False Memory

The white Rolls-Royce was parked near the top of the approach road, facing toward the lot. She reached it and got in behind the wheel just as the doctor slapped shoe leather against blacktop.

The engine caught with a roar.

He was still at least sixty yards from her.

The dark headlights suddenly blazed.

Fifty yards.

She shifted into reverse. The tires barked against the pavement as she jammed her foot down on the accelerator.

The doctor stopped, raised the Millennium, gripped it in both hands, and assumed a perfect isosceles shooting stance: facing her squarely with head and torso, right leg quartering back for balance, left knee flexed slightly, no bend whatsoever at the waist.

The distance was too great. The Rolls was receding. Then she was gone over the brow of the hill, reversing toward Pacific Coast Highway, out of sight. No point in taking the shot.

Time is of the essence, said Anonymous, possibly the most quoted poet in history, and this was truer now for the doctor than ever it had been. Backward, turn backward, 0 Time, in your flight, wrote Elizabeth Akers Allen, and Ahriman fervently wished that he possessed a magical watch that could turn this trick, because Delmore Schwartz had never written a truer word than Time is the fire in which we burn, and the doctor dreaded burning, though the electric chair was not the instrument of capital punishment in the state of California. Time, a maniac scattering dust, wrote Tennyson, and the doctor feared his own dust being scattered, though he knew that he must calm himself and embrace the attitude of Edward Young, who had written defy the tooth of time. Sara Teasdale advised Time is a kind friend, but she hadn’t known what the hell she was talking about, and The bards sublime whose distant footsteps echo through the corridors of Time wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which had absolutely no application to the current crisis, but the doctor was a genius, preposterously well educated, and distraught, so all these thoughts, and countless more, machine-gunned through his mind as he ran to the El Camino, started the engine, and drove out of the parking lot.

By the time Ahriman reached the Pacific Coast Highway, the Rolls-Royce was gone.

The rich ditz and her clam-dull husband lived in nearby Newport Coast, but she might not go directly home. Indeed, if her phobia had progressed to a more serious condition than he’d previously realized, to some form of paranoid psychosis, she might be reluctant to return home ever again, for fear that Keanu or one of his henchmen — such as her own pistol-packing psychiatrist — would be waiting there to do her harm.

Even if he’d thought she was headed home, Ahriman wouldn’t have pursued her there. She and her husband were certain to have a lot of household staff, each one a potential witness, and considerable security.

Instead, the doctor tore off his ski mask and drove to his own house as fast as he dared.

71

On the way home, no more poetic observations about time tumbled out of Mark Ahriman’s overturned memory chest, but during the first half of the ten-minute journey, he foamed at the mouth with vicious obscenities — all aimed at the Keanuphobe, as if she could hear — and with vivid oaths to humiliate, brutalize, mutilate, and dismember her in imaginative ways. This fit was adolescent and not worthy of him, which he realized, but he needed to vent.

During the second half of the trip, he pondered when or whether she would call the police to report the two murders. Paranoid, she might suspect that the nefarious Keanu controlled every police agency from the local cops to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in which case she would keep silent or at least take time to mull and fret over whether to approach the authorities.

She might go away for a while, even flee the country and hide until she had puzzled out a strategy. With half a billion bucks to draw upon, she could go far and be difficult to find.

The thought of her possible vanishment alarmed him, and an icy sweat oozed out of the nape of his neck. His friends in high places could easily help him conceal his links to any number of outrageous crimes committed by others who were under his control; but it was a very different thing, and a lot iffier, to expect them to protect him from the consequences of murders committed by his own hand, which was one reason he hadn’t taken such risks in twenty years. The sweat from the nape of his neck was now trickling down his spine.

A man of sublime confidence, he had never felt anything remotely like this before. He realized that he had better quickly get a grip on himself.