False Memory (64 page)

In the past, Dusty and Martie had felt like kidnapping the boy, hiding out with him in some far place, and raising him themselves, to give him a chance at a normal life. A glance at Martie confirmed that she, like Dusty, still felt like hiding out, although perhaps
from
Junior rather than
with
him anymore.

They followed the boy into Lampton’s upstairs study, where Skeet and Claudette were waiting with Foster Newton.

Fig was standing by the window, peering out at the front yard and the driveway.

“Hey, Fig,” Dusty said.

He turned. “Hey.”

“Are you okay?” Martie worried.

Fig rucked up his shirt to show them his chest and belly, which were neither as pale nor as slim as Skeet’s, and which were darkened by a different but equally ugly pattern of bruises from the impact of four slugs that had been stopped by Kevlar body armor.

“This is a very trying morning,” said Claudette, grimacing with distaste.

“I’m okay,” Fig assured her, missing the point.

“You saved our lives,” Martie told him.

“Fire truck?”

“Yes.”

“And he saved mine, too,” Skeet said.

Fig shook his head. “Kevlar.”

The boy was sitting at his father’s desk, before the computer.

Lampton stood behind Junior, watching over his shoulder. “Here we go.”

Dusty and Martie crowded close and saw that Junior was composing a scathing and well-written mini-review of
Learn to Love Yourself.

“Where we’re going with this,” Lampton said, “is the reader’s review page on the Amazon.com site. We’ve written and posted over a hundred and fifty denunciations of
Learn to Love Yourself,
using different names and E-mail addresses.”

Appalled, Dusty flashed to the memory of the inhuman viciousness in Ahriman’s face and eyes when they had confronted him in his office a short while ago. “
Whose
names and E-mail addresses?” he asked, wondering what vengeance the psychiatrist might have extracted from these unsuspecting and innocent people.

“Don’t worry,” Lampton said, “when we use real names, we choose brain-dead types who don’t read much. They aren’t likely to visit Amazon and see any of this.”

“Anyway,” Junior said, “most of the time we just make up names and E-mail addresses, which is even better.”

“You can do that?” Martie wondered.

“The Net is liquid,” Junior said.

Trying to puzzle out the full meaning of that statement, Dusty said, “It’s difficult to separate fiction from reality.”

“It’s better than that. Fiction and reality don’t matter. It’s all the same, one river.”

“Then how do you find the truth about anything?”

Junior shrugged. “Who cares? What matters isn’t what’s true…it’s what works.”

“I’m sure on Amazon’s site, half the rave reviews of Ahriman’s idiotic book were written by Ahriman himself,” Lampton said. “I know some novelists who do more of this stuff than spend time writing. All we’re trying to achieve here is to redress the imbalance.”

“Did you post your own raves about
Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend
?” Martie asked.

“Me? No, no,” Lampton assured her. “If the book is solid, the book takes care of itself.”

Yeah, right. For hours, for days, those clever mink paws had no doubt pounded out self-praise at such a blistering pace that the keyboard had locked up repeatedly.

“After this,” Junior promised, “we’ll show you what we can do with various Ahriman-related sites on the Web.”

“Derek is enormously clever with the computer,” boasted Derek the Elder. “We go all over the Web after Ahriman, all over. No security wall, no program architecture is too much for him.”

Turning away from the computer, Dusty said, “I think we’ve seen enough.”

Gripping Dusty’s right arm with both hands, Martie pulled him aside. Her expression, as ghastly as it was, could be no more horrified than his own face. She said, “When Susan was representing Ahriman’s house, before it
was
Ahriman’s house, she was the agent for the original owner, and she wanted me to see the place. Spectacular house, but very imposing, like a stage set for
Götterdämmerung.
Had to see it, she said. So I met her there. It was the day she first showed it to Ahriman, the day she met him. I arrived when she was finishing the tour with him. I met him that day, too. The three of us…talked a little.”

“Oh, Jesus. Can you remember?…”

“I’m trying. But, I don’t know. Maybe the subject of his book came up. Seventy-eight weeks on the best-seller list now. So back then it would have been fairly new. Eighteen months ago. And if I realized what kind of book it was…maybe I mentioned Derek.”

Trying to pad the sharp points of the piercing conclusion toward which Martie was hurtling, Dusty said, “Miss M., stop right now. Stop what you’re thinking. Ahriman would’ve gone after Susan anyway. As beautiful as she was, he had her in his sights before you came into the picture.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely.”

Lampton had turned away from the computer to listen. “You’ve actually met this pop-psych putz?”

Confronting Derek senior, fixing him with a glare that would have turned him to ice if there had been blood in his veins, Martie said, “We’re all dead because of you.”

Waiting to hear the punch line of what he assumed must be a joke, Lampton skinned his lips back from his nippy little teeth.

Martie said, “Dead because of your childish competitiveness.”

Like a radiant Valkyrie flying to the assistance of her wounded warrior, Claudette came to Lampton’s side. “There is nothing in the least childish about it. You don’t understand the academic world, Martine. You don’t understand intellectuals.”

“Don’t I?” Martie bristled.

Dusty heard so much loathing in
Don’t I?
that he was glad Martie was no longer in possession of the .45 Colt.

“Competition among men like Derek,” said Claudette, “isn’t about egos or self-interest. It’s about
ideas.
Ideas that shape society, the world, the future. For those ideas to be tested and tempered and readied for implementation, they have to survive challenges, debate of all types, in all arenas.”

“Like Amazon.com reader reviews,” Martie said scathingly.

Claudette was undaunted. “The battle of ideas is a very real war, not a childish competition, as you’re trying to paint it.”

Valet backed out of the room and stood watching from the hall.

Joining Dusty and Martie, though careful to stand behind them, Skeet found the courage to say, “Martie’s right.”

“When you’re off your medications,” Lampton told him, “your judgment isn’t good enough to make you a welcome ally, Holden.”

“I welcome him,” Dusty disagreed.

With her teeth into this issue, Claudette was more emotional than Dusty had ever seen her. “You think life is video games and movies and fashion and football and gardening, and whatever the hell else fills your days, but life is about
ideas.
People like Derek, people with ideas, shape the world. They shape government, religion, society, every tiniest aspect of our culture. Most people are drones by choice, spending their days in trivialities, absorbed with piffle, living their lives without ever realizing that Derek, people like Derek, have
made
this society and
rule
them by the power of ideas.”

Here, in this ugly confrontation with Claudette, which for Dusty and surely for Skeet, as well, was rapidly growing into a showdown of mythic proportions, Martie was their paladin, lance raised and eye to eye with the dragon. Skeet had moved directly behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders, and Dusty was half tempted to move behind Skeet for additional protection.

“Daring to be your own best friend,” Martie said, “and learning to love yourself—these are ideas that
shape
?”

“There’s no comparison between my book and Ahriman’s,” Lampton objected, but after his wife’s vigorous defense, he sounded as though he were pouting.

Moving half in front of Lampton, as if to physically defend her beleaguered man, but also to press her butt against him, Claudette insisted: “Derek writes vivid, solid, psychologically profound work. Rigorously composed ideas. Ahriman spews out pop-psych vomit.”

Dusty had never before seen his mother cast off her icy veil and reveal her sexual nature, and he hoped that he would
never
see anything like this again. What aroused her was not ideas themselves, but the idea that ideas were power.
Power
was her true aphrodisiac; not the naked power of generals and politicians and prize-fighters, or even the raw power of serial killers, but the power of those who shaped the minds of generals, politicians, ministers, teachers, lawyers, filmmakers. The power of manipulation. In her flared nostrils and glittering eyes, he saw now an eroticism as cold as that of the trapdoor spider and the whip-tailed skink.

“You still don’t get it,” Martie seethed. “In defense of
Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend,
you burned down our house. It might as well have been you, you directly. In defense of
Dare to Be Your Own Best Friend,
you shot Skeet and Fig. You think what they say happened last night is a dissociative fantasy, but it’s real, Claudette. Those bruises are real, the bullets were real. Your stupid, stupid, stupid idea of what constitutes
debate,
your
idea
that harassment is the same as reasoned discussion—that’s what influenced the finger that pulled the trigger. How’s
that
for shaping society, huh? Maybe you’re ready to die for Derek’s vivid, solid, rigorously composed, psychologically profound narcissistic bullshit,
but I’m not
!”

From his post at the window, Fig said, “Lexus.”

Claudette hadn’t breathed fire yet, though she was full of it. “How easy it evidently is to make ignorant, specious arguments when you’ve never had a college course in logic. If Ahriman burns down houses and shoots people, then he’s a maniac, a psychopath, and Derek is
right
to go after him any way he can. Indeed, if what you say is true, it’s
courageous
to go after him.”

Daring to be his own best friend, Lampton said, “I always sensed a sociopathic worldview in his writing. I always suspected there was risk in opposing him, but one takes risks if one cares.”

“Oh, yes,” Martie said, “let’s call the Pentagon at once and have them get a Medal of Honor ready for you. For valor on the field of academic battle, bravery at the computer keyboard with courageous use of false names and invalid E-mail addresses.”

“You are not welcome in my house,” said Claudette.

“Lexus in the driveway,” Fig said.

“So what if there’s a hundred fucking Lexuses in the driveway?” Claudette demanded, never taking her eyes off Martie. “Every idiot in this pretentious neighborhood has a Lexus or a Mercedes.”

“Parking,” said Fig.

Martie and Dusty joined Fig at the window.

The driver’s door of the Lexus opened, and a tall, handsome, dark-haired man got out of the car. Eric Jagger.

“Oh, God,” Martie said.

Through Susan, Ahriman had gotten at Martie. With or without the benefit of a college course in logic, Dusty was able to add this particular two-plus-two.

Eric reached back into the car to get something that he had left on the seat.

Through Susan, Ahriman had also gotten at Eric, programming him and instructing him to separate from his wife, thereby leaving Susan alone and more vulnerable, more accessible any time the psychiatrist was in the mood to have her. And now there was something else Ahriman wanted from Eric, something a little more strenuous than moving out of his wife’s house.

“Hacksaw,” Fig said.

“Autopsy saw,” Dusty corrected.

“With cranial blades,” Martie added.

“Gun,” said Fig.

And here came Eric.

74

Death was as stylish as anyone now: gone, the black carriage drawn by black horses, traded in on a silver Lexus. Gone, the black robe with the melodramatic hood: instead, tasseled loafers, black slacks, a Jhane Barnes sweater.

The Kevlar body armor was in the pickup, and the pickup was in the garage, so Skeet and Fig were as unprotected as everyone else, and this time the gunman would be taking head shots, anyway.

“Gun?” Lampton said when Martie asked. “You mean here?”

“No, of course not, don’t be ridiculous,” Claudette said, as if spoiling for another argument even now, “we don’t have a gun.”

“Then too bad you don’t have a really lethal
idea,”
Martie said.

Dusty grabbed Lampton by the arm. “The back-porch roof. You can get onto it through Junior’s room or the master bedroom.”

Blinking in confusion, nose twitching as if trying to catch a scent that would explain the precise nature of the danger, the mink man said, “But why—”

“Hurry!” Dusty said. “All of you. Go, go. Onto the porch roof, down to the lawn, down to the beach, and hide out at one of the neighbors’ houses.”

Junior was the first through the study doorway, out and gone in a sprint, apparently not in fact prepared to immerse himself in anything more than the
idea
of death.

Dusty followed the boy, pulling the wheeled office chair away from Lampton’s desk and then pushing it ahead of him, racing down the hall to the top of the stairs, while the rest of them hurried off in the opposite direction.

No, not all of them. Here was Skeet, sweet but useless. “What can I do?”

“Damn it, kid, just get out!”

“Help me with this,” Martie said.

She hadn’t fled, either. She was at a six-foot-long Sheraton sideboard that stood along the wide hallway, opposite the head of the stairs. With a sweep of her arm, she cleared off a vase and an arrangement of silver candlesticks, which shattered and rattled to the floor. Evidently, she had figured out what Dusty intended to do with the office chair, but she was of the opinion that higher-caliber ammunition was needed.

Together, after moving the chair aside, the three of them dragged the sideboard away from the wall and stood it on one end at the head of the stairs.

“Now make him
go,
” Dusty urged her. His voice was hoarse with terror, worse now than it had been when they had finished the slo-mo roll in the rental car outside Santa Fe, because at least then he’d had the comfort of knowing, as the gunmen descended the slope after them, that Martie had the Colt Commander, whereas now he had nothing but a damn sideboard.

Martie grabbed Skeet by the arm, and he tried to resist, but she was the stronger of the two.

Downstairs, a tattoo of automatic gunfire shattered the leaded glass in the front door, cracked off pieces of wood, too, and chopped into the walls of the foyer.

Dusty dropped onto the hall floor, behind the upended sideboard, looking past it down the long single flight of stairs.

The investment adviser slammed through the splintered door and stormed into the house as though a master’s in business administration from Harvard now required courses in ass-kicking and heavy weaponry. He put the autopsy saw on the foyer table, gripped the machine pistol in both hands, and turned in a hundred-eighty-degree arc, spraying bullets into the downstairs rooms on three sides of him.

This was an extended magazine, probably thirty-three rounds, but it wasn’t a magic well of cartridges, so at the end of Eric’s arc, the gun ran dry.

Spare magazines were tucked under his belt. He fumbled with the pistol, trying to eject the spent magazine.

He couldn’t be allowed to search the lower floor first, because when he went into the kitchen, he might see people dropping off the back-porch roof or fleeing across the backyard toward the beach.

Gunfire seemed to be still thundering through the house, but Dusty knew the inner workings of his ears were just vibrating in the aftermath, so he shouted, “Ben Marco!”

Eric looked up at the top of the stairs, but he didn’t freeze or get that telltale glazed look. He continued fumbling with the pistol, which was clearly unfamiliar to him.

“Bobby Lembeck!” Dusty shouted.

The spent magazine clattered to the foyer floor.

In this case, maybe the activating name didn’t come from
The Manchurian Candidate.
Maybe it came from
The Godfather
or
Rosemary’s Baby,
or from
The House at Pooh Corner,
for all he knew, but he didn’t have time to sample the last fifty years of popular fiction in search of the right character. “Johnny Iselin!”

After shoving another magazine into the machine pistol, Eric locked it in place with a hard whack from the palm of his hand.

“Wen Chang!”

Eric squeezed off a burst of eight or ten rounds, which tore through the solid cherry-wood top of the sideboard
—pock, pock, pock,
too many
pocks
to count—cracked through the drawers, smashed out of the bottom, and thudded into the hallway wall behind Dusty, passing over his head and leaving a wake of splinters to rain over him. High-velocity rounds, jacketed in something way harder than he wanted to think about, and maybe with Teflon tips.

“Jocelyn Jordan!” Dusty shouted into the jarring silence that throbbed through his head following the skull-ringing peals of the gunshots. He had read a sizable piece of the novel, and he had skimmed the whole thing, looking for names, in particular for the one that would activate him. He remembered them all. His eidetic memory was the one gift with which he’d been born into this world, that and the common sense that had driven him to be a housepainter instead of a mover and shaker in the world of Big Ideas, but Condon’s novel was chocked full of characters, major and minor—as minor as Viola Narvilly, who didn’t even appear until past page 300—and he might not have time to run through the entire cast before Eric blew his head off. “Alan Melvin!”

Holding his fire, Eric climbed the steps.

Dusty could hear him coming.

Climbing fast, unfazed by the Sheraton-sideboard deadfall that loomed over him. Coming like a robot. Which was pretty much what he was, in fact: a living robot, a meat machine.

“Ellie Iselin!” Dusty shouted, and he was simultaneously half mad with fear and yet aware of what a ludicrous exit this would be, blown to kingdom come while shouting out names like a frantic quiz-show contestant trying to beat a countdown clock. “Nora Lemmon!”

Unmoved by
Nora Lemmon,
Eric kept coming, and Dusty scrambled up from the floor, shoved the sideboard, and dove to his left, away from the top of the stairs, behind a sheltering wall, as another burst of gunfire smacked into the toppling mass of fine eighteenth-century cherry wood.

Eric grunted and cursed, but it was impossible to tell from the thunderous descent of the sideboard whether he had been hurt or carried to the foyer below. The stairs were wider than the upended antique, and he might have been able to dodge it.

Standing with his back to the hallway wall, next to the stairs, Dusty didn’t relish poking his head around the corner to have a look. In addition to never having attended a college class in logic, he’d never taken a class in magic, either, and he didn’t know how to catch bullets in his teeth.

And, dear God, even as the thudding-crashing-cracking-banging still rose from the staircase, here came Martie—who was supposed to be gone with the rest of them—pushing a wheeled, three-drawer filing cabinet along the hallway, having commandeered it from Lampton’s office.

Dusty glowered at her. What the hell was she thinking, anyway? That Eric would run out of bullets before they ran out of furniture?

Seizing the filing cabinet, pushing Martie away, using the four-foot-high stack of metal drawers as cover, Dusty moved to the head of the stairs again.

Eric had tumbled into the foyer with the sideboard. His left leg was pinned under it. He was still holding the machine pistol, and he fired toward the top of the stairs.

Ducking, Dusty heard the shots go wild. They slammed hard into the ceiling, and a few rounds twanged through ducts and pipes behind the plaster. Not even one ricocheted off the filing cabinet.

His heart was rattling in his chest as if several rounds were ricocheting from wall to wall of its chambers.

When he cautiously peered down into the foyer again, he saw that Eric had pulled his leg out from under the sideboard and was getting to his feet. Relentless as a robot, operating on programmed instructions rather than reason or emotion, the guy was nonetheless pissed.

“Eugenie Rose Cheyney!”

Not even limping, cursing fluently, Eric started toward the stairs. The filing cabinet wasn’t half as massive as the sideboard. He would be able to dodge it, pumping out rounds as he came.

“Ed Mavole!”

“I’m listening.”

Eric stopped at the foot of the stairs. The murderous glare melted off his face, and what replaced it was not the flat, grimly determined expression with which he had entered the house, but the glazed and slightly quizzical look that signified
activation.

Ed Mavole
was the name, all right, but Dusty was still lacking a haiku. According to Ned Motherwell, umpteen feet of shelves in the bookstore were devoted to haiku, so even if all the volumes Ned had bought were now near at hand—which they weren’t—the accessing lines might not be in them.

Down in the foyer, Eric twitched, blinked, and reacquainted himself with his murderous intentions.

“Ed Mavole,” Dusty said again, and once more Eric froze and said, “I’m listening.”

This wouldn’t be fun, but it ought to be doable. Keep using the magic name, snap Eric back into an activated state every time he came out of it, go straight down the stairs at him, snatch the gun from his hand, knock him ass over teakettle, clip him alongside the head with the butt of the gun, just hard enough to knock him unconscious without leaving him comatose for life, and then tie him up with whatever was at hand. Maybe when he regained consciousness, he would no longer be a robotic killer. Otherwise, they could keep him under restraint, buy all umpteen shelf feet of haiku, brew ten gallons of strong coffee, and read every verse to him until they got a response.

As Dusty rolled the filing cabinet aside, Martie said, “Oh, God, please, babe, don’t chance it,” and Eric twitched back to his killing glare.

“Ed Mavole.”

“I’m listening.”

Dusty descended the stairs fast. Eric was looking straight at him but didn’t seem to be able to work out the physics of what was about to happen. Before Dusty was a third of the way down, taking no chances, he shouted, “Ed Mavole,” and Eric Jagger replied, “I’m listening,” and then he was two-thirds of the way down, and he said, “Ed Mavole,” and as he reached Eric, the answer came in that same mellow voice, “I’m listening.” Looking straight into the muzzle, which seemed as big as any tunnel that he might drive through, Dusty closed one hand around the barrel, pushed it aside and out of his face, wrenched the gun from Eric’s slack hands, and at the same time drove his shoulder into the dazed man, knocking him to the floor.

Dusty fell, too, and rolled across broken glass and chunks of wood from the bullet-riddled front door, afraid he might accidentally discharge the pistol. He tumbled into the half-moon table that stood against the foyer wall, rapping his forehead hard against the sturdy stretcher bar that connected its three legs, but he didn’t shoot himself in the thigh, the groin, or anywhere else.

When Dusty staggered to his feet, he saw that Eric had already gotten off the floor. The guy looked confused but nonetheless angry and still in a programmed-killer mode.

From the stairs, which she was rapidly descending, Martie said, “Ed Mavole,” even before Dusty could say it, and suddenly this seemed to be the lamest video game Martie had ever concocted:
Housepainter Versus Investment Adviser,
one armed with an automatic weapon and the other with furniture and magic names.

It might have been funny, this thought at this moment, if he’d not looked past Martie to the top of the stairs, where Junior stood with a crossbow, cranked to full tension and loaded.

“No!” Dusty shouted.

Shusssh.

A crossbow quarrel, shorter and thicker than an ordinary arrow, is far more difficult to see in flight than is an arrow let off by a standard bow, so much faster does it move. Magic, the way this one appeared to pop
from
Eric Jagger’s chest, as if out of his heart like a rabbit out of a hat: All but two inches of its notchless butt protruded in a small carnation of blood.

Eric dropped to his knees. The homicidal glare cleared from his eyes, and he looked around in bewilderment at the foyer, which apparently was altogether new to him. Then he blinked up at Dusty and seemed astonished as he fell forward, dead.

When Martie tried to stop Dusty from going upstairs, he shook her off, and he climbed two steps at a time, his forehead throbbing where he’d rapped it against the stretcher bar, his vision swimming, but not from the blow on the head, swimming because his body was flooded with whatever brain chemicals induce and sustain rage, his heart pumping as much pure
fury
as blood, the angelic-looking boy seen now through a dark lens and a red tint, as though Dusty’s eyes were streaming tears of blood.

Junior tried to use the crossbow like a shield, to block the assault. Dusty grabbed the stock at midpoint, the revolving nut of the lock plate digging into the palm of his hand. He wrenched the bow out of the boy’s grasp, threw it on the floor, and kept moving. He drove the boy across the hall, into the space where the sideboard had stood, shoving him against the wall so hard that his head bounced off the plaster with a
thock
like a tennis ball off a racket.

“You sick, rotten little shit.”

“He had a gun!”

“I’d already taken it away from him,” Dusty screamed, spraying the boy with spittle, but Junior insisted, “I didn’t see!” And they repeated the same useless things to each other, twice, three times, until Dusty accused him with such violence that his damning words boomed along the hall: “You saw, you knew, you did it
anyway
!”