who could talk deadpan about mutilating and murdering a woman.
He had landed with his throat across the rolled metal edge of the wheelbarrow tray. The impact appeared to have crushed his larynx and collapsed his trachea.
His right forearm had broken, and his right hand, trapped under him, had reflexively fired the pistol. The index finger remained hooked through the trigger guard.
The bullet had penetrated just below the sternum, angled up and to the left. Minimal bleeding suggested a heart wound, instant death.
If the shot hadn't killed him instantly, the collapsed airway would have killed him quickly.
This was too much luck to be just luck.
Whatever it was — luck or something better, luck or something worse — Mitch didn't at first know whether it was a helpful or an unwelcome development.
The number of his enemies had been reduced by one. A tattered glee, frayed by the rough edge of vengeance, fluttered in him and might have teased out a torn and threadbare laugh if he had not also been at once aware that this death complicated his situation.
When this man did not report back to his associates, they would call him. When they could not raise him on the phone, they might come looking for him. If they found him dead, they would assume that Mitch had killed him, and soon thereafter Holly's fingers would be taken off one by one, each stump flame-cauterized without benefit of an anesthetic.
Mitch hurried to the Honda and switched off the engine. He used the remote control to shut the garage door.
As shadows closed in, he switched on the lights.
The single shot might not have been heard. If it had been heard, he felt sure that it had not been recognized for what it was.
At this hour, neighbors would not be home from work. Some kids might have returned from school, but they would be listening to CDs or would be deep in an Xbox world, and the muffled shot would be perceived as another bit of music or game percussion.
Mitch returned to the body and stood looking down at it.
For a moment, he was not able to proceed. He knew what needed to be done, but he could not act.
He had lived for almost twenty-eight years without witnessing a death. Now he'd seen two men shot in the same day.
Thoughts of his own death pecked at him, and when he tried to repress them, they could not be caged. The susurration in his ears was only the sound of his rushing blood, driven by the oars of a sculling heart, but his imagination provided dark wings beating at the periphery of his mind's eye.
Although he was squeamish about searching the corpse, necessity brought him to his knees beside it.
From a hand so warm that it seemed death might be a pretense, he removed the pistol. He put it in the nearby wheelbarrow.
If the right leg of the dead man's khakis had not been pulled up in the fall, Mitch wouldn't have seen the second weapon. The gunman carried the snub-nosed revolver in an ankle holster.
After putting the revolver with the pistol, Mitch considered the holster. He undid the Velcro closures, put the holster with the guns.
He dug through the pockets of the sports coat, turned out the pockets of the pants.
He discovered a set of keys — one for a car, three others — which he considered but then returned to the pocket where he'd found them. After a brief hesitation, he retrieved them and added them to the wheelbarrow.
He found nothing more of interest other than a wallet and a cell phone. The former would contain identification, and the latter might be programmed to speed-dial, among other numbers, each of the dead man's collaborators.
If the phone rang, Mitch didn't dare answer it. Even if he spoke in monosyllables and the man at the other end briefly mistook his voice for that of the dead man, he would give himself away by one slip or another.
He switched off the phone. They would be suspicious when they got voice mail, but they would not act precipitously on mere suspicion.
Restraining his curiosity, Mitch set the wallet and phone aside in the wheelbarrow. Other, more urgent tasks awaited him.
Chapter 15
From the back of the truck, Mitch fetched a canvas tarp that was used for bundling rosebush clippings. The thorns could not easily penetrate it, as they did burlap.
In case one of the other kidnappers came looking for the dead man, Mitch couldn't leave the body here.
The thought of driving around with the corpse in the trunk of his car turned his stomach sour. He would have to buy some antacids.
The tarp had softened with use and was as fissured as the glaze on an antique vase. Although not waterproof, it remained fairly water-resistant.
Because the gunman's heart had stopped instantly, little blood had escaped the wound. Mitch wasn't worried about bloodstains.
He didn't know how long he would have to keep the body in the trunk. A few hours, a day, two days? Sooner or later, fluids other than blood would leak from it.
He spread the tarp on the floor and rolled the cadaver onto it. A wave of revulsion washed through him, inspired by the way the dead man's arms flopped, by the way the head lolled.
Considering Holly's peril, which required him not to recoil from even the most disturbing tasks, he closed his eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. He choked down his revulsion.
The lolling head suggested that the gunman's neck was broken. In that case, he was three ways dead: broken neck, crushed trachea, bullet-torn heart.
This could not be luck. Such layered grisliness could not be a stroke of good fortune. To view it as such would be repellant.
Extraordinary, yes. An extraordinary incident. And strange. But not auspicious.
Besides, he could not yet say that this accident had been to his advantage. It might easily prove to be his undoing.
After rolling the body in the tarp, he did not take time to weave twine through the eyelets and tie the package shut. Worry was a clock ticking, an hourglass draining, and he feared an interruption of one kind or another before this cleanup could be completed.
He dragged the tarp-wrapped corpse to the back of the Honda. As he opened the trunk of the car, a thrill of dread went through him, the absurd thought that he would find another dead man already occupying the space, but of course the trunk was empty.
His imagination had never been a fever swamp, and it had not heretofore been morbid. He wondered if this expectation of a second corpse might be not a flash of fantasy but in fact a presentiment that other dead men lay in his immediate future.
Loading the body into the trunk proved to be an arduous job.
The gunman weighed less than Mitch, but he was after all a dead weight.
If Mitch had not been strong and if his business had not been one that kept him in good physical condition, the corpse might have defeated him. Sweat glazed him by the time he slammed shut the trunk lid and locked it.
A careful inspection revealed no blood on the wheelbarrow. None on the floor, either.
He gathered the broken balusters and the fallen section of the handrail, and he took them out of the garage and concealed them in a half-depleted stack of cordwood that had supplied the living-room fireplace during the previous winter.
Inside once more, he climbed the stairs to the loft and returned to the fateful spot at the end of the
