The Husband

stopped breathing through his mouth, and when the sweat began to dry on his face, he asked himself how long he should wait before assuming that the man was dead. He looked at his watch. He looked at the moon. He waited.
    He needed the car.
    He had timed the trip on the dirt track at twelve minutes. They had been making perhaps twenty-five miles per hour on that last leg of the journey. The math put him five miles from a paved road.
    Even when he got that far back toward civilization, he might find himself in lonely territory without much traffic. Besides, in his current condition, dirty and rumpled and no doubt wild-eyed, no one would give him a ride, except maybe an itinerant psychopath cruising for a victim.
    Finally he approached the Chrysler.
    He circled the vehicle, staying as far from the sides of it as the width of the road would allow, alert for a smooth ghostly face peering from the shadows within. After arriving without incident at the trunk from which he had twice escaped, he paused and listened.
    Holly was in a bad place, and if the kidnappers tried to reach Mitch, they wouldn't have any luck because his cell phone was in that white plastic bag back at Campbell's estate. The noon call to Anson's house would be his only chance to reconnect with them before they decided to chop their hostage and move on to another game.
    Without further hesitation, he went to the back door on the driver's side and opened it.
    Lying on the seat, eyes open, bloody but still alive, was the smooth-faced man, with his pistol aimed at the door. The muzzle looked like an eyeless socket, and the gunman looked triumphant when he said, "Die."
    He tried to pull the trigger, but the pistol wobbled in his hand, and then he lost his grip on it. The weapon dropped to the floor of the car, and the gunman's hand dropped into his lap, and now that his one-word threat had turned out to be a prediction of his own fate, he lay there as if making an obscene proposition.
    Leaving the door open, Mitch walked to the side of the road and sat on a boulder until he could be certain that, after all, he was not going to vomit.

Chapter 35

     
    Sitting on the boulder, Mitch had much to consider. When this was finished, if it was ever finished, maybe the best thing would be to go to the police, tell his story of desperate self-defense, and present them with the two dead gunmen in the trunk of the Chrysler.
    Julian Campbell would deny that he had employed them or at least that he had directed them to kill Mitch. Men like these two were most likely paid in cash; from Campbell's point of view, the fewer records the better, and the gunmen hadn't been the type to care that, if paid in cash with no tax deductions, they would eventually be denied their Social Security.
    The possibility existed that no authorities were aware of the dark side to Campbell's empire. To all appearances, he might be one of California's most upstanding citizens.
    Mitch, on the other hand, was a humble gardener already set up to take the fall for his wife's murder in the event that he failed to ransom her. And in Corona del Mar, on the street in front of Anson's house, the trunk of his Honda contained the body of John Knox.
    Although he believed in the rule of law, Mitch didn't for a minute believe that crime-scene investigation was as meticulous—or CSI technicians as infallible—as portrayed on TV The more evidence that suggested his guilt, even if it was planted, the more they would find to support their suspicion, and the easier they would find it to ignore the details that might exonerate him.
    Anyway, the most important thing right now was to remain free and mobile until he ransomed Holly. He would ransom her. Or die trying.
    After he'd met Holly and fallen almost at once in love, he had realized that he'd previously been only half alive, buried alive in his childhood. She had opened the emotional casket in which his parents had left him, and he had risen, flourished.
    His transformation had amazed him. He had thought himself fully alive, at last, when they married.
    This night, however, he realized that part of him had remained asleep. He had awakened to a clarity of vision no less exhilarating than it was terrifying.
    He had encountered evil of a purity that a day previously he had not thought existed, that he had been educated to deny existed. With the recognition of evil, however, came a growing awareness of more dimensions in every scene, in nearly every object, than he