She envisions a child of three — sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy — at play in their backyard, and laughing. She envisions it more vividly than she has envisioned anything before, in the hope that she can make it come to pass.
She tells herself that she will be strong, that she will not cry. She does not sob or otherwise disturb the stillness, but sometimes tears come.
To shut off that hot flow, she works more aggressively at the nail, the stubborn damn nail, in the blinding dark.
After a long period of silence, she hears a solid thud with a hollow metallic quality: ca-chunk.
Alert, wary, she waits, but the thud does not repeat. No other noise follows it.
The sound is tantalizingly familiar. A mundane noise — and yet her instinct tells her that her fate hangs on that ca-chunk.
She is able to replay the sound in her memory, but she is not at first able to connect it to a cause.
After a while, Holly begins to suspect that the sound was imagined rather than real. More accurately, that it occurred in her head, not beyond the walls of this room. This is a peculiar notion, but it persists.
Then she recognizes the source, something she has heard perhaps hundreds of times, and although it has no ominous associations for her, she is chilled. The ca-chunk is the sound of a lid slamming shut on a car trunk.
Just the lid slamming shut on a car trunk, whether imagined or actually heard, should not cause crystals of creeping frost to form in the hollows of her bones. She sits very erect, the nail forgotten for the moment, breathing not at all, then shallowly, quietly.
Part Two
Would You Die for Love?
Would You Kill?
Chapter 29
In the late 1940s, if you owned a car like a Chrysler Windsor, you knew the engine was big because it made a big sound. It had the throb of a bull's heart, low fierce snort and heavy stamp of hooves.
The war was over, you were a survivor, large swaths of Europe lay in ruin, but the homeland was untouched, and you wanted to feel alive. You didn't want a sound-proofed engine compartment. You didn't want noise-control technology. You wanted power, balanced weight, and speed.
The car's dark trunk reverberated with engine knock and rumble transferred along the drive shaft, through the body and the frame. The thrum and stutter of road noise rose and fell in direct relation to the tempo of the turning wheels.
Mitch smelled faint traces of exhaust gases, perhaps from a leak in the muffler, but he was in no danger of being overcome by carbon monoxide. Stronger were the rubbery scent of the mat on which he lay and the acidity of his own fear sweat.
Although as dark as the chamber in his parents' house, this mobile learning room otherwise failed to impose sensory deprivation. Yet one of the greatest lessons of his life was being driven home to him mile by mile.
His father says there is no tao, no natural law we are born to understand. In his materialist view, we should conduct ourselves not according to any code, only according to self-interest.
Rationality is always in a man's self-interest, Daniel says. Therefore, any act that is rational is right and good and
admirable.
Evil does not exist in Daniel's philosophy. Stealing, rape, murder of the innocent — these and other crimes are merely irrational because they put he who commits them in jeopardy of his freedom.
Daniel does acknowledge that the degree of irrationality depends on the criminal's chances of escaping punishment. Therefore, those irrational acts that succeed and have only positive consequences for the perpetrator may be right and admirable, if not good for society.
Thieves, rapists, murderers, and their ilk might benefit from therapy and rehabilitation, or they might not. In either case, Daniel says, they are not evil; they are recovering — or irredeemable — irrationalists, only that and nothing more.
Mitch had thought that these teachings had not penetrated him, that he'd not been singed by the fire of a Daniel Rafferty education. But fire produced fumes; he'd been smoked in his father's fanaticism so long that some of what steeped into him had stayed.
He could see, but he had been blind. He could hear, but he had been deaf.
This day, this night, Mitch had come face-to-face with evil. It was as real as stone.
Although an irrational man should be met with compassion and therapy, an evil man was owed nothing more or less than resistance and retribution, the fury of a righteous justice.
In Julian Campbell's library, when the gunman had produced the handcuffs, Mitch had at once held out his hands. He had not waited for instructions.
If he had not appeared worn down, had not seemed meek and resigned to his fate, they might have cuffed his hands behind him. Reaching the revolver in his ankle holster would have been more difficult; using it with accuracy would have been impossible.
Campbell had even commented on Mitch's weariness, by which he had meant primarily the weariness of mind and heart.
They thought they knew the kind of man he was, and maybe they did. But they didn't know the kind of man he could become when the life of his wife was in the balance.
Amused by his lack of familiarity with the pistol that they had confiscated, they had not imagined he would have a second weapon. Not only good men are disadvantaged by their expectations.
Mitch pulled up the leg of his jeans and retrieved the revolver. He unstrapped the holster and discarded it.
Earlier, he had examined the weapon and had not found a safety. In movies, only some pistols had safeties, never revolvers.
If he lived through the next two days and got Holly back alive, he would never again allow himself to be put in a position where he had to rely on Tinseltown's grasp of reality for his or his family's survival.
When he had first swung open the cylinder, he had discovered five rounds in five chambers, where he expected six.
He would have to score two hits out of five rounds. Direct hits, not just wing shots.
Perhaps one of the gunmen would open the trunk. It would be better if the two were there, giving him the advantage of surprise with both.
Both would have their weapons drawn — or only one. If one, Mitch must be quick enough to target his armed adversary first.
A peaceable man, planning violence, was plagued by thoughts that were not helpfuclass="underline" As a teenager, cursed by the explosions of acne that had left his face a moonscape, the scarred gunman must have suffered much humiliation.
Sympathy for the devil was a kind of masochism at best, a death wish at worst.
For a while, rocking to the rhythms of road and rubber, and of internal combustion, Mitch tried to imagine all the ways that the violence might go down when the trunk lid went up. Then he tried not to imagine.
According to his radiant watch, they traveled more than half an hour and then, slowing, changed from blacktop to an unpaved road. Small stones rattled through the undercarriage, rapped hard against the floor pan.
He smelled dust and licked the alkaline taste of it from his lips, but the air never became foul enough to choke him.
After twelve minutes at an easy speed, on the dirt road, the car came slowly to a stop. The engine idled for half a minute, and then the driver switched it off.
After forty-five minutes of drone and drum, the silence was like a sudden deafness.
One door opened, then the other. They were coming.
Facing the back of the car, Mitch splayed his legs, bracing his feet in opposite corners of the space. He could not sit erect until the lid raised, but he waited with his back partly off the floor of the trunk, as if in the middle of doing a series of stomach crunches at the gym.