The Husband

rooms.
    The cold shakes seize her. She isn't able to get them under control, and the links of her chain sing against one another.

Chapter 61

     
    Mitch in the shuddering shade of the wind-tossed podocarpuses, squinting through windows, finally began to test the doors of the vehicles parked at the curb. When they weren't locked, he opened them and leaned inside.
    If keys weren't in the ignition, they might be in a cup holder or tucked behind a sun visor. Each time that he didn't find keys in those places, either, he closed the door and moved on.
    Born of desperation, his boldness nevertheless surprised him. Because a police car might turn one corner or another momentarily, however, caution rather than assurance would be his downfall.
    He hoped that these residents were not people with a sense of community, that they had not joined the Neighborhood Watch program. Their police mentor would have coached them to notice and report suspicious specimens exactly like him.
    For laid-back southern California, for low-crime Newport Beach, a depressing percentage of these people locked their parked cars. Their paranoia gradually began to piss him off.
    When he had gone over two blocks, he saw ahead a Lexus parked in a driveway, the engine idling, the driver's door open. No one sat behind the wheel.
    The garage door also stood open. He cautiously approached the car, but no one was in the garage, either. The driver had dashed back into the house for a forgotten item.
    The Lexus would be reported stolen within minutes, but the cops wouldn't be looking for it immediately. There would be a process for reporting a stolen car; a process was part of a system, a system the work of a bureaucracy, the business of bureaucracy delay.
    He might have a couple of hours before the plates were on a hot sheet. He needed no more time than two hours.
    Because the car faced the street, he slipped behind the wheel, dropped the trash bag on the passenger's seat, pulled the door shut, and rolled at once out of the driveway, turning right, away from the boulevard and the gun shop.
    At the corner, ignoring the stop sign, he turned right once more and went a third of a block before he heard a thin shaky voice in the backseat say, "What is your name, honey?"
    An elderly man slumped in a corner. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, a hearing aid, and his pants just under his breasts. He appeared to be a hundred years old. Time had shrunken him, though not every part in proportion to every other.
    "Oh, you're Debbie," the old man said. "Where are we going, Debbie?"
    Crime led to more crime, and here were the wages of crime: certain destruction. Mitch himself had now become a kidnapper.
    "Are we going to the pie store?" the old man inquired, a note of hope in his quavery voice.
    Maybe some Alzheimer's was happening here.
    "Yes," Mitch said, "we're going to the pie store," and he turned right again at the next corner.
    "I like pie."
    "Everybody likes pie," Mitch agreed.
    If his heart had not been knocking hard enough to hurt, if his wife's life had not depended on his remaining free, if he had not expected to encounter roving police at any moment, and if he had not expected them to shoot first and discuss the fine points of his civil rights later, he might have found this amusing. But it wasn't amusing; it was surreal.
    "You aren't Debbie," the old man said. "I'm Norman, but you're not Debbie."
    "No. You're right. I'm not."
    "Who are you?"
    "I'm just a guy who made a mistake."
    Norman thought about that until Mitch turned right at the third corner, and then he said, "You're gonna hurt me. That's what you're gonna do."
    The fear in the old man's voice inspired pity. "No, no. Nobody is gonna hurt you."
    "You're gonna hurt me, you're a bad man."
    "No, I just made a mistake. I'm taking you right back home," Mitch assured him.
    "Where are we? This isn't home. We're nowhere near home." The voice, to this point wispy, suddenly gained volume and shrillness. "You're a bad sonofabitch!"
    "Don't get yourself worked up. Please don't." Mitch felt sorry for the old man, responsible for him. "We're almost there. You'll be home in a minute."
    "You're a bad sonofabitch! You're a bad sonofabitch!"
    At the fourth corner, Mitch turned right, onto the street where he'd stolen the car.
    "YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!"
    In the desiccated depths of that time-ravaged body, Norman found the voice of a bellowing youth.
    "YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!"
    "Please, Norman. You're gonna give yourself a