midnight Wednesday?'
Within his knitted mask, he smiles. 'Only a few minutes before one o'clock Tuesday afternoon,' he says. 'Your persuasive husband has encouraged his brother to come through with
the money quicker than ever seemed possible. This whole thing has moved so smoothly that it's obviously coasting on the wheels of destiny.'
Rising to his feet, he gestures for her to rise, as well, and she obeys.
Behind her back, he binds her wrists together with a blue silk scarf, as before.
Stepping in front of her again, he tenderly smoothes her hair back from her forehead, for some of it has fallen over her face. As he performs this grooming, with hands as cold as they are pale, he stares continuously into her eyes in a spirit of romantic challenge.
She dares not look away from him, and she closes her eyes only when he presses to them thick gauze pads that have been moistened to make them stick. He binds the pads in place with a longer length of silk, which he loops three times around her head and ties firmly at the back of her skull.
His hands brush her right ankle, and he unlocks the manacle, freeing her from the chain and the ringbolt.
He plays the flashlight over her blindfold, and she sees dim light penetrate the gauze and silk. Evidently satisfied by the job he's done, he lowers the light.
'When we've reached the ransom drop,' he promises, 'the scarves will come off. They're only to incapacitate you during transport.'
Because he is not the one who hit her and pulled her hair to make her scream, she can sound credible when she says, 'You've never been cruel to me.'
He studies her in silence. She assumes that he studies her, for she feels naked, undressed by his stare.
The wind, the dark again, the hideous expectation all make her heart jump like a rabbit battering itself against the wire walls of a trap cage.
Holly feels his breath brush lightly across her lips, and she endures it.
After he exhales four times upon her, he whispers, 'At night in Guadalupita, the sky is so vast that the moon seems shrunken, small, and the stars you can see, horizon to horizon, number more than all the human deaths in history. Now we must go.'
He takes Holly by one arm, and she does not shrink from his repulsive touch, but moves with him across the room and through an open doorway.
Here are the steps again, up which they led her the previous day. He patiently guides her descent, but she cannot hold a railing and therefore places each foot tentatively.
From attic to second floor, to first floor, and then into the garage, he encourages her: 'A landing now. Very good. Duck your head. And now to the left. Be careful here. And now a threshold.'
In the garage, she hears him open the door of a vehicle.
'This is the van that brought you here,' he says, and helps her through the rear entrance, into the cargo space. The carpeted floor smells as foul as she remembered it. 'Lie on your side.'
He exits, closes the door behind him. The signature metallic sound of a key in a lock eliminates any consideration that she might be able to let herself out somewhere en route.
The driver's door opens, and he gets in behind the wheel. 'This is a two-seat van. The seats are open to the cargo area, which is why you hear me so clearly. You do hear me clearly?'
'Yes.'
He closes his door. 'I can turn in my seat and see you. On our trip here, there were men to sit with you, to make sure that you behaved. I'm alone now. So…somewhere along the way, if we stop at a red light and you think a scream will be heard, I'll have to deal with you more harshly than I would like.'
'I won't scream.'
'Good. But please let me explain. On the passenger's seat beside me is a pistol fitted with a silencer. The instant that you begin to scream, I'll pick up the pistol, turn around in my seat, and shoot you dead. Whether you're dead or alive, I'll collect the ransom. You see the way it is?'
'Yes.'
'That sounded cold, didn't it?' he asks.
'I understand…your position.'
'Be honest now. It did sound cold.'
'Yes.'
'Consider this. I could have gagged you, but I didn't. I could have shoved a rubber ball in your pretty mouth and sealed your lips with duct tape. Couldn't I have done that easily?'
'Yes.'
'Why didn't I?'
'Because you know you can trust me,' she says.
'I hope that I can trust you. And because I'm a man of hope, who lives his life with hope in every hour, I did not gag you, Holly. A gag of the type I described is effective but extremely unpleasant. I didn't want an unpleasantness like that between us in case…in hope of Gaudalupita.'
Her mind works to deceive more smoothly than she would have thought possible one day ago.
In a voice not at all seductive but solemn with respect, she recites for him details that suggest he has indeed cast a spell over her: 'Guadalupita, Rodarte, Rio Lucio, Penasco, where your life was changed, and Chamisal, where it was also changed, Vallecito, Las Trampas, and Espanola, where your life will be changed again.'
He is silent for a moment. Then: 'I'm sorry for the discomfort, Holly. It will be over soon, and then transcendence…if you want it.'
Chapter 58
The architecture of the gun shop had been inspired by dry-goods stores in countless Western movies. A flat railed roof, vertical-clapboard walls, a covered boardwalk the length of the long building, and a hitching post raised the expectation that at any moment John Wayne would walk out of the front door, dressed as he had been in The Searchers.
Feeling less like John Wayne than like any supporting character who gets shot in the second act, Mitch sat in the Honda, in the gun-shop parking lot, examining the pistol that he had brought back from Rancho Santa Fe.
Several things were engraved in the steel, if it was steel. Some were numbers and letters that meant nothing to him. Others provided useful information for a guy who knew squat about handguns.
Near the muzzle, in script, were the words Super Tuned. Farther back on the slide the word champion looked as if it had been laser-incised in block letters, and cal.45 was directly under it.
Mitch preferred not to deliver the ransom with only seven rounds in the magazine. Now he knew that he needed to purchase.45-caliber ammunition.
Seven rounds were probably more than enough. Gunfights most likely dragged on only in movies. In real life, somebody fired the first shot, somebody responded, and within a total of four rounds, one of the somebodies was wounded or dead.
Buying more ammunition was not about fulfilling a genuine need, but a psychological one. He didn't care. Additional ammo would make him feel better prepared.
On the other side of the slide, he found the word spring-field. He took this to be the maker.
The word champion most likely referred to the model of the gun. He had a Springfield Champion.45 pistol. That sounded more likely than a Champion Springfield.45 pistol.
He wanted to avoid drawing attention to himself when he went into the shop. He hoped to sound like he knew what he was talking about.
After ejecting the magazine from the pistol, he extracted a cartridge from the magazine. The casing identified it as.45 ACP, but he didn't know what the letters meant.
He returned the cartridge to the magazine and put the magazine in a pocket of his jeans. He slid the pistol under the driver's seat.
