One Door Away from Heaven

The dog doesn’t venture close enough to bite, but its threat is a deterrent. The woman at once abandons the idea of getting up from the driver’s seat. She shrinks away from them, and terror twists her face into an ugly knot that is no doubt the same expression she has seen on the faces of the many victims to whom she herself has shown no mercy.

Jerked up and jammed down, the lever handle doesn’t release the latch, but pulled inward, it works, revealing that it wasn’t locked. No spell had been cast on the mechanism, after all. Curtis’s failure to open it sooner wasn’t a failure of mind or muscle, but a collapse of reason, the result of runaway fear.

Although the boy is mortified by this discovery, he’s also still unable to get a grip on the tossing reins of his panic. He throws the door open, plunges down the steps, and stumbles recklessly onto the blacktop with such momentum that he crashes into the side of a Lexus stopped in the lane adjacent to the motor home.

Face to glass, nose flattened a millimeter short of fracture, he peers into the car as if into an aquarium stocked with strange fish. The fish—actually a man with a buzz cut behind the wheel, a brunette with spiky hair in the passenger’s seat—stare back at him with the lidless eyes and the puckered-O mouths that he would have encountered from the finny residents of a real aquarium.

Curtis pushes away from the car and turns just as Old Yeller, no longer barking savagely, leaps out of the motor home. Grinning, wagging her tail, aware that she’s the hero of the hour, she turns left and trots away with the spring of pride in her step.

The dog follows the broken white line that defines this lane of stopped traffic from the next, and the boy hurries after the dog. He’s no longer screaming, but he’s still sufficiently addled by fear to concede leadership temporarily to his brave companion.

He glances back into a blaze of headlights and sees the white-haired woman gazing out and down at him from behind the windshield of the Windchaser. She’s half out of her seat, pulling herself up with the steering wheel, the better to see him. From here, she might be mistaken for an innocent and kindly woman—perhaps a librarian, considering that a librarian would know how easily a book of monsters could be disguised as a sweet romance novel with just a switch of the dust jackets.

A whiff of the city has come to this high desert. The warm air is bitter with the stink of exhaust fumes from the idling engines of the vehicles that are backed up from the roadblock.

Some motorists, recognizing the length of the delay ahead of them, have switched off their engines and gotten out of their cars to stretch their legs. Not all have fled the showdown at the truck stop; and as they rub the backs of their necks, roll their shoulders, arch their spines, and crack their knuckles, they ask one another what’s-happening-what’s-up-what’s-this-all-about.

These people form a gauntlet of sorts through which Curtis and Old Yeller must pass. Twisting, dodging, the boy treats them with equal courtesy, although he knows that they may be either ministers or murderers, or murdering ministers, either saints or sinners, bank clerks or bank robbers, humble or arrogant, generous or envious, sane or quite mad. “Excuse me, sir. Thank you, ma’am. Sorry, sir. Excuse me, ma’am. Excuse me, sir.”

Eventually, Curtis is halted by a tall man with the gray pinched face and permanently engraved wince lines of a long-term sufferer of constipation. Between a Ford van and a red Cadillac, he steps in the boy’s way and places a hand on his chest. “Whoa there, son, what’s the’ matter, where you going?”

“Serial killers,” Curtis gasps, pointing toward the motor home, which is more than twenty vehicles behind him. “In that Windchaser, they keep body parts in the bedroom.”

Disconcerted, the stranger drops his restraining hand, and his wince lines cut deeper into his lean face as he squints toward the sixteen-ton, motorized house of horrors.

Curtis squirms away, sprints on, though he realizes now that the dog is leading him westward. The roadblock is still a considerable distance ahead, beyond the top of the hill and not yet in sight, but this isn’t the direction that they ought to be taking.

Between a Chevy pickup and a Volkswagen, a jolly-looking man with a freckled face and a clown’s crop of fiery red hair snares Curtis by the shirt, nearly causing him to skid off his feet. “Hey, hey, hey! Who’re you running from, boy?”

Sensing that this guy won’t be rattled by the serial-killer alert—or by much else, for that matter—Curtis resorts to the excuse that Burt Hooper, the waffle-eating trucker in Donella’s restaurant, made for him earlier. He isn’t sure what it means, but it got him out of trouble before, so he says, “Sir, I’m not quite right.”

“Hell, that’s no surprise to me,” the red-haired man declares, but the tail of Curtis’s shirt remains twisted tightly in his fist. “You steal something, boy?”

No rational person would suppose that a ten-year-old boy would roam the interstate, waiting for a police roadblock to stop traffic and provide an opportunity to steal from motorists. Therefore, Curtis assumes that this freckled interrogator intuits his larcenies dating all the way back to the Hammond house in Colorado. Perhaps this man is psychic and will momentarily receive clairvoyant visions of five-dollar bills and frankfurters filched during Curtis’s long flight for freedom.

Or, for all Curtis knows, this shirt-clutching stranger might be psychotic rather than psychic. Loony, mad, insane. There’s a lot of that going around. Dressed in sandals and baggy plaid shorts and a T-shirt that proclaims LOVE IS THE ANSWER, with his jolly freckled face, this man doesn’t appear to be a lunatic, but so many things in this world aren’t what they appear to be, including Curtis himself.

The dog goes straight for the shorts. No bark, no growl, no warning, in fact no evident animosity: Almost playful, she bounds forward, snatches a muzzleful of plaid, and jerks the stranger off his feet. The man cries out and lets go of Curtis, but Old Yeller isn’t as quick to release the shorts. She pulls them down his legs, baring his underwear. He kicks at her, but the shorts trammel him; he fails to land a foot in fur, though unintentionally he flings off one of his sandals.

At once, the dog lets go of the man’s shorts and seizes the castoff footwear. Grinning around a mouthful of sandal, she sprints westward along the broken white line, flanked by frustrated motorists in their overheating vehicles.

She’s still headed in the dead-wrong direction, but Curtis races after Old Yeller because they can’t turn back toward the Windchaser, not with so many altercations likely to be rejoined if they do. They can’t cross the median strip and attempt to hitchhike east, either, because the traffic whizzing past in that direction will be halted by another roadblock somewhere beyond the truck stop.

Their only hope lies in the vastness of the high desert to the north of the interstate, out there where the black sky and the black land meet, where the sharper facets of quartz-rich rocks reflect the glitter of stars. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, and tarantulas will be more hospitable than the merciless pack of hunters to which the two cowboys had belonged—to which they still belong if they survived the fire-fight in the restaurant kitchen.

The FBI, the National Security Agency, and other legitimate authorities won’t kill Curtis immediately upon identifying him, as will the cowboys and their ilk. Once he’s in custody, however, he won’t be allowed to go free. Not ever.

Worse: If he’s in custody, those vicious hunters who killed his family—and the Hammond family, too—will sooner or later learn his whereabouts. Eventually they will get to him no matter in what deep bunker or high redoubt he’s kept, regardless of how many heavily armed bodyguards are assigned to protect him.

Ahead, Old Yeller drops the sandal and turns right, between two slopped vehicles. Curtis follows. The dog lingers on the shoulder of the highway until the boy catches up with her. Then, untroubled by I he possibility of capture or snakebite, frisky with the prospect of new terrain and greater excitement, tail raised like a flag, she leads the charge down the gently sloped embankment from the elevated interstate.

If Curtis could trade this particular swell adventure for a raft and a river, he would without hesitation make the swap. Instead, he lights out for the Territory, chasing the clever mutt, hurrying away from the carnival blaze of blockaded traffic and across a gradually rising wasteland of sand, scrub, shale. Weathered stone sentinels loom like the Injuns who probably stood here to watch wagon trains full of nervous settlers wending westward when the interstate had been de-lined not by pavement and signposts but by nothing more than landmarks, broken wagon wheels of previous failed expeditions, and the scattered bones of men and horses stripped of flesh by vultures, vermin. Curtis and Old Yeller go now where both the brave and the foolish have gone before them, in ages past: boy and dog, dog and boy, with the moon retiring behind blankets of clouds in the west and the sun still fast abed in the east, sister-becoming and her devoted brother racing north through the desert darkness, into darkness deeper still.

Chapter 23

IN THE ARMCHAIR, Noah Farrel talked past the point where he bothered to listen to himself anymore, and he kept talking until he was wrung dry of words.

On the bed, so still that the chenille spread was undisturbed, Laura remained cataleptic, curled in the fetal position. Wordless throughout her brother’s monologue, she remained mute now.

This exhausted silence was the closest thing that Noah knew to peace. A few times in the past, he had in fact dozed off in this chair. The only dreamless sleep he ever experienced was the silken repose that overcame him after words had failed, after he could do nothing but share the silence of his sister.

Perhaps peace came only with acceptance.

Acceptance, however, seemed too much like resignation. Even on those evenings when he napped in the armchair, he woke with guilt reborn, his sense of injustice not worn away by dreamless rest but sharpened on the whetstone of sleep.

He had a bone to chew with Fate, and he gnawed at it even though he knew that of the two of them, Fate possessed the sharper teeth, the stronger jaws.

This evening, he didn’t doze, and after a while his mind began to brim once more with unwanted thoughts. Words threatened to spill from him again, but this time they were likely to come in the form of rants of anger, self-loathing, self-pity. If these words filtered through the prison of the damped brain in which Laura served her life sentence, that inner darkness wouldn’t be brightened by them.

He went to the bed, leaned down to his sister, and kissed her damp cheek. If he had asked for water and had been given vinegar, it couldn’t have tasted more bitter than her slow steady tears.

In the hallway, he encountered a nurse pushing a stainless-steel serving cart: a petite raven-haired brunette with the pink complexion and the twinkling blue eyes of a Nordic blonde. In her crisp white-and-peach uniform, she was as perky as a parakeet on Dexedrine. Her infectious smile might have cultured one in Noah if the dispiriting visit with Laura hadn’t inoculated him against smiling for a while.

Her name was Wendy Quail. New to the staff. He’d only met her once before, but he had a cop’s memory for names.

“Bad?” she asked, glancing toward Laura’s room.

“Bad enough,” he admitted.

“She’s been blue all day,” said Wendy Quail.

The word blue was so absurdly inadequate to describe the depths of Laura’s misery that Noah almost managed a laugh even though a smile had eluded him. Oh, but it would have been a humorless bark of a laugh that might make this earnest little nurse want to jump off a bridge, so he held it back and simply nodded.

Wendy sighed. “We all have our plights and pickles.”

“Our what?”

“Plights and pickles. Troubles. Some of us get ‘em served one at a time on a little plate, and some of us get full servings of ‘em on bigger plates, but your poor sweet sister, she got hers heaped high on a platter.”

Thinking about plates and platters of plights and pickles, Noah risked an even more inappropriate laugh than the one he’d suppressed.

“But all the troubles in the world,” said Wendy, “have the same one answer.”

Although he could never again wear a badge, Noah carried in his mind a cop’s rope of suspicion, which he now tied in a hangman’s knot. “What answer?” he asked, recalling the Circle of Friends thug with the snake tattoo on his arm and the platitude on his T-shirt.

“Ice cream, of course!” With a flourish, she plucked the lid off the insulated rectangular serving pan that stood on the cart.

Inside the server were vanilla ice-cream sundaes with chocolate sauce, toasted coconut, and crowning maraschino cherries. Wendy was bringing a bedtime treat to her trouble-plagued wards.

Recognizing the sudden hardness in Noah’s demeanor, she said, “What did you think I was going to say?”

“Love. I thought you would say love is the answer.” Her sweet gamine face wasn’t designed for ironic smiles, but she tricked one out of it anyway. “Judging by the men I’ve fallen for, ice cream beats love every time.” Finally he smiled.

“Will Laura want a sundae?” she asked.

“She’s not in any condition to feed herself right now. Maybe if I helped her into a chair and fed her myself—“

“No, no, Mr. Farrel. I’ll distribute the rest of these and then see if she wants the last one. I’ll feed her if I can. I love taking care of her. Taking care of all these special people . . . that’s my ice cream.”

Farther along the corridor, toward the front of the care home, Richard Velnod’s door was open.

Rickster, liberator of ladybugs and mice, stood in the middle of his room, in bright yellow pajamas, savoring his ice cream while gazing out the window.

“Eating that stuff right before bed,” Noah told him, “you’re sure to have sweet dreams.”

Rickster’s slightly slurred voice was further numbed by the cold treat: “You know what’s a really good thing? Sundays on Wednesday.” At first Noah didn’t get it.

“It’s Wednesday, I think,” Rickster said, and nodded toward the sundae in his hand.

“Oh. Yeah. Nice things when you don’t expect them. That makes them even better. You’re right. Here’s to Sundaes on Wednesdays.” “You turning yourself loose?” Rickster asked. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m leaving.”

With only a wistful expression, Rickster said that being able to turn yourself loose, whenever you wanted to go, was a really good thing, too, better even than Sundaes on Wednesday.

Outside the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten, under trellises draped with bougainvillea, Noah took deep breaths of the warm night air. On the way to his car—another rustbucket Chevy—he tried to settle his nerves.