The Husband

maybe five."
    "How often did you have to play it?"
    "I guess half a dozen times over the years."
    "They put me through it eleven times that I remember, the last when I was thirteen."
    Mitch grimaced. "Man, I remember that one. You were given a full week of it."
    "Living naked twenty-four/seven while everyone else in the house remains clothed. Being required to answer in front of everyone the most embarrassing, the most intimate questions about your private thoughts and habits and desires. Being watched by two other family members at every toilet, at least one of them a sister, allowed no smallest private moment...Did that curt you of shame, Mickey?"
    "Look at my face," Mitch said.
    "I could light a candle off that blush." Anson laughed softly, a warm and bearish laugh. "Damn if we're getting him anything for Father's Day."
    "Not even cologne?" Mitch asked.
    This was a jokey routine from childhood.
    "Not even a pot to piss in," Anson said.
    "What about the piss without the pot?"
    "How would I wrap it?"
    "With love," Mitch said, and they grinned at each other.
    "I'm proud of you, Mickey. You beat 'em. It didn't work with you the way it worked with me."
    "The way what worked?"
    "They broke me, Mitch. I have no shame, no capacity for guilt." From under his sports coat, Anson withdrew a pistol.

Chapter 25

     
    Mitch held his smile in anticipation of the punch line, as if the pistol would prove to be not a weapon but instead a cigarette lighter or a novelty-store item that shot bubbles.
    If the salty sea could freeze and keep its color, it would have been the shade of Anson's eyes. They were as clear as ever, as direct as always, but they were further colored by a quality that Mitch had never seen before, that he could not identify, or would not.
    "Two million. Truth is," Anson said almost sadly, without bite or rancor, "I wouldn't pay two million to ransom you, so Holly was dead the moment she was snatched."
    Mitch's face set marble-hard, and his throat seemed to be full of broken stones that weighed down speech.
    "Some people I've done consulting work for—sometimes they come across an opportunity that is crumbs to them but meat to me. Not my usual work, but things that are more directly criminal."
    Mitch had to struggle to focus his attention, to hear what was said, for his head was filled with a roar of lifelong perceptions collapsing like a construct of termite-eaten timbers.
    "The people who kidnapped Holly are the team I put together for one of those jobs. They made a bundle from it, but they found out my take was bigger than I told them, and now they're greedy."
    So Holly had been kidnapped not solely because Anson had enough money to ransom her, but also because—primarily because—Anson had cheated her abductors.
    "They're afraid to come directly after me. I'm a valuable resource to some serious people who'd pop anyone who popped me."
    Mitch assumed he would soon meet some of those "serious people," but whatever threat they might pose to him, it could not equal the devastation of this betrayal.
    "On the phone," Anson revealed, "they said if I don't ransom Holly, they'll kill her and then shoot you down in the street one day, like they shot Jason Osteen. The poor dumb babies. They think they know me, but they don't know what I really am. Nobody does."
    Mitch shivered, for his mental landscape had turned wintry, his thoughts a storm of sleet, an icy and unrelenting barrage.
    "Jason was one of them, by the way. Sweet brainless Breezer. He thought his pals were going to shoot the dog to make their point with you. By shooting him instead, they made a sharper point and improved the split of the remaining partners."
    Of course, Anson had known Jason as long as Mitch had known him. But Anson evidently had remained in touch with Jason long after Mitch had lost track of his former roommate.
    "Is there something you want to say to me, Mitch?"
    Perhaps another man in his position would have had a thousand angry questions, bitter denunciations, but Mitch sat frozen, having just experienced an emotional and intellectual polar shift, his previous equatorial view of life having flipped arctic in an instant. The landscape of this new reality was unknown to him, and this man who so resembled his brother was not the brother he had known, but a stranger. They were foreigners to each other, with no common language, here on a desolate plain.
    Anson seemed to take Mitch's silence as a challenge or even an affront. Leaning forward