The Husband

had recently exited.
    As he reached the corner, his peripheral vision caught movement at the front door of the gun shop. When he glanced along the covered boardwalk, he glimpsed the security guard coming out of the store.
    He did not think that the guard had seen him, and then he was out of sight, past the corner.
    The side parking lot ended at a low concrete-block wall. He vaulted it, onto a property belonging to a fast-food franchise.
    Cautioning himself not to run like a fugitive, he crossed the parking lot, passed a queue of vehicles waiting in line for takeout, the air redolent of exhaust fumes and greasy French fries, rounded the back of the restaurant, came to another low wall, vaulted it.
    Ahead lay a small strip center with six or eight stores. He slowed down, looking in the windows as he passed, just a guy out on an errand, with one point four million to spend.
    As he came to the end of the block, a squad car went by on the main boulevard, emergency beacons flashing red-blue, red-blue, red-blue, heading in the direction of the gun shop. And immediately behind it sped another one.
    Mitch turned left on the small cross street, away from the boulevard. He picked up his pace again.
    The commercial zone was only one lot wide, facing the boulevard. Behind lay a residential neighborhood.
    In the first block were condos and apartment houses. After that he found single-family homes, most of them two stories, occasionally a bungalow.
    The street trees were huge old podocarpuses that cast a lot of shade. Most lawns were green, trimmed, shrubs well kept. But every community has landscape slobs eager to exert their rights to be bad neighbors.
    When the police didn't find him at the gun shop, they would search surrounding neighborhoods. In a few minutes, they could have half a dozen or more units cruising the area.
    He had assaulted a police officer. They tended to put his kind at the top of their priority list.
    Most of the vehicles parked on this residential street were SUVs. He slowed down, squinting through the passenger-door windows at the ignitions, hoping to spot a key.
    When he glanced at his watch, he saw the time was 1:14. The exchange was set for 3:00, and now he didn't have wheels.

Chapter 60

     
    The ride lasts about fifteen minutes, and Holly, bound and blindfolded, is too busy scheming to consider a scream.
    This time when her lunatic chauffeur stops, she hears him put the van in park and apply the hand brake. He gets out, leaving his door open.
    In Rio Lucio, New Mexico, a saintly woman named Ermina Something lives in a blue-and-green or maybe blue-and-yellow stucco house. She is seventy-two.
    The killer returns to the van and drives it forward about twenty feet, and then gets out again.
    In Ermina Something's living room are maybe forty-two or thirty-nine images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by thorns.
    This has given Holly an idea. The idea is daring. And scary. But it feels right.
    When the killer returns to the van, Holly guesses that he has opened a gate to admit them to someplace, and then has closed it behind them.
    In Ermina Something's backyard, the killer buried a "treasure" of which the old woman would not approve. Holly wonders what that treasure might be, but hopes she will never know.
    The van coasts forward maybe sixty feet, on an unpaved surface. Small stones crunch together and rattle under the tires.
    He stops again and this time switches off the engine. "We're here."
    "Good," she says, for she is trying to play this not as if she is a frightened hostage but as if she is a woman whose spirit is arising to its fullness.
    He unlocks the back door and helps her out of the van.
    The warm wind smells vaguely of wood smoke. Maybe canyons are afire far to the east.
    For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, she feels sun on her face. The sun feels so good she could cry.
    Supporting her right arm, escorting her in an almost courtly fashion, he leads her across bare earth, through weeds. Then they follow a hard surface with a vague limy smell.
    When they stop, a strange muffled sound is repeated three times—thup, thup, thup—accompanied by splintering-wood and shrieking-metal noises.
    "What's that?" she asks.
    "I shot open the door."
    Now she knows what a pistol fitted with a silencer sounds like. Thup, thup, thup. Three shots.
    He conducts her across the threshold of the place into which he has shot his way. "Not much farther."
    The echoes of their slow footsteps give her a