The Husband

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.

Chapter 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