'Anyone else?' he asked.
'Just him, just him.'
She exploded into him, threw her arms around him. He had never before been held so tight, with such sweet ferocity.
'Your hands.'
'They're okay.'
'Your hands,' he insisted.
'They're okay, you're alive, they're okay.'
He kissed every part of her face. Her mouth, her eyes, her brow, her eyes again, salty now with tears, her mouth.
The room stank of gunfire, a dead man lay on the floor, Holly was bleeding, and Mitch's legs felt weak. He wanted fresh air, the brisk wind, sunshine to kiss her in.
'Let's get out of here,' he said.
'The chain.'
A small stainless-steel padlock coupled the links around her wrist.
'He has the key,' she said.
Staring at the body, Mitch withdrew a spare magazine from a pocket of his jeans. He ejected the spent clip, replaced it with the fresh.
Pressing the muzzle against the back of the kidnapper's head, he said, 'One move, I'll blow your brains out,' but of course he got no answer.
Nevertheless, he pressed hard on the gun and, with his free hand, was able to search the side pockets of the windbreaker. He found the key in the second one.
The chain fell away from her wrist as the dropped padlock rapped the limestone floor.
'Your hands,' he said, 'your beautiful hands.'
The sight of her blood pierced him, and he thought of the staged scene in their kitchen, the bloody hand prints, but this was worse, so much worse to see her bleeding.
'What happened to your hands?'
'New Mexico. It's not as bad as it looks. I'll explain. Let's go. Let's get out of here.'
He snatched the bag of ransom off the floor. She started toward a doorway, but he led her to the entrance from the hall, which was the only route he knew.
They walked with her right arm around his shoulders and his left arm around her waist, past empty rooms haunted or not, and his heart knocked no softer and no slower than when he had been in the quick of the gunfire. Maybe it would race like this for the rest of his life.
The hall was long, and in the drawing room, they could not help looking toward the vast, dust-filmed view.
As they stepped into the living room, an engine roared to life
elsewhere in the house. The racket rattled room to hall to room, and chattered off the high ceilings, making it impossible to determine where it originated.
'Motorcycle,' she said.
'Bulletproof,' Mitch said. 'A vest under the windbreaker.'
The impact of the slugs, especially the two in the back, jarring the spine, must have knocked Jimmy Null briefly unconscious.
He had not intended to leave in the van that he'd driven here. Having stashed a motorcycle near the kitchen, perhaps in the breakfast room, he'd been prepared to leave — if things went wrong — through any wing of the house, any door. Once outside the house, he could flee not only by the construction gate that led into the street but also by switchbacking down the bluff, or by some third route.
As the clatter of the engine swelled, Mitch knew that Jimmy was not intent on fleeing. It wasn't the ransom that drew him, either.
Whatever had happened between him and Holly — New Mexico and Rosa Gonzales and two white dogs and bloody stigmata — all that drew him, and he was drawn, too, by the humiliation of the nail in the face. For the nail, he wanted Holly more than money, wanted her dead.
Logic suggested that he was at their backs and would come from the drawing room.
Mitch hurried Holly across the enormous living room, toward the equally huge receiving hall and the front door beyond.
Logic flopped. They had crossed less than half the living room when Jimmy Null on a Kawasaki shot out of somewhere, bulleting along the colonnade that separated them from the receiving room.
Mitch drew her back as Null steered between columns into the receiving room. He made a wide turn out there and came straight at them, across that room, across the width of the colonnade, gaining speed.
Null didn't have his pistol. Out of ammunition. Or wild with rage, the gun forgotten.
Shoving Holly behind him, Mitch raised the Champion in both hands, remembering the front sight, a white dot, and opened fire as Null was passing across the colonnade.
Aiming chest this time, hoping for head. Fifty feet and closing, thunder crashing off walls. First shot high, pull it down, second, pull it down, thirty feet and closing, third shot. PULL IT DOWN! The fourth turned off Jimmy Null's brain so abruptly, his hands sprang away from the handlebars.
The dead man stopped, the cycle did not, rearing on its back wheel, tire barking, smoking, screaming forward until it toppled, tumbled toward them, past them, hit one of the big windows, and shattered through, gone.
Be sure. Evil has cockroach endurance. Be sure, be sure. The Champion in both hands, approach him cool, no hurry now, circle him. Step around the spatters on the floor. Gray-pink spatters, bits of bone and twists of hair. He can't be alive. Take nothing for granted.
Mitch peeled up the mask to see the face, but it wasn't a face anymore, and they were done now. They were done.
Chapter 68
In the summer that Anthony is three years old, they celebrate Mitch's thirty-second birthday with a backyard party.
Big Green owns three trucks now, and there are five employees besides Iggy Barnes. They all come with their wives and kids, and Iggy brings a wahine named Madelaine.
Holly has made good friends — as she always makes good friends — at the real-estate agency where she is second in sales so far this year.
Although Dorothy followed Anthony by just twelve months, they have not moved to a bigger house. Holly had been raised here; this house is her history. Besides, already they have made quite a history here together.
They will add a second story before there is a third child. And there will be a third.
Evil has been across this threshold, but the memory of it will not drive them from the place. Love scrubs the worst stains clean. Anyway, there can be no retreat in the face of evil, only resistance. And commitment.
Sandy Taggart comes, as well, with his wife, Jennifer, and their two daughters. He brings the day's newspaper, wondering if Mitch has seen the story, which he has not: Julian Campbell, between conviction and appeal, throat slit in prison — a contract hit suspected, but no inmate yet identified as the killer.
Although Anson is in a different prison from the one to which Campbell was sent, he will eventually hear about the hit. It will give him something to ponder as his attorneys work to stave off his own lethal injection.
Mitch's youngest sister, Portia, comes to the party all the way from Birmingham, Alabama, with her restaurateur husband Frank and their five children. Megan and Connie remain distant in more than one sense, but Mitch and Portia have grown close, and he entertains hope of finding a way to gather his other two sisters to him, in time.
Daniel and Kathy had produced five children because he said continuation of the species could not be left to the irrationalists. Materialists must breed as vigorously as believers or the world would go to Hell by way of
