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.
Such elements as interior-exterior waterfalls, an underground shooting range, and an indoor ice-skating rink required heroic work of the structural, systems, and soil engineers. Two years were required for plans. During the first two years of construction, the builder worked solely on the foundation and subterranean spaces.
No budget. Turnbridge spent whatever was required.
Exquisite marbles and granites were purchased in matched lots. The exterior of the house would be clad in French limestone; sixty seamless limestone columns, from plinth to abacus, were fabricated at a cost of seventy thousand dollars each.
Turnbridge had been as passionately committed to the company he had created as to the house he was building. He believed it would become one of the ten largest corporations in the world.
He believed this even after a rapidly evolving Internet exposed flaws in his business model. From the start, he sold his shares only to finance lifestyle, not to broaden investments. When his company's stock price fell, he borrowed to buy more shares at market. The price fell further, and he leveraged more purchases.
When the share price never recovered and the company imploded, Turnbridge was ruined. Construction of the house came to a halt.
Pursued by creditors, investors, and an angry ex-wife, Thomas Turnbridge came home to his unfinished house, sat in a folding chair on the master-bedroom balcony, and with a 240-degree ocean-and-city-lights view to enchant him, washed down an overdose of barbiturates with an icy bottle of Dom Perignon. Carrion birds found him a day before his ex-wife did. Although the three-acre coastal property is a plum, it has not sold after Turnbridge's death. A snarl of lawsuits entangle it. The actual value of the land now appraises at the sixty million dollars that Turnbridge overpaid for it, which allows only a small pool of potential buyers.
To complete this project as specified in the plans, a buyer will need to spend fifty million on the finish work, so he better like the style. If he demos existing construction and starts again, he needs to be prepared to spend five million on top of the sixty million for the land, because he will be dealing with steel-and-concrete construction meant to ride out an 8.2 quake with no damage.
As a hope-to-be real-estate agent, Holly doesn't dream of getting the commission for the Turnbridge house. She will be content selling properties in middle-class neighborhoods to people who are thrilled to have their own homes.
In fact, if she could trade her modest real-estate dream for a guarantee that she and Mitch would survive the ransom exchange, she would be content to remain a secretary. She is a good secretary and a good wife; she will try hard to be a good mom, too, and she will be happy with that, with life, with love.
But no such deal can be made; her fate remains in her own hands, literally and figuratively. She will have to act when the time comes for action. She has a plan. She is ready for the risk, the pain, the blood.
The creep returns. He has put on a gray windbreaker and a pair of thin, supple gloves.
She is sitting on the floor when he enters, but she gets to her feet as he approaches her.
Violating the concept of personal space, he stands as close to Holly as a man would stand just before taking her in his arms to dance.
"In Duvijio and Eloisa Pacheco's house in Rio Lucio, there are two red wooden chairs in the living room, railback chairs with carved cape tops."