Dean Koontz - False Memory

Chase nodded. “But just a few.”

“If it was just one,” Zina said, “I wouldn’t have left and given him the satisfaction.”

Zina’s hands were on the table, and Chase covered both of them with one of his. “Mr. Rhodes, if you think it would help you, some of those Little Jackrabbit kids, the ones who recanted, I know they would talk to you. They’ve come to us. They’ve apologized. They aren’t bad people. They were used. I think they’d like to help.”

“If you could set it up,” Dusty said, “we’ll devote tomorrow to them. Today, while there’s still light and before it snows, we want to go out to the Pastore ranch.”

Chase pushed his chair back from the table and got to his feet, seeming taller than he had been earlier. “You know the way?”

“We’ve got a map,” Dusty said.

“Well, I’ll lead you halfway,” Chase said. “Because halfway to the Pastore ranch, there’s something you should see. The Bellon Tockland Institute.”

“What’s that?”

“Hard to say. Been there twenty-five years. It’s where you’ll find Mark Ahriman’s friends, if he has any.”

Without pulling on a jacket or sweater, Zina walked with them to the street.

The piñons in the forecourt were as still as trees in a diorama, sealed behind glass.

The squeak of the iron hinges on the spindled gate was the only sound in the winter day, as if every soul in the city had vanished, as if Santa Fe were a ghost ship on a sea of sand.

No traffic moved on the street. No cats roamed, no birds flew. A great weight of stillness pressed down on the world.

To Chase, whose Lincoln Navigator was parked in front of them, Dusty said, “Does that van across the street belong to a neighbor?”

Chase looked, shook his head. “I don’t think so. Maybe. Why?”

“No reason. Nice-looking van, is all.”

“Something’s coming down,” Zina said, gazing at the sky.

At first Martie thought she meant snow was falling, but there was no snow.

The sky was more white than gray. If the clouds were moving at all, their motion was internal, concealed behind the pale skin that they presented to the world below.

“Something bad.” Zina put her hand on Martie’s arm. “My Apache premonition. Warrior blood senses violence coming. You be careful, Martie Rhodes.”

“We will be.”

“Wish you lived in Santa Fe.”

“Wish you lived in California.”

“World’s too big, and all of us too small,” Zina said, and again they hugged each other.

In the car, as Martie pulled into the street, following Chase’s Navigator, she glanced at Dusty. “What about the van?”

Turned in his seat, peering through the rear window, he said, “Thought maybe I’d seen it earlier.”

“Where?”

“At the shopping center where we bought the recorder.”

“Is it coming?”

“No.”

One right turn and three blocks later, she asked, “Yet?”

“No. Guess I was wrong.”

In California, one time zone farther west than Santa Fe, Mark Ahriman ate lunch alone, at a table for two, in a stylish bistro in Laguna Beach. A dazzling Pacific vista lay to his left; a generally well dressed and monied luncheon crowd was seated to his right.

Not all was perfect. Two tables away, a thirtyish gentleman — and this was stretching the word to its elastic limits — let out a bray of laughter from time to time, so harsh and protracted that all donkeys west of the Pecos must have pricked their ears at each outburst. A grandmotherly woman at the next table was wearing an absurd mustard-yellow cloche hat. Six younger women at the far end of the room were obnoxiously giggly. The waiter brought the wrong appetizer, and then didn’t return with the correct dish for a tedious number of minutes.

Nevertheless, the doctor didn’t shoot any of them. For a true gamesman like him, little pleasure was to be had in a simple shooting spree. Mindless blasting appealed to the deranged, to the hopelessly stupid, to waxed-off teenage boys with far too much self-esteem and no self-discipline, and to the fanatical political types who wanted to change the world by Tuesday. Besides, his mini-9mm pistol had a double-column magazine that held only ten rounds.

After finishing lunch with a slice of flourless dark-chocolate cake and saffron ice cream, the doctor paid his check and departed, granting absolution even to the woman in the absurd cloche hat.

Thursday afternoon was pleasantly cool, not chilly. The wind had blown itself to far Japan during the night. The sky was pregnant, but the rain that was supposed to break shortly after dawn had not yet been delivered.

While the valet brought the Mercedes, Dr. Ahriman examined his fingernails. He was so pleased by the quality of his manicure that he almost didn’t pay attention to the surrounding scene, didn’t look up from his hands — strong, manly, and yet with the gracefully tapered fingers of a concert pianist — almost didn’t see the stranger lounging against a pickup parked across the street.

The truck was beige, well maintained but not new, the type of vehicle that would never be collectible even a thousand years from now and, therefore, one in which Ahriman had so little interest that he had no idea what make or model year it was. The bed of the truck was covered by a white camper shell, and the doctor shivered at the thought of a vacation thus spent.

The lounging man, although a stranger, was vaguely familiar. He was in his early forties, with reddish hair, a round red face, and thick eyeglasses. He was not staring directly at Ahriman, but there was something about his demeanor that screamed surveillance. He made a production of checking his wristwatch, and then looking impatiently toward a nearby store, as if waiting for someone, but his acting ability was far inferior even to that of the movie star currently preparing for his once-in-a-career role as a presidential nose nosher.

The antique-toy shop. Just a few hours ago. A half-hour drive and six towns away from here. That was where the doctor had seen the blushing man. When he’d amused himself by imagining the surprise that would sweep the shop staff if he gut-shot the other customers for no reason other than whimsy, this was one of two patrons who, in his mind’s eye, had been targets.

In a county with a population of three million, it was difficult to believe that this second encounter in only a few hours was merely happenstance.

A beige pickup with a camper shell was not a vehicle one would ordinarily associate with either undercover police surveillance or a private detective.

When Ahriman took a closer look at it, however, he saw that the truck boasted two antennae in addition to the standard radio aerial. One was a whip antenna, attached to the cab, most likely in support of a police-band receiver. The other was an odd item bolted to the rear bumper: a six-foot-long, straight, silvery antenna with a spiked knob at the top, surrounded by a black coil.

Driving away from the restaurant, Dr. Ahriman was not surprised to see the pickup following him.

The blushing man’s trailing technique was amateurish. He did not stay on the bumper of the Mercedes, and he allowed one or even two vehicles to intervene and screen him, as perhaps he had learned from watching idiotic detective shows on television, but he didn’t have sufficient confidence to let Ahriman out of his sight for more than a second or two; he constantly drove close to the center line of the street or as near to the parked cars on the right as he dared get, shifting back and forth as the traffic in front of him briefly obscured his view of the Mercedes. Consequently, in the doctor’s rear view and side mirrors, the pickup was the only anomaly in the traffic pattern, unprofessionally visible, its big antennae slashing at the air, weaving like a Dodgem car in a carnival ride.