the best thing would be to go to the police, tell his story of desperate self-defense, and present them with the two dead gunmen in the trunk of the Chrysler.
Julian Campbell would deny that he had employed them or at least that he had directed them to kill Mitch. Men like these two were most likely paid in cash; from Campbell's point of view, the fewer records the better, and the gunmen hadn't been the type to care that, if paid in cash with no tax deductions, they would eventually be denied their Social Security.
The possibility existed that no authorities were aware of the dark side to Campbell's empire. To all appearances, he might be one of California's most upstanding citizens.
Mitch, on the other hand, was a humble gardener already set up to take the fall for his wife's murder in the event that he failed to ransom her. And in Corona del Mar, on the street in front of Anson's house, the trunk of his Honda contained the body of John Knox.
Although he believed in the rule of law, Mitch didn't for a minute believe that crime-scene investigation was as meticulous — or CSI technicians as infallible — as portrayed on TV The more evidence that suggested his guilt, even if it was planted, the more they would find to support their suspicion, and the easier they would find it to ignore the details that might exonerate him.
Anyway, the most important thing right now was to remain free and mobile until he ransomed Holly. He would ransom her. Or die trying.
After he'd met Holly and fallen almost at once in love, he had realized that he'd previously been only half alive, buried alive in his childhood. She had opened the emotional casket in which his parents had left him, and he had risen, flourished.
His transformation had amazed him. He had thought himself fully alive, at last, when they married.
This night, however, he realized that part of him had remained asleep. He had awakened to a clarity of vision no less exhilarating than it was terrifying.
He had encountered evil of a purity that a day previously he had not thought existed, that he had been educated to deny existed. With the recognition of evil, however, came a growing awareness of more dimensions in every scene, in nearly every object, than he had seen before, greater beauty, strange promise, and mystery.
He did not know precisely what he meant by that. He only knew that it was the case, that he'd opened his eyes to a higher reality. Behind the layered and gorgeous mysteries of this new world around him, he sensed a truth that veil by veil would reveal itself.
In this state of enlightenment, funny that he should find the most urgent task before him to be the disposal of a pair of dead men.
A laugh rose in him, but he swallowed it. Sitting in the desert, near midnight, with no company but corpses, laughing at the moon did not seem to be the first step on the right path out of here.
From high in the east, a meteor slid westward like the pull-tab of a zipper, opening the black sky to reveal a glimpse of whiteness beyond, but the teeth of the zipper closed as quickly as they opened, keeping the sky clothed, and the meteor became a cinder, a vapor.
Taking the falling star as an omen to get on with his grisly work, Mitch knelt beside the scarred gunman and searched his pockets. He quickly found the two things he wanted: the handcuff key and the keys to the Chrysler Windsor.
Having freed himself of the cuffs, he threw them in the open trunk of the car. He rubbed his chafed wrists.
He dragged the body of the gunman to the south shoulder of the road, through the screening brush, and left it there.
Getting the second one out of the backseat involved unpleasant wrestling, but in two minutes the dead pair were lying side by side, faceup to the wonder of the stars.
At the car once more, Mitch found a flashlight on the front seat. He'd figured there would be one because they must have intended to bury him nearby and would have needed a light to guide them.
The car's weak ceiling lamp had not shown him as much of the backseat as he needed to see. He examined it with the flashlight.
Because the gunman had not died instantly, he'd had time to bleed, and he'd done a thorough job of it.
Mitch counted eight holes in the backrest, rounds that punched through from the trunk. The other two had evidently been deflected or fully stopped by the structure of the seat.
In the back of the front seat were five holes; but only one bullet had drilled all the way through. A pockmark in the glove-box door indicated the end point of its trajectory.
He found the spent slug on the floor in front of the passenger's seat. He threw it away into the night.
Once he got off the dirt track and onto paved roads, though he would be in a hurry, he would have to obey the posted speed limits. If a highway-patrol officer stopped him and got one glimpse of the blood and destruction in the backseat, Mitch would probably be eating at the expense of the state of California for a long time.
The two gunmen had not brought a shovel.
Considering their professionalism, he doubted they would have left his body to rot where hikers or off-road racers might have found it. Familiar with the area, they had known a feature of the landscape that served as a natural tomb unlikely to be discovered casually.
Searching for that burial place at night, with a flashlight, did not appeal to Mitch. Nor did the prospect of the bone collection that he might find there.
He returned to the bodies and relieved them of their wallets to make identification more difficult. He was becoming less squeamish about handling them — and his new attitude disturbed him.
After dragging the dead men farther from the road, he interred them in a tight grove of waist-high manzanita. Shrouds of leathery leaves concealed them from easy discovery.
Although the desert seems hostile to life, many species thrive in it, and a number are carrion eaters. Within an hour, the first of these would be drawn to the double treat in the manzanita.
Some were beetles like the one that the gunmen had taken care not to crush underfoot as they had led him along the car-pavilion loggia.
In the morning, the desert heat would begin to do its work as well, significantly hastening the process of decomposition.
If they were ever found, their names might never be known. And which of them suffered terrible acne scars and which had a smooth face would matter to no one, and count for nothing.
In the car pavilion, as they had been closing him into the trunk of the Chrysler, he had said / wish we didn't have to do this.
Well, said the one with the smooth skin, that's how it is.
Another shooting star drew his attention to the deep clear sky. A brief bright scar, and then the heavens healed.
He returned to the car and closed the trunk lid.
Having gotten the best of two experienced killers, perhaps he should have felt empowered, proud, and fierce. Instead, he had been further humbled.
To spare himself the stench of blood, he rolled down the windows in all four doors of the Chrysler Windsor.
The engine started at once: a full-throated song of power. He switched on the headlights.
He was relieved to see that the fuel gauge indicated the tank was nearly three-quarters full. He didn't want to stop at any public place, not even at a self-service station.
He had turned the car around and driven four miles on the dirt road when, topping a rise, he came upon a sight that caused him to brake to a stop.
To the south, in a shallow bowl of land, lay a lake of mercury with concentric rings of sparkling diamonds floating on it, moving slowly to the currents of a lazy whirlpool, as majestic as a spiral galaxy.
For a moment the scene was so unreal that he thought it must be a hallucination or a vision. Then he understood that it was a field of grass, perhaps squirreltail with its plumelike flower spikes and silky awns.
The moonlight silvered the spikes and struck sparkles from the high sheen of the awns. A wind eddy, the laziest of spiral breezes, pulsed around the bowl of land with such grace and consistent timing that, were there music for this dance of grass, it would be a waltz.
In mere grass was hidden meaning, but the stink of blood brought him back from the mystic to the
