'The single leads to a hallway. The hall passes other rooms and leads to the kitchen. She's in the kitchen. But don't go near her.'
Moving across the drawing room toward the specified doorway, Mitch said, 'Why not?'
'Because I'm still making the rules. She's chained to a pipe. I have the key. You stop just inside the kitchen.'
The hallway seemed to recede from him the farther he followed it, but he knew the telescoping effect had to be psychological. He was frantic to see Holly.
He didn't look in any of the rooms he passed. Null might have been in one of them. It didn't matter.
When Mitch entered the kitchen, he saw her at once, and his heart swelled, and his mouth went dry. Everything that he had been through, every pain that he had suffered, every terrible thing that he had done was in that instant all worthwhile.
Chapter 66
Because the creep arrives in the kitchen to stand beside her during the last of his phone conversation, Holly hears him give the final directions.
She holds her breath, listening for footsteps. When she hears Mitch approaching, hot tears threaten, but she blinks them back.
A moment later Mitch enters the room. He says her name so tenderly. Her husband.
She has stood with her arms crossed over her breasts, her hands fisted in her armpits. Now she lowers her arms and stands with her hands fisted at her sides.
The creep, who has drawn a wicked-looking pistol, is intently focused on Mitch. 'Arms straight out like a bird.'
Mitch obeys, a white trash bag dangling from his right hand.
His clothes are filthy. His hair is windblown. His face has lost all color. He is beautiful.
The killer says, 'Come slowly forward.'
As instructed, Mitch approaches, and the creep tells him to stop fifteen feet away.
As Mitch halts, the killer says, 'Put the bag on the floor.'
Mitch lowers the bag to the dusty limestone. It settles but does not flop open.
Covering Mitch with the pistol, the killer says, 'I want to see the money. Kneel in front of the bag.'
Holly doesn't like to see Mitch kneeling. This is the position that executioners instruct their victims to take before the coup de grace.
She must act, but the time feels not quite right. If she makes her move too soon, the scheme might fail. Instinct tells her to wait, though waiting with Mitch on his knees is so hard.
'Show me the money,' the killer says, and he has a two-hand grip on the pistol, finger tightened on the trigger.
Mitch opens the neck of the bag and withdraws a plastic-wrapped brick of cash. He tears off one end of the plastic, and riffles the hundred-dollar bills with his thumb.
'The bearer bonds?' the killer asks.
Mitch drops the cash into the sack.
The creep tenses, thrusting the pistol forward as Mitch reaches into the bag again, and he does not relax even when Mitch produces only a large envelope.
From the envelope, Mitch extracts half a dozen official-looking certificates. He holds one forward for the killer to read.
'All right. Put them back in the envelope.'
Mitch obeys, still on his knees.
The creep says, 'Mitch, if your wife had a chance for previously undreamed-of personal fulfillment, the opportunity for enlightenment, for transcendence, surely you would want her to follow that better destiny.'
Bewildered by this turn, Mitch does not know what to say, but Holly does. The time has come.
She says, 'I've been sent a sign, my future is New Mexico.'
Raising her hands from her sides, opening her fists, she reveals her bloody wounds.
An involuntary cry escapes Mitch, the killer glances at Holly, and her stigmata drip for his astonishment.
The nail holes are not superficial, though they don't go all the way through her hands. She stabbed herself and worked the wounds with brutal determination.
The worst had been having to bite back every cry of pain. If he had heard her agony expressed, the killer would have come to see what she was doing.
At once, the wounds had bled too much. She had packed them with powdered plaster to stop the bleeding. Before the plaster worked, blood had dripped on the floor, but she had covered it with a quick redistribution of the thick dust.
With her hands fisted in her armpits, as Mitch entered the room, Holly had clawed the plugs of plaster from the wounds, tearing them open once more.
Blood flows now for the killer's fascination, and Holly says, 'In Espanola, where your life will change, lives a woman named Rosa Gonzales with two white dogs.'
With her left hand, she pulls down the neck of her sweater, revealing cleavage.
His gaze rises from her breasts to her eyes.
She slips her right hand between her breasts, palms the nail, and fears not being able to hold it in her slippery fingers.
The killer glances at Mitch.
She grips the nail well enough, reveals it, and rams it into the killer's face, going for his eye, but instead pinning his mask to him, piercing the hollow of his cheek and ripping.
Screaming, tongue flailing on the nail, he reels back from her, and his pistol fires wildly, bullets thudding into walls.
She sees Mitch rising and moving fast, with a gun of his own.
Chapter 67
Mitch shouted, 'Holly, move,' and she was moving on the first syllable of Holly, separating herself from Jimmy Null as much as her chain allowed.
Point-blank, aiming abdomen, hitting chest, pulling down from the recoil, firing again, pulling down, firing, firing, he thought a couple of shots went wide, but saw three or four rounds tearing into the windbreaker, each roar so big booming through the big house.
Null reeled backward, off balance. His pistol had an extended magazine. It seemed to be fully automatic. Bullets stitched a wall, part of the ceiling.
Because he now had only a one-hand grip on the weapon, maybe the recoil tore it from him, maybe he lost all strength, but for whatever reason, it flew. The gun hit the wall, clattered to the limestone.
Driven backward by the impact of the.45s, rocked on his heels, Null staggered, dropped on his side, rolled onto his face.
When the echoes of the echoes of the gunfire faded, Mitch could hear Jimmy Null's ragged wheezing. Maybe that was how you breathed when you had a fatal chest wound.
Mitch wasn't proud of what he did next, didn't even take any savage delight in it. In fact he almost didn't do it, but he knew that almost would buy no dispensation when the time came to reckon for the way he lived his life.
He stepped over the wheezing man and shot him twice in the back. He would have shot him a third time, but he had expended all eleven rounds in the pistol.
Crouching defensively during the gunfire, Holly rose to meet Mitch as he turned to her.
