False Memory

the thirteenth floor, appropriately, when he realized why she put ice in his spine: She possessed an indefinable but undeniable quality that reminded him of his mother.
    At that moment, as they arrived at the fourteenth floor, Skeet knew that he was a dead man walking.

     
     
    When the elevator doors slid open, Martie immediately stepped inside and pressed 14.
    Dusty followed, blocked two other men who tried to enter after them, and said, “Sorry, emergency. We’re expressing to fourteen.”
    Martie had pressed close door immediately after pressing the floor number. She held her thumb on it.
    One of the men blinked in surprise, and one of them started to object, but the doors closed before an argument could begin.
    As they came out of the elevator alcove into the fourteenth-floor corridor, Skeet said, "Where are we going?”
    “Don’t be so stupidly disingenuous. It’s annoying. You know perfectly well where we’re going. Now move.”
    She seemed to want him to go to the left, so he did, not just because she had a gun, but because all his life he had gone where people told him to go. She followed him, jamming the muzzle of the sound suppressor into his back.
    The long, carpeted corridor was quiet. The acoustic ceiling soaked up their voices. No sounds came from beyond the hallway walls. They might have been the last two people on the planet.
    “What if I stop right here?” Skeet asked.
    “Then I shoot you right here,” she assured him.
    Skeet kept moving.
    As he passed the doors to office suites on both sides of the hall, he read the names on the etched-brass wall plates beside them. Mostly, they were doctors, specialists of one kind or another— though two were attorneys. This was convenient, he decided. If he somehow survived the next few minutes, he would no doubt need a few good doctors and one attorney.
    They arrived at a door where the name on the brass plate was DR. MARK AHRIMAN. Under the psychiatrist’s name, in smaller letters, Skeet read, A CALIFORNIA CORPORATION.

    “Here?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said.
    As Skeet pushed the door inward, the lady in pink shot him in the back. If the silenced pistol made any noise 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 blood-stained 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