gunman that he was not alone.
A sludge of seconds filled an empty minute, filled another, and another — and then the man's third bout of stifled coughing gave Mitch cover to roll from his left side to his right. The maneuver complete, he lay with his back to the open end of the trunk, very still.
The gunman's silence seemed to have a quality of heightened vigilance, of suspicion. The world now came to Mitch's five senses through a distorting lens of extreme anxiety.
What angle of fire? What pattern?
Think.
The man with the smooth face would not be sitting upright. He would slump to take full advantage of the darkness in the backseat.
In other circumstances, the assassin might have preferred a corner, where he could further ensure his invisibility. But because the raised lid of the trunk obstructed an easy view of him through the rear window of the car, he could safely sit in the center, the better to cover both front doors.
Keeping the cuff chain taut, Mitch quietly put down the pistol. He dared not risk knocking the weapon against something during the exploration he needed to perform.
Blindly reaching forward with both hands, he found the back wall of the trunk. Although firm under his fingertips, the surface had a cloth covering.
The Chrysler might not have been restored with a hundred percent fidelity. Campbell might have chosen some custom upgrades, including more refined materials in the trunk.
A pair of synchronized spiders, his hands crept left to right across the surface, testing. He pressed gently, and then a little harder.
Beneath his questing fingertips, the surface flexed slightly. Quarter-inch fiberboard, covered in cloth, might flex that way. It did not have the feel of metal.
The panel accepted his pressure in silence, but when he relaxed his hands, it returned to form with a subtle buckling noise.
From the passenger compartment came the protest of stressed upholstery, a short twist of sound and nothing more. The gunman had most likely adjusted his position for comfort — though he might have turned to listen more intently.
Mitch felt the floor, seeking the pistol, and rested his hands on it.
Lying on his side, knees drawn up, with no room to extend his arms, he was not in a good shooting position.
If he tried to move toward the open end of the trunk before firing, he would give himself away. A mere second or two of warning might be enough for the experienced gunman to roll off the backseat, onto the floor.
Mitch went through it in his mind one more time, to be sure that he had not overlooked anything. The smallest miscalculation could be the death of him.
He raised the pistol. He would shoot left to right, then right to left, a double spray, five rounds in each arc.
When he squeezed the trigger, nothing happened. Just a faint but crisp metallic snick.
His heart was both hammer and anvil, and he had to hear through that roar, but he was pretty sure the gunman had not moved again, had not detected the small sound of the stubborn pistol.
Earlier he had explored the weapon and hadn't found a safety click.
He eased off the trigger, hesitated, squeezed again.
Snick.
Before panic could seize him, serendipity fluttered against his cheek and into his open mouth: a moth, not as cold as they had looked when whirling like snowflakes.
Reflexively, he sputtered, spat out the insect, gagging, and pulled the trigger again. A stop was incorporated into the trigger — maybe that was the safety — through which you had to pull to fire, a double action, and because he pulled harder than before, the pistol boomed.
The recoil, exacerbated by his position, rocked him, and the crash couldn't have been louder if it had been the door to Hell slamming behind him, and he was surprised by a blow-back of debris, bits of singed cloth and flecks of fiberboard spraying his face, but he squinched his eyes shut and kept firing, left to right, the gun trying to pull up, pull wild, then right to left, controlling the weapon, not just shooting it, and though he had thought he would be able to count the rounds as he fired them, he lost track after two, and then the magazine was depleted.
Chapter 34
If the gunman wasn't dead, even if wounded, he could return fire through the backrest. The car trunk was still a potential deathtrap.
Abandoning the useless pistol, Mitch scrambled out, knocking a knee against the sill, an elbow against the bumper, dropped to his hands and knees in the road, then thrust to his feet. He ran in a crouch for ten yards, fifteen, before stopping and looking back.
The gunman hadn't gotten out of the Chrysler. The four doors were closed.
Mitch waited, sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, off his chin.
Gone were the snowflake moths, the great horned owl, the songs of crickets, the click-shrill of the sinister something.
Under the mute moon, in the petrified desert, the Chrysler looked anachronistic, like a time machine in the early Mesozoic, sleek and gleaming two hundred million years before it was built.
When the air, as dry as salt, began to sear his throat, he 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
