Dean Koontz: Your Heart Belongs To Me

“What kind of name is Bamping?”

“Don’t do this anymore, Dad.”

“When they bought your company, did they buy your balls?”

“Yes, they did, Dad. They bought them. Now go with him.”

“This sucks. This whole situation sucks.”

“It’s no tangerine dream, that’s for sure,” Ryan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“It means something, all right. Wise-ass.”

At last Jimmy allowed Bamping to escort him back the hall to the bedroom. A door closed.

“Very carefully,” Violet said, “take off your jacket.”

“I’m not carrying a weapon.”

“Very carefully,” she repeated.

He took off the jacket and draped it over the sofa, where she could examine it if she wished. At her command, he took off his shirt and placed that beside his jacket, and then he turned in a circle with his arms extended like the wings of a bird.

Satisfied that he wasn’t armed, she pointed to a La-Z-Boy recliner and said, “Sit there.”

Obeying, Ryan said, “Funny.”

“You are amused?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s funny how the warriors of the Greatest Generation and washouts of the next both like their La-Z-Boys.”

He did not recline but sat straight up, leaning forward.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“ Denver.”

She kept at a distance from him, not willing to get as near as she had been to Jimmy. “Were you running away?”

“I thought about it,” he admitted.

“I didn’t expect you to come here.”

“If I didn’t, you would have killed him.”

“Yes.”

“I guess you still might.”

“I might,” she said. “I will certainly kill you.”

“Maybe I didn’t come alone.”

“You came in a limousine, which is parked a block away. There is only the driver. He is in the car, listening to very bad music and reading an obscene magazine.”

Although Ryan’s fear was not diminished, a peculiar calm came over him, as well. He wanted not a single day more that was alike to the days of the past sixteen months. He had been saved from certain death, but he had lost Samantha, he had lost a sense of purpose, and he had lost the capacity for pure joy. His lifelong conviction that the future was worth the travails of the day, while not broken, had been shaken. He had arrived at a lever-point moment. Here he must pivot to a better future or give up the game.

“If you’re going to kill me,” he said, “may I have the courtesy of knowing fully why?”

The bamboo shades, dropped to sills, were dimly backlit by the overcast day but admitted no light to the living room or to the dining room that lay beyond a wide archway. Illumination came from two table lamps turned low, from the luminous shapes everchanging in a lava lamp, from three candles glimmering in colored glasses on the fireplace mantel, and from two glass vessels on the coffee table, in which floating wicks burned scented oils.

More than light, shadows shaped the room, smoothing every sharp corner into a radius, layering velvet folds of faux draperies over flat surfaces, and conspiring with the pulsating candlelight to suggest that the ceiling had an undulant form.

The woman roamed ceaselessly through orderless patterns of pale light and masking shadow, through shimmering nimbuses and quivering penumbras. Her languid movements might have seemed lethargic to some, but not to Ryan, who saw in her the measured restlessness and the lethal power of a tiger.

“Who is this?” she asked, pointing with the pistol to a poster.

“Country Joe and the Fish,” Ryan said.

“I don’t see fish.”

“It’s the name of the band. They changed the world.”

“How did they change the world?”

“I don’t know. That’s what my father told me.”

Lamplight uplit her face and, with illusory powder and mascara, painted her features into a stark kabuki mask.

“What is the stink?” she asked.

“Scented candles, scented oils.”

“The other odor, under that.”

“You’re probably smelling the pot.”

“Marijuana?”

“Yeah. The smoke saturates things. That’s why he burns scented candles, to mask it.”

“Why does he smoke pot?”

“I don’t know. Because he always has.”

“He is addicted?”

“They say it’s not addictive.”

“Doesn’t marijuana make you mellow?”

“I don’t use it. I don’t know. That’s what they say.”

“He isn’t mellow,” she said.

“No. He never has been.”

Dressed in black slacks, black sweater, and black jacket, she was a shadow moving through shadows. For the most part, the various lamps and candles confirmed her presence only as their light found her hands and her face. Whatever the denomination of the light that paid on her skin, it was given back as gold.

Ryan knew he should be alert for an opportunity to rush her and struggle for the weapon. Often, she pointed the gun away from him and seemed to be distracted by Jimmy’s nostalgic collection.

He suspected, however, that her distraction was more apparent than real, that any opening he saw was only an opportunity to be gut-shot.

Indicating another poster, she asked, “Who is this?”

“Another band. The Grateful Dead. They changed the world.”

“How did they change it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Dad can tell you.”

“I know where your mother lives, but I have not met her yet.”

“You’re in for a treat,” Ryan said.

“Is she like him?”

“Like but different. With her it’s alcohol and men, especially men who like alcohol.”

“I am thinking about killing all three of you.”

Ryan said nothing.

At another poster, she said, “Who is this?”

“Jim Morrison and the Doors.”

“Did they change the world?”

“That’s what I hear.”

As Violet moved past him into the portion of the room that lay behind his La-Z-Boy, Ryan turned his head and started to turn in his seat to follow her.

“Face forward,” she said, pointing the pistol at the bridge of his nose.

He did as he was told.

“If you turn your head to look back, I will shoot you. The people in these posters-where are they now?”

“I don’t know. A lot of them are dead.”

“So the world changed them,” she said.

He could barely hear her soft steps. She must have picked up something to have a look at it, for it knocked slightly against a table when she put it down.

In the lengthening silence, he searched his mind for a question or a comment that would begin to give him some control of their conversation.

From so close that her voice startled him, from just behind his right ear, she said, “I told your father my name. Do you know the name of my sister?”

The difference of intonation between the statement and the question was the difference between an emotionless declaration and the apparently innocent but entrapping query of a police detective. Her last eight words were a bottled accusation, and the wrong reply would pull the stopper, releasing her anger.

After a hesitation that he realized might be dangerous, he said, “Yes. Her name was Lily.”

“How did you learn her name? Did you deduce it from my flowers, from something that I said?”

“No. I asked the family for it, and for a photo, which is how I know you’re identical twins.”

“You were given a photo by the family?”

“Yes.”

“But I am the family.”

“Well, I guess it came from your parents.”

“Liar,” she said.

She slammed the side of his head with what might have been the butt of the pistol, and blood burst from his crushed ear.