Dean Koontz - False Memory

Now, sitting in the armchair across the low table from her, he listened to her fevered speculations about the Machiavellian scheming of Mr. Reeves, not bothering to take notes because a hidden recorder was capturing her monologue and his occasional prodding question.

Impish as ever, the doctor suddenly thought how fun it would have been if the actor now waiting to assault the president’s nose could have been Keanu himself. Imagine this patient’s terror when learning of the news, which would absolutely convince her that hers would have been the savaged nose had not fate put the nation’s chief executive in Keanu’s path before her.

Ah, well. If there was a sense of humor behind the workings of the universe, it wasn’t as acute as the doctor’s.

“Doctor, you’re not listening to me.”

“But I am,” he assured her.

“No, you were woolgathering, and I’m not paying these outrageous hourly rates so you can daydream,” she said sharply.

Although just five short years ago, this woman and her boring husband had been barely able to afford fries with their Big Macs, they had become as imperious and demanding as if they had been born into vast wealth.

Indeed, her Keanu madness and her pan-faced husband’s crazy need to seek validation at the ballot box resulted from the suddenness of their financial success, from a nagging guilt about having gained so much with so little effort, and from the unspoken fear that what had come so quickly could be quickly gone.

“You don’t have a patient conflict here, do you?” she asked with sudden worry.

“Excuse me?”

“An unrevealed patient conflict? You don’t know K-K-Keanu, do you, Doctor?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“Not to reveal a connection with him would be highly unethical. Highly. And how do I know you’re not capable of unethical conduct? What do I really know about you at all?”

Rather than draw the Taurus PT-ill Millennium from his shoulder holster and teach this nouveauriche dirt a lesson in manners, the doctor switched on his considerable charm and sweet-talked her into continuing with her delusional ramblings.

A wall clock revealed less than half an hour until he could send her out into the Keanu-haunted world. Then he would be able to deal with Skeet Caulfield and the blushing man.

In places, the glaze on the Mexican payers had been worn away.

“Where I kept seeing bloodstains,” Bernardo Pastore explained. “While I was in the hospital, friends cleaned out the room, got rid of the furniture, everything. When I came back, there were no stains… but I kept seeing them anyway. For a year, I scrubbed a little every day. It wasn’t blood I was trying to get rid of. It was the grief. When I realized that, I finally stopped scrubbing.”

During his first few days in the intensive-care unit, he had struggled to survive, only intermittently conscious; his injuries and his badly swollen face had prevented him from speaking even when he was alert. By the time he had accused Ahriman, the psychiatrist had been able to establish a cover story, with witnesses.

Pastore stepped to the bedroom window and gazed out at the ranch. “I saw him right here. Right here, looking in. It wasn’t anything I dreamed after I was shot, like they tried to say.”

Moving to the rancher’s side, keeping the tape recorder close to him, Dusty said, “And no one believed you?”

“A few. But only one that mattered. A cop. He started working on Ahriman’s alibi, and maybe he was getting somewhere, because they cracked his knuckles hard. And shifted him to another case while they closed this one.”

“You think he’d talk to us?” Dusty asked.

“Yeah. After all this time, I suspect he would. I’ll call and tell him about you.”

“If you could set it up for this evening, that would be good. I think Chase Glyson’s going to keep us busy tomorrow with former students at Little Jackrabbit.”

“None of what you’re doing is going to matter,” Pastore said, and he might have been staring into the past or the future rather than at the ranch as it was now. “Ahriman’s untouchable somehow.”

“We’ll see.”

Even in the gray light filtered through a skin of gray dust on the window, the thick keloid scars on the right side of Pastore’s face were angry red.

As if sensing Martie’s stare, the rancher glanced at her. “I’ll give you nightmares, ma’am.”

“Not me. I like your face, Mr. Pastore. There’s honesty in it. Besides, once a person’s met Mark Ahriman, there’s nothing else could ever give her nightmares.”

“That’s right enough, isn’t it?” Pastore said, turning his eyes once more to the waning afternoon.

Dusty switched off the recorder.

“They could remove most of these scars now,” Bernardo Pastore said. “And they wanted me to have more surgeries on the jaw, too. They promised they could smooth out the line. But what do I care how I look anymore?”

Neither Dusty nor Martie knew what to say to that. The rancher was no older than forty-five, with many years ahead of him, but no one could make him want those coming years, no one but he himself.

Jennifer lived within two miles of the office. In good weather and in bad, she walked to and from work, because walking was as much a part of her health regimen as tofu cheese, bean sprouts, and ginko biloba.

The doctor asked her to do him the favor of driving his car to the Mercedes dealership and leaving it for an oil change and tire rotation. “They’ll give you a lift home in their courtesy van.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, “I’ll walk home from there.”

“But that’s probably nine miles.”

“Really? Great!”

“What if it rains?”

“They’ve changed the forecast. Rain tomorrow, not today. But how will you get home?”

“I’m walking over to Barnes and Noble to browse, then meeting a friend for an early drink,” he lied. “He’ll take me home.” He consulted his wristwatch. “Close up early. in say about fifteen minutes. That way, even with a nine-mile walk, you’ll get home at the usual time. And take thirty dollars from petty cash, so you can stop at that place you like — Green Acres, is it? — for dinner if you want.”

“You’re the most considerate man,” she said.

Fifteen minutes would be enough time for Ahriman to leave this building by the front entrance, where the boys in the beige pickup could not see him, proceed to the building next door, and then to the parking lot behind it, where his 1959 Chevrolet El Camino would be waiting for him.

The riding rings and the paddocks were deserted, all the quarter horses warmly stabled in advance of the coming storm.

When Martie paused beside the rental car, the adobe ranch house didn’t appear quaint and romantic, as it had when she first arrived. As with so much of New Mexico’s architecture, this place had been magical, as if sprung from the desert by an act of sorcery; but now the patinaed earthen walls looked no more romantic than mud, and the house seemed not to be rising up, but settling down, slumped, melting into the earth from which it had been born, soon to vanish as though it had never existed, along with the people who had once known love and joy within its walls.

“What are we dealing with, I wonder?” Dusty said as Martie drove away from the ranch house. “What is Ahriman… in addition to what he appears to be?”

“You’re not talking just about his connections, the institute, who protects him and why.”

“No.” His voice had fallen, soft and solemn, as if he spoke now of sacred things. “Who is this guy, beyond the obvious and easy answers?”

“A sociopath. A narcissist, according to Closterman.” But she knew these were not the words that he was looking for, either.