One Door Away From Heaven (17 page)

Leilani hoped to see bloodstains on the baseboard—or if a snake didn’t have exactly blood in it, then a smear of something else that said
mortal wounds
as clearly as a lot of good red gore would have said it. But she saw no blood, no ichor, no snake syrup of any kind.

The sawn-off circular end of the hollow tubular pole wouldn’t be as effective as a sharp knife, but it would cut even tough scales and muscled coils if driven hard enough, if a lot of insistent pressure was put behind it. Her sweaty hands had slipped on the polished steel, but surely some damage had been done to the snake.

The chest of drawers stood against the wall, on four stubby legs. More than five feet high. Four feet wide. Maybe twenty inches deep. The bottom rail cleared the floor by three inches.

Snake under there somewhere. When Leilani held her breath, she could hear the angry hissing. The reverberant bottom of the lowest drawer amplified the sound in that confined space.

She’d better get a fix on the creature while it was stunned. She backed away, dropped awkwardly to her knees. Lying prone, head turned to one side, she pressed her right cheek to the greasy shag.

If Death had pockets in his robe, they smelled like this filthy carpet. Nauseating waves of righteous anger still churned Leilani, and the rotten-sour sludge of scent that pooled on the wall-to-wall gave her another reason to worry about losing her apple pie.

“Oh, listen to that snaky brain a-hummin’, listen to old thingy schemin’ up a scheme, like when he wants to kill him a tasty mouse.”

The silk-textured light, as red as Sinsemilla’s favorite party blouse, barely brightened the nest of shadows under the chest of drawers.

Leilani was gasping, not from exhaustion—she hadn’t exerted herself
that
much—but because she was worried, scared,
in a state.
As she lay squinting for a glimpse of the beast, her face only six or seven feet from the reptile’s crawlspace, she breathed rapidly, noisily, through her mouth, and her tongue translated the stink of the carpet into a taste that made her gag.

Under the chest of drawers, shadows appeared to throb and turn as shadows always do when you stare hard enough at them, but the lipstick light kissed only one form among all the shifting phantom shapes. Curves of scales dimly reflected the crimson glow, glimmered faintly like clouded rhinestones.

“Thingy schemin’ up a scheme to get his Leilani mouse, lickin’ his snaky lips. Thingy, him be dreamin’ what Lani girl gonna taste like.”

The serpent huddled all the way back against the wall, and about as far from one side of the chest of drawers as from the other.

Leilani rose to her knees again. She seized the pole with both hands and rammed it hard under the furniture, dead-on for the snake. She struck again, again, again, furiously, burning her knuckles from friction with the shag, and she could hear the critter thrashing, its body slapping loudly against the bottom of the lowest drawer.

On the bed, Sinsemilla romped, cheering one of the combatants, cursing the other, and though Leilani wasn’t any longer able to make sense of her mother’s words, she figured the woman’s sympathies were with the thingy.

She couldn’t clearly hear Sinsemilla’s ranting because of the snake lashing a crazy drumbeat on the underside of the chest, because of the pole punching into the snarled coils and knocking on the baseboard and rattling against the legs of the furniture—but also because she herself was grunting like a wild beast. Her throat felt scorched. Her raw voice didn’t sound like her own: wordless, thick, hideous with a primitive need that she didn’t dare contemplate.

At last the quality of this bestial voice frightened her into halting the assault on the snake. It was dead, anyway. She had killed it some time ago. Under the tall chest of drawers, nothing flopped, nothing hissed.

Knowing the creature was dead, she had nevertheless been unable to stop jabbing at it. Out of control. And who did those three words bring to mind?
Out of control
. Like mother, like daughter. Leilani’s accelerator had been pressed to the floorboard by fear, rather than by drugs, also by anger, but this distinction didn’t matter as much to her as did the discovery that she, like Sinsemilla, could lose control of herself under the right circumstances.

Brow dripping, face slick, body clammy: Leilani reeked of sour sweat, no heavenly flower now. On her knees, shoulders hunched, head cocked, wild damp hair hanging in tangles over her face, hands still clenched with such rage that she couldn’t release the pole, she made her bid for being Quasimodo reborn, only nine and a return to Notre Dame still years away.

She felt diminished, humiliated, shaken—no less afraid than she’d been a moment ago, but now for different reasons. Some serpents were more frightening than others: the specimens that didn’t come in ventilated pet-shop boxes, that never slithered through any field or forest, serpents invisible that inhabited the deeper regions of your mind. Until now, she hadn’t been aware that she herself provided a nest for such potent snakes of fear and anger, or that her heart could be inflamed and set racing by their sudden bite, so quickly reducing her to these spasms, these half-mad headlong frenzies, out of control.

Like a gargoyle above, Sinsemilla leaned over the footboard of the bed, her face shadowed but her head haloed by red lamplight, glittery-eyed with excitement. “Thingy, him a hard-ass stubborn little crawly boy.”

Leilani didn’t actually make sense of those words, and she was saved only because she met her mother’s eyes and saw where they were focused. Not on her daughter. On the nearest end of the makeshift cudgel, just behind Leilani’s two-hand grip.

The tubular-steel rod was hollow, two inches in diameter. The snake, not dead after all, seeking refuge when the battering stopped, had squirmed inside the pole. By this pipeline, it traveled unseen from beneath the chest of drawers to Leilani’s exposed back, where now it slowly extruded on the floor behind her like the finished product of a snake-making machine.

Whether the serpent moved slowly because it was hurt or because it was being cautious to deceive, Leilani didn’t know, didn’t care. Just as the full length of it oozed from the hollow cudgel, she seized it by the tail. She knew that snakehandlers always gripped immediately under the head to immobilize the jaws, but fear for her one good hand caused her to choose the nether end.

Slick it was, wet-slick and therefore injured, but still lively enough to wriggle fiercely in a quest for freedom.

Before the snake could wind back on itself and bite her hand, Leilani shot to her feet faster than her braced leg had ever before allowed, playing cowgirl-with-lariat as she rose from the floor. Swung like a rope, stretched long by centrifugal force that thwarted its inward-coiling efforts, the reptile parted the air with a
swoosh
louder than its hiss. She swung it twice as she stumbled two steps toward the chest of drawers, the bared fangs missing her mother’s face by inches on the first revolution, and then during the third swing, the serpent met the furniture with a
crack
of skull that took all the wriggle out of it forever.

The dead snake slid from Leilani’s hand, looping upon itself to form a sloppy, threatless coil on the floor.

Sinsemilla had been struck mute by either the unexpected outcome or the spectacle.

Although she could let go of the broken serpent and use the pivoting trick with her braced leg to turn her back on the scaly mess, Leilani couldn’t turn away as easily from the mental image of herself in a fit of grunting, gasping, snake-killing rage and terror. Like a foxtail bramble, this hateful picture would work its way deep into the flesh of her memory, beyond the hope of excision, and prickle as long as she lived.

Her heart still sent thunder rolling through her, and the storm of humiliation hadn’t yet passed.

She refused to cry. Not here. Not now. Neither fear nor anger, nor even this unwanted new knowledge of herself, could wring tears from her in front of her mother. The world didn’t have enough misery in it to force her to reveal her vulnerability before Sinsemilla.

Her usual ease of movement still eluded Leilani; however, when she thought through the movement of each step before taking it, like a patient learning to walk again after spinal injury, she was able to proceed to the open bedroom door with a measure of dignity.

In the hall, a violent fit of the shakes overcame her, rattling teeth to teeth, knocking elbows against ribs, but she willed steel into her good knee and kept moving.

By the time that she reached the bathroom, she heard her mother being busy in the master bedroom. She looked back just as a pulse of icy light filled that open doorway. The flash from a camera. The snake wasn’t road kill, but apparently the artist in Sinsemilla had been inspired by the grisly grace of the serpentine carcass resting on a grave cloth of orange shag.

Another pulse.

Leilani went into the bathroom, switched on the light and the fan. She closed the door and locked her mother out.

She turned on the shower, as well, but she didn’t undress. Instead, she lowered the lid on the toilet and sat there.

With the hum of the fan and the noise of the running water as cover, she did what she had never done in front of her mother or Preston Maddoc. Here. Now. She wept.

Chapter 22

AS TASTY AS FRESH orange juice is when lapped out of a shoe, Old Yeller nevertheless loses interest in her drink when the siren grows as loud as an air-raid warning in the immediate wake of the motor home. Curtis’s concern becomes her concern, too, and she watches him, ears pricked, body tensed, ready to follow his lead.

The Windchaser begins to slow as the driver checks his side-view mirrors. Even serial killers who keep collections of victims’ teeth at bedside for nostalgic examination will evidently pull over without hesitation for the highway patrol.

When the police cruiser sweeps past and rockets away into the night, the motor home gains speed once more, but Old Yeller doesn’t return to her juice. As long as Curtis remains uneasy, the dog will stay on guard, as well.

First the helicopter tracking the highway toward Nevada and now this patrol car following: These are signs and portents of trouble ahead. Though he may be dead, J. Edgar Hoover is no fool, and if his restless spirit guides the organization from which he so reluctantly departed, then two squads of FBI agents, and probably various other authorities, are already establishing roadblocks on the interstate both northeast and southwest of the truck stop.

Sitting on the edge of the bed once more, Curtis extracts the wadded currency from the pockets of his jeans. He smooths the bills and sorts them. Not much to sort. He counts his treasury. Not much to count.

He certainly doesn’t have enough money to bribe an FBI agent, and by far the most of them can’t be bribed, anyway. They aren’t politicians, after all. If the National Security Agency also has operatives in the field here, which now seems likely, and possibly the CIA, as well—those guys won’t sell out their country and their honor for a few wrinkled five-dollar bills. Not if movies, suspense novels, and history books can be believed. Maybe the history texts are written with political bias, and maybe some of those novelists took literary license, but you could trust most of what you saw in movies, for sure.

With his meager resources, Curtis has little hope of being able to bribe his way past even state or local authorities. He shoves the currency into his pockets once more.

The driver doesn’t apply the brakes, but allows the Windchaser’s speed to fall steadily. Not good, not good. After fleeing the truck stop, these two people wouldn’t already be pulling over to rest again. Traffic must be clotting ahead of them.

“Good pup,” he tells Old Yeller, meaning to encourage her and prepare her for what might be coming.
Good pup. Stay close.

As their speed continues to fall precipitously to fifty, then below forty, under thirty, as the brakes are tapped a time or two, Curtis goes to the bedroom window.

The dog follows at his heels.

Curtis slides a pane open. Wind blusters like restless bears at the bars of a cage, but this is a mildly warm and toothless zephyr.

He boosts himself against the sill. Leaning out, he squints into the wind, toward the front of the motor home.

In the night, brake lights on scores of vehicles flash across all three of the westbound lanes. More than half a mile ahead, at the top of a rise, traffic has come to a complete stop.

As the Windchaser slows steadily, Curtis slides shut the window and takes up a position at the bedroom door. The faithful dog stays at his side.

Good pup.

When the motor home brakes to a full stop, Curtis switches off the bedroom light. He waits in darkness.

More likely than not, both sociopathic owners of the Windchaser will remain in their cockpit seats for a while. They’ll be studying the roadblock with acute interest, planning strategy in the event of a vehicle inspection.

At any moment, however, one of them might retreat here to the bedroom. If a search by authorities seems imminent, these tooth fetishists will try to gather up and dispose of their incriminating collection of grisly souvenirs.

The advantage of surprise will belong to Curtis, but he’s not confident that surprise alone will carry the day. Either of the murderous pair up front will enjoy the greater advantages of size, strength, and psychotic disregard for his or her personal safety.

In addition to surprise, however, the boy has Old Yeller. And the dog has teeth. Curtis has teeth, too, though his aren’t as big and sharp as those of the dog, and unlike his four-legged companion, he doesn’t have the heart to use them.

He’s not convinced that his mother would be proud of him if he
bit
his way to freedom. Fighting men and women have seldom, if ever, to his knowledge, been decorated for bravery after gnawing their way through their adversaries. Thank God, then, for his sister-becoming.

Good pup.

After the Windchaser has been stopped for a couple minutes, it eases forward a few car lengths before halting again, and Curtis uses this distraction to open the bedroom door a crack. The lever-action handle squeaks softly, as do the hinges, and the door swings outward.

He puts one eye to the inch-wide gap and studies the bathroom beyond, which separates the bedroom from the galley, lounge, and cockpit. The door at the opposite end of the bath stands less than halfway open, admitting light from the forward part of the vehicle, but he can’t see much of what lies beyond it.

Staying closer than Curtis intended, the dog presses against his legs and pushes her nose to the gap between jamb and door. He hears her sniffing. Her exceptional sense of smell brings to her more information than all five human senses combined, so he doesn’t nudge her out of the way.

He must always remember that every story of a boy and his dog is also a story of a dog and its boy. No such relationship can be a success without respect.

The dog’s tail wags, brushing Curtis’s legs, either because she catches an appealing scent or because she agrees with his assessment of the fundamental requirement of a boy-dog friendship.

Suddenly a man enters the bathroom from the front of the motor home.

In the dark bedroom, Curtis almost shuts the door in shock. He realizes just in time that the one-inch gap won’t draw the man’s attention as much as will the movement of the door closing.

He expects the guy to come directly to the bedroom, and he’s ready to use the door as a battering ram to knock this killer off his feet. Then he and the dog will dash for freedom.

Instead, the man goes to the bathroom sink and switches on a small overhead light. Standing in profile to Curtis, he examines his face in the mirror.

Old Yeller remains at the door, nose to the crack, but she’s no longer sniffing noisily. She’s in stealth mode, though her tail continues to wag gently.

Although scared, Curtis is also intrigued. There’s something fascinating about secretly watching strangers in their own home, even if their home is on wheels.

The man squints at the mirror. He rubs one finger over the right corner of his mouth, squints again, and seems satisfied. With two fingers, he pulls down both lower eyelids and examines his eyes—God knows for what. Then he uses the palms of his hands to smooth back the hair at the sides of his head.

Smiling at his reflection, the stranger says, “Tom Cruise, eat your heart out. Vern Tuttle rules.”

Curtis doesn’t know who Vern Tuttle may be, but Tom Cruise is, of course, an actor, a movie star, a worldwide icon. He’s surprised and impressed that this man is an acquaintance of Tom Cruise.

He’s heard people say that it’s a small world, and this Cruise connection sure does support that contention.

Next, the man grins at his reflection. This is not an amusing grin. Even viewed in profile, it’s an exaggerated,
ferocious
grin. He leans over the sink, closer to the mirror, and studies his bared teeth with unnervingly intense interest.

Curtis is disturbed but not surprised by this development. He already knows that one or both of these people are homicidal tooth fetishists.

More disturbing even than the grinning man’s obsession with his teeth is the fact that otherwise he appears
entirely normal.
Pudgy, about sixty, with a full head of thick white hair, he might play a grandfather if he were ever in a major motion picture; but he would never be cast as a chainsaw-wielding maniac.

Many of the same folks who say that it’s a small world have also said you can’t judge a book by its cover, meaning people as well as books, and now they are proved right again.

Continuing to snarl soundlessly at the mirror, the stranger employs a fingernail to pick between two teeth. He examines whatever is now on his finger, frowns, looks closer, and finally flicks the bit of stuff into the sink.

Curtis shudders. His fevered imagination supplies numerous chilling possibilities for what was dislodged from those teeth, all related to the well-known fact that most serial killers are also cannibals.

Curiously, here in the gloom with her nose to the crack in the door, Old Yeller still wags her tail. She hasn’t acquired Curtis’s dread of this human monster. She seems to have an opinion of her own, to which she stubbornly clings. The boy worries about the reliability of her animal instincts.

The likely cannibal clicks off the sink light, turns, and crosses the bathroom to the small cubicle that contains the toilet. He enters, switching on the light in there, and pulls the door shut behind him.

The boy’s mother used to say that a wasted opportunity wasn’t just a missed chance, but was a wound to your future. Miss too many opportunities, thus sustaining too many wounds, and you wouldn’t have a future at all.

With one killer attending to his bodily functions and the other in the driver’s seat of the Windchaser, this is an opportunity that only a disobedient, mother-ignoring boy would fail to take.

Curtis pushes open the bedroom door.
You first, girl.

Tail wagging, the pooch pads into the bathroom—and straight toward the toilet cubicle.

No, pup, no, no! Out, pup, out!

Maybe the power of Curtis’s panic is transmitted to Old Yeller along the psychic wire that links every boy to his dog, but that’s unlikely because the two of them have so recently met and therefore are still in the process of becoming a fully simpatico boy-dog unit. More likely, she’s gotten a better smell of the cunningly deceptive grandfatherly stranger in the toilet cubicle and now recognizes him for the monster that he is. Whether the psychic wire or a good nose is responsible, she changes direction and pads out of the bathroom into the galley.

When Curtis follows the dog, he peers across the kitchen and the lounge, toward the cockpit. The woman occupies the driver’s seat, her attention devoted to the stalled traffic blocking the highway.

Curtis is relieved to see that this co-killer is encumbered by a safety harness that secures her to the command chair. She won’t be able to release those restraints and clamber out of the seat in time to block the exit.

Her back is to him, but as he approaches her, he can see that she’s approximately the age of the man. Her short-cropped hair glows supernaturally white.

Chastened by her near-disastrous misreading of the grandfatherly man’s character, Old Yeller proceeds waglessly and with caution, past the dining nook, paw by stealthy paw, pussyfooting as silently as any creeping cat.

As the dog arrives at the exit and as Curtis reaches over the dog toward the door handle, the woman senses them. She’s snacking on something, and she looks up, chewing, expecting the man, startled to discover a boy and his dog. Surprise freezes her in mid-chew, with her hand halfway to her mouth, and in that hand is a human ear.

Curtis screams, and even when he realizes that the snack in her hand isn’t a human ear, after all, but merely a large potato chip, he isn’t able to stop screaming. For all he knows, she eats potato chips
with
human ears, the way other people eat them with pretzels on the side, or with peanuts, or with sour-cream dip.

Door won’t open. Handle won’t move. He presses, presses harder. No good. Locked, it must be locked. He rattles it up and down, up and down, insistently, to no effect.

In the driver’s seat, the startled woman comes unstartled enough to speak, but the boy can’t make out what she’s saying because the loud rapping of his jackhammer heart renders meaningless those few words that penetrate his screaming.

Curtis and the door, willpower against matter, on the micro scale where will should win: Yet the lock holds, and still the door doesn’t open for him. Magic lock, bolt fused to the striker plate by a sorcerer’s spell, it resists his muscle and his mind.

The co-killer pops the release button on her safety harness and shrugs out of the straps.

Oh, Lord, there’s just one door, the sucker’s magically locked, all his tricks are thwarted, and he’s trapped in this claustrophobic rolling slaughterhouse with psychotic retirees who’ll eat him with chips and keep his teeth in their nightstand drawer.

Fierce as she has never been before, Old Yeller lunges toward the woman. Snarling, snapping, foaming, spitting, the dog seems to be saying,
Teeth? You want teeth? Take a look at THESE teeth, go fang-to-fang with ME, you psychotic bitch, and see how much you still like teeth when I’M done with you!

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.