by Dean Koontz
become aware of her interest in him and was not pleased. That he was hiring people to watch her. Then that he was watching her himself. When the telephone rang and the caller hung up without speaking, or when the caller said, Sorry, wrong number, she was convinced that it was Keanu. Once she had adored his face; now she became terrified of it. She destroyed all the scrapbooks and burned all the photographs of him in her bedroom, because she grew convinced that he could view her remotely through any picture of himself. Indeed, at the sight of his face, she was now stricken by a panic attack. She could no longer watch television, for fear of seeing an advertisement for his latest film. She dared not read most magazines, because she might turn a page and find Keanu watching her; even the sight of his name in print alarmed her, and her list of safe periodicals now included little more than Foreign Policy Journal and such medical publications as Advancements in Kidney Dialysis.
Dr. Ahriman knew that soon, as was the pattern in these cases, his patient would become convinced that Keanu Reeves was stalking her, following her everywhere she went, whereupon her phobia would be fully established. Thereafter, she would either stabilize and learn to live as restricted a life as Susan Jagger had lived under the influence of her agoraphobia, or she would descend into complete psychosis and perhaps require at least short-term care in a good institution.
Drug therapy offered hope to such patients, but the doctor did not intend to treat this one conventionally. Eventually, he would put her through three sessions of programming, not for the purpose of controlling her but simply to instruct her to be not afraid of Keanu. Thus, for his next book, he would have a great chapter about a miraculous cure, which he would attribute to his analytic skills and his therapeutic genius, concocting an elaborate story of therapy that he had, in fact, never performed.
He hadn’t yet begun to brainwash her, because her phobia needed more time to ripen. She needed to suffer more in order that her cure would make a better story and to ensure that her gratitude, after she was made whole again, would be boundless. Properly played, she might even consent to appear on Oprah with him when his book was published.
Now, sitting in the armchair across the low table from her, he listened to her fevered speculations about the Machiavellian scheming of Mr. Reeves, not bothering to take notes because a hidden recorder was capturing her monologue and his occasional prodding question.
Impish as ever, the doctor suddenly thought how fun it would have been if the actor now waiting to assault the president’s nose could have been Keanu himself. Imagine this patient’s terror when learning of the news, which would absolutely convince her that hers would have been the savaged nose had not fate put the nation’s chief executive in Keanu’s path before her.
Ah, well. If there was a sense of humor behind the workings of the universe, it wasn’t as acute as the doctor’s.
“Doctor, you’re not listening to me.”
“But I am,” he assured her.
“No, you were woolgathering, and I’m not paying these outrageous hourly rates so you can daydream,” she said sharply.
Although just five short years ago, this woman and her boring husband had been barely able to afford fries with their Big Macs, they had become as imperious and demanding as if they had been born into vast wealth.
Indeed, her Keanu madness and her pan-faced husband’s crazy need to seek validation at the ballot box resulted from the suddenness of their financial success, from a nagging guilt about having gained so much with so little effort, and from the unspoken fear that what had come so quickly could be quickly gone.
“You don’t have a patient conflict here, do you?” she asked with sudden worry.
“Excuse me?”
“An unrevealed patient conflict? You don’t know K-K-Keanu, do you, Doctor?”
“No, no. Of course not.”
“Not to reveal a connection with him would be highly unethical. Highly. And how do I know you’re not capable of unethical conduct? What do I really know about you at all?”
Rather than draw the Taurus PT-111 Millennium from his shoulder holster and teach this nouveau-riche ditz a lesson in manners, the doctor switched on his considerable charm and sweet-talked her into continuing with her delusional ramblings.
A wall clock revealed less than half an hour until he could send her out into the Keanu-haunted world. Then he would be able to deal with Skeet Caulfield and the blushing man.
In places, the glaze on the Mexican pavers had been worn away.
“Where I kept seeing bloodstains,” Bernardo Pastore explained. “While I was in the hospital, friends cleaned out the room, got rid of the furniture, everything. When I came back, there were no stains…but I kept seeing them anyway. For a year, I scrubbed a little every day. It wasn’t blood I was trying to get rid of. It was the grief. When I realized that, I finally stopped scrubbing.”
During his first few days in the intensive-care unit, he had struggled to survive, only intermittently conscious; his injuries and his badly swollen face had prevented him from speaking even when he was alert. By the time he had accused Ahriman, the psychiatrist had been able to establish a cover story, with witnesses.
Pastore stepped to the bedroom window and gazed out at the ranch. “I saw him right here. Right here, looking in. It wasn’t anything I dreamed after I was shot, like they tried to say.”
Moving to the rancher’s side, keeping the tape recorder close to him, Dusty said, “And no one believed you?”
“A few. But only one that mattered. A cop. He started working on Ahriman’s alibi, and maybe he was getting somewhere, because they cracked his knuckles hard. And shifted him to another case while they closed this one.”
“You think he’d talk to us?” Dusty asked.
“Yeah. After all this time, I suspect he would. I’ll call and tell him about you.”
“If you could set it up for this evening, that would be good. I think Chase Glyson’s going to keep us busy tomorrow with former students at Little Jackrabbit.”
“None of what you’re doing is going to matter,” Pastore said, and he might have been staring into the past or the future rather than at the ranch as it was now. “Ahriman’s untouchable somehow.”
“We’ll see.”
Even in the gray light filtered through a skin of gray dust on the window, the thick keloid scars on the right side of Pastore’s face were angry red.
As if sensing Martie’s stare, the rancher glanced at her. “I’ll give you nightmares, ma’am.”
“Not me. I like your face, Mr. Pastore. There’s honesty in it. Besides, once a person’s met Mark Ahriman, there’s nothing else could ever give her nightmares.”
“That’s right enough, isn’t it?” Pastore said, turning his eyes once more to the waning afternoon.
Dusty switched off the recorder.
“They could remove most of these scars now,” Bernardo Pastore said. “And they wanted me to have more surgeries on the jaw, too. They promised they could smooth out the line. But what do I care how I look anymore?”
Neither Dusty nor Martie knew what to say to that. The rancher was no older than forty-five, with many years ahead of him, but no one could make him want those coming years, no one but he himself.
Jennifer lived within two miles of the office. In good weather and in bad, she walked to and from work, because walking was as much a part of her health regimen as tofu cheese, bean sprouts, and ginko biloba.
The doctor asked her to do him the favor of driving his car to the Mercedes dealership and leaving it for an oil change and tire rotation. “They’ll give you a lift home in their courtesy van.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she said, “I’ll walk home from there.”
“But that’s probably nine miles.”
“Really? Great!”
“What if it rains?”
“They’ve changed the forecast. Rain tomorrow, not today. But how will you get home?”
“I’m walking over to Barnes and Noble to browse, t
hen meeting a friend for an early drink,” he lied. “He’ll take me home.” He consulted his wristwatch. “Close up early…in say about fifteen minutes. That way, even with a nine-mile walk, you’ll get home at the usual time. And take thirty dollars from petty cash, so you can stop at that place you like—Green Acres, is it?—for dinner if you want.”
“You’re the most considerate man,” she said.
Fifteen minutes would be enough time for Ahriman to leave this building by the front entrance, where the boys in the beige pickup could not see him, proceed to the building next door, and then to the parking lot behind it, where his 1959 Chevrolet El Camino would be waiting for him.
The riding rings and the paddocks were deserted, all the quarter horses warmly stabled in advance of the coming storm.
When Martie paused beside the rental car, the adobe ranch house didn’t appear quaint and romantic, as it had when she first arrived. As with so much of New Mexico’s architecture, this place had been magical, as if sprung from the desert by an act of sorcery; but now the patinaed earthen walls looked no more romantic than mud, and the house seemed not to be rising up, but settling down, slumped, melting into the earth from which it had been born, soon to vanish as though it had never existed, along with the people who had once known love and joy within its walls.
“What are we dealing with, I wonder?” Dusty said as Martie drove away from the ranch house. “What is Ahriman…in addition to what he appears to be?”
“You’re not talking just about his connections, the institute, who protects him and why.”
“No.” His voice had fallen, soft and solemn, as if he spoke now of sacred things. “Who is this guy, beyond the obvious and easy answers?”
“A sociopath. A narcissist, according to Closterman.” But she knew these were not the words that he was looking for, either.
The private, graveled road leading from the ranch to the paved highway was more than a mile long, passing first across table-flat land and then down a series of hills. Under the bleak gypsum sky, in this last hour of winter light, the dark green sage appeared to be mottled with silver leafing. The tumbleweeds, in this breathless day, stood as untumbled as the strange rock formations that resembled the half-buried, knobby bones of prehistoric behemoths.
“If Ahriman came walking across the desert right now,” Dusty said, “would rattlesnakes boil out of their dens by the thousands and follow him, as docile as kittens?”
“Don’t go spooky on me, babe.”
Yet Martie had no difficulty imagining Ahriman at Dion Pastore’s bedroom window, in the aftermath of the gunfire, unperturbed by the arrival of the coyotes, standing among those predators as though he insisted upon and received a place of honor in the pack, pressing his face to the screen and into the thick smell of blood, while the prairie wolves growled low in their throats and, on both sides of him, scraped their teeth against the mesh.
Where the graveled road rounded the side of a hill and took a sharp turn downward, someone had left a spike strip, one of those tricks the police resorted to in high-speed urban chases when the target of the pursuit proved difficult to catch.
Martie saw it too late. She braked just as both front tires blew out.
The steering wheel ripped back and forth in her hands. She fought for control.
Rattling against the undercarriage, like a frenzied snake with a cracked spine, the spike strip whipped from front to back of the Ford, where it found more rubber with its fangs. The rear tires blew.
Four flats, sliding and shredding across loose gravel, down a runneled incline, allowed Martie less control than she might have had if the Ford were skating across ice. The car turned sideways to the road.
“Hang on!” she cried, though it hardly needed to be said.
Then the pothole.
The Ford jolted, canted, seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second, and rolled.
Rolled twice, she thought, though it may have been three times, because counting was not her first concern, especially when they went over the edge of the road into a wide dry swale, tumbling and sliding twenty feet in a curiously lazy fall. The windshield burst and pieces of the car tore loose with shrieks and twangs before at last the Ford came to rest on its roof.
67
Faster than smelling salts, the pungent reek of gasoline brought Martie out of shock. She heard it gurgling, too, from some ruptured line.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” Dusty confirmed, struggling with his safety harness and cursing either because the buckle release wouldn’t work or because he was too disoriented to locate it.
Hanging upside down in her harness, looking up at the steering wheel and, higher still, at her feet and the floorboards, Martie was a little disoriented, too. “They’ll be coming.”
“The gun,” he said urgently.
The Colt was in her purse, but her purse was no longer on the seat, no longer wedged between her hip and the door.
Instinct told her to look toward the floor, but the floor was above her now. The purse couldn’t have fallen upward.
With trembling fingers, she found the harness release, flailed out of the stubbornly entangling straps, and slid onto the ceiling.
Voices. Not close but drawing nearer.
She would have bet her house that the approaching men weren’t paramedics rushing to the rescue.
Dusty clambered loose of his harness and eeled onto the ceiling. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know.” The words wheezed from her, because the stink of gasoline made breathing increasingly difficult.
The light inside the overturned car was dismal. Outside, the cloud-choked sky faded toward twilight. The broken-out windshield was clogged with tumbleweeds and other brush that filled the bottom of the swale, so hardly any light entered from that direction.
“There!” Dusty said.
Even as he spoke, she saw the purse, near the rear window, and she slithered on her belly across the ceiling.
The purse had been open, and several items had spilled from it. She swept a compact, a comb, a tube of lipstick, and other objects out of her way, and grabbed the bag, which was heavy with the weapon.
Small stones clattered down on the exposed undercarriage of the car, dislodged by men descending the slope from the graveled road.
Martie looked left and then right, at the side windows, which were low to the ground, expecting to see their feet first.
She tried to be quiet, listening for their footsteps, so she might have some advance warning of which side they would approach, but she was forced to gasp noisily for breath, because the air was thick with fumes. Dusty gasped, too, and the desperation in their wheezing was an even more frightening sound than the clatter of the falling stones.
Pitipat, pitipat—not the sound of her heart, because that was booming—pitipat, pitipat, and then a wetness dripping down the side of her face, which made her twitch and peer up toward the bottom of the car. Gasoline was drizzling through the floorboards.
Martie twisted her head, looked behind, and saw three or four other places where fuel was dripping down through the inverted Ford. The droplets caught what little light there was and glimmered like pearls as they fell.
Dusty’s face. Eyes wide with the realization of their hopeless situation.
Stinging fumes pricked tears from Martie’s eyes, and just as her husband’s face blurred, she saw him mouth the words Don’t shoot more clearly than she heard him wheeze them.
If the muzzle flash didn’t touch off an explosion—and it would—then the spark from a ricochet was sure to destroy them.
She wiped the back of her hand across her streaming eyes and glimpsed a pair of cowboy boots at the nearest window, and someone began wrenching on a stubborn, buckled door.
The grape-purple ’59 Chevrolet El Camino was smartly customized: a dechromed, filled, and louvered hood; smoothed, one-piece bumpers; a sweet tubular grille; an air-activated hard tonneau roof; lowered on McGaughly’s Classic Chevy dr
opped spindles.
Dr. Ahriman waited at the wheel, parked in the street within sight of the exit from the parking lot behind his office building.
Under the driver’s seat was the ski mask. He had checked for it before starting the engine. Good, reliable Cedric.
The weight of the mini-9mm pistol in the holster under his left arm was not in the least uncomfortable. Indeed, it was a pleasant, warm little weight. Bang, bang, you’re dead.
And here came Jennifer in the Mercedes, pausing at the tollbooth only to say hello to the clerk, because the car had a monthly sticker on its windshield. Then the striped barrier rose, and she proceeded to the stop sign at the street.
Behind her, the pickup braked to a hard stop at the booth, all its antennae quivering violently.
Jennifer turned left into the street.
Judging by the length of time they spent at the booth, the two dithering detectives had failed to have change in hand to ensure a quick exit. By the time they reached the street, the Mercedes was turning the corner at the far end of the block, and they nearly lost sight of it.
The doctor had been concerned that seeing only Jennifer and not their true quarry, Skeet and his sidekick would wait in the parking lot for him to reappear or until they died of thirst, whichever came first. Perhaps they were unprepared for the parking toll precisely because they had been debating the wisdom of tailing the car without their target in it. In the end, they had taken the bait, as the doctor had expected.
He didn’t follow them. He knew where Jennifer was going, and he set out for the Mercedes dealership via a route of his own, making use of a shortcut or two.
The El Camino was smartly powered by a 9.5:1 small-block Chevy 350 engine. The doctor enjoyed scooting across Newport Beach with one eye out for traffic cops and a quick hand on the horn for those pedestrians who dared enter a crosswalk.
He parked across the street from the service entrance to the dealership and waited more than four minutes for the Mercedes and the pickup to appear. Jennifer drove directly into a service bay, while the truck parked farther along the street, a few spaces in front of the El Camino.
With the camper shell blocking their view through the rear cab window of the pickup, neither Skeet nor his partner in adventure was easily able to see who was parked behind them. They could have used their side mirrors to scope the street, but Ahriman suspected that because they saw themselves as the intrepid surveillance team, they didn’t comprehend the possibility that they themselves could also be surveilled.
The compact, customized, slab-sided Colt slipped under Martie’s belt and snugged into the small of her back more easily than she had expected.
She pulled her sweater over it and tugged her tweed jacket into shape as the driver’s door was wrenched open with a hard screech-pop of twisted metal.
A man ordered them out.
Desperately sucking fumes, her lungs aching for a clean breath, Martie belly-crawled across the car ceiling, through the door, and into the open air.
A man grabbed her left arm and jerked her to her feet, pulled her, stumbling, after him, and then shoved her aside. She staggered and fell, landing hard on the sandy soil and half in a snagging mass of sagebrush.
She didn’t at once reach for the pistol, because she was still gasping uncontrollably and half blinded by a flood of tears. Her throat was hot and raw, her mouth full of an astringent taste. The lining of her nostrils felt scorched, and gasoline fumes writhed all the way into her sinuses, caustic in the hollows of her brow, where now a throbbing headache flared.
She heard Dusty being dragged from the rental car and knocked to the ground as she had been.
They both sat where they had fallen, sucking in great shuddering breaths, but choking on the too-sweet air and explosively exhaling before their lungs could get full benefit.
Martie’s watering eyes blurred and distorted everything, but she saw two men, one watching over them with what appeared to be a gun in his hand, the other circling the overturned car. Big men. Dark clothes. No facial details yet.
Something fluttered against her face. Gnats. Clouds of gnats. But cold. Not