The Husband

Chapter 61

Mitch in the shuddering shade of the wind-tossed podocarpuses, squinting through windows, finally began to test the doors of the vehicles parked at the curb. When they weren't locked, he opened them and leaned inside.

If keys weren't in the ignition, they might be in a cup holder or tucked behind a sun visor. Each time that he didn't find keys in those places, either, he closed the door and moved on.

Born of desperation, his boldness nevertheless surprised him. Because a police car might turn one corner or another momentarily, however, caution rather than assurance would be his downfall.

He hoped that these residents were not people with a sense of community, that they had not joined the Neighborhood Watch program. Their police mentor would have coached them to notice and report suspicious specimens exactly like him.

For laid-back southern California, for low-crime Newport Beach, a depressing percentage of these people locked their parked cars. Their paranoia gradually began to piss him off.

When he had gone over two blocks, he saw ahead a Lexus parked in a driveway, the engine idling, the driver's door open. No one sat behind the wheel.

The garage door also stood open. He cautiously approached the car, but no one was in the garage, either. The driver had dashed back into the house for a forgotten item.

The Lexus would be reported stolen within minutes, but the cops wouldn't be looking for it immediately. There would be a process for reporting a stolen car; a process was part of a system, a system the work of a bureaucracy, the business of bureaucracy delay.

He might have a couple of hours before the plates were on a hot sheet. He needed no more time than two hours.

Because the car faced the street, he slipped behind the wheel, dropped the trash bag on the passenger's seat, pulled the door shut, and rolled at once out of the driveway, turning right, away from the boulevard and the gun shop.

At the corner, ignoring the stop sign, he turned right once more and went a third of a block before he heard a thin shaky voice in the backseat say, "What is your name, honey?"

An elderly man slumped in a corner. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, a hearing aid, and his pants just under his breasts. He appeared to be a hundred years old. Time had shrunken him, though not every part in proportion to every other.

"Oh, you're Debbie," the old man said. "Where are we going, Debbie?"

Crime led to more crime, and here were the wages of crime: certain destruction. Mitch himself had now become a kidnapper.

"Are we going to the pie store?" the old man inquired, a note of hope in his quavery voice.

Maybe some Alzheimer's was happening here.

"Yes," Mitch said, "we're going to the pie store," and he turned right again at the next corner.

"I like pie."

"Everybody likes pie," Mitch agreed.

If his heart had not been knocking hard enough to hurt, if his wife's life had not depended on his remaining free, if he had not expected to encounter roving police at any moment, and if he had not expected them to shoot first and discuss the fine points of his civil rights later, he might have found this amusing. But it wasn't amusing; it was surreal.

"You aren't Debbie," the old man said. "I'm Norman, but you're not Debbie."

"No. You're right. I'm not."

"Who are you?"

"I'm just a guy who made a mistake."

Norman thought about that until Mitch turned right at the third corner, and then he said, "You're gonna hurt me. That's what you're gonna do."

The fear in the old man's voice inspired pity. "No, no. Nobody is gonna hurt you."

"You're gonna hurt me, you're a bad man."

"No, I just made a mistake. I'm taking you right back home," Mitch assured him.

"Where are we? This isn't home. We're nowhere near home." The voice, to this point wispy, suddenly gained volume and shrillness. "You're a bad sonofabitch!"

"Don't get yourself worked up. Please don't." Mitch felt sorry for the old man, responsible for him. "We're almost there. You'll be home in a minute."

"You're a bad sonofabitch! You're a bad sonofabitch!"

At the fourth corner, Mitch turned right, onto the street where he'd stolen the car.

"YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!"

In the desiccated depths of that time-ravaged body, Norman found the voice of a bellowing youth.

"YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH!"

"Please, Norman. You're gonna give yourself a heart attack."

He had hoped to be able to pull the car into the driveway and leave it where he'd found it, with nobody the wiser. But a woman had come out of the house into the street. She spotted him turning the corner.

She looked terrified. She must have thought that Norman had gotten behind the wheel.

"YOU'RE A BAD SONOFABITCH, A BAD, BAD SONOFABITCH!"

Mitch stopped in the street near the woman, put the car in park, tramped on the emergency brake, grabbed the trash bag, and got out, leaving the door open behind him.

Fortysomething, slightly stout, she was an attractive woman with Rod Stewart hair that a beautician had painstakingly streaked with blond highlights. She wore a business suit and heels too high to be sensible for a trip to the pie store.

"Are you Debbie?" Mitch asked.

Bewildered, she said, "Am I Debbie?"

Maybe there was no Debbie.

Norman still shrieked in the car, and Mitch said, "I'm so sorry. Big mistake."

He walked away from her, toward the first of the four corners around which he had driven Norman, and heard her say "Grandpapa? Are you all right, Grandpapa?"

When he reached the stop sign, he turned and saw the woman leaning in the car, comforting the old man.

Mitch rounded the corner and hurried out of her line of sight. Not running. Walking briskly.

A block later, as he reached the next corner, a horn blared behind him. The woman was pursuing him in the Lexus.

He could see her through the windshield: one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cell phone. She was not calling her sister in Omaha. She was not calling for a time check. She was calling 911.

Chapter 62

Leaning into the resisting wind, Mitch hurried along the sidewalk, and miraculously escaped being stung when a violent gust shook a cloud of bees out of a tree nest.

The determined woman in the Lexus stayed far enough back that she could hang a U-turn and elude him if he changed directions and sprinted toward her, but she maintained sight of him. He started to run, and she accelerated to match his pace.

Evidently she intended to keep him located until the police arrived. Mitch admired her guts even though he wanted to shoot out her tires.

The cops would be here soon. Having found his Honda, they knew that he was in the area. The attempted theft of a Lexus just a few blocks from the gun shop would ring all their bells.

The car horn blared, blared again, and then relentlessly. She hoped to alert her neighbors to the presence of a criminal in their midst. The over-the-top urgency of the horn blasts suggested Osama bin Laden was loose on the street.

Mitch left the sidewalk, crossed a yard, opened a gate, and hurried around the side of a house, hoping he wouldn't find a pit bull in the backyard. No doubt most pit bulls were as nice as nuns, but considering the way his luck was cutting, he wouldn't run into Sister Pit but instead would stumble over a demon dog.

The backyard proved to be shallow, encircled by a seven-foot cedar fence with pointed staves. He didn't see a gate. After tying the twisted neck of the trash bag to his belt, he climbed into a coral tree, crossed the fence on a limb, and dropped into an alley.

Police would expect him to prefer these service alleys to streets, so he couldn't use them.

He passed through a vacant lot, sheltered by the weeping boughs of long-untrimmed California pepper trees, which whirled and flounced like the many-layered skirts of eighteenth-century dancers in a waltz.

As he was crossing the next street in midblock, a police car swept through the intersection to the east. The shriek of its brakes told him that he had been seen.

Across a yard, over a fence, across an alley, through a gate, across a yard, across another street, very fast now, the plastic bag slapping against his leg. He worried that it would split, spilling bricks of hundred-dollar bills.

The last line of houses backed up to a small canyon, about two hundred feet deep and three hundred wide. He scaled a wrought-iron fence and was at once on a steep slope of loose eroded soil. Gravity and sliding earth carried him down.

Like a surfer chasing bliss along the treacherous face of a fully macking monolith, he tried to stay upright, but the sandy earth proved to be not as accommodating as the sea. His feet went out from under him, and on his back he slid the last ten yards, raising a wake of white dust, then thrashed feetfirst through a sudden wall of tall grass and taller weeds.

He came to a stop under a canopy of branches. From high above, the floor of the canyon had appeared to be choked with greenery, but Mitch hadn't expected large trees. Yet in addition to some of the scrub trees and brush that he had envisioned, he found an eclectic forest.

California buckeyes were garlanded with fragrant white flowers. Bristling windmill palms thrived with California laurels and black myrobalan plums. Many of the trees were gnarled and twisted and rough, junk specimens, as though the urban-canyon soil fed mutagens to their roots, but there were acer japonicums and Tasmanian snow gums that he would have been pleased to use in any high-end landscaping job.

A few rats scattered on his arrival, and a snake slithered away through the shadows. Maybe a rattlesnake. He couldn't be sure.

While he remained in the cover of the trees, no one could see him from the canyon rim. He no longer was at risk of immediate apprehension.

So many branches of different trees interlaced that even the raging wind could not peel back the canopy and let the sun shine in directly. The light was green and watery. Shadows trembled, swayed like sea anemones.

A shallow stream slipped through the canyon, no surprise this recently after the rainy season. The water table might be so close to the surface here that a small artesian well maintained the flow all year.

He untied the plastic trash-can liner from his belt and examined it. The bag had been punctured in three places and had sustained a one-inch tear, but nothing seemed to have fallen out of it.

Mitch fashioned a loose temporary knot in the neck of the bag and carried it against his body, in the crook of his left arm.

As he remembered the lay of the land, the canyon narrowed and the floor rose dramatically toward the west. The purling water eased lazily from that direction, and he paralleled it at a faster pace.

A damp carpet of dead leaves cushioned his step. The pleasant melange of moist earth, wet leaves, and sporing toadstools gave weight to the air.

Although the population of Orange County exceeded three million, the bottom of the canyon felt so remote that he might have been miles from civilization. Until he heard the helicopter.

He was surprised they were up in this wind.

Judging by sound alone, the chopper crossed the canyon directly over Mitch's head. It went north and circled the neighborhood through which he'd made his run, swelling louder, fading, then louder again.

They were searching for him from the air, but in the wrong place. They didn't know he'd descended into the canyon.

He kept moving—but then halted and cried out softly in surprise when Anson's phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket, relieved that he hadn't lost or damaged it.

"This is Mitch."

Jimmy Null said, "Are you feeling hopeful?"

"Yes. Let me talk to Holly."

"Not this time. You'll see her soon. I'm moving the meet from three to two o'clock."

"You can't do that."

"I just did it."

"What time is it now?"

"One-thirty," Jimmy Null said.

"Hey, no, I can't make two o'clock."

"Why not? Anson's place is only minutes from the Turnbridge house."

"I'm not at Anson's place."

"Where are you, what are you doing?" Null asked.

Feet planted wide in wet leaves, Mitch said, "Driving around, passing time."

"That's stupid. You should've stayed at his place, been ready."

"Make it two-thirty. I've got the money right here. A million four. I've got it with me."

"Let me tell you something."

Mitch waited, and when Null didn't go on, he said, "What? Tell me what?"

"About the money. Let me tell you something about the money."

"All right."

"I don't live for money. I've got some money. There are things that mean more to me than money."

Something was wrong. Mitch had felt it before, when talking to Holly, when she had sounded constrained and had not told him that she loved him.

"Listen, I've come so far, we've come so far, it's only right we finish this."

"Two o'clock," Null said. "That's the new time. You aren't where you need to be at two sharp, it's over. No second chance."

"All right."

"Two o'clock."

"All right."

Jimmy Null terminated the call. Mitch ran.

Chapter 63

Chained to the gas pipe, Holly knows what she must do, what she will do, and therefore she can pass her time only by worrying about all the ways things could go wrong or by marveling at what she can see of the uncompleted mansion.

Thomas Turnbridge would have had one fantastic kitchen if he had lived. When all the equipment had been installed, a high-end caterer with platoons of staff could have cooked and served from here a sit-down dinner for six hundred on the terraces.

Turnbridge had been a dot-com billionaire. The company that he founded—and that made him rich—produced no product, but it had been on the cutting edge of advertising applications for the Internet.

By the time Forbes estimated Turnbridge's net worth at three billion, he was buying homes on a dramatic Pacific-view bluff in an established neighborhood. He bought nine, side by side, by paying more than twice the going price. He spent over sixty million dollars on the houses and tore them down to make a single three-acre estate, a parcel with few if any equals on the southern California coast.

A major architectural firm committed a team of thirty to the design of a three-level house encompassing eighty-five thousand square feet, a figure that excluded the massive subterranean garages and mechanical plant. It was to be in the style of an Alberto Pinto-designed residence in Brazil.