False Memory

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 dropped 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 gnats, snow. Snow had begun to fall.

She was breathing easier but not normally, her vision clearing as her eyes dried out, when she was grabbed by her hair and urged to her feet once more.

“Come on, come on,” one of the strangers growled impatiently. “If you slow us down, I’ll just blow your brains out and leave you here.”

Martie took the threat seriously and started up the gentle slope of the swale along which the car had rolled.

When Jennifer appeared on the far side of the street, walking away from the Mercedes dealership, the sleuthhounds were flummoxed. They were prepared to trail her in their flivver, but neither frail Skeet nor his round-faced friend was in good enough condition to undertake a protracted foot pursuit.

Worse, Jennifer walked as if all the hounds of Hell and half a dozen aggressive insurance salesmen were after her. Head erect, shoulders back, bosom thrust forward, hips rolling, she strode into the cool afternoon like a woman intent on making the Nevada border before sundown.

She was wearing the same pantsuit she had worn at the office, but her feet were shod in Rockport’s best walking shoes instead of in high heels. Everything she needed to carry was secure in a fanny pack, freeing her hands; she swung her arms rhythmically, as if she were an Olympic racewalker. Her hair was tied back; her ponytail bobbed cutely as she burned up the pavement, on her way to dinner.

The El Camino windows were lightly tinted, and Jennifer wasn’t familiar with this car. When she passed, across the street, she didn’t even glance in the doctor’s direction.

She turned at the corner, still in sight, and started up a long but gentle incline.

Bounce, bounce, bounce: the ponytail. Her clenching butt muscles looked hard enough to crack walnuts.

Gesticulating at each other, the detectives pulled away from the curb, hung a sharp U-turn, drove past the El Camino without giving it a look, and proceeded to the corner, where they drew to the curb and stopped again.

A few hundred yards uphill, at the next intersection, Jennifer turned right. She headed west.

When she was nearly out of sight, the pickup pursued her.

After a decent interval, the doctor followed the pickup.

Once more, the funky truck pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the roadway about a hundred yards behind Jennifer.

The street ahead led uphill for perhaps a mile, and apparently the gumshoes intended to watch Jennifer until she reached the crest, then catch up to her, pull to the shoulder, and watch her some more as she strode onward.

Green Acres, culinary mecca to the alfalfa-sprouts set, was about four miles away, and Ahriman saw no reason to follow the pickup there in fits and starts. He drove past the truck, past Jennifer, and on to the restaurant.

The two amateur detectives greatly amused the doctor, Sherlock and Watson without wisdom or good costumes. Their sweet idiocy gave them a charm all their own. He almost wished that he didn’t have to kill them, that he could keep them around like two pet monkeys, to enliven the occasional dull afternoon.

Of course, it had been a long time since he had directly taken a human life, rather than through an intermediary, and he was looking forward to getting his hands wet, so to speak.

Silver fleece, shorn from a woolly sky, drifted straight down through the windless twilight, and every clump of sage and every frozen tumbleweed was already knitting itself a white sweater.

By the time they reached the top of the slope, Martie’s vision cleared, and her breathing was labored but not ragged. She was still spitting out saliva soured by gasoline fumes, but she wasn’t choking anymore.

A midnight-blue BMW was stopped on the ranch road, doors open, engine running, clouds of vapor billowing from its exhaust pipe. The heavy winter tires were fitted with snow chains.

Martie glanced back into the swale, at the wrecked Ford, hoping that it would explode. In this still and open land, the sound might be heard even half a mile away at the ranch house; or looking out a window at an opportune moment, maybe Bernardo Pastore would spot the glow of fire just beyond the hill, a beacon.

False hopes, and she knew it.

Even in this dying light, Martie could see that both gunmen were carrying machine pistols with extended magazines. She didn’t know much about such guns, just that they were point-and-spray weapons, deadly even in the hands of a lousy marksman, deadlier still when wielded by men who knew what they were doing.

These two appeared to have been created in a cloning lab, using a genetic formula labeled presentable thugs. Although good-looking, clean-cut, and almost cuddly in their Eddie Bauer winter togs, they were a formidable pair, with necks thick enough to foil any garroting wire thinner than a winch cable and with shoulders of such massive width that they ought to be able to carry horses out of a burning stable.

The one with blond hair opened the trunk of the BMW and ordered Dusty to get into it. “And don’t do anything stupid, like trying to come out at me later with a lug wrench, because I’ll blow you away before you can swing it.”

Dusty glanced at Martie, but they both knew this wasn’t a good time to pull the Colt. Not with the two machine pistols trained on them. Their advantage wasn’t the concealed pistol; it was surprise, a pathetic advantage but an advantage nonetheless.

Angry at the delay, the blond moved fast and kicked Dusty’s legs out from under him, tumbling him to the ground. He screamed, “Get in the trunk!”

Reluctant to leave Martie alone with them but with no rational choice except to obey, Dusty got to his feet and climbed into the trunk of the car.

Martie could see her husband in there, on his side, peering out, face bleak. This was the pose of victims on the covers of tabloids, related to stories about Mafia hits, and the only things missing from the composition were the fixed stare of death and the blood.

As if weaving shroud cloth, snow shuttled into the trunk, laying a white weft first on Dusty’s eyebrows and lashes.

She had the sickening feeling she would never see him again.

The blond slammed the lid and twisted the key in the lock. He went around to the driver’s side and got in behind the wheel.

The second man pushed Martie into the backseat and quickly slid in after her. He was directly behind the driver.

Both gunmen moved with the grace of athletes, and their faces were not like those of traditional hired muscle. Unscarred, fresh, with high brows, good cheekbones, patrician noses, and square chins, either was a man whom an heiress could bring home to Mummy and Daddy without having her allowance slashed and her dowry reduced to one teapot. They looked so much alike that their essential clone nature was disguised only by hair color — dark blond, coppery red — and by personal style.

The blond seemed to be the more volatile of the two. Still hot because of Dusty’s hesitancy about getting into the trunk, he slammed the car into gear, spun the tires, causing gravel to clatter against the undercarriage, and he drove away from the Pastore ranch, toward the highway half a mile ahead.

The redhead smiled at Martie and raised his eyebrows, as though to say that sometimes his associate was a tribulation.

He held the machine pistol in one hand, pointed at the floor between his feet. He seemed unconcerned that Martie might offer effective resistance.

Indeed, she could never have taken the weapon away from him or landed a disabling blow. As quick and big as he was, he would crush her windpipe with a hard chop of his elbow or pound her face through the side window.

Now more than ever, she needed Smilin’ Bob beside her, either in the flesh or in spirit. And with a fire ax.

She thought they were headed toward the highway to the south. In less than a quarter mile, however, they turned off the ranch road and traveled due east on a rutted track defined almost solely by the clear swath it carved through sagebrush, mesquite, and cactus.

If her memory of the map could be trusted — and judging by what she had seen of the landscape on the trip out from Santa Fe — nothing lay in this direction but wasteland.

Cascades of snow, a foaming Niagara of flakes, resisted the probing headlights, so a city might have waited ahead of them. She held out no hope for a metropolis, however, and expected instead a killing ground with unmarked graves.

“Where are we going?” she asked, because she thought they would expect her to be full of nervous questions.

“Lover’s lane,” said the driver, and his eyes in the rearview mirror met hers, looking for a thrill of fear.

“Who are you people?”

“Us? We’re the future,” the driver said.

Again, the man in the backseat smiled and raised his eyebrows, as if to mock his partner’s dramatic flair.

The BMW wasn’t moving as fast as it had been on the ranch road, though it was still going too fast for the terrain. Encountering a bad pothole, the car bounced hard; the muffler and the gas tank scraped on the down side of the bounce, and they were jolted again.

Because neither the redhead nor Martie was wearing a seat belt, they were lifted and rocked forward.

She seized the opportunity, reached behind herself, and slid her right hand up under her coat and sweater. She pulled the pistol from her belt while they were being pitched around.

As the car settled down, Martie held the gun at her side, on the seat, against her thigh, letting her unbuttoned jacket trail over it. Her body also blocked the redhead’s view of the Colt.

The driver’s pistol was probably on the seat at his side, within easy reach.

Beside Martie, the redhead was still gripping his gun in his right hand, between his knees, muzzle aimed at the floor.

Action. Action informed by intelligence and a moral perspective. She trusted her intelligence. Murder wasn’t moral, of course, though killing in self-defense surely was.

But the time wasn’t right.

Timing. Timing was equally important in ballet and gunplay.

She’d heard that somewhere. Unfortunately, in spite of her visits to the shooting range, having shot at nothing more than paper silhouettes of the human form, she knew nothing about either ballet or gunplay.

“You’ll never get away with this,” she said, letting them hear the genuine terror in her voice, because it would reinforce their conviction that she was helpless.

The driver was amused. To his partner, he said, with a mock tremor of doubt in his voice, “Zachary, you think we’ll get away with this?”

“Yeah,” said the redhead. He raised his eyebrows again and shrugged.

“Zachary,” the driver said, “what do we call an operation like this?”

“A simple hump and dump,” said Zachary.

“You hear that, girl? With the emphasis on simple. Nothing to it. A walk in the park. A piece of cake.”

“You know, Kevin, for me,” Zachary said, “the emphasis is on hump.”

Kevin laughed. “Girl, since you’re the humpee and you and your husband are the dumpees, it’s naturally a big deal to you. But it’s no big deal to us, is it, Zachary?”

“No.”

“And it won’t be to the cops, either. Tell her where she’s going, Zachary.”

“With me, to Orgasmo City.”

“Man, you’re delusional but fun. And after Orgasmo City?”

“You’re going down an old Indian well,” Zachary told Martie, “and God knows how deep into the aquifer under it.”

“Been no Indians living there or using it for more than three hundred years,” Kevin explained.

“Wouldn’t want to contaminate anybody’s drinking water,” said Zachary. “Federal offense.”

“Nobody’ll ever find your bodies. Maybe after your car crash, you just wandered off into the desert, got disoriented and lost in the storm, and froze to death.”

As the speed of the car dropped, eerie shapes appeared in the snow on both sides. They were low and undulant, pale formations reflecting the headlights, gliding past like ghost ships in a fog. Weathered ruins. Fragments of buildings, the stacked-stone and adobe walls of a long-abandoned settlement.

When Kevin braked to a stop and put the car in park, Martie turned toward Zachary and jammed the.45 Colt into his side so hard that his face clutched in pain.

His eyes revealed a man who was both fearless and pitiless, but not a stupid man. Without her saying a word, he dropped the machine pistol onto the floor between his feet.

“What?” Kevin asked, instinct serving him well.

As the driver sought Martie in the rearview mirror, she said, “Reach behind and put your hands on the headrest, you sonofabitch.”

Kevin hesitated.

“Now,” Martie screamed, “before I gut-shoot this moron and blow out the back of your head. Hands on the headrest where I can see them.”

“We have a situation here,” Zachary confirmed.

Kevin’s right shoulder dropped slightly, as he started to reach for the machine pistol on the front seat.

“HANDS ON THE HEADREST NOW, YOU FUCKER!” she roared, and she was shocked to hear how totally psychotic she sounded, not like a woman merely playing at being tough, but like a genuine crazy person, and in fact she probably was crazy right now, totally psychotic with raw fear.

Sitting up straight again, Kevin reached behind himself with both hands and gripped the headrest.

With the Colt jammed into his gut, Zachary was going to behave, because she could pull the trigger faster than he could move.

“You got off that plane with nothing but carry-ons,” Kevin said.

“Shut up. I’m thinking.”

Martie didn’t want to kill anyone, not even human garbage like this, not if it could be avoided. But how to avoid it? How could she get out of the car and get them out of the car, too, without giving them a chance to try anything?

Kevin wouldn’t leave it alone. “Nothing but carry-ons, so where did you get a gun?”

Two of them to watch. All that movement getting out. Moments of imbalance, vulnerability.

“Where did you get the gun?” Kevin persisted.

“I pulled it out of your buddy’s ass. Now shut up!”

Going out of the driver’s side, she’d have to turn her back on one of them, at some point. No good.

So then ease backward out of the passenger’s side. Make Zachary slide across the seat with her, keeping the gun in his belly, looking past him to Kevin in the front.

With the windshield wipers off, the snow began to spread a thin coverlet on the glass. The motion of the descending flakes made her dizzy.

Don’t look outside.

She met Zachary’s eyes.

He recognized her irresolution.

She almost looked away, realized that would be dangerous, and jammed the muzzle of the Colt even deeper into his gut, until he broke eye contact.

“Maybe it’s not a real gun,” Kevin said. “Maybe it’s plastic.”

“It’s real,” Zachary was quick to inform him.

Feeling her way backward, out of the car, would be tricky. Could hook her foot on the doorsill or hook up on the door itself. Could fall.

“You’re just damn housepainters,” Kevin said.

“I’m a video-game designer.”

“What?”

“My husband’s the housepainter.”

And after she was out, when Zachary followed her, he would for a moment fill the open door, her gun in his belly, and Kevin would be blocked from her sight.

The only smart thing to do was shoot them while she had a clear advantage. Smilin’ Bob hadn’t told her what to do when intelligence and morality collided head-on.

“I don’t think the lady knows what’s next,” Zachary told his partner.

“Maybe we got a stalemate here,” Kevin said.

Action. If they thought she was incapable of ruthless action, then they would act.

Think. Think.