“It is,” Carter said with excitement. “In the back of the catalogue they had a picture of you. They used you as proof that you can inherit multiple memories without going crazy or doing permanent damage to your brain. You’re their proof that the legal limits have no real scientific basis. You’re one of the main reasons that I was willing to order more memories.”
Cole put his head in his hands. “Those bastards,” he mumbled out loud. He turned his head and looked out toward the sun as it rose slowly higher into the sky out over the sea. He had no idea what to do now.
“What are you doing here?” Carter asked Cole.
“I followed you here,” Cole said, deflated. “Actually, I followed the memories that you inherited here, and they brought me to you. I was trying to find the Memory Vampire. Instead, I found you.” He shook his head. “I still can’t believe you paid eleven million dollars for a bunch of fake memories.”
“They’re not fake,” Carter objected. “They’re real. They’re realer than my own memories.”
“They’re real memories,” Cole countered, “but they’re real memories of a fake life. They have no meaning.”
“They mean something to me,” Carter said. “I paid for those memories what other people pay for a Picasso. I read about you. The memories you inherit, you find them abandoned in the street. The memories I have in my head are not of a fake life. They’re of a great life, a life without wasted opportunities. They’re memories of what life should be.”
“A life that you ended.”
“No,” Carter said. “You can’t blame me for that. I didn’t end his life. I just bought his memories. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been somebody else.”
Cole stood up. He walked past Carter toward a shelf where he had seen a pen and some paper. He left his gun on the coffee table in front of the chair he’d been sitting in. He didn’t think twice about leaving his gun, because he didn’t believe that Carter could be dangerous even if he wanted to. This man wasn’t the Memory Vampire. He was a leech with money. Cole reached the pen and paper and picked them up. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about this company,” Cole said to Carter, “because I actually can blame you for the one death that you paid for, and I’m confident that a jury will be happy to do the same. If you want to avoid going on trial for murder, you’re going to talk. Come over here. You can start by telling me the company’s name and how you found them.”
Murder? The idea had honestly never crossed Carter’s mind. “I didn’t kill anyone,” Carter repeated.
“You didn’t pull the trigger. That doesn’t mean you didn’t kill anyone. What is the name of the company, and how did you find it?”
Carter took another handful of steps toward Cole. “I didn’t kill anyone,” Carter said again.
“I understand,” Cole said to Carter. “You’re finally starting to feel a little guilty now. You feel like you bonded with the man whose memories you took because you’ve seen life through his eyes, and yet you know that you’re the one who paid for him to die. Denying it isn’t going to help. You want to feel better about what you’ve done? Tell me what you know.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.” Carter was almost yelling the words. He took another step closer to Cole. They were only a few feet apart now.
Cole wasn’t going to give in. He wasn’t going to let Carter escape any blame by hiding behind his money. “Sure, but that’s because you didn’t have—” Cole stopped mid-sentence when he glanced up and saw the expression on Carter’s face. The light from the sun was flooding through the house now, illuminating everything. Cole could see every horrid contour and line in Carter’s face. Cole had never seen anything like his expression, not even with all the terrible memories in his head. Carter’s nose twitched as his eyes and mouth took on a look of abject horror. Then Carter’s face grew even more sallow, his mouth turned down and his eyes grew wide and full of dread. For a moment, he looked as if he were staring into the distance at some unimaginable atrocity that he could do nothing to stop. Cole didn’t think he’d pushed Carter that hard, but Carter’s face looked utterly broken.
As Carter turned his devastated eyes toward the coffee table behind him, Cole followed his gaze to the gun on the table. Cole had made a horrible mistake. He knew with certainty and dread what was about to happen. Carter was going to go for the gun. Cole hadn’t been afraid of Carter a moment ago, but after seeing that look on his face, he was more than afraid. He was terrified.
Carter went for the gun and Cole went for Carter. Cole lunged toward Carter with everything he had in him, every ounce of purpose and strength. Cole was lucky to catch him at all. He almost missed, grabbing only the toes of one of Carter’s bare feet. It was just enough to knock Carter off balance, tripping him and sending him sprawling on the floor. Instead of reaching the gun, Carter tumbled past the coffee table and hit the far wall. The bright light from the sun gave everything around them an almost surreal shine. Everything looked too real to be real. Cole got back on his feet first. He could think of nothing at the moment but get the gun, get the gun, get the gun. No memories were triggered. It was all instinct. It was all survival. That look on Carter’s face shot his whole body full of adrenaline. It was like staring into the face of death. Get the gun.
Cole almost made it. He’d had the advantage. He’d gotten to his feet first and was closer to the gun. It took Carter an extra second to get back on his feet, and then he had to turn around to face Cole again. Yet whatever it was that had come over Carter, whatever was driving him, was pushing him harder than the instinct to survive was pushing Cole.
Cole bent down to pick the gun off the table. Just as his fingers grazed the handle, just as he was about to lift the gun, he was hit by the force of a moving wall. Carter shouldn’t have been able to move like that. He had a businessman’s build. And yet the shock reverberated through Cole’s whole body. He felt it in every muscle. He felt it in every bone. How this pale, soft, middle-aged man had become so strong so fast was beyond Cole. Carter stayed on top of Cole for a minute, their two bodies tangled together on the floor, both feeling the impact of their collision, both slow to get up. Carter began to push himself up first. He was breathing heavily now, working his way to his feet. Cole’s whole body throbbed. He could barely move, but he knew he couldn’t let Carter get up. If Carter got up, Cole would have no way of stopping him from reaching the gun, no way to defend himself. So Cole clutched at Carter as Carter tried to stand, grabbing an arm and a shoulder.
Cole’s fingers pressed into Carter’s soft flesh but no matter how hard Cole held on, Carter kept pulling away. Cole felt like he was trying to hold an unstoppable machine. “No!” Cole shouted as Carter slowly pulled himself out of Cole’s grip. “You don’t need to do this.” Cole fought to get each word out between shortened breaths. He knew he couldn’t physically stop Carter now. All he could do was slow him down and convince him that what he was trying to do was unnecessary. “I believe you. I believe that you didn’t kill anyone. I just want your help finding the people who did.” Carter didn’t answer him with words. He simply looked at Cole again. Cole could see the depth of the pain in his eyes, pain that hadn’t been there before. It was new and it had brought this inhuman strength with it. Without a word, Carter placed a hand on Cole’s chest and slowly pushed. As he pushed, Cole’s grip slowly slipped, inch after painful inch. Cole couldn’t hold on much longer. Even knowing that the gun was on the table only a few feet behind Carter, even knowing that letting go would almost certainly mean his own death, Cole’s grip continued to give. Carter had become too strong to stop.
“Why are you doing this?” Cole wrenched the words through his gritted teeth. “You don’t have to do this.” The sun burst into Cole’s eyes; above him, Carter had become nothing more than a hulking shadow. “Why?” Cole begged again as Carter freed himself and climbed to his feet.
Carter still didn’t answer. He simply stood up, facing Cole. Cole could feel his pulse in every part of his a
ching body. He wanted to get up too, to keep fighting, but his body wouldn’t let him. Carter had knocked all the fight out of him, and he could barely move. Carter stepped slowly backward toward the table with the gun. His sad eyes stayed on Cole with every step. “You don’t have to do this,” Cole shouted at him again, trying to make him at least respond. “You’re not a killer. You said so yourself.” The fear inside Cole was growing, preparing him for the inevitable. Carter took another step backward. He was standing next to the coffee table now, the gun only inches from his fingers. “It’s wrong,” Cole yelled out to him, choosing his last words. “What you did was wrong. People’s memories aren’t meant to be a rich person’s plaything.”
Carter reached down and picked up the gun. He lifted it into the air. Cole closed his eyes and, when the darkness hit him, the memories came. They flooded into him. He swam in them. It was a moment of pure ecstasy. He remembered childhood after childhood. He remembered playing games on street corners and in giant fields. He remembered Christmas mornings and New Year’s nights. He remembered Sam, beautiful and bold and dark. He remembered Allie, his own Allie, his only ever Allie. And then, through the wash of memories, he heard Carter finally speak. “The memories,” Carter said in barely more than a whisper. Then Cole heard the bang. It was loud, so loud. At first, everything sped up. All of Cole’s unremembered memories flashed through his mind. Each and every memory flew by him as he waited for the bullet. Then his mind emptied of all thought and all memory and Cole felt he could breathe again, and still he waited for the bullet.
Cole didn’t know how long he’d held his eyes closed. He didn’t know how long his brain stayed quiet and empty. All he knew was that he never felt the bullet, so he opened his eyes again. Carter’s body lay in front of him, slumped on the floor. The wall behind his body was covered in blood. Judging from the blood running down the wall in long red streaks, Cole guessed that he’d only had his eyes closed for a few seconds. He tried to stand up, to go to Carter’s motionless body. He lifted himself halfway up and then fell down again, completely spent.
Cole looked at the wall again. He stared at Carter’s blood, and whatever else had been expelled from the back of Carter’s head, as it dripped slowly down toward the floor. Cole leaned up on his elbows to get a better look. The gun lay next to the body. Cole got onto his hands and knees and crawled toward it. His head hurt as much as his body, but he was still alive. With the amount of blood that he could see on the wall, Cole was confident that Carter was dead, but he wasn’t going to take any more careless chances. He’d done enough of that already. He picked up the gun. It didn’t feel any lighter in his hand. He couldn’t feel the weight of a single bullet.
The sun was so bright. The blood on the wall was so red. Cole knew it would turn brown as it dried but now, under the glare of the sun, it was so bright and so wrong. Cole took a deep breath to try to regain some composure and take stock of his situation. He could hear the waves crashing along the shore just outside of the house. He didn’t hear anything else. No one seemed to be rushing to the house. No one seemed to be chasing the sound of the gun. He heard no sirens and no shouting. Even so, Cole was alone in a house in the jungle with a dead man who had been shot in the head with Cole’s illegal gun. He had to decide what to do, and he had to do it fast.
Cole crawled over to Carter’s body. He hadn’t even learned the man’s name. He rolled the body over so that he could get a closer look at the wound, if you could even call it a wound. In reality, it was more like an open chasm in the back of the man’s skull. Carter had placed the gun inside his mouth before he pulled the trigger, destroying the part of his brain where his memories were stored. Cole wondered if he’d done that on purpose. Cole looked up at the wall again. Eleven million dollars’ worth of memories dripped down that wall, and that wasn’t even counting Carter’s own memories. They were all gone now, splattered into oblivion, the stain on the wall the only remnants of their existence. Cole thought about how strange it was that memories, whose power he understood perhaps better than anyone else in the world, could be so easily lost forever.
All of Cole’s leads on the Memory Vampire case disappeared with those memories, along with the answers to so many of his questions. They were gone and somehow Cole was still alive. He’d survived.
Slowly, Cole made it back to his feet. He was still confused, unsure of everything that had just happened. The only thing Cole knew with any confidence was that he needed to cover his tracks. Who would believe his story when he could barely believe it himself? Who would believe that a rich man on vacation had, for some unknown reason, fought to take Cole’s gun just so he could shoot himself in the head? Cole had other reasons to cover his tracks too. He wasn’t merely up against the Memory Vampire anymore. Now he was against a whole enterprise. Cole walked into the kitchen and grabbed a paper towel and some cleaning supplies. He began to wipe away any evidence that he’d been there, every fingerprint, every smudge. When he was done scrubbing and wiping, Cole was convinced that the only evidence left of what he had seen were the memories in his head. He was wrong.
Chapter 51
Cole put his drink to his lips. He took a sip, staring over the brim of the glass at the thick, red liquid inside. It reminded him, as it always had, of blood. This time, however, it reminded him of very specific blood. He stared into his glass and saw Carter’s blood shining in the sun as it dripped slowly down the wall. Cole was sitting alone at a bar in the Miami airport. He’d gotten out of Costa Rica as quickly as he could, but he was now stuck in Miami for another six hours before he could board his connecting flight back to New York. To get out that quickly, he’d been forced to leave a few things behind, including his gun. It didn’t worry him too much. He didn’t think the authorities would have the desire, or the wherewithal, to trace it. As long as he left his gun behind, it would seem obvious that the dead body on the floor had committed suicide. Why would they bother to ask any more questions when they already had the answer they wanted, one that was simple and clean and wouldn’t affect the tourism industry? All Cole had to worry about was the man’s family, if he had any, and their desire to press for more answers. Cole still didn’t know anything about the man other than what his insides looked like.
The Miami airport was crowded and bustling as always. Thousands of people were coming and going right behind Cole as he sat staring into his Bloody Bull. They were boarding and disembarking from planes that would take them to far-off places so that they could make new memories, or bringing them home from far-off places so that they could reminisce. Cole barely even glanced at them. The stools at the bar faced away from the traveling hordes, but Cole could hear them behind him. He did his best to ignore the incessant buzz of excited voices. In front of him were his drink and a television set playing and replaying the same highlights from the same sports games over and over and over again—or maybe they were different games. Cole couldn’t tell and didn’t care. He had other things on his mind.
Cole took another sip of his drink. It was his third one already. He was tired. He’d slept a little bit on the plane, maybe an hour or two, but otherwise he was going on almost forty-eight hours without sleep. He’d spent the last part of those hours trying to figure out how much of what the dead man had told him was true. How much was lies or rumors, and what the hell happened that made him decide to blow his own brains out? All Cole was certain of was that the man had believed every word he’d said.
As Cole sat, lost in quiet thought, a stranger sat down on the empty stool next to him. He was a bald, muscular man. Cole gave him only a cursory glance. Then, for reasons he would never understand, he remembered. He remembered seeing the stranger on the airplane when he flew down to Costa Rica. He remembered Jerry’s and Bon’s description of the man they had met, the man searching for other people’s memories. Finally, he remembered seeing the man at Johnny Dragon’s toga party, where they had literally bumped into each other. The stranger had pushed Cole away with one of his massive hands befo
re disappearing into the crowd. He had been everywhere, and Cole had failed to notice him until now. As Fergus sat down, Cole finished his drink in a single gulp.
The bartender strode over to Fergus and asked him what he wanted to drink. “A rye old-fashioned for me,” the stranger said, adding, without even looking at Cole, “and another Bloody Bull for my friend.” His voice was deep and smooth, like the voice you hear on the radio in the middle of the night. Cole stared straight ahead. He could see Fergus’s face in the mirror behind the bar. He didn’t need to see his face, though. Cole knew exactly what the man looked like. He could draw every line of his face from memory if he had to. Neither of them said another word until the bartender returned with their drinks.
“How did you do it?” Cole asked without turning his head. Some things were finally beginning to make sense to him. Fergus casually reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a tiny vial full of clear liquid. A small cork plugged up the top. Fergus placed the vial on the bar in front of Cole. Cole stared at it without moving. He fought the urge to pick it up. “What is it?” he asked.
“A scent,” Fergus said.
“Like perfume?” Cole asked.
“Not exactly. You can smell it if you want,” Fergus told him.
“I’ll pass.”
“Don’t worry,” Fergus assured Cole, “it won’t do anything to you. You might not even smell anything. This scent isn’t a trigger for you.”
“You’re trying to tell me that you put something in his memories, something so awful that a simple smell would act as a trigger and make him want to kill himself?”
“You really do know this stuff, don’t you?” Fergus said with a chuckle chock-full of admiration. “I guess I should have assumed as much from the Memory Detective.”
“But how do you do it? How can you plant something in the memory like that?”
“It’s done during the procedure. While we’re transferring all the other memories, we add this one. It’s not a real memory. It’s synthetic. The synthetic memory is linked to the smell, which we create in a lab. It has to be something totally unique, something that couldn’t be duplicated in nature. After all, we don’t want to put our customers in any unnecessary danger. Since the odor and the memory are both synthetic, we can make it so only a tiny whiff will act as a trigger.”
The Memory Detective Page 28