Читать книгу The Husband - Dean Koontz - Страница 12
ОглавлениеHe did not have to tread in blood to reach the telephone. He picked up the handset on the third ring, and heard his haunted voice say, “Yeah?”
“It’s me, baby. They’re listening.”
“Holly. What’ve they done to you?”
“I’m all right,” she said, and she sounded strong, but she did not sound all right.
“I’m in the kitchen,” he said.
“I know.”
“The blood—”
“I know. Don’t think about that now. Mitch, they said we have one minute to talk, just one minute.”
He grasped her implication: One minute, and maybe never again.
His legs would not support him. Turning a chair away from the dinette table, collapsing into it, he said, “I’m so damn sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. Don’t beat yourself up.”
“Who are these freaks, are they deranged, what?”
“They’re vicious creeps, but they’re not crazy. They seem… professional. I don’t know. But I want you to make me a promise—”
“I’m dyin’ here.”
“Listen, baby. I want your promise. If anything happens to me—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“If anything happens to me,” she insisted, “promise you’ll keep it together.”
“I don’t want to think about that.”
“You keep it together, damn it. You keep it together and have a life.”
“You’re my life.”
“You keep it together, mower jockey, or I’m going to be way pissed.”
“I’ll do what they want. I’ll get you back.”
“If you don’t keep it together, I’ll haunt your ass, Rafferty. It’ll be like that Poltergeist movie cubed.”
“God, I love you,” he said.
“I know. I love you. I want to hold you.”
“I love you so much.”
She didn’t reply.
“Holly?”
The silence electrified him, brought him up from the chair.
“Holly? You hear me?”
“I hear you, mower jockey,” said the kidnapper to whom he had spoken previously.
“You sonofabitch.”
“I understand your anger—”
“You piece of garbage.”
“—but I don’t have much patience for it.”
“If you hurt her—”
“I already have hurt her. And if you don’t pull this off, I’ll butcher the bitch like a side of beef.”
An acute awareness of his helplessness brought Mitch crashing down from anger to humility.
“Please. Don’t hurt her again. Don’t.”
“Chill, Rafferty. You just chill while I explain a few things.”
“Okay. All right. I need things explained. I’m lost here.”
Again his legs felt weak. Instead of sitting in the chair, he brushed a broken dish aside with one foot and knelt on the floor. For some reason, he felt more comfortable on his knees than in the chair.
“About the blood,” the kidnapper said. “I slapped her down when she tried to fight back, but I didn’t cut her.”
“All the blood…”
“That’s what I’m telling you. We put a tourniquet on her arm until a vein popped up, stuck a needle in it, and drew four vials just like your doctor does when you get a physical.”
Mitch leaned his forehead against the oven door. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate.
“We smeared blood on her hands and made those prints. Spattered some on the counters, cabinets. Dripped it on the floor. It’s stage setting, Rafferty. So it looks like she was murdered there.”
Mitch was the turtle, just leaving the START line, and this guy on the phone was the rabbit, already halfway through the marathon. Mitch couldn’t get up to speed. “Staged? Why?”
“If you lose your nerve and go to the cops, they’ll never buy the kidnapping story. They’ll see that kitchen and think you croaked her.”
“I didn’t tell them anything.”
“I know.”
“What you did to the dogwalker—I knew you had nothing to lose. I knew I couldn’t mess with you.”
“This is just a little extra insurance,” the kidnapper said. “We like insurance. There’s a butcher knife missing from the rack there in your kitchen.”
Mitch didn’t bother to confirm the claim.
“We wrapped it with one of your T-shirts and a pair of your blue jeans. The clothes are stained with Holly’s blood.”
They were professional, all right, just like she had said.
“That package is hidden on your property,” the kidnapper continued. “You couldn’t easily find it, but police dogs will.”
“I get the picture.”
“I knew you would. You aren’t stupid. That’s why we’ve bought ourselves so much insurance.”
“What now? Make sense of this whole thing for me.”
“Not yet. Right now you’re very emotional, Mitch. That’s not good. When you’re not in control of your emotions, you’re likely to make a mistake.”
“I’m solid,” Mitch assured him, although his heart still stormed and his blood thundered in his ears.
“You don’t have any room for a mistake, Mitch. Not one. So I want you to chill, like I said. When you’ve got your head straight, then we’ll discuss the situation. I’ll call you at six o’clock.”
Though remaining on his knees, Mitch opened his eyes, checked his watch. “That’s over two and a half hours.”
“You’re still in your work clothes. You’re dirty. Take a nice hot shower. You’ll feel better.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“Anyway, you’ll need to be more presentable. Shower, change, and then leave the house, go somewhere, anywhere. Just be sure your cell phone is fully charged.”
“I’d rather wait here.”
“That’s no good, Mitch. The house is filled with memories of Holly, everywhere you look. Your nerves will be rubbed raw. I need you to be less emotional.”
“Yeah. All right.”
“One more thing. I want you to listen to this….”
Mitch thought they were going to twist a scream of pain from Holly again, to emphasize how powerless he was to protect her. He said, “Don’t.”
Instead of Holly, he heard two taped voices, clear against a faint background hiss. The first voice was his own:
“I’ve never seen a man murdered before.”
“You don’t get used to it.”
“I guess not.”
“It’s worse when it’s a woman… a woman or a child.”
The second voice belonged to Detective Taggart.
The kidnapper said, “If you had spilled your guts to him, Mitch, Holly would be dead now.”
In the dark smoky glass of the oven door, he saw the reflection of a face that seemed to be looking out at him from a window in Hell.
“Taggart’s one of you.”
“Maybe he is. Maybe not. You should just assume that everybody is one of us, Mitch. That’ll be safer for you, and a lot safer for Holly. Everybody is one of us.”
They had built a box around him. Now they were putting on the lid.
“Mitch, I don’t want to leave you on such a dark note. I want to put you at ease about something. I want you to know that we won’t touch her.”
“You hit her.”
“I’ll hit her again if she doesn’t do what she’s told. But we won’t touch her. We aren’t rapists, Mitch.”
“Why would I believe you?”
“Obviously, I’m handling you, Mitch. Manipulating, finessing. And obviously there is a lot of stuff I won’t tell you—”
“You’re killers, but not rapists?”
“The point is that everything I have told you has been true. You think back over our relationship, and you’ll see I’ve been truthful and I’ve kept my word.”
Mitch wanted to kill him. Never before had he felt an urge to do serious violence to another human being, but he wanted to destroy this man.
He was clutching the phone so fiercely that his hand ached. He was not able to relax his grip.
“I’ve had a lot of experience working through surrogates, Mitch. You’re an instrument to me, a valuable tool, a sensitive machine.”
“Machine.”
“Hang with me a minute, okay? It makes no sense to abuse a valuable and sensitive machine. I wouldn’t buy a Ferrari and then never change the oil, never lubricate it.”
“At least I’m a Ferrari.”
“When I’m your handler, Mitch, you won’t be pressed beyond your limits. I would expect very high performance from a Ferrari, but I wouldn’t expect to be able to drive it through a brick wall.”
“I feel like I’ve already been through a brick wall.”
“You’re tougher than you think. But in the interest of getting the best performance out of you, I want you to know we’ll treat Holly with respect. If you do everything we want, then she’ll come back to you alive… and untouched.”
Holly was not weak. She would not easily be mentally broken by physical abuse. But rape was more than a violation of the body. Rape rended the mind, the heart, the spirit.
Her captor might have raised the issue with the sincere intent of putting some of Mitch’s fears to rest. But the sonofabitch had also raised it as a warning.
Mitch said, “I still don’t think you’ve answered the question. Why should I believe you?”
“Because you have to.”
That was an inescapable truth.
“You have to, Mitch. Otherwise, you might as well consider her dead right now.”
The kidnapper terminated the call.
For a while, Mitch’s sense of powerlessness kept him on his knees.
Eventually a recording, a woman with the vaguely patronizing tone of a nursery-school teacher not fully comfortable with children, requested that he hang up the phone. He put the handset on the floor instead, and a continuous beeping urged him to comply with the operator’s suggestion.
Remaining on his knees, he rested his forehead against the oven door once more, and closed his eyes.
His mind was in tumult. Images of Holly, tornadoes of memories, tormented him, fragmented and spinning, good memories, sweet, but they tormented because they might be all that he would ever have of her. Fear and anger. Regret and sorrow. He had never known loss. His life had not prepared him for loss.
He strove to clear his mind because he sensed that there was something he could do for Holly right here, now, if only he could quiet his fear and be calm, and think. He didn’t have to wait for orders from her kidnappers. He could do something important for her now. He could take action on her behalf. He could do something for Holly.
Humbled against the hard terra-cotta tiles, his knees began to ache. This physical discomfort gradually cleared his mind. Thoughts no longer blew through him like shatters of debris, but drifted as fallen leaves drift on a placid river.
He could do something meaningful for Holly, and the awareness of the thing that he could do was right below the surface, floating just beneath his questing reflection. The hard floor was unforgiving, and he began to feel as if he were kneeling on broken glass. He could do something for Holly. The answer eluded him. Something. His knees ached. He tried to ignore the pain, but then he got to his feet. The pending insight receded. He returned the telephone handset to its cradle. He would have to wait for the next call. He had never before felt so useless.
