False Memory

with, I wonder?” Dusty said as Martie drove away from the ranch house. “What is Ahriman... in addition to what he appears to be?”
    “You’re not talking just about his connections, the institute, who protects him and why.”
    “No.” His voice had fallen, soft and solemn, as if he spoke now of sacred things. “Who is this guy, beyond the obvious and easy answers?”
    “A sociopath. A narcissist, according to Closterman.” But she knew these were not the words that he was looking for, either.
    The private, graveled road leading from the ranch to the paved highway was more than a mile long, passing first across table-flat land and then down a series of hills. Under the bleak gypsum sky, in this last hour of winter light, the dark green sage appeared to be mottled with silver leafing. The tumbleweeds, in this breathless day, stood as untumbled as the strange rock formations that resembled the half-buried, knobby bones of prehistoric behemoths.
    “If Ahriman came walking across the desert right now,” Dusty said, “would rattlesnakes boil out of their dens by the thousands and follow him, as docile as kittens?”
    “Don’t go spooky on me, babe.”
    Yet Martie had no difficulty imagining Ahriman at Dion Pastore’s bedroom window, in the aftermath of the gunfire, unperturbed by the arrival of the coyotes, standing among those predators as though he insisted upon and received a place of honor in the pack, pressing his face to the screen and into the thick smell of blood, while the prairie wolves growled low in their throats and, on both sides of him, scraped their teeth against the mesh.
    Where the graveled road rounded the side of a hill and took a sharp turn downward, someone had left a spike strip, one of those tricks the police resorted to in high-speed urban chases when the target of the pursuit proved difficult to catch.
    Martie saw it too late. She braked just as both front tires blew out.
    The steering wheel ripped back and forth in her hands. She fought for control.
    Rattling against the undercarriage, like a frenzied snake with a cracked spine, the spike strip whipped from front to back of the Ford, where it found more rubber with its fangs. The rear tires blew.
    Four flats, sliding and shredding across loose gravel, down a runneled incline, allowed Martie less control than she might have had if the Ford were skating across ice. The car turned sideways to the road.
    “Hang on!” she cried, though it hardly needed to be said.
    Then the pothole.
    The Ford jolted, canted, seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second, and rolled.
    Rolled twice, she thought, though it may have been three times, because counting was not her first concern, especially when they went over the edge of the road into a wide dry swale, tumbling and sliding twenty feet in a curiously lazy fall. The windshield burst and pieces of the car tore loose with shrieks and twangs before at last the Ford came to rest on its roof.
    67
    Faster than smelling salts, the pungent reek of gasoline brought Martie out of shock. She heard it gurgling, too, from some ruptured line.
    “You all right?”
    “Yeah,” Dusty confirmed, struggling with his safety harness and cursing either because the buckle release wouldn’t work or because he was too disoriented to locate it.
    Hanging upside down in her harness, looking up at the steering wheel and, higher still, at her feet and the floorboards, Martie was a little disoriented, too. “They’ll be coming.”
    “The gun,” he said urgently.
    The Colt was in her purse, but her purse was no longer on the seat, no longer wedged between her hip and the door.
    Instinct told her to look toward the floor, but the floor was above her now. The purse couldn’t have fallen upward.
    With trembling fingers, she found the harness release, flailed out of the stubbornly entangling straps, and slid onto the ceiling.
    Voices. Not close but drawing nearer.
    She would have bet her house that the approaching men weren’t paramedics rushing to the rescue.
    Dusty clambered loose of his harness and eeled onto the ceiling. “Where is it?”
    “I don’t know.” The words wheezed from her, because the stink of gasoline made breathing increasingly difficult.
    The light inside the overturned car was dismal. Outside, the cloud-choked sky faded toward twilight. The broken-out windshield was clogged with tumbleweeds and other brush that filled the bottom of the swale, so hardly any light entered from that direction.
    “There!” Dusty said.
    Even as he