still a block away. The roof appeared to be outfitted with an array of emergency beacons, like those on a police vehicle.

  This was a street lined with mature trees. The dappling shadows and piercework of light rippled in veils across the moving vehicle, making it difficult to identify.

  Out on northbound lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway, a police car passed, parting the traffic before it with emergency beacons but not with a siren.

  Behind the Honda, the worrisome vehicle cruised within half a block, at which point Mitch could read the word AMBULANCE on the brow above the windshield. They were in no hurry. They must be off duty or carrying the dead.

  He exhaled a pent-up breath. The ambulance braked to a stop behind him, and his relief was short-lived when he wondered whether paramedics usually listened to a police scanner.

  The traffic light changed to green. He crossed the southbound lanes and turned left, north on Coast Highway.

  One bead of sweat chased another down the nape of his neck, under his collar, along the spillway of his spine.

  He had traveled only a block on Coast Highway when a siren shrilled behind him: this time, in the rearview mirror, a police car.

  Only fools led cops on a chase. They had air resources as well as a lot of iron on the ground.

  Defeated, Mitch steered toward the curb. As he vacated the lane, the squad car shot past him and away.

  From the curb, Mitch watched until the cruiser left the highway two blocks ahead. It turned left into the north end of the Village.

  Evidently Taggart hadn’t yet sufficiently recovered his wits to give them a description of the Honda.

  Mitch took a very deep breath. He took another. He wiped the back of his neck with one hand. He blotted his hands on his jeans.

  He had assaulted a police officer.

  Easing the Honda back into the northbound traffic, he wondered if he had lost his mind. He felt resolved, and perhaps reckless in a venturous sense, but not shortsighted. Of course, a lunatic could not recognize madness from the inside of his bubble.

  57

  After Holly extracts the nail from the plank, she turns it over and over in her stiff sore fingers, assessing whether or not it is as lethal as she imagined when it
was sheathed in wood.

  Straight, more than three but less than four inches long, with a thick shank, it qualifies as a spike, all right. The point is not as sharp as, say, the wicked point of a poultry skewer, but plenty sharp enough.

  While the wind sings of violence, she spends time imagining the ways the spike might be employed against the creep. Her imagination is fertile enough to disturb her.

  After quickly grossing herself out, she changes the subject from the uses of the spike to the places where it might be hidden. What value it has is the value of surprise.

  Although the spike probably won’t show if tucked in a pocket of her jeans, she worries that she’ll not be able to extract it quickly in a crisis. When they had transported her from her house to this place, they had bound her wrists tightly with a scarf. If he does the same when he takes her away from here, she will not be able to pull her hands apart and, therefore, might not be able to get her fingers easily into a particular pocket.

  Her belt offers no possibilities, but in the dark, by touch, she considers her sneakers. She can’t carry the nail inside the shoe; it will rub and blister her foot, at the least. Maybe she can conceal it on the outside of the shoe.

  She loosens the laces on her left sneaker, carefully tucks the nail between the tongue and one of the flaps, and reties the shoe.

  When she gets to her feet and walks a circle around the ringbolt to which she is tethered, she quickly discovers that the rigid nail is an impediment to a smoothly flexed step. She can’t avoid limping.

  Finally she pulls up her sweater and secrets the nail in her bra. She isn’t as extravagantly endowed as the average female mud wrestler, but Nature has been more than fair. To prevent the nail from slipping out between the cups, she presses the point through the elastic facing, thus pinning it in place.

  She has armed herself.

  With the task complete, her preparations seem pathetic.

  Restless, she turns to the ringbolt, wondering if she can set herself free or at least augment her meager weaponry.

  With her questing hands, she had earlier determined that the ringbolt is welded to a half-inch-thick steel plate that measures about eight inches on a side. The plate is held to the floor by what must be four countersunk screws.

  She is unable to say with certainty that they are screws, for some liquid has been poured into the sink around each one and has formed a hard puddle. This denies her access to the slot in the head of each screw, if indeed they are screws.

  Discouraged, she lies on her back on the air mattress, her head raised on the