Intensity Read online

  The one with the phone said, “She gets up, punch her. You want to lose some teeth, honey?”

  She was with two men. One of them had hit her. Hit her.

  Mitch couldn’t get his mind around the situation. Reality suddenly seemed as slippery as the narrative of a nightmare.

  A meth-crazed iguana was more real than this.

  Near the house, Iggy planted impatiens. Sweating, red from the sun, as solid as ever.

  “That’s better, honey. That’s a good girl.”

  Mitch couldn’t draw breath. A great weight pressed on his lungs. He tried to speak but couldn’t find his voice, didn’t know what to say. Here in bright sun, he felt casketed, buried alive.

  “We have your wife,” said the guy on the phone.

  Mitch heard himself ask, “Why?”

  “Why do you think, asshole?”

  Mitch didn’t know why. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to reason through to an answer because every possible answer would be a horror.

  “I’m planting flowers.”

  “What’s wrong with you, Rafferty?”

  “That’s what I do. Plant flowers. Repair sprinklers.”

  “Are you buzzed or something?”

  “I’m just a gardener.”

  “So we have your wife. You get her back for two million cash.”

  Mitch knew it wasn’t a joke. If it was a joke, Holly would have to be in on it, but her sense of humor was not cruel.

  “You’ve made a mistake.”

  “You hear what I said? Two million.”

  “Man, you aren’t listening. I’m a gardener.”

  “We know.”

  “I have like eleven thousand bucks in the bank.”

  “We know.”

  Brimming with fear and confusion, Mitch had no room for anger. Compelled to clarify, perhaps more for himself than for the caller, he said, “I just run a little two-man operation.”

  “You’ve got until midnight Wednesday. Sixty hours. We’ll be in touch about the details.”

  Mitch was sweating. “This is nuts. Where would I get two million bucks?”

  “You’ll find a way.”

  The stranger’s voice was hard, implacable. In a movie, Death might sound like this.

  “It isn’t possible,” Mitch said.

  “You want to hear her scream again?”

  “No. Don’t.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really love her?”

  “She’s everything to me.”

  How peculiar, that he should be sweating yet feel so cold.

  “If she’s everything to you,” said the stranger, “then you’ll find a way.”

  “There isn’t a way.”

  “If you go to the cops, we’ll cut her fingers off one by one, and cauterize them as we go. We’ll cut her tongue out. And her eyes. Then we’ll leave her alone to die as fast or slow as she wants.”

  The stranger spoke without menace, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were not making a threat but were instead merely explaining the details of his business model.

  Mitchell Rafferty had no experience of such men. He might as well have been talking to a visitor from the far end of the galaxy.

  He could not speak because suddenly it seemed that he might so easily, unwittingly say the wrong thing and ensure Holly’s death sooner than later.

  The kidnapper said, “Just so you’ll know we’re serious…”

  After a silence, Mitch asked, “What?”

  “See that guy across the street?”

  Mitch turned and saw a single pedestrian, the man walking the slow dog. They had progressed half a block.

  The sunny day had a porcelain glaze. Rifle fire shattered the stillness, and the dogwalker went down, shot in the head.

  “Midnight Wednesday,” said the man on the phone. “We’re damn serious.”

  chapter 2

  THE DOG STOOD AS IF ON POINT: ONE FOREPAW raised, tail extended but motionless, nose lifted to seek a scent.

  In truth, the golden retriever had not spotted the shooter. It halted in midstep, startled by its master’s collapse, frozen by confusion.

  Directly across the street from the dog, Mitch likewise stood paralyzed. The kidnapper terminated the call, but Mitch still held the cell phone to his ear.

  Superstition promised that as long as the street remained still, as long as neither he nor the dog moved, the violence might be undone and time rewound, the bullet recalled to the barrel.

  Reason trumped magical thinking. He crossed the street, first haltingly, then at a run.

  If the fallen man was wounded, something might be done to save him.

  As Mitch approached, the dog favored him with a single wag of its tail.

  A glance at the victim dispelled any hope that first aid might sustain him until paramedics arrived. A significant portion of his skull was gone.

  Having no familiarity with real violence, only with the edited-analyzed-excused-and-defanged variety provided by TV news, and with the cartoon violence in movies, Mitch was rendered impotent by this horror. More than fear, shock immobilized him.

  More than shock, a sudden awareness of previously unsensed dimensions transfixed him. He was akin to a rat in a sealed maze, for the first time looking up from the familiar passageways and seeing a world beyond the glass lid, forms and figures, mysterious movement.

  Lying on the sidewalk near its master, the golden retriever trembled, whimpered.

  Mitch sensed that he was in the company of someone other than the dog, and felt watched, but more than watched. Studied. Attended. Pursued.

  His heart was a thundering herd, hooves on stone.

  He surveyed the day but saw no gunman. The rifle could have been fired from any house, from any rooftop or window, or from behind a parked car.

  Anyway, the presence he sensed was not that of the shooter. He did not feel watched from a distance, but from an intimate vantage point. He felt as if someone loomed over him.

  Hardly more than half a minute had passed since the dogwalker had been killed.

  The crack of the rifle had not brought anyone out of any of the beautiful houses. In this neighborhood, a gunshot would be perceived as a slammed door, dismissed even as it echoed.

  Across the street, at the client’s house, Iggy Barnes had risen from his knees to his feet. He didn’t appear to be alarmed, merely puzzled, as if he, too, had heard a door and didn’t understand the meaning of the fallen man, the grieving dog.

  Midnight Wednesday. Sixty hours. Time on fire, minutes burning. Mitch couldn’t afford to let hours turn to ashes while he was tied up with a police investigation.

  On the sidewalk, a column of marching ants changed course, crawling toward the feast within the cratered skull.

  In a mostly clear sky, a rare cloud drifted across the sun. The day paled. Shadows faded.

  Chilled, Mitch turned from the corpse, stepped off the curb, halted.

  He and Iggy couldn’t just load the unplanted impatiens into the truck and drive away. They might not be able to do so before someone came along and saw the dead man. Their indifference to the victim and their flight would suggest guilt even to the most unworldly passerby, and certainly to the police.

  The cell phone, folded shut, remained in Mitch’s hand. He looked upon it with dread.

  If you go to the cops, we’ll cut her fingers off one by one….

  The kidnappers would expect him to summon the authorities or to wait for someone else to do so. Forbidden, however, was any mention of Holly or of kidnapping, or of the fact that the dogwalker had been murdered as an example to Mitch.

  Indeed, his unknown adversaries might have put him in this predicament specifically to test his ability to keep his mouth shut at the moment when he was in the most severe state of shock and most likely to lose his self-control.

  He opened the phone. The screen brightened with an image of colorful fish in dark water.

  After keying in 9
and 1, Mitch hesitated, but then entered the final digit.

  Iggy dropped his trowel, moved toward the street.

  Only when the police operator answered on the second ring did Mitch realize that from the moment he’d seen the dead man’s shattered head, his breathing had been desperate, ragged, raw. For a moment, words wouldn’t come, and then they blew out of him in a rough voice he barely recognized.

  “A man’s been shot. I’m dead. I mean, he’s dead. He’s been shot and he’s dead.”