Dean Koontz

by Your Heart Belongs to Me (v5)

  Her skin seemed translucent in the high-altitude light, and when Cathy pressed a few fingers to the glass, Ryan had the strangest notion that, if she wanted, she could reach through that barrier as if it were less substantial than a gauzy membrane, even less solid than the surface tension on a pond.

  He did not repeat his question, because he recognized that this withdrawal was different from her other silences, more contemplative and yet more urgent.

  When she turned to him again, she said, “You may not have time for the heroic act. To be effective for you, it requires a future of satisfactory works.”

  The directness of her stare, the tone of her voice, and her earnestness implied that she believed she was speaking plainly to him, her meaning unmistakable.

  Confused, Ryan did not at once ask her to clarify, because he recalled what she had said earlier—that understanding comes with patience—and he suspected that any question he asked would be met with the same advice.

  “What you need to do,” she continued, “is offer yourself as a victim.” Perhaps she saw bafflement in his face, for she elaborated. “Suffer for the intentions of others, Mr. Perry. If you have the courage and the stamina, offer yourself as a victim all the rest of your life.”

  If he’d been required to put into words the course of action that she had just suggested, he could not have made much sense of it. Yet on some deep level of his mind, in some profound recess of his heart, he knew that she had planted a truth in him and that in time he would understand it fully, and only in time.

  Without another word, he returned to the seat in which he had been sitting before joining Cathy, and they completed the flight apart from each other.

  Crossing Arizona into California, Ryan considered that he did not have to go home, where Lily’s sister must be waiting. He could go anywhere, to Rome or Paris, or Tokyo. He could spend the rest of his life on the run in high style and never exhaust his fortune.

  Nevertheless, he rode the plane down to southern California, where the day was overcast and the sea choppy in the distance.

  On the Tarmac, before going to the limo that Ryan had arranged to transport Cathy back to Los Angeles, she came to him and said, “You remembered what I said about the roots of violence. Do you remember the taproot—always the ultimate and truest motivation?”

  “The hatred of truth,” he said. “And the enthusiasm for disorder that comes from it.”

  To his surprise, she put down her small suitcase and hugged him, not in the manner of a woman embracing a man, but with a fierceness that expressed more than affection. She whispered in his ear and then picked up her suitcase and went to the car that waited for her.

  In his own limo, leaving the airport, Ryan thought again of escape. They could drive to San Francisco. He could get a new car there and drive himself, next to Portland then east to Boise, down to Salt Lake, to Albuquerque and Amarillo. Spending a night or two in each place, on a perpetual road trip.

  His cell phone rang.

  He checked the screen. His father was calling.

  When Ryan answered, the old man said, “What the shit is going on, kid?”

  “Dad?”

  “How deep is the shit you’re in? Are you gonna drown in it? Am I going down with you, what the hell?”

  “Dad, take it easy. Calm down. What’s happening?”

  “Violet is happening, right here, right now, get your ass over here.”

  For a moment, Ryan thought his father had said violence was happening, but when the word registered properly, he repeated it: “Violet.”

  “What’re you doing with a psycho bitch like this, kid? Are you out of your freakin’ mind? You get her out of here. You get her out of here now.”

  Lily and Violet, sisters in life, sisters forever.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Nearly nine years earlier, Ryan had bought houses for his mother and father—Janice and Jimmy—and put them on monthly allowances. Considering the general indifference with which they raised him and the number of times the indifference was punctuated with craziness and cruelty, he didn’t feel that he owed them anything. But he was famous, at least in the business world; the media lived to make a goat of a guy like him, which would be inevitable if they found his parents living in near destitution. Besides, there was a kind of satisfaction in treating them better than they had treated him.

  Because Janice and Jimmy divorced when Ryan was nineteen, he put his mother in a view house on the hills of Laguna Beach, and settled his father closer, in a place half a block from the beach in Corona del Mar. Janice liked glitz and square footage, but his father wanted a cozy bungalow with “attitude and funk.”

  Corona del Mar, which was a part of Newport Beach, didn’t have a reputation for funk. Ryan found a 2,200-square-foot cottage-style bungalow with enormous charm, confident that Jimmy would bring plenty of attitude and funkiness with him.

  Unsure of the situation he would find, he had his limo driver park a block away, and he walked to the house.

  Step by step, he considered backing off until Wilson Mott could get armed escorts here.

  The United States was one of the few places in the world where a wealthy man could safely live without being parenthesized by bodyguards. In the interest of leading a normal life, with as much liberty as he could keep, Ryan used Mott’s armed escorts only when absolutely necessary.

  In this instance, while prudence argued for backup, instinct said he must go in alone. Instinct and a belated acknowledgment of the truth also told him that by his actions, he had narrowed his many possible futures to this one aneurysm in the time stream, and Fate would either end him here or give him another chance. Only he could save himself.

  He opened a white gate in a white picket fence and walked under a trellis draped with bougainvillea in its less flamboyant winter dress but still with an impressive spray of red petals as bright as blood. A brick walkway led to a porch with side trellises up which climbed trumpet vines.

  A gardening service maintained the landscape. Left to Jimmy, the lawn would be dead, and everything else would have rioted into a tangle reminiscent of a third-act set for Little Shop of Horrors.

  The front door stood ajar. He did not ring the bell, but pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  He seldom came here, so the time warp always surprised him, just as it always depressed him. The Age of Aquarius had passed in most of the rest of the world, but here the clocks had stopped in 1968. The psychedelic posters, the Grateful Dead memorabilia, here Sly and the Family Stone, there Hendrix and Joplin, here the Jefferson Airplane, the Day-Glo peace signs, the portrait of Chairman Mao, bamboo window shades flanked by tie-dyed drapes, and of course the hookah on the coffee table.

  Jimmy sat on the sofa, and Lily’s sister, Violet, stood over him with a silencer-equipped pistol.

  Seeing Ryan, his father said, “Shit, man, you took long enough. We have a situation here. Whatever you did to make it, you unmake it right now, ’cause this bitch is a stone-serious psycho.”

  At sixty-three, Jimmy had no hair on the top of his head but a sufficient crop at the back to make a ponytail. He wore a headband like one that Pigpen had worn, a mustache like David Crosby’s, beads purportedly worn by Grace Slick. The only thing about him that was not copied after someone else were his eyes like burnt holes into which had drained water and ashes, the aftermath of a fire, full of childlike calculation and need and quiet desperation, restless eyes that Ryan could bear to meet only when his old man was sufficiently stoned that the fear and resentment and bitterness were for the moment drowned in chemical bliss.

  “Bamping,” Violet said.

  Hearing movement, he turned to see a man step into the living room from the hallway. He was Asian, Ryan’s size, and had a pistol of his own.

  Indicating Jimmy, she said to Bamping, “Take him to his bedroom and keep him quiet until this is done.”

  “I don’t want to go back there,” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to go with him.”

  Vio
let put the muzzle of the silencer against Jimmy’s forehead.

  “Dad,” Ryan said. “Do what they want.”

  “Screw ’em,” Jimmy said. “Fascist shits.”

  “She’ll blow your brains out, Dad. What can he do to you that would be more final?”

  Licking his lips and the fringe of mustache that overhung them, Jimmy rose unsteadily from the sofa. He was a skinny wreck. The seat of his jeans sagged, he had no butt left, and sticking out of his T-shirt, his elbows looked almost as big as his forearms.

  “She’s making this worse for me,” Jimmy said to Ryan. “Bitch won’t let me have a joint. Make her let me have one.”

  “I don’t set the rules here, Dad.”

  “It’s your house, isn’t it?”

  “Dad, go with Bamping.”

  “Go with what?”

  “Bamping. That’s his name. Go with him now.”

  “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?”

  FIFTY-TWO

  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 clos
e 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.

  As he tried to push up from the chair, the next blow landed on the top of his skull, so swiftly delivered after the first that the agony in his ear had just begun to bloom.

  A scintillation of pain followed the natural sutures between the frontal bone of his skull and the two parietals. Behind his eyes, which had squinched shut with the pain, he saw the squiggly line of those sutures picked out in the darkness by sputters of coppery sparks.

  Defensively, frantically, he clasped the top of his head with his hands, so the third blow cracked his fingers. He cried out, or thought he did, but even if he screamed, the fourth blow cut it short, and knocked him unconscious.

  FIFTY-THREE

  He regained consciousness in stages defined by an increasing tolerance for light. At first, rising from oblivion, he found the oil lamps unendurably bright, their flames so sharp that it seemed each flicker lacerated his eyes. He didn’t know where he was or to whom the lamps belonged, and his head was such a mass of pain that he could not think of the words to ask that the wicks be snuffed. He sank back into senselessness, returned, sank again, and by degrees adapted to light and recovered his memory.