Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

Under the circumstances, he did not believe that he could rise to the occasion. He was surprised-and dismayed-to discover desire trumped his concern that she was guilty of dissimulation if not duplicity.

The qualities he found most erotic in a woman were intelligence, wit, affection, and tenderness. Sam had all four and could not fake the first two, though Ryan now worried that her intelligence was of a kind that facilitated manipulation and fostered cunning. He wondered if in fact she loved him and wanted the best for him, or had all along been disingenuous.

Never before had he made love when his heart was a cauldron of such wretched feelings, when physical passion was detached from all of the gentler emotions. In fact, love might have had nothing to do with it.

When the moment had passed, Samantha kissed his brow, his chin, his throat. She whispered, “Good night, Winky,” and turned away from him, onto her side.

Soon her open-mouthed breathing indicated that she slept. Or pretended to sleep.

Ryan pressed two fingers to his throat to time his pulse. He marveled at the slow steady throb, which seemed to be yet another deception, the most intimate one so far: his body pretending to be in good health when actually it was in the process of failing him.

For an hour, he stared at the ceiling but in fact examined, with memory’s eye, a year of loving Samantha. He sought to recall any incident that, from his new perspective, suggested she had darker intentions than those he had attributed to her at the time.

Initially, none of her actions through the months seemed in the least deceitful. When Ryan considered those same moments a second time, however, shadows fell where shadows had not been before, and every memory was infused with an impression of hidden motives and of secret conspirators lurking just offstage.

No specific deceit occurred to him, no example of her possible duplicity prior to the last few days, yet a cold current of suspicion crawled along his nerves.

The tendency to paranoia that infected contemporary culture had always disquieted him. He was ashamed to be indulging in the self-delusion that troubled him in others. He had a few disturbing facts; but he was trying to manufacture others out of fevered fantasies.

Ryan rose quietly from bed, and Samantha did not stir.

A window invited moonlight, which fell so lightly in this space that he could not have perceived the positions of the furniture if he had not been familiar with the room.

More than half blind, but with a blind man’s intuition, he found his clothes, dressed, and silently navigated the bedroom. Without a sound, he closed the door behind him.

Familiarity with the floor plan and dark-adapted eyes allowed him to reach the kitchen without a misstep or collision. He switched on the light above the sink.

On the notepad by the telephone, he left her a message: Sam, manic insomnia strikes again. Too jittery to lie still. Call you tomorrow. Love, Winky.

He drove home, where he packed a suitcase.

The great house was as silent as the vacuum between planets. Although he made only a few small noises, each seemed as loud as thunder.

He drove to a hotel, where no one on his house staff or in his private life would think to look for him.

In an anonymous room, on a too-soft bed, he slept so soundly for six hours that he did not dream. When he woke Saturday morning, he was in the fetal position in which he had gone to sleep.

His hands ached. Evidently, he had closed them into fists through most of the night.

Before ordering a room-service breakfast, Ryan made two phone calls. The first was to Wilson Mott, the detective. The second was to arrange to have one of Be2Do’s corporate jets fly him to Las Vegas.

Flensing knives of desert sun stripped the air to the bone, and the shimmers of heat rising off the airport Tarmac were as dry as the breath of a dead sea.

The Learjet and crew would stand by to return Ryan to southern California the following morning.

A black Mercedes sedan and chauffeur awaited him at the private-plane terminal. The driver introduced himself as George Zane, an employee of Wilson Mott’s security firm.

He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. Instead of shoes, he wore boots, and the blunt toes looked as though they might be reinforced with steel caps.

Two knots of pale scar tissue marked his shaved head at the brink of his brow. Tall, muscular, with a thick neck, with wide nostrils and intense eyes as purple-black as plum skins, Zane looked as though his lineage included bull blood, suggesting that the scars on his skull resulted from the surgical removal of horns.

He was not only a driver but also a bodyguard, and more. After Zane stowed Ryan’s suitcase in the trunk, he opened a rear door of the sedan for him and presented him with a disposable cell phone.

“While you’re here,” Zane said, “make any calls with this. They can never be traced to you.”

Like a limousine, this customized sedan was equipped with a motorized privacy panel between the front seat and the back.

Through the tinted windows, Ryan gazed at the barren desert mountains in the distance until a maze of soaring hotels and casinos blocked the natural world from view.

At the hotel where Ryan would stay, Zane parked in a VIP zone. While Ryan waited in the car, the driver carried the suitcase inside.

When Zane returned, he opened a back door to give an electronic-key card to Ryan. “Room eleven hundred. It’s a suite. It’s registered to me. Your name appears nowhere, sir.”

As they pulled away from the hotel, the disposable cell phone rang, and Ryan answered it.

A woman said, “Are you ready to see Rebecca’s apartment?”

Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.

“Yes,” said Ryan.

“It’s number thirty-four, on the second floor. I’m already inside.”

She terminated the call.

Away from the fabled Strip, Vegas was a parched suburban sprawl. Pale stucco houses reflected the bloodless Mojave sun, and many landscape schemes employed pebbles, rocks, cactuses, and succulents.

The palm fronds looked brittle. The olive trees appeared more gray than green.

Ribbons of heat, rising from vast parking lots, caused shopping malls to shimmer and shift shape like the underwater city in his troubling dream.

Sand, dry weeds, and litter choked tracts of undeveloped land.

The Oasis, an upscale two-story apartment complex, was a cream-colored structure with a roof of turquoise tiles. The privacy wall that concealed its large courtyard was inlaid with a caravan of ceramic Art Deco camels that matched the color of the roof.

Behind the apartments stood garages, as well as guest parking shaded by horizontal trellises festooned with purple bougainvillea.

Zane put down the privacy panel and both front windows before switching off the engine. “You best walk in alone. Be casual.”

After stepping out of the car, Ryan considered returning at once to it and calling off this questionable operation.

The memory of Spencer Barghest standing under the pepper tree with Samantha, his thatch of hair whiter than white in the moonlight, reminded Ryan of what he needed to know and why he needed to know it.

Beyond the back gate lay a covered walkway to the courtyard, but the gate could be opened only with a tenant’s key. He had to walk around to the public entrance.

The wrought-iron front gate featured a palm-tree motif and had been finished to resemble the green patina of weathered copper.

At the center of the courtyard lay a large pool and spa with turquoise-tile coping. Faint fumes of chlorine trembled in the scorched air and seemed to vibrate in Ryan’s nostrils.