One Door Away From Heaven (25 page)

Trusting his sister-becoming and therefore Gabby, Curtis lights out after them, past the livery and onto the boardwalk in front of Bettleby’s Grand Hotel. Bettleby’s is a forty-foot-wide, three-story, shabby clapboard building that could no more satisfy a taste for grandness than a cow pie could satisfy when you wanted a slice of grandma’s deep-dish apple.

Suddenly the
chop
of the helicopter rotors explodes into a
boom-boom-boom,
no longer muffled by the valley wall.

Curtis senses that if he looks to his right, across the street and over the roofs of buildings on the other side of town, he will see the aircraft hovering at the crest of the valley, an ominous black mass defined only by its small red and white running lights. Instead, he keeps his mind on Old Yeller, keeps his eyes fixed on Gabby and on the bobbling beam of the flashlight.

Past the hotel, tightly adjoining it, stands Jensen’s Readymade,
ALL-DONE OUTFITS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
. A hand-lettered sign in the window announces that fashions “currently to be seen everywhere in San Francisco” are now for sale here, which makes San Francisco seem as far away as Paris.

Past Jensen’s Readymade and before reaching the post office, Gabby turns left, off the boardwalk and into a narrow walkway between buildings. This passage is similar to the one by which Curtis and Old Yeller earlier entered town from the other side of the street.

The chopper approaches: an avalanche of hard rhythmic sound sliding down the valley wall.

Something else is coming, too. Something marked by a hum that Curtis feels in his teeth, that resonates in his sinuses, and by a rapidly swelling but also quickly subsiding tingle in the Haversian canals of his bones.

To counter a rising tide of fear, he reminds himself that the way to avoid panicking in a flood is to concentrate on swimming.

The wood-frame structures, crowding them on both sides, glow golden as the flashlight passes. Shadows ebb up the plank walls in advance of Gabby, flow down again in his wake, and spill across Curtis as he wades after the caretaker and the dog.

Overall the faint fumes of recently applied paint, with an underlying spice of turpentine. A whiff of dry rabbit pellets. So peculiar that a rabbit would venture in here where it might easily be trapped by predators. Tart fragrance of a discarded apple core, fresh this very day, still a human scent clinging to it. Coyote urine, aggressively bitter.

Reaching the end of the passageway, the caretaker switches off the flashlight, and the moonless dark closes over them as if they have descended into a storm cellar and pulled the door shut at their backs. Gabby halts only a step or two into the open dirt yard beyond the west side of town.

If not for the dog’s guidance, Curtis would collide with the old man. Instead, he steps around him.

Gabby grabs Curtis, pulls him close, and raises his voice above the thunder of the incoming chopper. “We goin’ spang north to the barn what ain’t a barn!”

Curtis figures that the barn-what-ain’t-a-barn, whatever it might be, isn’t far enough north to be safe. The Canadian border isn’t far enough north, for that matter, nor the Arctic Circle.

Judging by the sound of it, the helicopter is putting down at the south end of town, in the vicinity of Smithy’s Livery. Near the evidence of the sodden platform and the wet footprints in the dirt around the water pump.

The FBI—and the soldiers, if there are any—will be conducting a sweep south to north, the direction in which Gabby and Curtis and Old Yeller now flee. They’ll be highly trained in search-and-secure procedures, and most if not all of them will be equipped with night-vision goggles.

Peripherally, to his left, Curtis becomes aware of a faint pearly radiance close to the earth. Alarmed, he glances west and sees what appears to be a low skim of mist blanketing the ground, but then he realizes he’s looking out across the salt flats not from a higher perspective, as before, but from the zero elevation of the valley floor. The illusory mist is in fact the natural phosphorescence of the barren plain, the ghost of the long-dead sea.

The hard whack of chopper blades abruptly softens, accompanied by a wheezy whistle of decelerating rotation. The aircraft is on the ground.

They’re coming. They’ll be efficient and
fast.

Hurrying north, Curtis is worried, but not primarily about the men in the helicopter or those in the two SUVs that are probably even now descending the valley wall. Worse enemies have arrived.

The intervening buildings foil thermal-reading and motion-detection gear. They also somewhat, but not entirely, screen the telltale energy signature that only Curtis emits.

Because of the natural fluorescence of the nearby salt fields, the night isn’t as black as it was just moments ago. Curtis can see Gabby ahead, and the dog’s white flags.

The caretaker doesn’t run in the usual sense of the word, but progresses in the herky-jerky fashion that his presumed grandfather displayed when, in those movie moments of high jeopardy, he had said,
Dang, we better skedaddle.
This Gabby moves fast in a skedaddle, but he keeps stopping to look back, waving his gun, as if he expects to discover a villain of one kind or another looming point-blank over him every time he turns.

Curtis wants to scream
Move-move-move,
but Gabby is probably an ornery cuss who always does things his way and who won’t react well to instruction.

Though the search squads must be pouring out of the helicopter, there’s no light to the south, where they landed. They’re conducting a natural-conditions exploration, because they believe that their high-tech gear makes darkness their friend.

In addition to the buildings, commotion screens Curtis, too, makes it more difficult for the hunters to read his special energy signature, and there’s going to be plenty of commotion coming in mere seconds.

In fact, it starts with screaming. The shrieks of a grown man reduced by terror to the condition of a small child.

Gabby hitches to a halt again and squints back along the route they followed, his pistol jabbing this and that way as he seeks a threat.

Clutching the caretaker by the arm, Curtis urges him onward.

Toward the south end of town, two men are screaming. Now three or even four. How suddenly the horror struck, and how rapidly it escalates.

“
Criminy!
What’s that?” Gabby wonders, his voice quaking.

Curtis tugs at him, and the caretaker starts to move again, but then the screams are punctuated by the rattle and crack of automatic-weapons fire.

“The fools blastin’ at
each other
?”

“Go, go,
go,
” Curtis demands, guided now by panic that overrides all sense of diplomacy, trying to muscle the old man into motion once more.

Men being torn apart, men being gutted, men being eaten alive would scream no more chillingly than this.

In skittles and lurches, the caretaker heads north again, Curtis at his side rather than behind him, the dog preceding them, as if, by some psychic perception, she knows where to find the barn-what-ain’t-a-barn.

With only half the town behind them, as they arrive at another passageway between buildings, a strange light flares to their right, out in the street, framed for their view by a tunnel of plank walls. Sapphire and scintillant, as brief as fireworks, it twice pulses, the way that a luminous jelly-fish propels itself through the sea. Out of the subsequent gloom, while a negative image of the pyrotechnic burst still blossoms like a black flower in Curtis’s vision, a smoldering dark mass hurtles from the street into the passage, tumbling end-over-end toward them.

Spry but graceless in the manner of a marionette jerked backward on its control strings, all bony shoulders and sharp elbows and knobby knees, Gabby springs out of the way with surprising alacrity. Curtis jukes, and the dog bolts for cover.

With shot-out-of-a-cannon velocity, a stone-dead man caroms off the flanking buildings, extremities noisily flailing the palisades of the narrow passageway, as though he’s the apparition in a high-speed seance, rapping out a dire warning from the Other Side. He bursts into the open and explodes past Curtis. A lightning-struck scarecrow, spat out by a raging tornado, could not have been cast off with any greater force than this, and the carcass finally comes to rest in the tattered, bristling, yet boneless posture of a cast-down cornfield guardian. The steaming stink of him, however, is indescribably worse than a scarecrow’s wet straw, moldering clothes, and moth-infested flour-sack face.

On the victim’s sprung chest, scorched and wrinkled but still readable, a large white
F
and a large white
I
bracket the missing, blown-out
B.

Ornery cuss or not, arthritic or not, the grizzled caretaker recognizes big trouble when he sees it, and he finds in himself the comparatively more youthful energy and nimbleness that his famous elder had shown in earlier films like
Bells of Rosarita
and
The Arizona Kid.
He sets out spang for the barn, as if challenging the dog to a race, and Curtis hurries after him, playing the sidekick’s sidekick.

Screams, anxious shouts, and gunfire echo among the buildings, and then comes an eerie sound—
priong, priong, priong, priong
—such as the stiff steel tines of a garden rake might produce if they could be plucked as easily as the strings of a fiddle.

One Curtis Hammond lies dead in Colorado, and another now runs headlong toward a grave of his own.

Chapter 31

BUTTONS GLEAMED, badges flashed, buckles shone on the khaki uniforms of the cops milling outside the front door of Cielo Vista Care Home.

Martin Vasquez, general manager of this facility, stood apart from the police, beside one of the columns that supported the loggia trellis. Called from bed at a bleak hour, he had nonetheless taken time, as an expression of respect, to dress in a dark suit.

In his forties, Vasquez had the smooth face and the guileless eyes of a pious young novitiate. As he watched Noah Farrel approach, he looked as though he would have gladly traded this night’s duty for vows of poverty and celibacy. “I’m so sorry, so sick about this. If you’ll come to my office, I’ll try to make sense of it for you, as much as can be made.”

Noah had been a cop for only three years, but he’d been present at four homicide scenes in that time. The expressions on the faces and in the eyes of these attending officers matched the look that he had once turned upon the grieving relatives in those cases. Sympathy formed part of it, but also a simmering suspicion that persisted even after a perpetrator was identified. In certain types of homicides, a family member is more likely to be involved than a stranger, and regardless of what the facts of the case appear to be, it’s always wise to consider who might gain financially or be freed of an onerous responsibility by the death in question.

Paying for Laura’s care had been not a burden, but the purpose of his existence. Even if these men believed him, however, he would still see the keen edge of suspicion sheathed in their sympathy.

One of the cops stepped forward as Noah followed Vasquez to the front door. “Mr. Farrel, I’ve got to ask you if you’re carrying.”

He had pulled on chinos and a Hawaiian shirt. The holster was in the small of his back. “Yeah, but I’ve got a permit for it.”

“Yes, sir, I know. If you’ll trust me with it, I’ll return it to you when you leave.”

Noah hesitated.

“You were in my shoes once, Mr. Farrel. If you think about it, you’ll realize you’d do the same.”

Noah wasn’t sure why he had strapped on the pistol. He didn’t always carry it. He didn’t
usually
carry it. When he’d left home, after Martin Vasquez’s call, he hadn’t been thinking clearly.

He surrendered the handgun to the young officer.

Although the lobby was deserted, Vasquez said, “We’ll have privacy in my office,” and indicated a short hallway off to the left.

Noah didn’t follow him.

Directly ahead, the door stood open between the lobby and the long main corridor of the ground-floor residential wing. At the far end, more men gathered outside of Laura’s room. None wore a uniform. Detectives. Specialists with the scientific-investigation division.

Returning to Noah’s side, Vasquez said, “They’ll let us know when you can see your sister.”

A morgue gurney waited near her room.

“Wendy Quail,” Noah guessed, referring to the perky raven-haired nurse who had been serving ice-cream sundaes a few hours ago.

On the phone, he had been given only the essence of the tragedy. Laura dead. Gone quickly. No suffering.

Now, Martin Vasquez expressed surprise. “Who told you?”

So his instinct had been right. And he hadn’t trusted it. Ice cream wasn’t the answer, after all. Love was the answer. Tough love, in this case. One of the Circle of Friends had indulged in a little tough love, teaching Noah what happens to the sisters of men who think they’re too good to accept airsickness bags full of cash.

In his mind’s eye, Noah imagined himself squeezing the trigger and the congressman contorting in agony around a gut wound.

He could do it, too. He was without a purpose now. A man needed worthwhile work to occupy his time. In the absence of anything more meaningful, maybe revenge would suffice.

Receiving no answer to his question, Vasquez said, “Her resume was impressive. And her commitment to nursing. Several excellent letters of recommendation. She said she wanted to work in a less stressful atmosphere than a hospital.”

For seventeen years, since Laura was beaten out of this world but not all the way into the next, Noah had pretended that he wasn’t a Farrel, that he was an outsider in his criminal family, just as Laura had been an outsider, that he was cleaner of heart than those who had conceived him, capable of being redeemed. But with his sister twice lost and beyond recovery, he could see no reason to resist embracing his true dark nature.

“But caught,” said Vasquez, “she admitted everything. She’s been a nurse in neonatal-care units at three hospitals. Each time, just when someone might begin to wonder if all the infant deaths pointed to something worse than just nature’s work, she changed jobs.”

Killing the congressman wouldn’t give Noah a new cup from which to drink, but the pleasure of that murder might be sweet enough to mask, for a while, the bitterness here at the bottom of his life.

“She admits to sixteen babies. She doesn’t think what she’s done is wrong. She calls those murders her ‘little mercies.’”

He had been listening to Vasquez but hardly hearing what was said. At last a measure of the man’s meaning penetrated. “Mercies?”

“She chose infants with health problems. Or sometimes just those who looked weak. Or whose parents seemed dirt poor and ignorant. She says she was sparing them from lives of suffering.”

Noah’s instinct had been half right. The nurse was bent, but not by the Circle of Friends. Yet their roots grew from the same swamp of self-importance and excess self-esteem. He knew their kind too well.

“Between the third neonatal unit and here,” Vasquez said, “she worked at a nursing home. Euthanized five elderly patients without arousing suspicion. She’s…proud of those, too. Not only no remorse, but also no shame at all. She seems to expect us to admire her for…for her compassion, she would call it.”

The congressman’s evil was born of greed, envy, and a lust for power, which was a logical wickedness that Noah understood. That was the evil of his old man, of Uncle Crank.

The nurse’s irrational idealism, on the other hand, incited only cold contempt and disgust, not a raging desire for revenge. Without a banquet of vengeance to sustain him, Noah felt starved of purpose once more.

“Another member of the staff walked in on Nurse Quail when she was…finishing with your sister. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known.”

At the far end of the long corridor, a guy wheeled the gurney into Laura’s room.

Rolling through Noah’s head came a sound like distant thunder or the faraway roar of a great cataract, soft though charged with power.

He passed through the door between the lobby and the residential hallway. Martin Vasquez called to him, reminding him that the police had restricted access to this area.

Approaching the nurses’ station, Noah was met by a uniformed officer who attempted to turn him back.

“I’m family.”

“I know that, sir. Won’t be much longer.”

“Yeah. It’ll be now.”

When Noah tried to move past him, the cop put a hand on his shoulder. Noah wrenched loose, didn’t take a swing, but kept going.

The young officer followed, grabbed him again, and they would have gotten physical then, because the cop had no choice, but mainly because Noah wanted to hit someone. Or maybe he wanted to
be
hit, hard and repeatedly, because physical pain might distract him from an anguish for which there was neither numbing medication nor any prospect of healing.

Before any punches were thrown, one of the detectives farther along the hall said, “Let him through.”

The roar of five Niagaras still echoed from a distance in Noah’s mind, and though this internal sound was no louder than before, the voices of the men around him were muffled by it.

“I can’t let you alone with her,” the detective said. “There’s an autopsy gotta be done, and you know I’ll have to show we’ve had continuous possession of the evidence.”

The corpse was evidence. Like a spent bullet or a bloody hammer. Laura had ceased to be a person. She was an object now, a thing.

The detective said, “Don’t want to give that crazy bitch’s attorney any chance to say someone tampered with the remains before we got toxicology back.”

Crazy bitch
instead of
defendant,
instead of
the accused.
No need to be politically correct here, as later in court.

If the attorney could sell the
crazy
without the
bitch,
however, then the nurse might do light time in a progressive mental facility with a swimming pool, TVs in every room, classes in arts and crafts, and sessions with a therapist not to analyze her homicidal compulsion but to ensure that she maintained high self-esteem.

Juries were stupid. Maybe they hadn’t always been, but they were stupid these days. Kids killed their parents, resorted to the orphan defense, and a reliable percentage of jurors grew teary-eyed.

Noah couldn’t rekindle his fury either with the prospect of the nurse remanded to a country-club sanitarium or with the possibility that she would be entirely acquitted.

The distant roar in his head wasn’t the sound of building rage. He didn’t know what it was, but he couldn’t shut it off, and it scared him.

Laura on the bed. In yellow pajamas. Either she had come out of her cataleptic trance sufficiently to dress for sleep or perhaps the nurse had changed her, brushed her hair, and arranged her artfully as a courtesy before the killing.

The detective said, “Quail figured, given the patient’s brain damage, death would be attributed to natural causes without a full autopsy. She didn’t bother using a substance that would be hard to trace. It was a massive injection of Haldol, a tranquilizer.”

By the time Laura turned eight, she understood that her family wasn’t like others. A conscience had never been nurtured in her, not in the Farrel house, but nature had given her a strong moral sense. Shame came easily to her, and everything about her family mortified her more deeply year by year. She kept to herself, taking refuge in books and daydreams. She wanted only to grow up, to get out, and to make a life that would be “clean, quiet, not a harm to anyone.”

The detective tried to console Noah with a final revelation: “The overdose was so large, death was immediate. That crap just shut down the central nervous system like a switch.”

By the time she was eleven, Laura wanted to be a doctor, as if she no longer felt able to cut free of her roots merely by doing the world no harm. She needed to give to other people, perhaps through medicine, in order to ransom her soul from her family.

When she was twelve, she morphed in her daydreams from physician to veterinarian. Animals made better patients. Most people, she said, could never be cured of their worst sicknesses, only of their body’s ailments. No one should have to learn that much about the human condition by the tender age of twelve.

Twelve years of striving to shape the future with dreams and seventeen more years of dreaming without purpose ended here, in this bed, where no more dreams waited beneath the pillows.

The detectives and the medical examiner’s people had stepped back, leaving Noah alone at the bedside, although they continued to watch in their capacity as guardians of the mortal evidence.

Laura rested on her back, arms at her sides. The palm of her left hand lay flat against the sheets, but her right hand was turned up and closed in a three-quarter fist, as if in the final instant, she had tried to hold fast to life.

Both the porcelain-smooth half and the ruined half of her face were revealed, God’s work and Crank’s.

To Noah, now that he would never see her again, both sides of her face were beautiful. They touched his heart in different ways.

We bring beauty with us into this world, as we bring innocence, and the ugliness that we take with us when we leave is what we’ve made of ourselves instead of what we should have made. Laura had moved on from this life with no ugliness at all. Only the soul leaves here; and hers was without stain or scar, as innocent at departure as it had been upon arrival.

Noah had lived longer and more fully than his sister, but not as well. He knew that when his time came to go, unlike her, he wouldn’t be able to leave behind all his ugliness with his blood and bone.

He almost began to talk to her, as he had talked so often over the years, hour after hour, with the hope that she heard him and was comforted. But now that his sister had traveled beyond hearing, Noah discovered he had nothing to say anymore—not to her, not to anyone.

He had hoped that the distant thunder in his head would stop rolling when he saw Laura and confirmed beyond doubt that she was gone. Instead, the roar gradually grew louder.

He turned from the bed and walked away. The air thickened and resisted him at the threshold, but only for an instant.

Across the hallway, the door opposite Laura’s was closed. On his last few visits, that room—also a single—had stood open for airing because no patient currently occupied it.

Although a new resident might have been admitted in the past few hours, instinct carried Noah boldly across the hall. He threw open the door and took one step past the threshold before men seized him from behind, restraining him.

Nurse Quail sat in an armchair, so petite that her feet barely touched the floor. Twinkling blue eyes, pink complexion, pert and pretty: as Noah remembered her.

Two men and one woman were with the murderess. At least one of them would be a homicide detective and at least one would be from the DA’s office. The three were tough professionals, skilled at psychological manipulation, not likely to allow any suspect to hijack an interrogation.

Yet Wendy Quail clearly controlled the situation, most likely because she was too deluded to understand the real nature of her situation. Her posture and her expression weren’t those of a suspect facing a hard inquisition. She appeared to be as poised as royalty, like a queen granting an audience to admirers.

She didn’t shrink from Noah, but smiled at him in recognition. She held out a hand toward him as might a queen who saw before her a grateful subject who had come to kneel abjectly and to offer effusive appreciation for some grace that earlier she had bestowed on him.