The Husband by Dean Koontz Page B

felt deceived, watched, mocked. He had been overcome by an instinctive sense that a greater truth waited in that loft to be discovered, that it hid from him in plain sight.
    He had been shaken by the thought that he saw and yet was blind, that he heard and yet was deaf.
    Now the mocking man on the telephone:
Your eyes are wide open, Mitch, but you don’t see.
    Uncanny
seemed not to be too strong a word. He felt that the kidnappers could not only watch him and listen to him anywhere, at any time, but also that they could pore through his thoughts.
    He reached for the pistol on the passenger’s seat. No immediate threat loomed, but he felt safer holding the gun.
    “Are you with me, Mitch?”
    “I’m listening.”
    “I’ll call you again at seven-thirty—”
    “More waiting?
Why?
” Impatience gnawed at him, and he could not cage it, though he knew the danger of the infection proceeding to a state of foaming recklessness.
“Let’s get on with this.”
    “Easy, Mitch. I was about to tell you what to do next when you interrupted.”
    “Then, damn it,
tell
me.”
    “A good altar boy knows the ritual, the litanies. A good altar boy responds, but he doesn’t interrupt. If you interrupt again, I’ll make you wait until
eight
-thirty.”
    Mitch got a leash on his impatience. He took a deep breath, let it slowly out, and said, “I understand.”
    “Good. So when I hang up, you’ll drive to Newport Beach, to your brother’s house.”
    Surprised, he said, “To Anson’s place?”
    “You’ll wait with him for the seven-thirty call.”
    “Why does my brother have to be involved in this?”
    “You can’t do alone what has to be done,” said the kidnapper.
    “But what has to be done? You haven’t told me.”
    “We will. Soon.”
    “If it takes two men, the other doesn’t have to be him. I don’t want Anson dragged into this.”
    “Think about it, Mitch. Who better than your brother? He loves you, right? He won’t want your wife to be cut to pieces like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”
    Throughout their beleaguered childhood, Anson had been the reliable rope that kept Mitch tethered to a mooring. Always it was Anson who raised the sails of hope when there seemed to be no wind to fill them.
    To his brother, he owed the peace of mind and the happiness that eventually he had found when at last free of his parents, the lightness of spirit that had made it possible for him to win Holly as a wife.
    “You’ve set me up,” Mitch said. “If whatever you want me to do goes wrong, you’ve set me up to make it look as if I killed my wife.”
    “The noose is even tighter than you realize, Mitch.”
    They might be wondering about John Knox, but they didn’t know that he was dead in the trunk of the Honda. A dead conspirator was
some
proof of the story Mitch could tell the authorities.
    Or was it? He had not considered all the ways that the police might interpret Knox’s death, perhaps most of them more incriminating than exculpatory.
    “My point,” Mitch said, “is that you’ll do the same to Anson. You’ll wrap him in chains of circumstantial evidence to keep him cooperative. It’s how you work.”
    “None of that will matter if the two of you do what we want, and you get her back.”
    “But it isn’t fair,” Mitch protested, and realized that he must in fact sound as ingenuous and credulous as an altar boy.
    The kidnapper laughed. “And by contrast, you feel we’ve dealt fairly with
you
? Is that it?”
    Clenched around the pistol, his hand had grown cold and moist.
    “Would you rather we spared your brother and partnered you with Iggy Barnes?”
    “Yes,” Mitch said, and was at once embarrassed to have been so quick to sacrifice an innocent friend to save a loved one.
    “And that would be fair to Mr. Barnes?”
    Mitch’s father believed that shame had no social usefulness, that it was a signature of the superstitious mind, and that a person of reason, living a rational life, must be free of it. He