by Dean Koontz
He had not intended to leave in the van that he’d driven here. Having stashed a motorcycle near the kitchen, perhaps in the breakfast room, he’d been prepared to leave—if things went wrong—through any wing of the house, any door. Once outside the house, he could flee not only by the construction gate that led into the street but also by switchbacking down the bluff, or by some third route.
As the clatter of the engine swelled, Mitch knew that Jimmy was not intent on fleeing. It wasn’t the ransom that drew him, either.
Whatever had happened between him and Holly—
New Mexico and Rosa Gonzales and two white dogs and bloody stigmata—all that drew him, and he was drawn, too, by the humiliation of the nail in the face. For the nail, he wanted Holly more than money, wanted her dead.
Logic suggested that he was at their backs and would come from the drawing room.
Mitch hurried Holly across the enormous living room, toward the equally huge receiving hall and the front door beyond.
Logic flopped. They had crossed less than half the living room when Jimmy Null on a Kawasaki shot out of somewhere, bulleting along the colonnade that separated them from the receiving room.
Mitch drew her back as Null steered between columns into the receiving room. He made a wide turn out there and came straight at them, across that room, across the width of the colonnade, gaining speed.
Null didn’t have his pistol. Out of ammunition. Or wild with rage, the gun forgotten.
Shoving Holly behind him, Mitch raised the Champion in both hands, remembering the front sight, a white dot, and opened fire as Null was passing across the colonnade.
Aiming chest this time, hoping for head. Fifty feet and closing, thunder crashing off walls. First shot high, pull it down, second, pull it down, thirty feet and closing, third shot. PULL IT DOWN! The fourth turned off Jimmy Null’s brain so abruptly, his hands sprang away from the handlebars.
The dead man stopped, the cycle did not, rearing on its back wheel, tire barking, smoking, screaming forward until it toppled, tumbled toward them, past them, hit one of the big windows, and shattered through, gone.
Be sure. Evil has cockroach endurance. Be sure, be sure. The Champion in both hands, approach him cool, no hurry now, circle him. Step around the spatters on the floor. Gray-pink spatters, bits of bone and twists of hair. He can’t be alive. Take nothing for granted.
Mitch peeled up the mask to see the face, but it wasn’t a face anymore, and they were done now. They were done.
68
In the summer that Anthony is three years old, they celebrate Mitch’s thirty-second birthday with a backyard party.
Big Green owns three trucks now, and there are five employees besides Iggy Barnes. They all come with their wives and kids, and Iggy brings a wahine named Madelaine.
Holly has made good friends—as she always makes good friends—at the real-estate agency where she is second in sales so far this year.
Although Dorothy followed Anthony by just twelve months, they have not moved to a bigger house. Holly had been raised here; this house is her history. Besides, already they have made quite a history here together.
They will add a second story before there is a third child. And there will be a third.
Evil has been across this threshold, but the memory of it will not drive them from the place. Love scrubs the worst stains clean. Anyway, there can be no retreat in the face of evil, only resistance. And commitment.
Sandy Taggart comes, as well, with his wife, Jennifer, and their two daughters. He brings the day’s newspaper, wondering if Mitch has seen the story, which he has not: Julian Campbell, between conviction and appeal, throat slit in prison—a contract hit suspected, but no inmate yet identified as the killer.
Although Anson is in a different prison from the one to which Campbell was sent, he will eventually hear about the hit. It will give him something to ponder as his attorneys work to stave off his own lethal injection.
Mitch’s youngest sister, Portia, comes to the party all the way from Birmingham, Alabama, with her restaurateur husband Frank and their five children. Megan and Connie remain distant in more than one sense, but Mitch and Portia have grown close, and he entertains hope of finding a way to gather his other two sisters to him, in time.
Daniel and Kathy had produced five children because he said continuation of the species could not be left to the irrationalists. Materialists must breed as vigorously as believers or the world would go to Hell by way of God.
Portia had balanced her father’s five with five of her own, and raised them by traditional standards that did not involve a learning room.
On this birthday evening, they eat a feast at tables on the patio and lawn, and Anthony sits proudly on his special chair. Mitch built it for him to a design sketched by Holly, and she painted it a cheerful red.
“This chair,” she had told Anthony, “is in memory of a boy who was six years old for fifty years and much loved for fifty-six years. If you ever think that you aren’t loved, you will sit in this chair and know you are loved as much as that other Anthony was loved, as much as any boy ever has been loved.”
Anthony, being three, had said, “Can I have ice cream?”
After dinner, there is a portable dance floor on the lawn, and the band is not as woofy as the one at their wedding. No tambourines and no accordion.
Later, much later, when the band has departed and all the guests are gone, when Anthony and Dorothy are sound asleep on the back-porch glider, Mitch asks Holly to dance to the music of a radio, now that they have the entire floor to themselves. He holds her close but not too tight, for she is breakable. As they dance, husband and wife, she puts a hand to his face, as though after all this time she is still amazed that he brought her home to him. He kisses the scar in the palm of her hand, and then the scar in the other. Under a great casting of stars, in the moonlight, she is so lovely that words fail him, as they have so often failed him before. Although he knows her as well as he knows himself, she is as mysterious as she is lovely, an eternal depth in her eyes, but she is no more mysterious than are the stars and the moon and all things on the earth.
