Mitch dodged one box and raised an arm to deflect another.
The falling first stack destabilized a second.
Mitch almost reached toward the gunman to steady him. But then he realized that any offer of support might be misinterpreted as an attack. To avoid being misunderstood—and shot—he stepped out of his enemy’s way.
The old dry wood of the railing at the back of the loft could safely accommodate anyone who leaned casually on it, but it proved too weak to endure the impact of the stumbling gunman. Balusters cracked, nails shrieked loose of their holes, and two butted lengths of the handrail separated at the joint.
The gunman cursed at the storm of boxes. He cried out in alarm as the railing sagged away from him.
He fell to the floor of the garage. The distance was not great, approximately eight feet, yet he landed with a terrible sound, and in a clatter of broken railing, and the gun went off.
From the toppling of the first box to the concluding punctuation of the gunshot, only a few seconds had passed. Mitch stood in stunned disbelief longer than the event itself had taken to unfold.
Silence shocked him from paralysis. The silence below.
He hurried to the stairs, and under his feet the boards released a great thunder, as though they had stored it up from the storms that long ago had lashed the trees from which they had been milled.
As Mitch crossed the garage on the ground level, past the front of the truck, past the idling Honda, elation contested with despair for control of him. He did not know what he would find and therefore did not know what to feel.
The gunman lay facedown, head and shoulders under an overturned wheelbarrow. He must have slammed into one edge of the wheelbarrow, flipping it over and on top of himself.
An eight-foot fall should not have left him in such a profound stillness.
Breathing hard but not from physical exertion, Mitch righted the wheelbarrow, shoved it aside. Each breath brought him the scent of motor oil, of fresh grass clippings, and as he crouched beside the gunman, he detected the bitter pungency of gunfire, too, and then the sweetness of blood.
He turned the body over and saw the face clearly for the first time. The stranger was in his middle twenties, but he had the clear complexion of a preadolescent boy, jade-green eyes, thick lashes. He did not look like a man who could talk deadpan about mutilating and murdering a woman.
He had landed with his throat across the rolled metal edge of the wheelbarrow tray. The impact appeared to have crushed his larynx and collapsed his trachea.
His right forearm had broken, and his right hand, trapped under him, had reflexively fired the pistol. The index finger remained hooked through the trigger guard.
The bullet had penetrated just below the sternum, angled up and to the left. Minimal bleeding suggested a heart wound, instant death.
If the shot hadn’t killed him instantly, the collapsed airway would have killed him quickly.
This was too much luck to be just luck.
Whatever it was—luck or something better, luck or something worse—Mitch didn’t at first know whether it was a helpful or an unwelcome development.
The number of his enemies had been reduced by one. A tattered glee, frayed by the rough edge of vengeance, fluttered in him and might have teased out a torn and threadbare laugh if he had not also been at once aware that this death complicated his situation.
When this man did not report back to his associates, they would call him. When they could not raise him on the phone, they might come looking for him. If they found him dead, they would assume that Mitch had killed him, and soon thereafter Holly’s fingers would be taken off one by one, each stump flame-cauterized without benefit of an anesthetic.
Mitch hurried to the Honda and switched off the engine. He used the remote control to shut the garage door.
As shadows closed in, he switched on the lights.
The single shot might not have been heard. If it had been heard, he felt sure that it had not been recognized for what it was.
At this hour, neighbors would not be home from work. Some kids might have returned from school, but they would be listening to CDs or would be deep in an Xbox world, and the muffled shot would be perceived as another bit of music or game percussion.
Mitch returned to the body and stood looking down at it.
For a moment, he was not able to proceed. He knew what needed to be done, but he could not act.
He had lived for almost twenty-eight years without witnessing a death. Now he’d seen two men shot in the same day.
Thoughts of his own death pecked at him, and when he tried to repress them, they could not be caged. The susurration in his ears was only the sound of his rushing blood, driven by the oars of a sculling heart, but his imagination provided dark wings beating at the periphery of his mind’s eye.
Although he was squeamish about searching the corpse, necessity brought him to his knees beside it.
From a hand so warm that it seemed death might be a pretense, he removed the pistol. He put it in the nearby wheelbarrow.
If the right leg of the dead man’s khakis had not been pulled up in the fall, Mitch wouldn’t have seen the second weapon. The gunman carried the snub-nosed revolver in an ankle holster.
After putting the revolver with the pistol, Mitch considered the holster. He undid the Velcro closures, put the holster with the guns.
He dug through the pockets of the sports coat, turned out the pockets of the pants.
He discovered a set of keys—one for a car, three others—which he considered but then returned to the pocket where he’d found them. After a brief hesitation, he retrieved them and added them to the wheelbarrow.
He found nothing more of interest other than a wallet and a cell phone. The former would contain identification, and the latter might be programmed to speed-dial, among other numbers, each of the dead man’s collaborators.
If the phone rang, Mitch didn’t dare answer it. Even if he spoke in monosyllables and the man at the other end briefly mistook his voice for that of the dead man, he would give himself away by one slip or another.
He switched off the phone. They would be suspicious when they got voice mail, but they would not act precipitously on mere suspicion.
Restraining his curiosity, Mitch set the wallet and phone aside in the wheelbarrow. Other, more urgent tasks awaited him.
From the back of the truck, Mitch fetched a canvas tarp that was used for bundling rosebush clippings. The thorns could not easily penetrate it, as they did burlap.
In case one of the other kidnappers came looking for the dead man, Mitch couldn’t leave the body here.
The thought of driving around with the corpse in the trunk of his car turned his stomach sour. He would have to buy some antacids.
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