nothing more.
Mitch had thought that these teachings had not penetrated him, that he'd not been singed by the fire of a Daniel Rafferty education. But fire produced fumes; he'd been smoked in his father's fanaticism so long that some of what steeped into him had stayed.
He could see, but he had been blind. He could hear, but he had been deaf.
This day, this night, Mitch had come face-to-face with evil. It was as real as stone.
Although an irrational man should be met with compassion and therapy, an evil man was owed nothing more or less than resistance and retribution, the fury of a righteous justice.
In Julian Campbell's library, when the gunman had produced the handcuffs, Mitch had at once held out his hands. He had not waited for instructions.
If he had not appeared worn down, had not seemed meek and resigned to his fate, they might have cuffed his hands behind him. Reaching the revolver in his ankle holster would have been more difficult; using it with accuracy would have been impossible.
Campbell had even commented on Mitch's weariness, by which he had meant primarily the weariness of mind and heart.
They thought they knew the kind of man he was, and maybe they did. But they didn't know the kind of man he could become when the life of his wife was in the balance.
Amused by his lack of familiarity with the pistol that they had confiscated, they had not imagined he would have a second weapon. Not only good men are disadvantaged by their expectations.
Mitch pulled up the leg of his jeans and retrieved the revolver. He unstrapped the holster and discarded it.
Earlier, he had examined the weapon and had not found a safety. In movies, only some pistols had safeties, never revolvers.
If he lived through the next two days and got Holly back alive, he would never again allow himself to be put in a position where he had to rely on Tinseltown's grasp of reality for his or his family's survival.
When he had first swung open the cylinder, he had discovered five rounds in five chambers, where he expected six.
He would have to score two hits out of five rounds. Direct hits, not just wing shots.
Perhaps one of the gunmen would open the trunk. It would be better if the two were there, giving him the advantage of surprise with both.
Both would have their weapons drawn — or only one. If one, Mitch must be quick enough to target his armed adversary first.
A peaceable man, planning violence, was plagued by thoughts that were not helpful: As a teenager, cursed by the explosions of acne that had left his face a moonscape, the scarred gunman must have suffered much humiliation.
Sympathy for the devil was a kind of masochism at best, a death wish at worst.
For a while, rocking to the rhythms of road and rubber, and of internal combustion, Mitch tried to imagine all the ways that the violence might go down when the trunk lid went up. Then he tried not to imagine.
According to his radiant watch, they traveled more than half an hour and then, slowing, changed from blacktop to an unpaved road. Small stones rattled through the undercarriage, rapped hard against the floor pan.
He smelled dust and licked the alkaline taste of it from his lips, but the air never became foul enough to choke him.
After twelve minutes at an easy speed, on the dirt road, the car came slowly to a stop. The engine idled for half a minute, and then the driver switched it off.
After forty-five minutes of drone and drum, the silence was like a sudden deafness.
One door opened, then the other. They were coming.
Facing the back of the car, Mitch splayed his legs, bracing his feet in opposite corners of the space. He could not sit erect until the lid raised, but he waited with his back partly off the floor of the trunk, as if in the middle of doing a series of stomach crunches at the gym.
The cuffs all but required that he hold the revolver in a two-hand grip, which was probably better anyway.
He didn't hear footsteps, just the gallop of his heart, but then he heard the key in the trunk lock.
Through his mind's eye blinked an image of Jason Osteen being shot in the head, blinked and blinked, repeating like a film loop, Jason slammed by the bullet, skull exploding, slammed by the bullet, skull exploding….
As the lid lifted, Mitch realized that the trunk did not have a convenience light, and he began to sit up, thrusting the revolver forward.
The full-pitcher moon spilled its milk, backlighting the two gunmen.
Mitch's eyes were adapted to absolute blackness, and theirs were not. He sat in darkness, and they stood in moonlight. They thought he was a meek and broken and helpless man, and he was not.
He didn't consciously squeeze off the first shot, but felt the hard recoil and saw the muzzle flash and heard the crash, and then he was aware of squeezing the trigger the second time.
Two point-blank rounds knocked one silhouette down out of the moon-soaked night.
The second silhouette backed away from the car, and Mitch sat all the way up, squeezing off one, two, three more rounds.
The hammer clicked, and there was just the quiet of the moon, and the hammer clicked, and he reminded himself Only five, only five!
He had to get out of the trunk. With no ammunition, he was a fish in a barrel. Out. Out of the trunk.
Chapter 30
Rising too fast, Mitch knocked his head against the lid, almost fell back, but maintained forward momentum. He scrambled out of the trunk.
His left foot came down on solid ground, but he planted his right on the twice-shot man. He staggered, stepped on the body again, and it shifted under him, and he fell.
He rolled away from the gunman, to the verge of the road. He was stopped by a wild hedge of mesquite, which he identified by its oily smell.
He had lost the revolver. It didn't matter. No ammunition.
Around him lay a parched moon-silvered landscape: the narrow dirt road, desert scrub, barren soil, boulders.
Sleek, its ample chrome features lustrous with lunar polish, the Chrysler Windsor seemed strangely futuristic in this primitive land, like a ship meant to sail the stars. The driver had switched off the headlights when he killed the engine.
The gunman on whom Mitch had twice stepped, when exiting the trunk, had not cried out. He had not reared up or clutched at Mitch. He was probably dead.
Maybe the second man had been killed, too. Coming out of the trunk, Mitch had lost track of him.
If one of the last three rounds had found its target, the second man should have been a buffet for vultures on the dirt road behind the car.
The sandy soil of the roadbed was rich in silica. Glass is made from silica, mirrors from glass. The single-lane track offered much higher reflectivity than any surface in the night.
Lying facedown and flat, head cautiously raised, Mitch could see a significant distance along the pale ribbon as it dwindled through the gnarled and bristling scrub, in the direction from which they had come. No second body lay on the road.
If the guy hadn't been at least winged, surely he would have charged, firing, as Mitch clambered out of the Chrysler.
Hit, he might have hobbled or crawled into the scrub or behind a formation of stone. He could be anywhere
