The Husband

merely irrational because they put he who commits them in jeopardy of his freedom.
    Daniel does acknowledge that the degree of irrationality depends on the criminal's chances of escaping punishment. Therefore, those irrational acts that succeed and have only positive consequences for the perpetrator may be right and admirable, if not good for society.
    Thieves, rapists, murderers, and their ilk might benefit from therapy and rehabilitation, or they might not. In either case, Daniel says, they are not evil; they are recovering—or irredeemable—irrationalists, only that and nothing more.
    Mitch had thought that these teachings had not penetrated him, that he'd not been singed by the fire of a Daniel Rafferty education. But fire produced fumes; he'd been smoked in his father's fanaticism so long that some of what steeped into him had stayed.
    He could see, but he had been blind. He could hear, but he had been deaf.
    This day, this night, Mitch had come face-to-face with evil. It was as real as stone.
    Although an irrational man should be met with compassion and therapy, an evil man was owed nothing more or less than resistance and retribution, the fury of a righteous justice.
    In Julian Campbell's library, when the gunman had produced the handcuffs, Mitch had at once held out his hands. He had not waited for instructions.
    If he had not appeared worn down, had not seemed meek and resigned to his fate, they might have cuffed his hands behind him. Reaching the revolver in his ankle holster would have been more difficult; using it with accuracy would have been impossible.
    Campbell had even commented on Mitch's weariness, by which he had meant primarily the weariness of mind and heart.
    They thought they knew the kind of man he was, and maybe they did. But they didn't know the kind of man he could become when the life of his wife was in the balance.
    Amused by his lack of familiarity with the pistol that they had confiscated, they had not imagined he would have a second weapon. Not only good men are disadvantaged by their expectations.
    Mitch pulled up the leg of his jeans and retrieved the revolver. He unstrapped the holster and discarded it.
    Earlier, he had examined the weapon and had not found a safety. In movies, only some pistols had safeties, never revolvers.
    If he lived through the next two days and got Holly back alive, he would never again allow himself to be put in a position where he had to rely on Tinseltown's grasp of reality for his or his family's survival.
    When he had first swung open the cylinder, he had discovered five rounds in five chambers, where he expected six.
    He would have to score two hits out of five rounds. Direct hits, not just wing shots.
    Perhaps one of the gunmen would open the trunk. It would be better if the two were there, giving him the advantage of surprise with both.
    Both would have their weapons drawn—or only one. If one, Mitch must be quick enough to target his armed adversary first.
    A peaceable man, planning violence, was plagued by thoughts that were not helpful: As a teenager, cursed by the explosions of acne that had left his face a moonscape, the scarred gunman must have suffered much humiliation.
    Sympathy for the devil was a kind of masochism at best, a death wish at worst.
    For a while, rocking to the rhythms of road and rubber, and of internal combustion, Mitch tried to imagine all the ways that the violence might go down when the trunk lid went up. Then he tried not to imagine.
    According to his radiant watch, they traveled more than half an hour and then, slowing, changed from blacktop to an unpaved road. Small stones rattled through the undercarriage, rapped hard against the floor pan.
    He smelled dust and licked the alkaline taste of it from his lips, but the air never became foul enough to choke him.
    After twelve minutes at an easy speed, on the dirt road, the car came slowly to a stop. The engine idled for half a minute, and then the driver switched it off.
    After forty-five minutes of drone and drum, the silence was like a sudden deafness.
    One door opened, then the other. They were coming.
    Facing the back of the car, Mitch splayed his legs, bracing his feet in opposite corners of the space. He could not sit erect until the lid raised, but he waited with his back partly off the floor of the trunk, as if in the middle of doing a series of stomach crunches at the gym.
    The cuffs all but required that he hold the revolver in a two-hand grip, which was