The advocate for Ahriman, in the corridors of Dusty’s mind, had wandered to far reaches, its voice fainter than before and no longer convincing.
Martie said, “You have any guesses who those three men were?”
“Doesn’t matter much to me exactly which institution’s name is printed on their paycheck,” Roy Closterman said. “I know what they smelled like.”
“Authority,” Dusty said.
“Reeked of it,” the physician confirmed.
Evidently, right now, Martie didn’t fear her violent potential as much as she feared that of others, because she put her hand over Dusty’s and gripped him tightly.
Panting and the pad of dog paws sounded in the hall. Valet and Charlotte returned to the kitchen, played out and grinning.
Behind them came footsteps, and a stocky, affable-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt and calf-length shorts entered the kitchen. He was carrying a manila envelope in his left hand.
“This is Brian,” Roy Closterman said, and made introductions.
After they shook hands, Brian gave the envelope to Dusty. “Here’s the Ahriman file that Roy put together.”
“But you didn’t get it from us,” the physician cautioned. “And you don’t need to bring it back.”
“In fact,” said Brian, “we don’t want it back, ever.”
“Brian,” Roy Closterman said, “show them your ear.”
Pushing his longish blond hair back from the left side of his head, Brian twisted, pulled, lifted, and detached his ear.
Martie gasped.
“Prosthetic,” Roy Closterman explained. “When the three suits left that night, I went upstairs and found Brian unconscious. His ear was severed — and the wound sutured with professional expertise. They had put it down the garbage disposal, so it couldn’t be sewn back on.”
“Real sweethearts,” Brian said, pretending to fan his face with his ear, exhibiting a macabre
“Brian and I have been together more than twenty-four years,” the doctor said.
“More than twenty
“They didn’t need to hurt him,” the physician said. “The video of the boy was enough, more than enough. They just did it to drive the point home.”
“It worked with me,” Brian said, reattaching his prosthetic ear.
“And,” Roy Closterman said, “maybe now you can understand how the threat of the boy had extra punch. Because of me and Brian, our life together, some people would more easily credit accusations about child molestation. But I swear to God, if I ever felt
“If I didn’t slit it first,” Brian said.
With Brian’s entrance, Closterman’s throttled rage had slowly subsided, and the stormy clotted coloration under his tan had faded. Now some of that darkness gathered in his face again. “I don’t much love myself for backing down. The Ornwahl family was ruined, and all but certainly were innocent. If it was just me against Mark Ahriman, I’d have battled it out no matter what the cost. But these people who crawl out from under their rocks to protect him…I just don’t understand that. And what I don’t understand, I can’t fight.”
“Maybe we can’t fight it, either,” Dusty said.
“Maybe not,” Closterman agreed. “And you’ll notice I avoided asking you exactly what might’ve happened to your friend Susan and what your own problems with Ahriman are. Because, frankly, there’s only so much I want to know. It’s cowardly of me, I guess. I never thought of myself as a coward until this, until Ahriman, but I know now that I’ve got my breaking point.”
Hugging him, Martie said, “We all do. And you’re no coward, Doc. You’re a dear, brave man.”
“I tell him,” Brian said, “but to me, he never listens.”
Holding Martie very tightly for a moment, the physician said, “You’re going to need all your father’s heart and all his guts.”
“She’s got them,” Dusty said.
This was the strangest moment of camaraderie that Dusty had ever known: the four of them so dissimilar in so many ways, and yet bonded as though they were the last human beings left on the planet after colonization by extraterrestrials.
“May we set two more places for dinner?” Brian wondered.
“Thanks,” Dusty said, “but we’ve eaten. And we’ve got a lot to do before the night’s out.”
Martie clipped Valet to his leash, and the two dogs sniffed crotches in a last good-bye.
At the front door, Dusty said, “Dr. Closterman—”
“Roy, please.”
“Thank you. Roy, I can’t say that Martie and I would be in less of a mess right now if I had trusted my instincts and stopped calling myself paranoid, but we’d be maybe half a step ahead of where we are now.”
“Paranoia,” Brian said, “is the clearest sign of mental health in this new millennium.”
Dusty said, “So…as paranoid as it sounds…I have a brother who’s in drug rehab. It’s his third time. The last two have been at the same facility. And last night, when I left him there, I had a disturbing reaction to the place, this paranoid feeling…”
“What’s the facility?” Roy asked.
“New Life Clinic. Do you know it?”
“In Irvine. Yes. Ahriman is one of the owners.”
Remembering the tall and imperial silhouette at Skeet’s window, Dusty said, “Yeah. That would’ve surprised me yesterday…but not today.”
After the warmth of the Closterman house, the January night seemed to have a colder, sharper edge. Skirling wind skimmed a foamy scruff off the surface of the harbor and flung it across the island promenade.
Valet pranced at the limit of his leash, and his masters hurried after him.
No moon. No stars. No certainty that dawn would come, and no eagerness to see what might arrive with it.
59
With no dimming of the lights or raising of the curtain to alert Martie that it was show time, with no previews of coming attractions to prepare her, dead priests with spiked heads and other mind movies of an apparently worse nature suddenly flickered across a screen in the multiplex cinema that occupied the most haunted neighborhood of her head. She cried out and jerked in her car seat, as if she’d felt a sleek theater rat, fat on spilled popcorn and Milk Duds, scampering across her feet.
Not a measured descent into panic this time, not a slow slide down a long chute of fear: Martie plunged in midsentence out of a conversation about Skeet and into a deep pit swarming with terrors. One gasp, two quick hard grunts, and then, already, the screaming. She tried to bend forward but was hampered by her safety harness. The entangling straps terrified her as much as her visions, perhaps because many of the monstrosities in her mind were restrained by chains, ropes, shackles, spikes through their heads, nails through their palms. She clawed with both hands at the nylon belts, but with no apparent recollection of the nature of the device that was hindering her, too desperately frightened to remember the buckle release.
They were traveling a wide avenue in light traffic, and Dusty angled across lanes to the curb. He stopped
