False Memory

60

The rat-stalking cat, as black as soot, moving as sinuously as smoke, looked up into the Saturn headlights, eyes flaring hot orange, and then vanished into burnt-out corners of the night.

Dusty parked next to a Dumpster, close to the building, leaving the alleyway unobstructed.

The dog watched them, nose pressed to a car window, his breath clouding one pane, as they walked quickly to the service entrance of New Life.

Although visiting hours had ended twenty minutes ago, they would most likely be permitted upstairs to see Skeet if they used the front door, especially if they announced that they had come to remove him from the clinic. That bold approach, however, would lead to a lot of discussion with the head shift nurse and with a physician if one were on duty, as well as to delays with paperwork.

Worse, Ahriman might have Skeet’s file flagged with a directive requiring his notification if the patient or the patient’s family requested a discharge. Dusty didn’t want to risk a face-to-face encounter with the psychiatrist, at least not yet.

Fortunately, the service door was unlocked. Beyond lay a small, dimly lighted, empty receiving room with a drain in the center of the concrete floor. The astringent scent of pine disinfectant masked but didn’t entirely conceal a sour odor, which was probably milk that had dripped from a punctured carton on delivery and then soaked into the porous concrete, but which smelled to Dusty like curdled blood or old puke, evidence of cruelty or crime. In this new millennium, when reality was so plastic, he could look at even this mundane space and imagine a secret abattoir where ritual sacrifices were practiced at the first midnight of each full moon.

He wasn’t sufficiently paranoid to believe that every member of the clinic staff was a mind-controlled minion of Dr. Ahriman, but he and Martie proceeded stealthily, as if in enemy territory.

Beyond the first room was a long hallway leading to a junction with another hall, and farther to a pair of doors that probably opened to the lobby. Offices, storerooms, and perhaps the kitchen lay left and right off the corridor.

No one was in sight, but two people, speaking a language other than English, perhaps an Asian tongue, conversed in the distance. Their voices were ethereal, as if they didn’t arise from one of the rooms ahead, but instead pierced a veil from a strange otherworld.

Immediately to the right, outside the receiving room, Martie indicated a door labeled STAIRS, and in the best tradition of premillennium reality, stairs actually lay beyond it.

Wearing a simple charcoal-gray suit, a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned, and a blue-and-yellow striped tie loosened at the neck, forgoing a pocket square, having allowed the wind to disarrange his thick hair and then having combed it distractedly with his fingers upon stepping into the lobby at New Life, Mark Ahriman was costumed and coiffed for the role of a dedicated doctor whose evenings were not his own when patients needed him.

At the security station sat Wally Clark, pudgy and dimpled and pink-cheeked and smiling, looking as though he were waiting to be buried in a sand pit lined with hot coals, and served at a luau.

“Dr. Ahriman,” Wally inquired, as the doctor crossed the lobby with a black medical bag in hand, “no rest for the weary?”

“That should be ‘No rest for the wicked,’” the doctor corrected.

Wally chuckled dutifully at this self-deprecatory witticism.

Smiling inwardly, imagining how quickly Wally would choke on that chuckle if presented with a certain jar containing two famous eyes, the doctor said, “But the rewards of healing far outweigh an occasional missed dinner.”

Admiringly, Wally said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all doctors had your attitude, sir?”

“Oh, I’m sure most do,” Ahriman said generously as he pushed the elevator call button. “But I’ll agree, there’s nothing worse than a man of medicine who doesn’t care anymore, who’s just going through the motions. If the joy of this job ever leaves me, Wally, I hope I have the good sense to move on to other work.”

As the elevator doors slid open, Wally said, “Hope that day never comes. Your patients would miss you terribly, Doctor.”

“Well, if that’s so, then before I retire, I’ll just have to kill them all.”

Laughing, Wally said, “You tickle me, Dr. Ahriman.”

“Guard the door against barbarians, Wally,” he replied as he entered the elevator.

“You can count on me, sir.”

On the way up to the second floor, the doctor wished that the night were not cool. In warmer weather, he could have entered with his suit coat slung over one shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled up; the desired image would thus have been better conveyed with less need of supporting dialogue.

If he had chosen screen acting as a career, he was confident he would have become not merely famous but internationally renowned. Awards would have been showered on him. Initially, there would have been petty talk of nepotism, but his talent eventually would have silenced the naysayers.

Having grown up in Hollywood’s highest circles and on studio lots, however, Ahriman could no longer see any romance in the movie industry, just as the son of any third-world dictator might grow up to be bored and impatient even with the spectacles in well-equipped torture chambers and with the pageantry of mass executions.

Besides, movie-star fame — and the loss of anonymity that went with it — allowed one to be sadistic only to film crews, to the high-priced call girls who serviced the kinkier members of the celluloid set, and to the young actresses dumb enough to allow themselves to be victimized. The doctor would never have been content with such easy pickings.

Ding. The elevator arrived at the second floor.

On the second floor, when Dusty and Martie cautiously ventured out of the back stairwell, their luck held. A hundred feet away, at the junction of the well-lighted main corridors, two women were at the nursing station, but neither happened to be looking toward the stairs. He led Martie to Skeet’s nearby quarters without being seen.

The room was illuminated only by the television. A flurry of cops-and-robbers action on the screen caused pale forms of light to writhe like spirits up the walls.

Skeet was sitting in bed, propped like a pasha against pillows, drinking through a straw from a bottle of vanilla Yoo-hoo. When he saw his visitors, he blew bubbles in his beverage as though tooting a horn, and he greeted them with delight.

While Martie went to the bed to give Skeet a hug and a kiss on the cheek, Dusty said a cheery good-evening to Jasmine Hernandez, the suicide-watch nurse on duty, and he opened the small closet.

When Dusty turned from the closet, Skeet’s suitcase in hand, Nurse Hernandez had risen from the armchair and was consulting the luminous numbers on her wristwatch. “Visiting hours are over.”

“Yes, that’s right, but we’re not visiting,” Dusty said.

“This is an emergency,” Martie said, as she coerced Skeet into putting down his Yoo-hoo and sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Illness in the family,” Dusty added.

“Who’s sick?” Skeet asked.

“Mom,” Dusty told him.

“Whose mom?” Skeet asked, clearly unable to believe what he had heard.

Claudette ill? Claudette, who had given him Holden Caulfield for a father and then Dr. Derek “Lizard” Lampton for a stepfather? That woman with the beauty and the cool indifference of a goddess? That paramour of third-rate academics? That muse to novelists who found no meaning in the written word and to hack psychologists who despised the human race? Claudette, the hard-nosed existentialist with her pure contempt for all rules and laws, for all definitions of reality that did not begin with her? How could this unmovable and apparently immortal creature fall victim to anything in this world?

“Our mom,” Dusty confirmed.

Skeet was already wearing socks, and Martie knelt beside the bed, jamming his feet into his sneakers.

“Martie,” the kid said, “I’m still in my pajamas.”

“No time to change here, honey. Your mom is really sick.”

With a note of bright wonder in his voice, Skeet said, “Really? Claudette is really sick?”

Throwing Skeet’s clothes into the suitcase as fast as he could pull them out of the dresser drawers, Dusty said, “It hit her so suddenly.”

“What, a truck or something?” Skeet asked.

Jasmine Hernandez heard the note of almost-delight in Skeet’s voice, and she frowned. “Chupaflor, does this mean you’re self-discharging?”

Looking down at his pajama bottoms, Skeet said, with complete sincerity, “No, I’m clean.”

The doctor checked in at the station on the second floor to let the nurses know that neither he nor his patient in Room 246 were to be disturbed while in session.

“He called me, saying he intends to discharge himself in the morning, which would probably be the end of him. I’ve got to talk him out of it. He’s still in deep addiction. When he hits the streets, he’ll score heroin in an hour, and if I’m right about his psychopathology, he really wants to overdose and be done with it.”

“And him,” said Nurse Ganguss, “with everything to live for.”

She was in her thirties, attractive, and usually a consummate professional. With this patient, however, she was more like a horny schoolgirl than an RN, always on the brink of a swoon from cerebral anemia, insufficient circulation to the brain, as a consequence of so much of her blood flooding into her loins and genitalia.

“And he’s so sweet,” Nurse Ganguss added.

The younger woman, Nurse Kyla Woosten, wasn’t impressed by the patient in Room 246, but clearly she had an interest in Dr. Ahriman himself. Whenever the doctor had occasion to talk with her, Nurse Woosten performed the same repertoire of tricks with her tongue. Pretending to be unaware of what she was doing — but, in fact, with more calculation than a Cray supercomputer could accomplish in one full day of operation — she frequently licked her lips to moisten them: long, slow, sensuous licks. When considering a point that Ahriman made, the vixen sometimes stuck her tongue out, biting on the tip of it, as if to do so assisted thoughtful contemplation.

Yes, here came the tongue, questing into the right corner of her lips, perhaps seeking a sweet crumb lodged in that ripe and tender crease. Now her lips parted in surprise, tongue fluttering against the roof of her mouth. Again, the moistening of the lips.

Nurse Woosten was pretty, but the doctor wasn’t interested in her. For one thing, he had a policy against brainwashing business employees. Although a mind-controlled workforce, throughout his various enterprises, would eliminate demands for increased wages and fringe benefits, the possible complications were not worth risking.

He might have made an exception of Nurse Woosten, because her tongue fascinated him. It was a perky, pink little thing. He would have liked to do something inventive with it. Regrettably, in a time when body piercing for cosmetic purposes was no longer shocking, when ears and eyebrows and nostrils and lips and navels and even tongues were regularly drilled and fitted with baubles, the doctor couldn’t have done much to Woosten’s tongue that, upon waking, she would have deemed horrifying or even objectionable.

Sometimes he found it frustrating to be a sadist in an age when self-mutilation was all the rage.

So, on to Room 246 and his star patient.

The doctor was the principal investor in New Life Clinic, but he didn’t regularly treat patients here. Generally speaking, people with drug problems didn’t interest him; they were so industriously wrecking their lives that any additional misery he could inflict on them would be merely filigree atop filigree.

Currently, his only patient at New Life was in 246. Of course, he also had a particular interest in Dustin Rhodes’s brother, down the hall in 250, but he was not one of Skeet’s official physicians; his consultation in that case was strictly off the record.

When he entered 246, which was a two-room suite with full bath, he found the famous actor in the living room, standing on his head, palms flat on the floor, heels and buttocks against a wall, watching television upside down.

“Mark? What’re you doing here at this hour?” the actor asked, holding his yoga position — or whatever it was.

“I was in the building for another patient. Thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”

The doctor had lied to Nurses Ganguss and Woosten when he had said that the actor had phoned him, threatening to check out of the clinic in the morning. Ahriman’s real purpose was to be here when the midnight shift arrived, so he could program Skeet after the too-diligent Nurse Hernandez went home. The actor was his cover. After a couple hours in 246, the few minutes that he spent with Skeet would seem like an incidental matter, and any staff who noticed the visit would not find it remarkable.

The actor said, “I spend about an hour a day in this position. Good for brain circulation. It’d be nice to have a second, smaller TV that I could turn upside down when I needed to.”

Glancing at the sitcom on the screen, Ahriman said, “If that’s the stuff you watch, it’s probably better upside down.”

“No one likes critics, Mark.”

“Don Adriano de Armado.”

“I’m listening,” said the actor, quivering briefly but able to maintain his headstand.

For the name to activate this subject, the doctor had chosen a character from Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare.

The upside-down actor, who collected twenty million dollars plus points for starring in a film, had accepted little education of any kind during his thirty-odd years, and had received no formal training in his profession. When he read a screenplay, he often didn’t read anything except his own lines, and frogs were likely to fly before he ever read Shakespeare. Unless the legitimate theater was one day turned over to the management of chimps and baboons, there was no chance whatsoever that he would be cast in anything by the Bard of Avon, and so no danger that he would hear the name Don Adriano de Armado other than directly from the doctor himself.

Ahriman put the actor through his personal, enabling haiku.

As Martie finished tying the laces of Skeet’s athletic shoes, Jasmine Hernandez said, “If you’re checking him out of here, I’ll need you to sign a release of liability.”

“We’re bringing him back tomorrow,” Martie said, rising to her feet and encouraging Skeet to stand up from the edge of the bed.

“Yeah,” Dusty said, still jamming clothes into the suitcase, “we just want to take him to see Mom, and then he’ll be back.”

“You’ll still have to sign a release,” Nurse Hernandez insisted.

“Dusty,” Skeet warned, “you better never let Claudette hear you call her Mom instead of Claudette. She’ll bust your ass for sure.”

“He attempted suicide only yesterday,” Nurse Hernandez reminded them. “The clinic can’t take any responsibility for his discharge in this condition.”

“We absolve the clinic. We take full responsibility,” Martie assured her.

“Then I’ll get the release form.”

Martie stepped in front of the nurse, leaving Skeet to wobble on the uncertain support of his own two legs. “Why don’t you help us get him ready? Then the four of us can go up to the nurses’ station together and sign the release.”

Eyes narrowing, Jasmine Hernandez said, “What’s going on here?”

“We’re in a hurry, that’s all.”

“Yeah? Then I’ll get that release real quick,” Nurse Hernandez replied, pushing past Martie. At the door, she pointed at Skeet, and ordered: “Don’t you go anywhere until I come back, chupaflor.”

“Sure, okay,” Skeet promised. “But could you hurry? Claudette’s really sick, and I don’t want to miss anything.”

The doctor instructed the actor to get off his head and then to sit on the sofa.

Ever the exhibitionist, the heartthrob was wearing only a pair of black bikini briefs. He was as fit as a sixteen-year-old, lean and well-muscled, in spite of his formidable list of self-destructive habits.

He crossed the room with the lithe grace of a ballet dancer. Indeed, although his personality was deeply repressed and although, in this state, he was hardly more self-aware than a turnip, he moved as if performing. Evidently, his conviction that he was at all times being watched and adored by admirers was not an attitude that he had acquired as fame had corrupted him; it was a conviction rooted in his very genes.

While the actor waited, Dr. Ahriman took off his suit coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He checked his reflection in a mirror above a sideboard. Perfect. His forearms were powerful, thatched with hair, manly without being Neanderthalian. When he left this room at midnight and strolled down the hall to Caulfield’s room, he would sling his coat over his shoulder, the very picture of a weary, hardworking, deeply committed, and sexy man of medicine.

Ahriman drew a chair to the sofa and sat facing the actor. “Be calm.”

“I am calm.”

Jiggle, jiggle, the blue eyes that made Nurse Ganguss weak.

This prince of the box office had come to Ahriman the younger rather than to any other therapist because of the doctor’s Hollywood pedigree. Ahriman the elder, Josh, had been dead of petits-fours poisoning when this lad had still been failing math, history, and assorted other courses in junior high school, so the two had never worked together. But the actor reasoned that if the great director had won two Oscars, then the son of the great director must be the best psychiatrist in the world. “Except, maybe, for Freud,” he had told the doctor, “but he’s way over there in Europe somewhere, and I can’t be flying back and forth all the time for sessions.”

After Robert Downey Jr. was finally sent to prison for a long stay, this hunk of marketable meat had worried that he, too, might be caught by “fascist drug-enforcement agents.” While he was loath to change his lifestyle to please the forces of repression, he was even less enthusiastic about sharing a prison cell with a homicidal maniac who had a seventeen-inch neck and no gender preferences.

Although Ahriman regularly turned away patients with serious drug problems, he had taken on this one. The actor moved in elite social circles, where he could make rare mischief with a singularly high entertainment value for the doctor. Indeed, already, utilizing the actor, an extraordinary game was being prepared for play, one that would have profound national and international consequences.

“I have some important instructions for you,” Ahriman said.

Someone rapped urgently on the door to the suite.

Martie was trying to get Skeet into a bathrobe, but he was resisting.

“Honey,” she said, “it’s chilly tonight. You can’t go outside in just these thin pajamas.”

“This robe sucks,” Skeet protested. “They provided it here. It’s not mine, Martie. It’s all nubbly with fuzz balls, and I hate the stripes.”

In his prime, before drugs wasted him, the kid had drawn women the way the scent of raw beef brought Valet running. In those days, he’d been a good dresser, the male bird in full plumage. Even now, in his ruin, Skeet’s sartorial good taste occasionally resurfaced, although Martie didn’t understand why it had to surface now.

Snapping shut the packed suitcase, Dusty said, “Let’s go.”

Improvising frantically, Martie tore the blanket off Skeet’s bed and draped it over his shoulders. “How’s this?”

“Sort of American Indian,” he said, pulling the blanket around himself. “I like it.”

She took Skeet by the arm and hustled him toward the door, where Dusty was waiting.

“Wait!” Skeet said, halting, turning. “The lottery tickets.”

“What lottery tickets?”

“In the nightstand,” Dusty said. “Tucked in the Bible.”

“We can’t leave without them,” Skeet insisted.

In response to the rapping on the door, the doctor called out impatiently, “I am not to be disturbed here.”

A hesitation, and then more rapping.

To the actor, Ahriman said quietly, “Go into the bedroom, lie down on the bed, and wait for me.”

As though the direction he had just received was from a lover promising all the delights of the flesh, the actor rose from the sofa and glided out of the room. Each liquid step, each roll of the hips was sufficiently seductive to fill theater seats all over the world.

The rapping sounded a third time. “Dr. Ahriman? Dr. Ahriman?”

As he moved toward the door, the doctor decided that if this interruption was courtesy of Nurse Woosten, he would apply himself more diligently to the problem of what to do with her tongue.

Martie took the pair of lottery tickets out of the Bible and tried to give them to Skeet.

Clutching the blanket-cloak with his left hand, he waved away the tickets with his right. “No, no! If I touch them, they won’t be worth anything, all the luck will go out of them.”

As she thrust the tickets into one of her pockets, she heard someone farther down the hall calling for Dr. Ahriman.

When Ahriman opened the door to 246, he was even more dismayed to see Jasmine Hernandez than he would have been to see Nurse Woosten with pink tongue rampant.

Jasmine was an excellent RN, but she was too much like a few especially annoying girls the doctor had encountered in his boyhood and early adolescence, a breed of females that he referred to as The Knowers. They were the ones who mocked him with their eyes, with sly little looks and smug smiles that he caught in his peripheral vision as he turned away from them. The Knowers seemed to see through him, to understand him in ways he didn’t wish to be understood. Worse, he had the curious feeling that they knew something hilarious about him, as well, something he himself didn’t know, that he was a figure of fun to them due to qualities in himself he couldn’t recognize.

Since the age of sixteen or seventeen, when his previous gangly cuteness had begun to mature into devastating good looks, the doctor had rarely been troubled by The Knowers, who for the most part seemed to have lost their ability to see into him. Jasmine Hernandez was one of that breed, however, and though she had not yet been able to x-ray him, there were times when he was sure that she was going to blink in surprise and peer more closely, her eyes filling with that special mockery and the corner of her mouth turning up in the faintest smirk.

“Doctor, I’m sorry to disturb you, but when I told Nurse Ganguss what’s happening, and she said you were on the premises, I felt you ought to know.”

She was so forceful that the doctor backed up a couple steps, and she took this as an invitation to enter the room, which was not what he had intended.

“A patient is self-discharging,” Nurse Hernandez said, “and in my estimation, under peculiar circumstances.”

Skeet said, “Could I have my Yoo-hoo?”

Martie looked at him as if he had gone a little mad. Of course, when she thought about it, there was ample evidence that both of them were in possession of less than half their marbles, so she tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Your what?”

“His soda,” Dusty said from the doorway. “Grab it and let’s get out of here!”

“Someone called Ahriman,” Martie said. “He’s here.”

“I heard it, too,” Dusty assured her. “Get the damn soda quick.”

“Vanilla Yoo-hoo, or the chocolate for that matter,” Skeet said, as Martie rounded the bed and snatched the bottle off the nightstand, “isn’t a soda. It’s not carbonated. It’s more of a dessert beverage.”

Shoving the bottle of Yoo-hoo into Skeet’s right hand, Martie said, “Here’s your dessert beverage, honey. Now move your ass, or I’ll put a boot in it.”

Initially, in his confusion, the doctor assumed that Nurse Ganguss had mentioned to Nurse Hernandez that the actor was going to check himself out of the hospital and that this was the self-discharging patient about whom she was so exercised.

Since the whole story about the actor was a lie to cover the doctor’s true purpose in coming to the clinic this evening, he said, “Don’t worry, Nurse Hernandez, he won’t be leaving, after all.”

“What? What’re you talking about? They’re trying to hustle him out of here right now.”

Ahriman turned to look at the living room and the open door to the bedroom. He half expected to see several young women, perhaps members of a fan club, lowering the nearly naked and semicatatonic actor out of a window, with the intention of imprisoning him and making him their love slave.

No abductors. No movie star.

Turning to the nurse again, he said, “Who are you talking about?”

“Chupaflor,” she said. “The little hummingbird. Holden Caulfield.”

Martie descended the stairs, supporting Skeet.

The kid was so pale and frail that in his pajamas and white blanket, he might have been a ghost haunting the back ways of New Life. A feeble ghost. He doddered down the stairs, weak-kneed, unsure of his balance, and with every step he took, the trailing blanket threatened to snare his feet and trip him.

Lugging the suitcase, Dusty followed Martie and Skeet, edging sideways down the steps, covering their backs by keeping a lookout for Ahriman above them in the stairwell. He had drawn the.45 Colt out of his jacket pocket.

Gunning down a prominent psychiatrist wouldn’t ensure him a hallowed place in the Heroes Hall of Fame, alongside Smilin’ Bob Woodhouse. Instead of being feted at testimonial dinners, he’d be standing in a prison chow line.

In spite of all they had learned about Dr. Ahriman and all they had deduced, the bitter truth was that they didn’t have any proof that he was guilty of either any illegal or even unethical acts. The tape from the answering machine, with Susan’s message, was the closest thing to admissible evidence that they possessed, but in it she accused the psychiatrist of nothing more than being a bastard. If Susan had somehow videotaped Ahriman, as claimed, that video was gone.

Skeet was taking the steps as a toddler would negotiate them. He lowered his right foot to the next tread, then put his left foot beside it, hesitated a moment to contemplate his subsequent move, and repeated the procedure.

They reached the landing, and still there was no pursuit from above. Dusty waited here, covering the upper flight of steps, while Martie and the kid continued toward the door below.

If Ahriman entered the stairwell at the second floor and saw them in flight, he would know they were on to him, a danger to him, and so Dusty would have to shoot him on sight. Because if Ahriman had time to say Viola Narvilly and then followed the name with the heron haiku, the psychiatrist would control the pistol even though it was still in Dusty’s hand. Thereafter, anything might happen.

Alarmed but too experienced a performer to allow his concern to show, the doctor backed Nurse Hernandez out of 246 and into the hall as he assured her that Dustin and Martine Rhodes would make no rash decisions endangering Skeet’s rehabilitation. “Mrs. Rhodes, in fact, recently became a patient of mine, and I know she has full confidence in the care we’re giving her brother-in-law.”

“They had some story about chupaflor’s mother being ill—”

“Well, that would be a shame.”

“—but it sounded like so much refried beans, if you ask me. And considering the potential liability to the clinic—”

“Yes, yes, well, I’m sure I can straighten this out.”

After firmly pulling shut the door to 246, Dr. Ahriman walked down the hall to Room 250, shadowed by Jasmine Hernandez. He refused to hurry because haste would indicate that in fact he considered this matter more important than he pretended it was.

He was glad that he’d taken the time to remove his coat and roll up his shirtsleeves. This working-Joe touch and his manly forearms supported the aura of confidence and competence he wished to project.

The only life in 250 was the false life on the television. The bed was disarranged, dresser drawers open and empty, a clinic-issued bathrobe rumpled on the floor, and the patient gone.

“Please go ask Nurse Ganguss if she saw them leave by the front stairs or elevator,” the doctor instructed Jasmine Hernandez.

Because Nurse Hernandez wasn’t programmed, because she was in possession of her free will and far too much of it, she started to argue: “But there can’t have been enough time for them to—”

“Only one of us is needed to check the back stairs,” the doctor interrupted. “Now please see Nurse Ganguss.”

Scowling so fiercely that no one would have disputed her if she claimed to be a transsexual reincarnation of Pancho Villa, Jasmine Hernandez turned from him and stalked toward the nurses’ station.

At the back stairs, Ahriman opened the door, stepped into the upper landing, listened, heard nothing, and leaped down the stairs two at a time, his heavy footfalls slapping off the concrete walls, echoing and re-echoing over one another, until by the time he came to the bottom of the second flight, he seemed to have left a wildly applauding audience behind him.

The ground-floor hallway was deserted.

He pushed through a door into the receiving room at the back of the building. Nobody here.

One more door, this opening to the alleyway.

As Ahriman stepped outside, the wind rattled the lid on one of the Dumpsters and seemed to blow a red Saturn past him.

Behind the wheel was Dustin Rhodes. He glanced at the doctor. Fright and too much knowledge were written across the housepainter’s face.

The dope-withered, snot-nosed, useless little shit of a brother was in the backseat. He waved.

Taillights dwindling like those of a spaceship going to warp speed, the Saturn rocketed recklessly into the night.

The doctor hoped the car would slam into a Dumpster behind one of the buildings along the alleyway, hoped it would spin out of control and tumble and explode into flames. He hoped that Dusty and Martie and Skeet would be burned alive, their carcasses reduced to scorched bones and charred hunks of smoking meat, and then he hoped that out of the sky would come a great flock of big mutant crows that would settle into the blasted ruins of the Saturn and tear at the cooked flesh of the deceased, tear and tear and rip and rend, until not an edible scrap remained.

None of that happened.

The car traveled two blocks before turning left at a corner, onto a main street.

Long after the Saturn was out of sight, the doctor stood in the middle of the alleyway, staring into its wake.

The wind buffeted him. He welcomed its cold blasts, as though it might blow the confusion out of him and clear his head.

In the outgoing waiting room earlier in the day, Dusty had been reading The Manchurian Candidate, which the doctor had planted with Martie as a wild card that, if ever played, would add an acceptable measure of excitement to this game. Reading the thriller, Rhodes would experience little frissons of fear too piercing to be explained by the tale itself, especially when he found the name Viola Narvilly, and he would recognize odd connections to the events in his own life. The book would start him thinking, wondering.

Nevertheless, the possibility that the Condon novel alone would spur Dusty to make great leaps of logic, leading to his understanding of the doctor’s true nature and real agenda, was so remote that there was a far greater likelihood of astronauts discovering a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise on Mars, with Elvis chowing down in a corner booth. And he could see no — underscore that: no—chance whatsoever that the housepainter could have deduced all this in one afternoon.

Consequently, there must be other wild cards that the doctor himself had not stacked in the deck, that had been dealt by fate.

One of them would be Skeet. Skeet, with a brain so addled by drugs that he hadn’t been entirely programmable.

Concerned about the apprentice painter’s reliability, Ahriman had come here this evening expressly to establish a suicide scenario in Skeet’s sub-subconscious and then send the wasted wretch toddling off to self-destruct before dawn. Now he would need a new strategy.

What other wild cards in addition to Skeet? Unquestionably, others had been played. However much Dusty and Martie knew — and their knowledge might not be quite as complete as it seemed — they had not put together a major portion of the puzzle with just the book and Skeet.

This unexpected development didn’t appeal to Ahriman’s sporting spirit. He enjoyed some risk in his games, but only manageable risk.

He was a gamester, not a gambler. He preferred the architecture of rules to the jungle of luck.