Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

Once more, she stopped him before he could speak. “Don’t say you’re lost. Don’t say it again.” Her eyes were lustrous with grief and her voice tremulous. “It’s true. I accept it’s true, and that’s why I can’t bear to hear it again. I just can’t, Winky.”

She pulled her hand from his, not angrily but with a quiet desperation, got to her feet, hesitated as if she might change her mind and sit again, but then turned and walked away.

For fear of chasing after her, Ryan remained on the bench, in the glassy sunshine, the red ivy geraniums as colorful as a Tiffany lampshade, the shop windows a blur of glare, the arcs of water in a fountain shimmering like Steuben and splashing into the receiving pool with a bright, brittle, shattering sound.

Eventually he noticed the young Asian woman standing twenty feet away, in front of the bookstore. She appeared to be watching him, and must have seen him with Samantha.

She held in both hands perhaps half a dozen stems of pale-pink lilies rising from a cone of florist-shop cellophane tied with a blue ribbon.

Concerned that she might be an admirer of Samantha’s book and, intrigued by his tête-à-tête with the author, might approach him to discuss the novel, Ryan rose from the bench. He could only tell this woman that he was lost, and she, too, would be unable to help him.

The winters of the past half decade had been among the chilliest on record for California, though temperatures that made a local reach for a sweater might seem like picnic weather to anyone in Maine or Michigan. With two hours of unseasonably balmy daylight remaining, Saturday crowds strolled the sprawling open-air mall, more to bask in the sun and to people-watch than to shop.

At one time, these multitudes would have energized Ryan, and he would have found the scene engaging. Now they made him edgy.

Recuperation from transplant surgery had required a period of calm and quiet. Thereafter, he avoided crowds, out of concern his immunosuppressant drugs would make him vulnerable to colds and flu that might be hard to shake. Eventually he spent more time at home not because of medical necessity but because he had come for the time being to prefer solitary pursuits.

This throng did not push or jostle, but wandered the mall maze at a relaxed pace. Yet these people seemed like crushing legions, a buzzing swarm, an alien species that would sweep him along to some inescapable hive. As he made his way toward the parking lot, he resisted a plein-air claustrophobia that, had he surrendered to it, would have sent him running pell-mell for open space.

Crammed with vehicles, the enormous parking lot was largely still and quiet. By this tail-end of the afternoon, most people who intended to come to the mall had already arrived; and with two hours of window-shopping weather remaining, few were ready to go home.

As he found the row in which he had parked, as he walked toward the farther end where he had left his deuce coupe, Ryan dwelt on the look in Samantha’s eyes. He thought she pitied him, but now in his misery, he suspected it had been something even worse than pity.

Pity is pain felt at seeing the distress of others, joined with a desire to help. But Samantha could not help him; she made it clear that she could not. What he had seen in her eyes seemed more like commiseration, which might be as tender as pity, but was a compassion for the hopeless, for those who could not be reached or relieved.

The sun oppressed him, the glare of windshields, the heat rising from parked cars, the scent of tar wafting up from the hot blacktop, and he wanted to be home in the cool of the solarium.

“Hello,” said a voice behind him. “Hello, hello.”

He turned to discover the Asian woman with the bouquet of pale-pink lilies. She was in her twenties, petite, strikingly pretty, with long glossy black hair, not fully Asian but Eurasian, with celadon eyes.

“You know her, you know the author,” she said, her English without accent.

If he was too short with her, his rudeness would reflect on Sam, so he said, “Yes. I know her. Used to know her.”

“She is a very good writer, so talented.”

“Yes, she certainly is. I wish I had her talent.”

“So compassionate,” the woman said, stepping closer and with her glance indicating the book he carried.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan said, “but I’m afraid I have to be somewhere, I’m late.”

“A remarkable book, full of such insights.”

“Yes, it is, but I’m late.”

Holding the lilies with both hands, she thrust them toward him. “Here. I can see the sorrow between you and her, you need these more than I do.”

Startled, he said, “Oh, no, I can’t take them.”

“Please do, you must,” she said, pushing them against his chest with such insistence that one heavy bloom broke off its stem and fell to the blacktop.

With pungent pollen from the stamens abrasive in his nostrils, nonplussed, Ryan said, “No, see, I’m not going anywhere that I’ll be able to put them in water.”

“Here, here, you must,” she said, and if he had not taken the crackling cellophane cone in his free hand, she would have let the flowers fall to the ground.

Although he had accepted the lilies, he tried to pass them back to her.

He felt suddenly that he had been scorched, a line of fire searing along his left side. An instant later a sharper pain followed the hot shock of laceration-and only then he saw the switchblade knife.

As the lilies and the book dropped from Ryan’s hands, the woman said, “I can kill you any time I want.”

Stunned, clutching at his wound, Ryan collapsed back against a Ford Explorer.

She turned and walked away at a brisk pace toward the parallel row of cars, but she did not run.

The blade had been so sharp, it slit his shirt without pulling the threads, as cleanly as a straight razor slashing through one sheet of newspaper.

Reaching cross-body, right hand slick with blood, he frantically traced the wound. It was not ragged enough to be a laceration, more like an incision, about four inches long, too shallow to require stitches, not mortal, just a warning cut, but deep enough to have discernible lips.

He looked up and saw that, as petite as she was, she would swiftly disappear through the crowded rows of cars, perhaps in one of which she would escape.

Shock had silenced him. Now that he thought to shout for help, he could summon only a wheeze.

Looking for someone to call to his aid, Ryan surveyed the surrounding lot. In the distance, two cars moved away along the trunk road from which the rows of parking spaces branched. He saw three people on foot, but none nearby.

The woman with the knife vanished among the vehicles, as if she liquefied into the glass glare, into the heat rising off blacktop.

Ryan possessed his full voice now, but only cursed quietly, having had time for second thoughts about making a public spectacle of himself. Anyway, she was gone, beyond finding.

He crushed a few lilies underfoot, without intention, as he made his way to the dropped book, which he plucked off the pavement with his clean hand.

At his ’32 Ford coupe, perspiration dripped off his brow onto the trunk lid as he fumbled in a pants pocket for his keys. He had broken out in a sweat that had nothing to do with the warm day.

In the trunk he kept a tool kit for road repairs. With it were a moving blanket, a few clean chamois cloths, a roll of paper towels, and bottled water, among other items.

He stuffed a chamois through the tear in his shirt and pressed it to the wound, clutching his arm to his side to hold the cloth in place.

After he washed his bloody hand with bottled water, he half opened the folded moving blanket and draped it over the driver’s seat.