False Memory

at all, he didn’t hear it, because the pain was so instantaneous and terrible that he wouldn’t have heard a marching band going past. He was focused entirely, intensely on the pain, and he was amazed that being shot could hurt so much worse when you weren’t wearing Kevlar. Even as the woman blew a hole in him, she shoved him hard through the door and into Dr. Ahriman’s reception lounge.

* * *

Bing!

Ahriman’s computer announced an arrival, and the screen filled with a security-camera view of the reception lounge.

With more amazement than he had experienced in years, the doctor swiveled away from his contemplation of the blue bag and saw Skeet stagger into the lounge, the door to the corridor slowly falling shut behind him.

A large blot of blood stained the front of his yellow sweater, which certainly ought to have been the case after he had taken four rounds in the chest and gut at close range. Although this might have been the same sweater Skeet had been wearing yesterday, the camera angle wasn’t clear enough to allow Ahriman to see whether there were four bullet holes in the bloodstained fabric. Skeet clawed at the air as if for support, stumbled, and collapsed facedown on the floor.

The doctor had heard stories of dogs, accidentally separated from their masters when far from home, crossing hundreds and even thousands of miles of inhospitable terrain, through rain and snow and sleet and blazing sun, often with cut feet and worse injuries, and showing up weeks later on the very doorstep where they belonged, to the astonishment and tearful joy of their families. He had never heard even one story about a gut-shot man getting up from a beach, walking approximately six to eight miles over — he checked his watch — eighteen hours, through a densely populated area, ascending fourteen floors in an elevator, and staggering into the office of the man who had shot him, to point a finger of accusation, so he was convinced that there was more to this development than met the eye.

With his mouse, the doctor clicked on the security icon shaped like a gun. The metal detector indicated that Skeet was not carrying a firearm.

Lying flat on the floor, the would-be detective was not aligned with the roentgen tubes, so fluoroscopy wasn’t possible.

Jennifer came out from behind the receptionist’s window and stood over the fallen Skeet. She appeared to be screaming — although whether because the condition of this wounded man horrified her or because the sight of blood offended her vegetarian sensibilities, Ahriman couldn’t be sure.

The doctor activated the audio. Yes, she was screaming, though not loudly, hardly more than wheezing, as though she couldn’t draw a breath deep enough to let go with a real window-rattler.

As Jennifer dropped to one knee beside Skeet to check for vital signs, Ahriman clicked on the nose icon, activating the trace-scent analyzer. Any sane person’s credulity would be stretched past the breaking point by the notion that this man, with four bullet wounds, had paused in his eighteen-hour trek to acquire explosives and build a bomb, which was now strapped to his chest. Nevertheless, reminding himself that attention to detail was important, the doctor waited for the system to report. Negative: no explosives.

Jennifer rose from the body and hurried out of camera range.

She no doubt intended to call the police and paramedics.

He buzzed her through the in-phone intercom. “Jennifer?”

“Doctor, oh, God, there’s—”

“Yes, I know. A man’s been shot. Do not call the police or the paramedics, Jennifer. I will do that. Do you understand?”

“But he’s bleeding badly. He’s—”

“Calm down, Jennifer. Call no one. I’m handling this.”

Less than a minute had passed since Skeet had staggered into the reception lounge. The doctor calculated that he had one more minute, at most two, before his delay in calling paramedics would alarm Jennifer into action.

What worried him and what he needed an answer to was this: If one man with four serious bullet wounds could show up eighteen hours later, why not two?

As highly imaginative as he was, the doctor was not able to conjure in his mind a credible picture of the wounded Skeet and his wounded pal staggering up the coast, their arms around each other’s shoulders, providing mutual support, like a pair of drunken pirates heading shipward after a long night of revelry ashore. Yet if one had shown up, there might be two, and the second could be lurking somewhere with bad intentions.

* * *

The worst delay was at the sixth floor. The elevator stopped and the doors opened, even though Martie kept pressing the close door button.

A stout, determined woman with iron-gray curls and the face of a longshoreman in drag insisted on boarding, though Dusty blocked her and claimed emergency privilege.

“What emergency?” She inserted a foot into the cab, triggering the safety mechanism and preventing the door from closing, regardless of how hard Martie leaned on the button. “I don’t see any emergency.”

“Heart attack. Fourteenth floor.”

“You’re not doctors,” she said suspiciously.

“It’s our day off.”

“Doctors don’t dress like you even on their day off. Anyway, I’m going all the way to fifteen.”

“Then get in, get in,” Dusty relented.

When she was safely inside, when the doors closed, the woman pressed the button for the twelfth floor and glared triumphantly.

Dusty was furious. “I love my brother, lady, and if anything happens to him now, I’ll track you down and gut you like a fish.”

She looked him up and down with undisguised contempt and said, “You?”

* * *

The doctor plucked the.380 Beretta off the desk and headed toward the door, but stopped when he remembered the blue bag. It still stood in the center of his desk blotter.

Whatever might happen next, eventually the police were going to arrive. If Skeet wasn’t already dead, Ahriman intended to finish him before the authorities got here. With a corpse lying in a pool of blood in the reception lounge, the cops were certain to have a lot of questions.

They would at the least take a casual look around the premises. If their suspicions were in any way aroused, they would station a man in the office while they got a warrant for a thorough search.

They were not permitted by law to inspect his patient files, so he was not concerned about anything they might find — except for his Beretta and the blue bag.

The pistol was unregistered, and while he would never go to jail for possessing it, he didn’t want to give them any reason whatsoever to wonder about him. Wondering, they might keep an eye on him in the days ahead, seriously cramping his style.

The bag of dog poop wasn’t incriminating, but it was…peculiar. Definitely peculiar. Finding it on his desk, they would surely ask why he had brought it to the office. As clever as he was, the doctor could not think of a single answer, on such short notice, that made sense. Again, they would wonder about him.

He returned quickly to the desk, pulled open a deep drawer, and dropped the bag into it. Then he realized that if they went so far as to obtain a search warrant, they would find the bag in the drawer — where it would seem no less strange than if found in plain sight. Indeed, wherever he put the bag in the office, even in the waste can, it would seem weird to them when they found it.

All of these considerations flashed through the doctor’s mind in mere seconds, since he was every bit as sharp as in the days when he’d been a child prodigy, but still he reminded himself that time was a maniac scattering dust. Hurry, hurry.

His intention was to get rid of the Beretta and the shoulder holster before the police arrived, so he might as well ditch the blue bag with the pistol. Which meant he had to take it with him now.

For several reasons, not the least being his sense of personal style, he didn’t want Jennifer to see him carrying the bag. Besides, it would hamper him if he were forced to deal with Skeet’s pal. What had Dusty called