Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

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From the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense comes a riveting thriller that probes the deepest terrors of the human psyche – and the ineffable mystery of what truly makes us who we are. Here an innocent man finds himself fighting for his very existence in a battle that starts with the most frightening words of all.
At thirty-four, Internet entrepreneur Ryan Perry seemed to have the world in his pocket – until the first troubling symptoms appeared out of nowhere. Within days, he's diagnosed with incurable cardiomyopathy and finds himself on the waiting list for a heart transplant; it's his only hope, and it's dwindling fast. Ryan is about to lose it all.his health, his girlfriend, Samantha, and his life.
One year later, Ryan has never felt better. Business is good and there's even a chance of getting Samantha back in his life. Then the unmarked gifts begin to arrive in the mail – a heart pendant, a box of Valentine candy hearts. And, most disturbing of all, a graphic heart surgery video accompanied by a chilling message: Your heart belongs to me.
In a heartbeat, the medical miracle that gave Ryan a second chance at life is about to become a curse worse than death. For Ryan is being stalked by a mysterious woman who feels entitled to everything he has. She's the spitting image of the twenty-eight-year-old donor of the heart beating steadily in Ryan's own chest.
And she's come to take it back.

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None of the rooms featured security cameras, but the hallways had them. A video record of hallway traffic was stored on DVDs to be reviewed only in the event that the house was invaded by burglars or victimized by a sneak thief.

No one monitored the hallway cameras in real time. Nevertheless, Ryan felt watched.

ELEVEN

In his home office, Ryan ate at his desk, gazing out of the big windows at the swimming pool in the foreground, at the sea in the distance.

The phone rang: his most private line, a number possessed by a handful of people. The caller-ID window told him it was Samantha.

“Hey, Winky, you still aging gracefully?”

“Well, I haven’t grown any hair in my ears yet.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“And I haven’t developed man breasts.”

“You paint an irresistible portrait of yourself. Listen, I’m sorry about Wednesday night.”

“What about Wednesday night?”

“I brought the whole evening down, talking about Teresa, pulling her feeding tube, the starvation thing.”

“You never bring me down, Sam.”

“You’re sweet. But I want to make it up to you. Come over for dinner tonight. I’ll make saltimbocca alla romana.”

“I love your saltimbocca.”

“With polenta.”

“This is a lot of work.”

“Caponata to start.”

He had no reason to distrust her.

“Why don’t we eat out?” he suggested. “Then there’s no cleanup.”

“I’ll do the cleaning up.”

He loved her. She loved him. She was a good cook. He was succumbing to irrational fear.

“It’s so much work,” he said. “I heard about this great new restaurant.”

“What’s the name?”

The great new restaurant was a lie. He would have to find one. He said, “I want to surprise you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m just in a going-out mood. I want to try this new place.”

They talked about what she should wear, what time he would pick her up.

“Love you,” she said.

“Love you,” he echoed, and disconnected.

He had eaten no more than a third of his lunch, but he had lost his appetite.

With a glass of Far Niente, he went outside, crossed the patio, and stood watching satiny ribbons of sunlight shimmer through the variegated-blue Italian-glass tiles that lined the swimming pool.

He became aware that he was fingering the bandage on his neck.

As Gypsies read tea leaves and palms, some shaman would read those tissue samples and tell him his fate.

The mental image of a Gypsy by candlelight led him to think of stories in which a lock of a man’s hair was used by a practitioner of black magic to cast a curse upon him.

In the hands of a voodooist, three moist pieces of a man’s heart-more intimate and therefore more powerful than a few strands of hair-might be used to destroy him in ways singularly horrific.

When a centipedal chill climbed his spine, when his heart accelerated, when a thin sweat prickled along his hairline, Ryan chastised himself for surrendering to unreason. A warrantless suspicion about Sam had metastasized into superstitious nonsense.

He went back into his office and phoned Samantha. “On second thought, I’d rather have your saltimbocca.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I don’t want to share you with a gaggle of envious men.”

“What gaggle?”

“The waiter, the busboy, and every man in the restaurant who would be lucky enough to lay eyes on you.”

“Sometimes, Winky, you walk a thin line between being a true romantic and a bullshit artist.”

“I’m only speaking from the heart.”

“Well, sweetie, if you’re going to do more of that this evening, bring a shovel. I don’t have one.”

She hung up, and before Ryan could lower the handset from his ear, he heard what might have been a brief, stifled laugh.

Although Sam had disconnected, the dial tone did not return. Ryan listened to the faint hollow hiss of an open line.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

No one answered.

The house phone was a digital hybrid system with ten lines, plus intercom and doorbell functions. None of the phone lines was shared, and no other phones in the house could eavesdrop on a line that was in use.

He waited for another telltale sound, like guarded breathing or a background noise in the room where the listener sat, but he was not rewarded. He had nothing more than an impression of someone out there in the ether, a hostile presence that might or might not be real.

At last he returned the handset to the cradle.

картинка 8

By four o’clock Friday afternoon, sooner than promised, Wilson Mott provided by e-mail a background report on Samantha’s mother.

As soon as Ryan had a printout, he sent the e-mail to trash, and at once deleted it from trash to ensure no one could retrieve it. He sat on a lounge chair by the pool to read Mott’s findings.

Rebecca Lorraine Reach, fifty-six, lived in a Las Vegas apartment complex called the Oasis. She was employed as a blackjack dealer at one of the classier casinos.

By means most likely questionable, Mott had obtained the current photo of Rebecca on file with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. She looked no older than forty-and remarkably like her daughter.

She owned a white Ford Explorer. Her driving record was clean.

She had never been a party to a criminal or civil action in Nevada. Her credit report indicated a responsible borrowing history.

According to a neighbor, Amy Crocker, Rebecca rarely socialized with other tenants at the Oasis, had a “my-poop-don’t-smell attitude,” never spoke of having a daughter, either dead or alive, and was in a romantic relationship with a man named Spencer Barghest.

Mott reported that Barghest had been indicted twice for murder, in Texas, and twice had been judged innocent. As a noted right-to-die activist, he had been present at scores of assisted suicides. There was reason to believe that some of those whom he had assisted were not terminally-or even chronically-ill, and that the signatures on their requests for surcease from suffering were forged.

Ryan had no idea how an assisted suicide was effectuated. Maybe Barghest supplied an overdose of sedatives, which would be a painless poison but a kind of poison nonetheless.

Mott’s report included a photo of Spencer Barghest. He had an ideal face for a stand-up comic: agreeable but rubbery features, a knowing yet ingratiating grin, and a shock of white hair cut in a punkish bristle that looked amusing on a fiftysomething guy.

Because he might be critically ill, Ryan was troubled to find only three degrees of separation between himself and a man who would be pleased to grant him eternal peace whether he wanted it or not.

This, however, did not confirm his intuitive sense that Sam’s mother-and perhaps Samantha herself-was linked to his sudden health problems.

Life was often marked by synchronicities, surprising connections that seemed to be meaningful. But coincidence was only coincidence.

Barghest might be a nasty piece of work, but there was nothing sinister in his relationship with Rebecca, nothing relating to Ryan.

In his current state of mind, he had to guard against a tendency toward paranoia. Such a regrettable inclination had already led him to order Mott’s report on Samantha’s mother.

Rebecca had turned out to be an ordinary person leading an unremarkable existence. Ryan’s suspicion had been irrational.

Now that he thought about it, the presence of Spencer Barghest in Rebecca Reach’s life was not surprising. It didn’t even qualify as a coincidence, let alone a suspicious one.

Six years ago, she had made the difficult decision to remove a feeding tube from her brain-damaged daughter. A weight of guilt might have settled on her-especially when Samantha strenuously disagreed with her decision.

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