Dean Koontz - False Memory

Fortunately, the doctor had a good imagination. With the blue bag before him for inspiration, he had no trouble painting the most vivid and entertaining mind pictures.

By one-thirty, he assumed Eric Jagger had completed the shooting and was busy — perhaps nearly finished — with the amateur craniotomy. When he closed his eyes, the doctor could hear the rhythmic rasp of the cranial blade. Considering the density of bone mass in Lampton’s skull, sending a spare blade had been a wise decision. In the event that the Lamptons didn’t have a dog, he hoped Eric’s dietary regimen included a high-fiber cereal every morning.

His greatest regret was that he had not been able to play out his original game plan, in which Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have tortured and killed Claudette and the two Dereks. Before committing suicide, Dusty, Skeet, and Martie would have written a long statement accusing the elder Derek and his wife of horrendous physical abuse of Skeet and Dusty when they were children, and of repeated Rohypnol-facilitated rapes of Martie and of Susan Jagger, whom Ahriman might even have chosen to include as part of the killing team if she hadn’t gotten clever with a video camera. The death toll would have been seven, plus housekeepers and visiting neighbors, if any, which was by Ahriman’s calculations the minimum magnitude of slaughter necessary to attract the attention of the national media — although with Derek’s reputation as a pop-psych guru, seven deaths would receive as much coverage as a bomb blast that killed two hundred but that produced no celebrity among the casualties.

Well, although the game had been played with less grace than he would have preferred, he took satisfaction in winning. With no way to take possession of Derek Lampton’s brain, perhaps he would have the blue bag vacuum-sealed in Lucite as a symbolic trophy.

Although Skeet’s thought processes had grown clearer and more efficient during the past two drug-free days, he still didn’t have the mental acuity needed to manage a nuclear power plant or even to be trusted to sweep the floors of one. Fortunately, he was aware of this, and he intended to think carefully through each step of his attack on Dr. Ahriman during his drive from Malibu to Newport Beach.

He was also an emotional mess, frequently breaking into tears, even sobbing. Operating a motor vehicle with badly blurred vision was particularly dangerous along the Pacific Coast Highway during the rainy season, because sudden massive mudslides and dislodged boulders the size of semitrucks tumbling onto the roadway required drivers to have the reflexes of a wired cat. Worse, the early-afternoon traffic on the freeway was southbound at eighty miles per hour, in spite of a legal limit of sixty-five, and uncontrollable sobbing at that speed could have cataclysmic consequences.

His chest and belly were sore from the impact of four Keviar arrested bullets. Painful cramps twisted his stomach, unrelated to the bruising, born of stress and fear. He had a migraine, which he always had after seeing his mother, whether or not anyone was shot with a crossbow during the visit.

His heartache, however, was worse than any of the physical pains that he suffered. Dusty and Martie’s house was gone, and he felt as if his own house had been burned to the ground. They were the best people in the world, Martie and Dusty, the best. They didn’t deserve such trouble. Their terrific little house gone in flames, Susan dead, Eric dead, living in fear.

More heartache assailed him when he thought of himself as a baby, his mother standing over him with a pillow in her hands, his own beautiful mother. When Dusty called her on it, she didn’t even deny that she’d been going to kill him. He knew he was a total screwup as an adult, had been a screwup as a kid, but now it seemed to him that he must have been such an obvious screwup-waiting to happen even as an infant that his own mother had felt justified in smothering him while he slept in his crib.

He didn’t want to be such a screwup. He wanted to do the right thing, and he wanted to do well, to have his brother, Dusty, be proud of him, but he always lost his way without realizing he was losing it. He also realized he caused Dusty a lot of heartache, too, which made him feel worse.

With chest pain, belly pain, serial stomach cramps, migraine, heartache, blurred vision, and eighty-mile-per-hour traffic to keep him distracted, worried as well because his driver's license had been revoked years ago, he arrived in Newport Beach, in the parking lot behind Ahriman’s office building, shortly before three o’clock in the afternoon, without having carefully thought out any step of his attack on Dr. Ahriman.

“I’m a total screwup,” he said.

Screwup that he was, the chances that he would make it across the parking lot, up to the fourteenth floor, into Ahriman’s office, and successfully execute the bastard were too small to be calculated. Like trying to weigh the hair on a flea’s ass.

He did have one thing going for him. If he defied all the odds and managed to shoot the psychiatrist, he would probably not go to prison for the rest of his life, as Dusty or Martie surely would if either of them pulled the trigger. Considering his colorful record of rehab, a foot-tall stack of unflattering psychiatric evaluations, and his history of pathological meekness rather than violence, Skeet would probably end up in a mental institution, with a hope of being released one day, supposing that there was anything left of him after another fifteen years of massive drug therapy.

The pistol had a long magazine, but he was still able to tuck it under his belt and cover it with his sweater. Fortunately, the sweater was meant to be baggy; it was even baggier than intended, because he had bought it years ago, and after his continued weight loss, it was now two sizes too large.

He got out of the Lexus, remembering to take the keys with him. If he left them in the ignition, someone might steal the car, perhaps making him an accessory to grand theft auto. When his name was all over the newspapers and people were looking at him being arrested on TV, he didn’t want them thinking that he was the type of person to be involved in car theft. He’d never stolen a penny in his life.

The sky was blue. The day was mild. There was no wind, and he was grateful for the calm, because he felt as if a stiff breeze might have blown him away.

He walked back and forth in front of the car, staring down at his sweater, cocking his head to one side and then the other, trying to detect the outline of the pistol from various angles. The weapon was completely concealed.

Hot tears welled again, just as he was ready to march into the building and do the deed, and so he walked back and forth, blotting his eyes on the sleeves of his sweater. A security guard was likely to be posted in the lobby. Skeet realized that a gaunt, gray-faced man in clothes two sizes too large for him, sobbing his eyes out, was likely to arouse suspicion.

One row in front of where Skeet had parked the Lexus and a few spaces to the north, a woman got out of a white Rolls-Royce and stood beside it, staring openly at him. His eyes were now dry enough to allow him to see that she was a nice-looking blond lady, very neat, in a pink knit suit, obviously a successful person and good citizen. She didn’t appear to be the rude type who would stand and stare at a perfect stranger, so he figured he must look as suspicious as if he were wearing bandoliers of ammunition and openly carrying an assault rifle.

If this lady in the pink suit found him alarming, the security guard would probably spray him with Mace, shock him with a Taser, and club him to the floor the moment he walked through the door into the lobby. He was going to screw up again.