False Memory

tires, causing gravel to clatter against the undercarriage, and he drove away from the Pastore ranch, toward the highway half a mile ahead.
    The redhead smiled at Martie and raised his eyebrows, as though to say that sometimes his associate was a tribulation.
    He held the machine pistol in one hand, pointed at the floor between his feet. He seemed unconcerned that Martie might offer effective resistance.
    Indeed she could never have taken the weapon away from him or landed a disabling blow. As quick and big as he was, he would crush her windpipe with a hard chop of his elbow or pound her face through the side window.
    Now more than ever, she needed Smilin’ Bob beside her, either in the flesh or in spirit. And with a fire ax.
    She thought they were headed toward the highway to the south. In less than a quarter mile, however, they turned off the ranch road and traveled due east on a rutted track defined almost solely by the clear swath it carved through sagebrush, mesquite, and cactus.
    If her memory of the map could be trusted—and judging by what she had seen of the landscape on the trip out from Santa Fe—nothing lay in this direction but wasteland.
    Cascades of snow, a foaming Niagara of flakes, resisted the probing headlights, so a city might have waited ahead of them. She held out no hope for a metropolis, however, and expected instead a killing ground with unmarked graves.
    “Where are we going?” she asked, because she thought they would expect her to be full of nervous questions.
    “Lover’s lane,” said the driver, and his eyes in the rearview mirror met hers, looking for a thrill of fear.
    “Who are you people?”
    “Us? We’re the future,” the driver said.
    Again, the man in the backseat smiled and raised his eyebrows, as if to mock his partner’s dramatic flair.
    The BMW wasn’t moving as fast as it had been on the ranch road, though it was still going too fast for the terrain. Encountering a bad pothole, the car bounced hard; the muffler and the gas tank scraped on the down side of the bounce, and they were jolted again.
    Because neither the redhead nor Martie was wearing a seat belt, they were lifted and rocked forward.
    She seized the opportunity, reached behind herself, and slid her right hand up under her coat and sweater. She pulled the pistol from her belt while they were being pitched around.
    As the car settled down, Martie held the gun at her side, on the seat, against her thigh, letting her unbuttoned jacket trail over it. Her body also blocked the redhead’s view of the Colt.
    The driver’s pistol was probably on the seat at his side, within easy reach.
    Beside Martie, the redhead was still gripping his gun in his right hand, between his knees, muzzle aimed at the floor.
    Action. Action informed by intelligence and a moral perspective. She trusted her intelligence. Murder wasn’t moral, of course, though killing in self-defense surely was.
    But the time wasn’t right.
    Timing. Timing was equally important in ballet and gunplay.
    She’d heard that somewhere. Unfortunately, in spite of her visits to the shooting range, having shot at nothing more than paper silhouettes of the human form, she knew nothing about either ballet or gunplay.
    “You’ll never get away with this,” she said, letting them hear the genuine terror in her voice, because it would reinforce their conviction that she was helpless.
    The driver was amused. To his partner, he said, with a mock tremor of doubt in his voice, “Zachary, you think we’ll get away with this?”
    “Yeah,” said the redhead. He raised his eyebrows again and shrugged.
    “Zachary,” the driver said, “what do we call an operation like this?”
    “A simple hump and dump,” said Zachary.
    “You hear that, girl? With the emphasis on simple. Nothing to it. A walk in the park. A piece of cake.”
    “You know, Kevin, for me,” Zachary said, “the emphasis is on hump.”
    Kevin laughed. “Girl, since you’re the humpee and you and your husband are the dumpees, it’s naturally a big deal to you. But it’s no big deal to us, is it, Zachary?”
    "No."

    “And it won’t be to the cops, either. Tell her where she’s going, Zachary.”
    “With me, to Orgasmo City.”
    “Man, you’re delusional but fun. And after Orgasmo City?”
    “You’re going down an old Indian well,” Zachary told Martie, “and God knows how deep into the aquifer under it.”
    “Been no Indians living there or using it for more than three hundred years,” Kevin explained.
    “Wouldn’t want to contaminate