"Because I'm still making the rules. She's chained to a pipe. I have the key. You stop just inside the kitchen."

The hallway seemed to recede from him the farther he followed it, but he knew the telescoping effect had to be psychological. He was frantic to see Holly.

He didn't look in any of the rooms he passed. Null might have been in one of them. It didn't matter.

When Mitch entered the kitchen, he saw her at once, and his heart swelled, and his mouth went dry. Everything that he had been through, every pain that he had suffered, every terrible thing that he had done was in that instant all worthwhile.

Chapter 66

Because the creep arrives in the kitchen to stand beside her during the last of his phone conversation, Holly hears him give the final directions.

She holds her breath, listening for footsteps. When she hears Mitch approaching, hot tears threaten, but she blinks them back.

A moment later Mitch enters the room. He says her name so tenderly. Her husband.

She has stood with her arms crossed over her breasts, her hands fisted in her armpits. Now she lowers her arms and stands with her hands fisted at her sides.

The creep, who has drawn a wicked-looking pistol, is intently focused on Mitch. "Arms straight out like a bird."

Mitch obeys, a white trash bag dangling from his right hand.

His clothes are filthy. His hair is windblown. His face has lost all color. He is beautiful.

The killer says, "Come slowly forward."

As instructed, Mitch approaches, and the creep tells him to stop fifteen feet away.

As Mitch halts, the killer says, "Put the bag on the floor."

Mitch lowers the bag to the dusty limestone. It settles but does not flop open.

Covering Mitch with the pistol, the killer says, "I want to see the money. Kneel in front of the bag."

Holly doesn't like to see Mitch kneeling. This is the position that executioners instruct their victims to take before the coup de grace.

She must act, but the time feels not quite right. If she makes her move too soon, the scheme might fail. Instinct tells her to wait, though waiting with Mitch on his knees is so hard.

"Show me the money," the killer says, and he has a two-hand grip on the pistol, finger tightened on the trigger.

Mitch opens the neck of the bag and withdraws a plastic-wrapped brick of cash. He tears off one end of the plastic, and riffles the hundred-dollar bills with his thumb.

"The bearer bonds?" the killer asks.

Mitch drops the cash into the sack.

The creep tenses, thrusting the pistol forward as Mitch reaches into the bag again, and he does not relax even when Mitch produces only a large envelope.

From the envelope, Mitch extracts half a dozen official-looking certificates. He holds one forward for the killer to read.

"All right. Put them back in the envelope."

Mitch obeys, still on his knees.

The creep says, "Mitch, if your wife had a chance for previously undreamed-of personal fulfillment, the opportunity for enlightenment, for transcendence, surely you would want her to follow that better destiny."

Bewildered by this turn, Mitch does not know what to say, but Holly does. The time has come.

She says, "I've been sent a sign, my future is New Mexico."

Raising her hands from her sides, opening her fists, she reveals her bloody wounds.

An involuntary cry escapes Mitch, the killer glances at Holly, and her stigmata drip for his astonishment.

The nail holes are not superficial, though they don't go all the way through her hands. She stabbed herself and worked the wounds with brutal determination.

The worst had been having to bite back every cry of pain. If he had heard her agony expressed, the killer would have come to see what she was doing.

At once, the wounds had bled too much. She had packed them with powdered plaster to stop the bleeding. Before the plaster worked, blood had dripped on the floor, but she had covered it with a quick redistribution of the thick dust.

With her hands fisted in her armpits, as Mitch entered the room, Holly had clawed the plugs of plaster from the wounds, tearing them open once more.

Blood flows now for the killer's fascination, and Holly says, "In Espanola, where your life will change, lives a woman named Rosa Gonzales with two white dogs."

With her left hand, she pulls down the neck of her sweater, revealing cleavage.

His gaze rises from her br**sts to her eyes.

She slips her right hand between her breasts, palms the nail, and fears not being able to hold it in her slippery fingers.

The killer glances at Mitch.

She grips the nail well enough, reveals it, and rams it into the killer's face, going for his eye, but instead pinning his mask to him, piercing the hollow of his cheek and ripping.

Screaming, tongue flailing on the nail, he reels back from her, and his pistol fires wildly, bullets thudding into walls.

She sees Mitch rising and moving fast, with a gun of his own.

Chapter 67

Mitch shouted, "Holly, move," and she was moving on the first syllable of Holly, separating herself from Jimmy Null as much as her chain allowed.

Point-blank, aiming abdomen, hitting chest, pulling down from the recoil, firing again, pulling down, firing, firing, he thought a couple of shots went wide, but saw three or four rounds tearing into the windbreaker, each roar so big booming through the big house.

Null reeled backward, off balance. His pistol had an extended magazine. It seemed to be fully automatic. Bullets stitched a wall, part of the ceiling.

Because he now had only a one-hand grip on the weapon, maybe the recoil tore it from him, maybe he lost all strength, but for whatever reason, it flew. The gun hit the wall, clattered to the limestone.

Driven backward by the impact of the .45s, rocked on his heels, Null staggered, dropped on his side, rolled onto his face.

When the echoes of the echoes of the gunfire faded, Mitch could hear Jimmy Null's ragged wheezing. Maybe that was how you breathed when you had a fatal chest wound.

Mitch wasn't proud of what he did next, didn't even take any savage delight in it. In fact he almost didn't do it, but he knew that almost would buy no dispensation when the time came to reckon for the way he lived his life.

He stepped over the wheezing man and shot him twice in the back. He would have shot him a third time, but he had expended all eleven rounds in the pistol.

Crouching defensively during the gunfire, Holly rose to meet Mitch as he turned to her.

"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 God.

Portia had balanced her father's five with five of her own, and raised them by traditional standards that did not involve a learning room.

On this birthday evening, they eat a feast at tables on the patio and lawn, and Anthony sits proudly on his special chair. Mitch built it for him to a design sketched by Holly, and she painted it a cheerful red.

"This chair," she had told Anthony, "is in memory of a boy who was six years old for fifty years and much loved for fifty-six years. If you ever think that you aren't loved, you will sit in this chair and know you are loved as much as that other Anthony was loved, as much as any boy ever has been loved."

Anthony, being three, had said, "Can I have ice cream?" After dinner, there is a portable dance floor on the lawn, and the band is not as woofy as the one at their wedding. No tambourines and no accordion.

Later, much later, when the band has departed and all the guests are gone, when Anthony and Dorothy are sound asleep on the back-porch glider, Mitch asks Holly to dance to the music of a radio, now that they have the entire floor to themselves. He holds her close but not too tight, for she is breakable. As they dance, husband and wife, she puts a hand to his face, as though after all this time she is still amazed that he brought her home to him. He kisses the scar in the palm of her hand, and then the scar in the other. Under a great casting of stars, in the moonlight, she is so lovely that words fail him, as they have so often failed him before. Although he knows her as well as he knows himself, she is as mysterious as she is lovely, an eternal depth in her eyes, but she is no more mysterious than are the stars and the moon and all things on the earth.