Dean Koontz - False Memory

Although Martie had expected to lie restless for the remainder of the night, a particularly peaceful sleep overcame her, until she stirred again more than an hour later, in the predawn stillness, just minutes before the wake-up call was due from the hotel operator.

She could no longer detect even the faintest trace of the scent of smoke, and no visitor stood watch in the satiny shadows. She was living in one world again, her world, so familiar, fearsome, and yet full of promise.

She couldn’t prove to anyone else what had been real in the night and what had not, but to her own satisfaction, the truth was clear.

As the bedside phone rang with their wake-up call, she knew that she would never see Smilin’ Bob again in this world, but she wondered how soon she would see him in his, whether in fifty years or sometime tomorrow.

High deserts seldom offer warmth in winter, and on Thursday morning at the Santa Fe Municipal Airport, the plane brought Martie and Dusty down into cold dry air, to a pale land as windless now as the surface of the moon.

They had carried both small pieces of luggage onto the flight, after the bag with the toy fire engine had passed inspection at the security gate in Orange County. With no need to visit the baggage carousel, they went directly to the car-rental agency.

Getting into the two-door Ford, Martie inhaled an orange grove’s worth of citrus-scented air freshener. Yet the fragrance could not entirely mask the underlying noxiousness of stale cigarette smoke.

On Cerrillos Road, as Dusty drove into the city, Martie removed the brass screws from the bottom of the fire truck. She extracted the felt shoe bag from the truck, and the pistol from the shoe bag.

“You want to carry?” she asked Dusty.

“No, you go ahead.”

Dusty had ordered the supertuned Springfield Armory Champion, a version of the Colt Commander produced by Springfield’s custom shop, with numerous aftermarket parts. Featuring a beveled magazine well, a throated barrel, a lowered and flared ejection port, a Novak low-mount combat sight, a polished feed ramp, a polished extractor and ejector, and an A-i style trigger tuned to a 4.5-pound pull, the seven-shot pistol was lightweight, compact, and easy to control.

Initially she had been opposed to owning the gun. After having fired two thousand rounds during a dozen visits to a shooting range, however, she’d proved to be somewhat more effective with the weapon than Dusty was, which surprised her more than it surprised him.

She slipped the pistol into her purse. This wasn’t the ideal way to carry it, because making a quick and unhampered draw wasn’t possible. Dusty had researched holsters, strictly for use on the shooting range, but he hadn’t gotten around to selecting one yet.

Because she was wearing blue jeans, a navy-blue sweater, and a blue tweed jacket, Martie could have tucked the gun under her belt, either against her abdomen or in the small of her back, and concealed it with the sweater. In either case, the discomfort factor would be too high, so the purse was the only choice.

“We’re now officially outlaws,” she said, leaving the central compartment of the purse unzipped, for easier access.

“We were already outlaws the moment we boarded the plane.”

“Yeah, well, now we’re outlaws in New Mexico, too.”

“How’s it feel?”

“Didn’t Billy Bonney come from Santa Fe?” she asked.

“Billy the Kid? I don’t know.”

“He came from New Mexico, anyway. How I feel is not a damn thing like Billy the Kid, let me tell you. Unless he walked around so scared that he worried about wetting his pants.”

They stopped at a shopping center and purchased a tape recorder with a supply of minicassettes and batteries.

Using a directory chained in a public telephone booth, their breath pluming frostily over the pages, they went through the short list of names they had culled from the articles in Roy Closterman’s file. Some were not listed, having either died or moved out of town — or perhaps the now grown-up girls had married and were living under new names. Still, they found addresses for a few people on the list.

In the car again, eating a lunch of chicken tacos from a fast-food joint, Dusty studied the city map provided by the rental agency, while Martie inserted batteries in the tape recorder and scanned the operating instructions. The recorder was the essence of simplicity and easy to use.

They weren’t sure what testimony they would be able to gather, whether any of it would support the story that they themselves hoped to bring to the police in California, but they had nothing to lose by trying. Without the statements of others who’d suffered at the hands of Ahriman, to establish context, the complaints Martie and Dusty filed would have the grotesque quality of paranoid rants and would not be taken seriously, even with the tape of Susan’s phone call.

Two advantages gave them heart. First, because of what Roy Closterman had uncovered, they knew there were people in Santa Fe who hated Ahriman, who suspected him of the worst offenses against his oaths as a medical doctor and therapist, and who were frustrated beyond endurance to see him escape prosecution and move out of state with his reputation intact and with his license to practice medicine unchallenged. Surely, these individuals were potential allies.

Second, because Ahriman wasn’t aware that they knew of his past and because he wasn’t likely to credit them with either the ambition or the intelligence to discover the roots of his earliest attempts at brainwashing, he wouldn’t think to look for them in Santa Fe. Which meant that at least for a day or two, and perhaps longer, they. could operate without attracting the frightening attention of the mystery men who had cut off Brian’s ear.

Here in the land of Ahriman’s past, flying below the radar of the psychiatrist and his enigmatic associates, they might be able to gather enough information to make their story credible when at last they approached the authorities in California.

No. Might wasn’t an acceptable word. Might was a loser’s word. Must was the word she wanted, from the vocabulary of winners. They must gather enough information; and because they must, they would.

Action.

Leaving the shopping center, Martie drove while Dusty consulted the map and gave directions.

Over this high land, the sky was low and the color of New Mexico gypsum. Those slowly grinding clouds were icy, too, and according to the radio weather report, they were going to scrape some snow off one another before the day was out.

Only a few blocks from the Cathedral of Saint Francis of Assisi, the residence was surrounded by an adobe wall with a raised, stepped arch in which was set a spindled wooden gate.

Martie parked at the curb. She and Dusty went visiting with tape recorder and concealed pistol, bringing a little California style to mystic Santa Fe.

Beside the gate, a cascading ristra of red chiles spilled down the earthen wall under a copper lamp with coppery mica panes. This bright autumn decoration, long past its season, was frosty in parts but colorful and glossy where ice jacketed the chiles.

The gate was ajar, and beyond lay a brick forecourt. Agave and century plants bristled low, and tall piñons would have cast deep shadows had there been sun.

The single-story, pueblo-style house, by itself, validated the state’s claim to be the Land of Enchantment. Solid and round-edged, all soft lines and earth tones. Deep door and window openings, with simple fenestration.

A porch extended the width of the structure, supported by time-smoothed fir-log columns and by carved corbels painted with blue star designs. In the ceiling, aspen latillas bridged the spaces between the large fir vigas that supported the roof.