bad — hard enough, as it turned out, to knock him unconscious.
The point had been to gain Anson's cooperation by convincing him that he was not dealing with the same Mitch. But this worked, too.
Chapter 43
He ain't heavy, he's my brother. Bullshit. He was Mitch's brother, and he was heavy.
Dragging him across the polished wood floor of the kitchen and into the laundry room proved harder than Mitch expected. Hoisting him into the chair was one door away from impossible, but Mitch got it done.
The upholstered panel on the back of the chair fit between two steel verticals. Between each side of that padded panel and the frame was an open space.
He pulled Anson's hands through those gaps. With the handcuffs that he himself had worn earlier, he shackled his brother's wrists behind the chair.
Among the items in a utility drawer were three spare electrical extension cords. A thick orange cord was about forty feet long.
After weaving it through the chair's legs and stretcher bars, Mitch tied it around the washing machine. Far less flexible than rope, the rubber cord would allow only loose knots, so he tied three.
Although Anson might be able to rise into a half crouch, he would have to lift the chair with him. But anchored to the washer, he could not go anywhere.
The blow with the pistol had cut his ear. He was bleeding but not heavily.
His pulse was slow but steady. He might come around quickly.
Leaving the overhead light on, Mitch went upstairs to the master bedroom. He saw what he expected: two small night-lights plugged into wall outlets, neither switched on at the moment.
As a child, Anson had slept with a lamp on low As a teenager, he had settled for a night-light similar to these. In every room of this house, as preparation for a power failure, he kept a flashlight that received fresh batteries four times a year.
Downstairs again, Mitch glanced in the laundry room. Anson remained unconscious in the chair.
Mitch searched the kitchen drawers until he found where Anson kept keys. He plucked out a spare house key. He also took the keys for three different cars, including his Honda, and left the house by the back door.
He doubted that the neighbors could have heard the shot — or, having heard it, could have recognized it for what it was — after it had been filtered through the boom and cry of the wind at war with itself. Nevertheless, he was relieved to see no lights in the houses to either side.
He climbed the stairs to the condo above the garages and tried the door, which was locked. As he expected, the key to Anson's house also opened this one.
Inside, he found Anson's home office occupying space that would normally be a living room and dining area. The nautical paintings were by some of the artists featured in the front condo.
Four computer workstations were served by a single wheeled office chair. The size of the logic units, far larger than anything ordinarily seen in a home, suggested his work required rapid multitiered computation and massive data storage.
Mitch wasn't a computer maven. He had no illusions that he could boot up these machines — if boot up was even a term in use anymore — and discover the nature of the work that had made his brother rich.
Besides, Anson would have layers of security, passwords and procedures, to keep out even serious hackers. He had always been delighted by the elaborate codes and arcane symbolism of the maps that pirates drew to their caches of treasure in those tales that enthralled him as a boy.
Mitch left, locked the door, and went down to the first of the garages. Here were the Expedition that he had driven to Campbell's estate in Rancho Santa Fe and the 1947 Buick Super Woody Wagon.
In the other two-car garage were an empty stall and Mitch's Honda, which he had left on the street.
Perhaps Anson had stored it here after driving it to Orange and taking two of Mitch's garden tools as well as some of his clothes, to Daniel and Kathy's place to murder them, and then to Mitch's again to plant the incriminating evidence.
Mitch opened the trunk. John Knox's body remained wrapped in the weathered canvas tarp.
The accident in the loft seemed to have happened in a long-ago time, in another life.
He returned to the first garage, started the Expedition, and moved it to the empty stall in the second garage.
After moving his Honda to park it beside the Buick wagon, he closed the big roll-up door on that garage.
Grimly, he wrestled the recalcitrant body from the trunk of the Honda. While it lay on the garage floor, he rolled the corpse out of the tarp.
Serious putrescence had not set in yet. The dead man had a sinister sweet-and-sour smell, however, that Mitch was eager to get away from.
The wind keened at the small high windows of the garage, as if it had a taste for the macabre and had blown itself a long way across the world to see Mitch at this gruesome work.
He thought that all this dragging around of bodies should have about it a quality of farce, especially considering that Knox was stiff with rigor mortis and hellaciously cumbersome. But at the moment he had a serious case of laugh-deficit disorder.
After he had loaded Knox into the Buick wagon and closed the tailgate, he folded the tarp and put it in the trunk of the Honda. Eventually he would dispose of it in a Dumpster or in a stranger's trash can.
He couldn't recall ever having been this exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally. His eyes felt singed, his joints half-melted, his muscles fully cooked and tender enough to fall off the bone.
Maybe the sugar and caffeine in the Hershey's bars prevented his engine from stalling. Fear fueled him, too. But what most kept his wheels turning was the thought of Holly in the hands of monsters.
Till death us do part was the stated commitment in their vows.
For Mitch, however, the loss of her would not release him. The commitment would endure. The rest of his life would pass in patient waiting.
He walked the alleyway to the street, returned to the Chrysler Windsor, and drove it back to the second garage. He parked it beside the Expedition and closed the roll-down door.
He consulted his wristwatch—4:09.
In ninety minutes, maybe a little longer, maybe a little less, the furious wind would blow dawn in from the east. Because of dust flung high into the atmosphere, the first light would be pink, and it would rapidly squall across the heavens, fading to the color of a more mature sky as it was blown toward the sea.
Since he had met Holly, he had greeted every day with great expectations. This day was different.
He returned to the house and found Anson awake in the laundry room, and in a mood.
Chapter 44
The cut on his left ear had crusted shut, and body heat was quickly drying the blood that had trickled down his cheek and neck.
His bearish good looks had settled into harder edges, as though a genetic contagion had introduced major wolf DNA into his face. Jaws clenched so tight that his facial muscles knotted, eyes molten with rage, Anson sat in seething silence.
The wind wasn't loud here. A vent pipe carried sighs and whispers from outside into the dryer, so it seemed as if a troubled spirit haunted that machine.
Mitch said, 'You're going to help me get Holly back alive.'
That statement elicited neither agreement nor refusal, only a glower.
'They'll be calling in a little more than seven and a half hours with wiring instructions.'
