False Memory

Crazily, she recalled an illustration in a storybook she’d treasured as a child: an evil troll under an old stone bridge, bent over a glowing forge, working with hammer and tongs to make chains and shackles for his victims.

What would she have done to Dusty if he had arrived at the very moment when her frenzied hammering had been at a peak — or, for that matter, if he arrived now?

With a shudder of revulsion, she dropped the hammer.

25

Having expected to be away from home past feeding time, Dusty had brought Valet’s dinner in a Ziploc bag: two cups of dry lamb-and-rice kibble. He poured it into a plastic bowl and put the bowl on the pavement beside the van.

“Sorry about the lousy ambience,” he apologized.

If the clinic parking lot had been a lush meadow or a penthouse, Valet would have approached his dinner with no greater pleasure than he showed now. Like all of his kind, he had no pretensions.

Dogs possessed so many admirable qualities, in fact, that Dusty sometimes wondered if God had created this world expressly for them above all other creatures. Human beings might have been put here as an afterthought, to ensure that dogs would have companions to prepare their meals, to groom them, to tell them they were cute, and to rub their bellies.

While Valet made quick work of the kibble, Dusty fished his cell phone from under the driver’s seat and called home. On the third ring, the answering machine responded.

Assuming that Martie was screening calls, he said, “Scarlett, it’s me. Rhett. Just calling to say I do give a damn, after all.”

She didn’t pick up.

“Martie, are you there?” He waited. Then, stretching the message to give her time to get to the study — and the answering machine — from anywhere in the house, he said: “Sorry I’m running late. Hell of a day. I’ll be there in half an hour, we’ll go out for dinner. Somewhere we can’t afford. I’m sick of always being so damn responsible. Choose something extravagant. Maybe even a place where the food comes on real plates instead of in Styrofoam containers. We’ll take a bank loan if we have to.”

Either she hadn’t heard the phone or she wasn’t home.

Valet had finished his kibble. He used his tongue to imitate an airplane propeller, making 360-degree sweeps of his chops and muzzle, collecting crumbs.

When traveling with the dog, Dusty carried bottled water. He poured a few ounces into the blue dish.

After Valet finished drinking, they walked the dimly lighted lawns that embraced three sides of New Life Clinic. This stroll was ostensibly for the purpose of giving the dog a chance to do his post-dinner dump, but it also provided Dusty with an opportunity to examine more closely the rambling structure.

Even if the clinic were less legitimate than it appeared to be, Dusty had no idea where he should look for clues to its true nature. There would be no hidden door to the vast subterranean headquarters of a flamboyant James Bond-style villain. Nor could he expect to discover the soulless personal servant of Count Dracula clandestinely transferring the undead nobleman’s coffin from a horse-drawn lorry into the basement of the building. This was southern California in the dazzling new millennium, and it was, therefore, full of far stranger creatures than Goldfinger and vampires — though currently none appeared to be lurking in this neighborhood.

Dusty’s suspicion was difficult to sustain in the face of the unrelenting ordinariness of the clinic grounds. The grass was well manicured, the earth still slightly squishy from the recent rain. The shrubs were neatly trimmed. The night shadows were only shadows.

Although Valet was easily spooked, he was so comfortable here that he completed his toilet without any nervous hesitation — and did it in the amber glow of a landscape lamp, which allowed his master to pick up easily after him.

The fully loaded, conspicuous blue bag gave Dusty an excuse to explore the alleyway behind the clinic, where no grass bordered the pavement. As he located a small trash Dumpster and deposited the bag, he surveyed this more humble aspect of the building: delivery and service entrances, utilities boxes, a second small Dumpster.

Neither he nor his four-legged Dr. Watson discovered anything amiss in the backstreet — although beside the second Dumpster, the dog found a grease-stained Big Mac container that he would have enjoyed sniffing and licking for six or seven hours.

Retreating from the alley, passing once more across the lawn along the south side of the clinic, Dusty glanced up at Skeet’s room — and saw a man standing at the window. Backlit by a single well-shaded lamp, he was a featureless silhouette.

Though the angle was deceiving, the guy seemed too tall and too broad-shouldered to be Skeet or Dr. Donklin. Tom Wong was gone for the night, but he, too, was a different physical type from this man.

Dusty could discern nothing of the stranger’s face, not even the vague glint of his eyes. Nevertheless, he was sure the man was watching him.