False Memory by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
    Holding the raincoat as Susan slipped her arms into it, Martie said, “You be good, girlfriend, and on the way back from the doctor, we’ll get some great Chinese takeout. We’ll open a couple bottles of Tsingtao, and we’ll play some killer two-hand pinochle over lunch, fifty cents a point.”
    “You already owe me over six hundred thousand bucks.”
    “So break my legs. Gambling debts aren’t legally collectible.”
    After Susan switched off all but one of the lamps, she retrieved her purse from the coffee table and led Martie through the apartment.
    As she was crossing the kitchen behind Susan, Martie found her attention drawn to a wicked-looking item that lay on a cutting board near the sink. It was a mezzaluna knife, a classic Italian kitchen tool: The curved stainless-steel blade was shaped like a half-moon, with a handle at each end, so it could be rocked rapidly back and forth to dice and slice.
    Like an electric current, scintillant light seemed to sizzle along the cutting edge.
    Martie could not look away from it. She didn’t realize how completely the mezzaluna had mesmerized her—until she heard Susan ask, “What’s wrong?”
    Her throat was tight, and her tongue felt swollen. With audible thickness, she asked a question to which she already knew the answer: “What’s that?”
    “Haven’t you ever used one? It’s great. You can dice an onion in a flash.”
    The sight of the knife didn’t fill Martie with terror, as had her shadow and the bathroom mirror. It did, however, make her uneasy, although she couldn’t explain her queer reaction to it.
    “Martie? Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, sure, let’s go.”
    Susan twisted the knob but hesitated to open the kitchen door.
    Martie put her hand over her friend’s, and together they pulled the door inward, admitting cold gray light and a sharp-toothed wind.
    Susan’s face drained of color at the prospect of entering the roofless world beyond her threshold.
    “We’ve done this a hundred times before,” Martie assured her.
    Susan clutched the doorjamb. “I can’t go out there.”
    “You will,” Martie insisted.
    Susan attempted to return to the kitchen, but Martie blocked her. “Let me in, this is too hard, it’s
agony.
”
    “It’s agony for me, too,” Martie said.
    “Bullshit.” Desperation clawed some of the beauty out of Susan’s face, and a feral terror darkened the green of her jungle eyes. “You’re getting off on this, you love it, you’re crazy.”
    “No, I’m mean.” Martie gripped the doorjamb with both hands, holding her ground. “I’m the mean bitch.
You’re
the crazy bitch.”
    Suddenly Susan stopped pushing at Martie and clutched at her instead, seeking support. “Damn, I want that Chinese takeout.”
    Martie envied Dusty, whose biggest worry of the morning would be whether the rain would hold off long enough for his crew to get some work done.
    Fat drops of rain—at first in fitful bursts but soon more insistently—began to rattle on the roof that covered the landing.
    Finally, they stepped across the threshold, outside. Martie pulled the door shut and locked it.
    The extraction phase was behind them. Worse lay ahead, however, and Martie was unable to see most of it coming.

6
    Skeet ran exuberantly down the steeply pitched roof, toward the brink, angling for a point of departure that would ensure he landed on skull-cracking pavement rather than on mattresses, bounding along the convex orange-brown tiles as though he were a kid racing across a cobbled street to an ice-cream vendor, and Dusty ran grimly after him.
    To those watching from below, it must have appeared that the two men were equally deranged, fulfilling a suicide pact.
    More than halfway down the slope, Dusty caught up with Skeet, grabbed him, wrenched him off his intended trajectory, and stumbled diagonally across the incline with him. Some clay tiles cracked underfoot, dislodging small chunks of roofer’s