The Husband

vehicle. But if time passed and nothing happened, he might undertake another general exploration of the area and, on returning, cross Mitch's sights.
    Only seven or eight minutes had passed since the pair had opened the trunk to receive a greeting of gunfire. The surviving man would be patient. But eventually, if his surveillance and his searches were not fruitful, he would consider packing up and getting out of here, regardless of how much he might fear his boss.
    At that time, if not before, he would come to the back of the car to deal with the corpse. He would want to load it into the trunk.
    Now Mitch half sat, half lay, swaddled in darkness, his head raised just enough to see across the sill of the trunk.
    He had killed a man.
    He intended to kill another.
    The pistol felt heavy in his hand. He smoothed his trembling fingers along its contours, seeking a clickable safety, but he found none.
    As he stared at the lonely moon-glazed road crowded by the spectral desert, he understood that what he had lost-innocence, and that fundamentally childlike expectation of impending, ineffable joy—was gradually being replaced by something else, and not by something bad. The hole in him was filling, with what he could not yet say.
    From the car trunk he had a limited view of the world, but in that wedge he perceived far more this night than he would have been capable of perceiving previously.
    The silvery road receded from him but also approached, offering him a choice of opposite horizons.
    Some stone formations contained chips of mica that sparkled in the moonlight, and where the rock rose in silhouette against the sky, the stars appeared to have salted themselves upon the earth.
    Out of the north, southbound, on its feathered sails, a great horned owl, as pale as it was immense, swooped low and silent across the road, then rowed itself higher into the night, much higher and away.
    Mitch sensed that what he seemed to be gaining for what he had lost, what so quickly healed the hole in him, was a capacity for awe, a deeper sense of the mystery of all things.
    Then he pulled back from the brink of awe, to terror and to grim determination, when the gunman returned with an intention that had not been foreseen.

Chapter 32

     
    So stealthily had the killer returned that Mitch was unaware of his presence until he heard one of the car doors click open and swing wide with the faintest creak.
    The man had approached from the front of the Chrysler. Risking exposure in the brief glow of the car's interior lights, he got in and pulled the door shut as softly as it could be closed.
    If he had gotten behind the wheel, he must intend to leave the scene.
    No. He wouldn't drive away with the trunk lid open. And surely he wouldn't leave the corpse.
    Mitch waited in silence.
    The gunman was silent, too.
    Slowly the silence became a kind of pressure that Mitch could feel on his skin, on his eardrums, on his unblinking eyes, as if the car were descending into a watery abyss, an ever-increasing weight of ocean bearing down on it.
    The gunman must be sitting in the dark, surveying the night, waiting to learn whether the throb of light had drawn attention, whether he had been seen. If his return inspired no response, what would he do next?
    The desert remained breathless.
    In these circumstances, the car would seem as sensitive to motion as a boat on water. If Mitch moved, the killer would be alerted to his presence.
    A minute passed. Another.
    Mitch pictured the smooth-faced gunman sitting up there in the car, in the gloom, at least thirty years old, maybe thirty-five, yet with such a remarkably soft smooth face, as if life had not touched him and never would.
    He tried to imagine what the man with the smooth face was doing, planning. The mind behind that mask remained inaccessible to Mitch's imagination. He might have more profitably pondered what a desert lizard believed about God or rain or jimsonweed.
    After a long stillness, the gunman shifted positions, and the movement proved to be a revelation. The unnerving intimacy of the sound indicated that the man wasn't behind the wheel of the Chrysler. He was in the backseat.
    He must have been sitting forward, watchful, ever since getting into the car. When at last he leaned back, the upholstery made a sound like leather or vinyl does when stressed, and the seat springs quietly complained.
    The backseat of the car formed the back wall of the trunk. He and Mitch were within a couple feet of each