One Door Away from Heaven

His intention had been to scout site 62 and find a place from which he could maintain surveillance on it at least for fifteen or twenty minutes, until he had gained a better sense of the situation. That plan had to be discarded, however, when he saw that the door to the Prevost stood wide open in the tempest.

The wind pinned the door against the wall of the vehicle. Rain slashed into the cockpit, and during the minute that Noah watched, no one appeared to close up.

Something was wrong.

LIGHTNING BARED its bright teeth in the sky, and its reflection gnashed in the mirrored blacktop surface of the county road.

Nun’s Lake lay two miles behind Preston, the farmhouse just a mile ahead.

In spite of having been washed thoroughly by the rain, he felt dirty. The desperate nature of the moment had required that he touch the Hand, including the most deformed parts of her, without a chance to pull on a pair of gloves.

Unless he could find work gloves at the Teelroy house, he would have to touch her again, more than once, before the afternoon drew to a close, if only to carry her into the filthy heart of the living-room portion of the maze, where he had left the Slut Queen. There, he would secure her to the armchair, which would allow her a front-row seat for the murder of her friend.

She herself would die in that armchair, after he had indulged the brute within and had done a satisfying number of hurtful things to her. He had been born for this, and so had she. Both of them were broken spokes in the dumb grinding wheel of nature.

Those tortures could be conducted without touching the Hand directly, using imaginative instruments. Therefore, the moment that he had secured her, he would vigorously wash his hands with a strong soap and lots of water nearly hot enough to scald. He would feel clean then, and the coiling nausea in his stomach would relent, and he would be able to enjoy his necessary work.

He worried at the possibility that the Toad might not have soap, and then he let out a short sharp bark of laughter. Even as slovenly as that bearded geek had been, it was more likely that he would have thousands of slivers of soap-bar remains, carefully stored and maybe even cataloged, than that he would have no soap at all.

Slowly regaining consciousness, the Hand groaned softly on the seat beside him. She was sitting up, restrained by the belt, her head slumped against the window in the passenger’s door.

The plastic Hefty OneZip bag lay on the console, folded but not sealed. Driving with one hand, he fished the anesthetic-saturated washcloth out of the bag and spread it over the girl’s face.

He didn’t want to apply it continuously, for fear of killing her too soon and too mercifully.

Her groaning subsided to an anxious murmur, and her hideous hand stopped twitching in her lap, but she didn’t grow as still as she had been previously. Once exposed to the air, the homemade anesthetic in the cloth had begun to evaporate, and the rain had further diluted the chemical, even though he had quickly returned the cloth to the bag after initially felling her with the fumes.

Repeatedly, he checked the rearview mirror, expecting to see the shimmer of headlights through the silver skeins of rain.

He remained confident that the storm had adequately screened him from observers when he had captured the Hand. Even if other campers, at their windows, had been able to glimpse anything of significance in the bleak light and the occluding cloudburst, they would be likely to interpret what they’d seen as nothing more sinister than a father scooping up his errant child and carrying her through thunderclaps and thunderbolts to safety.

As for the two women and the boy from that Fleetwood, he had no clue who they were or what they had been doing in his motor home. He doubted that they were associates of the Slut Queen, because if she’d come to Nun’s Lake with backup, she probably wouldn’t have stationed herself alone in the woods to watch the farmhouse.

Whoever they were, they could not have gotten past the alarm system unless the Black Hole had let them inside. When Preston had left for the Teelroy farm, he’d told the stupid bitch to keep the Fair Wind buttoned up tight. In the past, she’d always done what he

required oilier. ‘Hint was the deal. She knew the deal well, ;ill the paragraphs and subparagraphs and clauses, knew it as well as if it actually existed in a written form that she could study. It was a good deal for her, a dream contract, providing a fortune in drugs and a quality of life she couldn’t otherwise have known, guaranteeing the aggressive and unrelenting dissolution for which she hungered. In spite of how crazy she was—crazy and venal and sick—she’d always upheld her end of the bargain.

Occasionally, of course, the Hole stuffed herself with so many contraindicated chemicals that she didn’t remember the deal any more than she remembered who she was. Those depths of indulgence rarely occurred this early in the day, but nearly always at night, when he usually arranged to be present to manage her with a whiff of this same homemade anesthetic if she could not be calmed by words or by a little physical force.

He removed the cloth from the girl’s face and threw it on the floor instead of bothering to return it to the plastic bag. She still groaned and rolled her head against the back of the seat, but the job was done: They had reached the turnoff to the Teelroy farm.

THE DRIVING WIND gave way to hard shifting gusts that blew from more than one point of the compass, causing the door to rattle and bang against the side of the big Prevost, but still no one rushed to secure it.

Drenched during the few seconds that he was exposed while racing from the car to the motor home, Noah Farrel entered cautiously but without pausing to knock. He ascended the steps, stood beside the co-pilot’s seat. He listened to the door thumping behind him and to the mad drumming of the rain on the metal roof, seeking other sounds that might help him to analyze the situation, hearing nothing useful.

An unfolded sofabed occupied most of the lounge. One lamp cast light down upon three hula dolls, two motionless and one rotating its hips, and sprayed light up on a dreamily smiling painted face that filled most of the ceiling.

Disregarding the daylight, which settled as gray as a coat of wet ashes on the windows, the only additional illumination issued from the rear of the vehicle, past the open door to the bedroom. The light back there was subdued and red.

Saturday afternoon, when he’d left Geneva Davis’s place to do some final research on Maddoc and to pack a suitcase, and again this morning during his flight to Coeur d’Alene and then during his drive to Nun’s Lake, Noah mulled over numerous approaches to the problem, each depending on different circumstances that he might encounter when he arrived here. None of his scenarios included this situation, however, and after all his mulling, he was forced to wing it.

The first choice was whether to proceed silently or to announce his presence. He decided on the latter course. Affecting a jolly-fellow-camper voice, he called out, “Hello! Anybody home?” And when he got no reply, he eased past the sofabed, toward the galley. “Saw your door open in the rain. Thought something was wrong.”

More hula dolls on the dining-nook table. On the galley counter.

He glanced toward the front of the Prevost. No one had entered behind him.

Lightning flared repeatedly, and every window flickered like a television screen afflicted by inconstant reception. Ghostly faces, formed of shadows, swarmed the rain-smeared panes and peered into the motor home as though spirits strove to channel themselves from their plane of existence to this one through the transmitting power of the storm. Thunder boomed, and after the last peal had tolled to the far end of the sky, a tinny vibration lingered in the metal shell of the motor home, like the faint screaky voices of haunting entities.

Proceeding toward the back, he called out once more, “You okay, neighbor? Does anybody need help here?”

In the bathroom, hula dolls flanked the sink.

At the open bedroom door, Noah hesitated. He called out again, but received no answer.

He stepped across the threshold, out of the shadowy bath, into the crimson glow, which had been achieved by draping the lamps with red blouses.

Beside the rumpled bed, she waited, standing straight, head held high on a graceful neck, as though she were a titled lady who’d risen to grant an audience to an inferior. She wore a brightly patterned sarong. Her hair appeared windblown, but she had not been out in the storm, for she was dry.

Her bare arms hung slackly at her sides, and although her face was a mask of serenity, like the peaceful countenance of a Buddhist meditating, her eyes were as twitchy as those of a rabid animal. He’d seen this contrast before, and often in his youth. Though she didn’t appear to be amped out on meth, she was operating on a substance more potent than caffeine.

“Are you Hawaiian?” she asked.

“No, ma’am.”

“Why the shirt?”

“Comfort,” he said.

“Are you Lukipela?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Did they beam you up?”

On his long trip to Nun’s Lake, during all his planning, Noah had not anticipated, under any circumstances, that he would boldly reveal his intentions either to this woman or to Preston Maddoc. But Sinsemilla—easily identifiable from Geneva’s description—reminded him of Wendy Quail, the nurse who had killed Laura. Sinsemilla didn’t resemble Quail, but in her serene face and her bird-bright busy eyes, he detected a smugness, a self-satisfaction, a self-adoration that the nurse, too, had worn as though it were the aura of a saint. Her attitude, the atmosphere in this place, the sound of the front door banging in the wind, cranked up the heat under the stew pot of his instinct, and he suspected that Micky and Leilani were someplace beyond mere trouble. He said, “Where’s your daughter?”

She took a step toward him, swayed, stopped. “Luki baby, your mommy’s glad you got healed all righteous and then got fast-grown into a whole new incarnation, been out there to the stars and seen cool stuff. Mommy’s glad, but it scares her, you comin’ back here like this.”

“Where’s Leilani,” he persisted.

“See, Mommy’s got new babies comin’, pretty babies different only in their heads, not like you used to be different, all screwed up in your hips. Mommy’s movin’ on, Luki baby, Mommy’s movin’ on and don’t want her new pretty babies hangin’ with her old gnarly babies.”

“Has Maddoc taken her somewhere?”

“Maybe you been to Jupiter and got healed up, but you still got the gnarly inside you, the little crip you used to be is still like a worm inside your spirit, and my new pretty babies will see all the sad gnarly in you ’cause they’re gonna be true wizard babies, got themselves total psychic powers.”

Until now loosely cupped at her side, Sinsemilla’s right hand tightened into a fist, and Noah knew that she held a weapon.

When he backed off a step, she rushed him. Her right arm came up, and she slashed at his face with what might have been a scalpel.

Past his eyes the keen blade arced, glimmering with red light, two inches short of a blinding cut.

He leaned away from the attack, then came in under it and seized her right wrist.

The scalpel in her left hand, unanticipated, punctured his right shoulder, which was a stroke of luck, pure good luck. She could have slashed instead of jabbed, opening his throat and one or both of his carotid arteries.

The wound registered more as pressure than as pain. Rather than struggle to disarm her, when suddenly she was spitting and screaming like a Tasmanian devil, he kicked her legs out from under her and simultaneously pushed her backward.

As she fell away, she held fast to the scalpel with which she’d scored, yanking it out of him. That was all pain, no pressure.

She landed on the bed and virtually bounced to her feet, not with any grace, but with the jerky energy of a jack-in-the-box.

Noah drew the snub-nosed .38 out of the belt-clipped holster in the small of his back, from beneath his shirt. Loath to use the revolver, he was even less enthusiastic about being carved like Christmas turkey.

He expected only more of what she’d given him thus far, more

irrational ranting and ;in even more determined effort to remake his face and anatomy, hut she surprised him by tossing aside the blades and turning away from him. She went to the dresser, and he stepped farther into the room rather than retreat from it, because he feared that she was going for a handgun. She came up with bottles of pills instead, muttering over them, letting some drop out of her hands, throwing others aside angrily, ransacking the drawer for still more bottles, until at last she found what she wanted.

As though she had forgotten Noah, she returned to the bed and settled down on the tossed sheets, amid the torn and crumpled pages of a book. She crossed her legs and sat like a young girl waiting for her friends to arrive for a pajama party, tossed her head, and laughed insouciantly. As she popped open the bottle of pills, she chanted in a singsong voice: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!” With one of the wanted pills in hand, she allowed the others to spill among the bedclothes. At last looking up at Noah, she said, “Go, go, Luki baby, you don’t have a place here anymore.” And then, as if never she had drawn his blood, she began to rock her head back and forth, shaking her tangled locks, and she sang again: “I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight. …”

Noah retreated, backing across the bathroom, keeping a watch on the red-lit bedroom, holding fast to the gun in his right hand, using his left hand to test the wound in his shoulder. The pain was sharp but not intolerable, and though blood had spread across the front of his shirt, the bleeding wasn’t arterial. She hadn’t severed any major blood vessels or punctured a vital organ. His biggest problem would be the risk of infection—assuming he got out of here alive.

As Noah backed into the galley, the woman continued her singsong chant, celebrating her wonderfulness, which reassured him that she remained on the bed where he had left her.

When he reached the dinette, Noah turned, intending to flee with no regard for pride.

A young boy, a statuesque blonde, and a dog stood in the lounge, and as much as that sounded like the opening line of one of those a-priest-a-rabbi-and-a-minister jokes, Noah didn’t have a smile in him. The boy had freckles, the blonde had a 9-mm pistol, and the

dog had a bushy tail that, alter a moment, began to wag so vigorously that its burden of rain spattered opposite walls of the motor home.

ETERNALLY WAITING Indians, guardians without power, watched him bring the Hand into the house. He dumped her on the hall floor at the entrance to the maze.

The door had bounced open when he kicked it shut after himself. He closed it and engaged the lock.

With his hands, he pressed some of the water out of his hair, slicking it back from his face.