False Memory Part 41

"Skeet's doing fine," Dusty said. "Thanks for asking."

"I hope wherever you took him, they're kicking his skinny a.s.s around the clock."

"Absolutely. I checked him into Our Lady of the a.s.s-Kickers Hospital."

"There ought to be such a place."

"I'm sure if Straight Edgers take over the church, there'll be one in every town. Listen, Ned, can you let Fig close up the job today while you do something for me?"

"Sure. Fig Fig isn't a dope-sucking, self-destructive, walking s.c.r.o.t.u.m. isn't a dope-sucking, self-destructive, walking s.c.r.o.t.u.m. Fig Fig is reliable." is reliable."

"Has he seen Big Foot recently?"

"If he ever said he did, I'd believe him."

"Me, too," Dusty admitted.

He told Ned Motherwell what he needed to have done, and they agreed on when and where to meet.

After terminating the call, Dusty clipped the phone to his belt. He checked his watch. Almost three o'clock. He sat down again.

Two minutes later, hunched forward in his chair, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the black granite floor, Dusty was thinking so hard that the wax should have been blown out of his ears with the velocity of bullets. When the lever-action handle squeaked and the latch clicked, he twitched but didn't explode to his feet.

Martie came out of the office first, smiling prettily, and Dusty rose to greet her, smiling less prettily, and Dr. Ahriman entered the waiting room behind her, smiling paternally, and maybe Dusty smiled a little more prettily when he saw the psychiatrist, because the man virtually radiated competence and compa.s.sion and confidence and all sorts of good stuff.

"Excellent session," Dr. Ahriman a.s.sured Dusty. "We're already making progress. I believe Martie is going to respond brilliantly to therapy, I really do."

"Thank G.o.d," Dusty said, getting Martie's jacket from the rack.

"Not to say there won't be difficult times ahead," the doctor cautioned. "Perhaps even worse panic attacks than any heretofore. This is, after all, a rare and challenging phobia. But whatever short-term setbacks there may be, I'm absolutely sure that in the long term there will be a complete cure."

"Long term?" Dusty asked, but not worriedly, because no one could be worried in the presence of the doctor's confident smile.

"Not more than a few months," Dr. Ahriman said, "perhaps much more quickly. These things have clocks of their own, and we can't set them. But there's every reason to be optimistic. I'm not even going to consider a medication component at this time, just therapy for a week or two, and then see where we are."

Dusty almost mentioned the prescription for Valium that Dr. Closterman had issued, but Martie spoke first.

Shrugging into her black leather jacket as Dusty held it for her, she said, "Honey, I feel pretty good. Really much, much better. I really do."

"Friday morning. Ten o'clock appointment," Dr. Ahriman reminded them.

"We'll be here," Dusty a.s.sured him.

Smiling, nodding, Ahriman said, "I'm certain you will."

When the doctor retreated to his inner office and closed the heavy door, a measure of warmth went out of the waiting room. A little chill came in from somewhere.

"He's really a great psychiatrist," Martie said.

Zipping up his jacket, Dusty said, "He's deeply committed to his patients," and though he was smiling and still felt good, some cranky part of him wondered how he knew Ahriman was committed to anything more than collecting his fees.

Opening the door to the fourteenth-floor corridor, Martie said, "He'll make this trouble go away. I feel good about him."

In the long corridor, heading toward the elevator, Dusty said, "Who uses the word heretofore heretofore?"

"What do you mean?"

"He used it. Dr. Ahriman. Heretofore. Heretofore."

"Did he? Well, it's a word, isn't it?"

"But how often do you ever hear it? I mean outside a lawyer's office or a courtroom."

"What's your point?"

Frowning, Dusty said, "I don't know."

In the elevator alcove, when she pushed the call b.u.t.ton, Martie said, "Heretofore, you have generally made sense, but not now."

"It's a pompous word."

"No, it's not."

"In everyday conversation it is," he insisted. "It's something my old man would say. Trevor Penn Rhodes. Or Skeet's old man. Or either of her other two elitist-b.a.s.t.a.r.d husbands."

"You're ranting, which you've seldom done heretofore. What's your point?"

He sighed. "I guess I don't have one."

On the way down to the ground floor, Dusty's stomach dropped out of him, as though they were in an express elevator to h.e.l.l.

Crossing the lobby, he seemed to be decompressing after a dive into a deep ocean trench, or adjusting to gravity after living in a s.p.a.ce shuttle for a week. Coming out of a dream.

As they approached the doors, Martie took his arm, and he said, "I'm sorry, Martie. I'm just feeling...weird."

"That's okay. You were weird when I married you."

51.

Unlike Dr. Ahriman's fourteenth-floor suite, the parking lot offered no view of the nearby Pacific. Dusty couldn't see whether the ocean was as ominously dark now as it had appeared to be from the psychiatrist's office.

The sky was sludge, but it didn't press down with full doomsday weight as before, and within the works of man, he could no longer see the future wreckage from pending cataclysms.

The breeze was promoting itself to a wind, busily sweeping dead leaves and a few small sc.r.a.ps of litter across the pavement.

In the car, Martie had a nervous edge to her, although it was only a fraction as sharp as it had been this morning. Still in a post-therapy glow, she rummaged through the glove box, found a roll of chocolate candies, and popped them into her mouth one at a time, chewing each with relish. Evidently she had no concern that she would have to give them back later, in a panic attack, if she found herself bent forward, retching uncontrollably.

Declining a chocolate when Martie offered it, Dusty withdrew the paperback from his jacket pocket and said, "Where did you get this?"

She glanced at the book and shrugged. "Picked it up somewhere."

"Did you buy it?"

"Bookstores don't give the things away, you know."

"Which bookstore?"

Frowning, she said, "What's this about?"

"I'll explain. But first I need to know. Which store? Barnes and n.o.ble? Borders? Book Carnival, where you buy mysteries?"

Chewing chocolate, she studied the paperback for a long moment, and a bemused look came over her. "I don't know."

"Well, it's not as if you buy a hundred books a week from twenty different stores," he said impatiently.

"Yeah, okay, but I never claimed to have your memory. Don't you you remember where I got it?" remember where I got it?"

"I must not have been with you."

Martie put down the roll of candies and took the paperback from him. She didn't open the book or even fan the pages with her thumb, as he might have expected, but she held it in both hands, staring at the t.i.tle, held it very tightly, as though trying to squeeze out its origins as she might squeeze juice from an orange.

"I better go back to the hospital, get a test for early-onset Alzheimer's," she finally said, returning the book to Dusty and picking up the chocolates.

"Maybe it was a gift," he suggested.

"From whom?"

"That's what I'm asking."

"No. If it was a gift, I'd remember."

"When you examined the book just now, why didn't you open it?"

"Open it? There's nothing in it that'll tell me where I bought it." She held out the half-depleted roll of candy. "Here. You're a little irritable. Maybe you're hypoglycemic. Pump in some sugar."

"Pa.s.s. Martie, do you know what this novel is about?"

"Sure. It's a thriller."

"But a thriller about what what?"

"Entertaining plot, colorful characters. I'm enjoying it."

"And what's it about about?"

She stared at the paperback, chewing the candy more slowly. "Well, you know thrillers. Run, jump, chase, shoot, run some more."

In Dusty's hands, the book seemed to grow cold. Heavier. Its texture began to change, too: The colorful cover seemed slicker than before. As if it weren't just a book. More than a book. A talisman, too, that might at any moment work its witchery and send him plunging through a magical doorway into a dragon-infested alternate reality of the type Skeet liked to read about. Or maybe the talisman already had performed that trick, without him realizing that he'd stepped out of one world and into another. Here Here there be dragons. there be dragons.

"Martie, I don't think you've read a sentence of this book. Or even opened it."

Holding a chocolate between thumb and forefinger, poised to pop it into her mouth, she said, "I told you, it's a real thriller. The writing's good. The plot is entertaining, and the characters are colorful. I'm...enjoying...it."

Dusty saw that she recognized the singsong quality in her voice. Her mouth was open, but the chocolate morsel remained unpopped. Her eyes widened as if with surprise.

Holding the book up, back cover turned to her, he said, "It's about brainwas.h.i.+ng, Martie. Even the sales copy makes that clear."

Her expression, better than any words she could have spoken, revealed that the subject of the novel was news to her.

"It takes place during and a few years after the Korean War," he told her.

The circlet of chocolate was beginning to get tacky between her fingers, so she slipped it into her mouth.

"It's about this guy," Dusty said, "this soldier, Raymond Shaw, who has-"

"I'm listening," she said.

Dusty's attention was on the book when Martie interrupted him, and when he looked up, he saw that a placid, detached expression had claimed her face. Her mouth hung open. He saw the chocolate lozenge on her tongue.

"Martie?"

"Yeah," she said thickly, not bothering to close her mouth, the candy quivering on her tongue.

Here was the episode with Skeet at New Life Clinic, repeating with Martie.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," he said.

She blinked, closed her mouth, tongued the candy into her left cheek, and said, "What's wrong?"

She was back with him, no longer detached, eyes clear.

"Where did you go?" he asked.

"Me? When?"

"Here. Just now."

She c.o.c.ked her head. "I really think you need a hit of sugar."

"Why did you say 'I'm listening'?"

"I didn't say it."