One Door Away From Heaven (26 page)

Now he knew why he’d been required to check his pistol at the front door: just in case an unexpected encounter like this occurred.

Maybe he would have shot her if he’d had the handgun; but he didn’t think so. He had the capacity to kill her, the nerve and the ruthlessness, but he didn’t have the requisite rage.

Curiously, Wendy Quail failed to arouse his anger. In spite of the self-satisfaction that virtually oozed from her, and although her peaches-and-cream cheeks pinked with the warmth generated by a well-banked and well-tended moral superiority, she lacked the substance to excite anyone’s hatred. She was a hollow creature into whose head had been poured evil philosophies that she couldn’t have brewed in the cauldron of her own intellect; and if in her formative years she had been exposed to a gentler and humbler school of thought, she might have been the committed healer that now she only pretended to be. She was plates and platters of plights and pickles; she was ice-cream therapy; but although she was worthy of being loathed and even of being abhorred, she was too pathetic to merit hatred.

Noah allowed himself to be drawn backward out of the room before the nurse could speak some witless platitude. Someone closed the door between them.

Wise enough to offer no commiseration or advice, two detectives escorted him along the corridor toward the lobby. Noah had never been a member of their department; his three years of service had been in another of the county’s many cities, which interlocked like puzzle pieces in a jigsaw of jurisdictions. Nevertheless, they were his age or older, and they knew why he no longer wore a uniform. They surely understood why he had done what he’d done, ten years ago, and they might even sympathize with him. But they had never straddled the line that he had crossed with both feet, and to them he was to be treated as politely as any citizen but with more wariness, regardless of the fact that at one time he had worn the tin and done the job just as they did. They spoke to him only to report how long the body would be held by the medical examiner and to describe the process by which it could be claimed and be transferred to a mortuary.

The care home’s residents had been asked to remain in their rooms with the doors closed, and had been issued sleep aids when they requested them. But Richard Velnod stood in his open doorway, as though waiting for Noah.

Rickster’s unnaturally sloped brow seemed to recede from his eyes at a more severe angle than previously, and gravity exerted a greater than ordinary pull on his heavy features. His mouth moved, but his thick tongue, always a barrier to clear speech, failed him entirely this time; no sound came from him. Although usually his eyes were windows to his thoughts, they were paled now by tears, and he seemed to be holding back some question that he was afraid to ask.

The detectives would have preferred that Noah leave directly, but he stopped here and said, “It’s all right, son. She didn’t have any pain.”

Rickster’s hands moved restlessly, pulling at each other, at the buttons on his pajama top, at his low-set ears, at his wispy brown hair, and at the air as though he might pluck understanding from it. “Mr. Noah, wha…wha…?” His mouth went soft, twisted with anguish.

Assuming that the question had been
Why?,
Noah could provide no answer other than a platitude worthy of Nurse Quail: “It was just Laura’s time to go.”

Rickster shook his head. He wiped at his flooded eyes, swabbed wet hands across damp cheeks, and gathered his troubled face into an expression so affectingly earnest, so miserable, so desperate that Noah could hardly bear to look at it. Rickster’s mouth firmed, and his malformed tongue found the shape of the words that had a moment ago eluded it, and he asked not
Why?,
but a question more to the point and yet even more difficult to answer: “What’s
wrong
with people?”

Noah shook his head.

“What’s
wrong
with people?” Rickster implored.

His eyes fixed so beseechingly on Noah that it was impossible to turn away from him without responding, and yet impossible to lie even though, to this hard question, lies were the only answers that would soothe.

Noah knew that he should have put an arm around the boy and walked him back to his bed, where the framed photographs of his dead parents stood on the nightstand. He should have tucked him in and talked to him about anything that came to mind, or about nothing at all, as he had talked for so many years to his sister. More than a need to know what was wrong with people, loneliness plagued this boy, and although Noah had no insight into the source of human cruelty, he could medicate loneliness with a gift of his time and company.

He felt burnt out, however, and doubted that he had anything within him worth giving. Not anymore. Not after Laura.

He had no idea what was wrong with people, but he knew that whatever might have broken in the soul of humanity was manifestly broken in him.

“I don’t know,” he told this castaway boy with the castaway face. “I don’t know.”

By the time that he retrieved his pistol and reached his car in the parking lot, the previously faraway roar in his head grew louder and acquired a more distinctive character. No longer like thunder, it might have been the angry chanting of the whole mad crowd of humankind—or still the rumble of water tumbling from a high cliff into an abyss.

On the way to Cielo Vista, he’d broken every law of the highway; but he exceeded no speed limits on the way home, ran no stop signs. He drove with the exaggerated care of a cautious drunk because, mile by mile, the surging sound within him was accompanied by a deepening flood of darkness, and those black torrents seemed to spill from him into the California night. Block by block, streetlamps appeared to grow dimmer, and previously well-lighted avenues seemed to be drowned in murk. By the time he parked at his apartment, the river that might have been hope finished draining entirely into the abyss, and Noah was borne to a bottle of brandy and to his bed on the currents of a bleaker emotion.

Chapter 32

BOY, DOG, AND GRIZZLED GRUMP arrive at the barn-what-ain’t-a-barn, but to Curtis it appears to be a barn and nothing more. In fact, it looks like merely the ruins of a barn.

The structure stands by itself, two hundred yards northwest of the town, past clumps of stunted sage and bristles of wild sorrel and foot-snaring tendrils of creeping sandbur. At a surprisingly sharp line of demarcation, all forms of desert scrub and weeds and cactus surrender to the saline soil, and the inhospitable desert gives way to the utterly barren salt flats—which seems to be a curious place to have built a barn.

Even in the dark-drenched night, where shadows drip off shadows, the building’s decrepit condition is obvious. Instead of describing a straight line, the steeply pitched roof swags from peak to eave. The walls are a little catawampus to the foundation, time-tweaked and weather-warped at the corners.

Unless the ramshackle barn is actually a secret armory stocked with futuristic weapons—plasma swords, laser-pulse rifles, neutron grenades—Curtis can’t imagine what hope it offers them. No shelter will be safe in this storm.

In the strife-torn town behind them, the tempest already rages. Much of the screaming and the shouting fails to carry across the intervening desert, but a few faint cries are chilling enough to plate his spine with ice. Gunfire, familiar to this territory for a century and a half, is answered by battle sounds never heard before in the Old West or the New: an ominous tolling that shivers the air and shudders the earth, a high-pitched oscillating whistle, a pulsing bleat, a tortured metallic groan.

As Gabby wrenches open a man-size door next to the larger doors of the barn, a hard flat
crump
draws Curtis’s attention to the town just in time to see one of the larger structures—perhaps the saloon and gambling hall—implode upon itself, as if collapsing into a black hole. The reverse-pressure wave pulls eddies of salt from the dry bed of the ancient ocean, sucking them toward the town, and Curtis rocks on the balls of his feet.

A second
crump,
following close after the first, is accompanied by a whirlpool of fiery orange light where the saloon had stood. In that churning blaze, the imploded structure seems to disgorge itself: Planks and shingles, posts and balcony railings, doors, cocked window frames—plus two flights of stairs like a portion of a brontosaurus spine—erupt from the darkness that had swallowed them, spinning in midair, in tornadolike suspension, silhouetted by the flames. As a pressure wave casts back the eddies of salt and chases them with showers of sand, nearly rocking Curtis off his feet once more, it’s possible to believe that the whirling rubble of the saloon will magically reassemble into a historic structure once more.

Gabby has no time for the spectacle, and Curtis should have none, either. He follows the caretaker and the dog into the barn.

The door isn’t as rickety as he expects. Rough wood on the exterior but steel on the inside, heavy, solid, it swings smoothly shut behind him on well-oiled hinges.

Inside lies a short shadowy corridor with light beyond an open doorway at the end. Not the light of an oil lamp, but a constant fluorescent glow.

The air contains neither the faint cindery scent of the desert nor the alkali breath of the salt flats. And it’s cool.

Pine trees, pine trees, close to the floor, pine on the floor. Pine-scented wax on the vinyl tiles. Cinnamon and sugar, crumbs of a cookie, butter and sugar and cinnamon and flour. Good, good.

The fluorescent light arises in a windowless office with two desks and filing cabinets. And a refrigerator. Chilled air floods out of a ventilation duct near the ceiling.

Barely detectable vibrations in the floor suggest a subterranean vault containing a gasoline-powered generator. This is a barn worthy of Disneyland: entirely new, but crafted to resemble the battered remains of a home-steader’s farm. The building provides office and work space for the support staff that oversees maintenance of the ghost town, without introducing either contemporary structures or visible utilities that would detract from the otherwise meticulously maintained period ambience.

On the nearest of the desks stands a cup of coffee and a large thermos bottle. Beside the cup lies a paperback romance novel by Nora Roberts. Unless the official night-shift support staff includes a ghost or two, the coffee and the book belong to Gabby.

Although they are on the run, with the prospect of heavily armed searchers bursting into this building behind them at any second, the caretaker pauses to sweep the paperback off the desk. He shoves it under a sheaf of papers in one of the drawers.

He glances sheepishly at Curtis. His deeply tanned face acquires a rubescent-bronze tint.

The dilapidated barn isn’t at all what it appears to be from outside, and Gabby isn’t entirely what he appears to be, either. The not-entirely-what-he-or-she-or-it-appears-to-be club has an enormous membership.

“Judas jump to hellfire, boy, we’re in dangerous territory here! Don’t just stand there till you’re growed over with clockface an’ cow’s-tongue! Let’s go, let’s go!”

Curtis stopped at the desk only because Gabby stopped there first, and he realizes that the caretaker is shouting at him merely to distract his attention from the incident with the romance novel.

As he follows Gabby across the room to another door, however, Curtis wonders what sort of plants clockface and cow’s-tongue might be and whether in this territory they really grow so fast that you could be completely overtaken by them if you stand too still even for a few seconds. He wonders, too, whether these are carnivorous plants that not only cocoon you, but then also feed on you while you’re still alive.

The sooner he gets out of Utah, the better.

Beyond the first office lies a second and larger office. The four doors leading from this space suggest additional rooms beyond.

Gimping like a dog with two short legs on the left side, Gabby leads Old Yeller and Curtis to the farthest door, snares a set of keys off a pegboard, and proceeds into a garage with bays for four vehicles. Three spaces are empty, and an SUV waits in the fourth, facing toward the roll-up door: a white Mercury Mountaineer.

As Curtis hurries around to the passenger’s side, Gabby pulls open the driver’s door and says, “That dog, she broke?”

“She fixed, sir.”

“Say what?”

“Say
fixed,
sir,” says Curtis as he frantically jerks open the front door on the passenger’s side.

Levering himself in behind the steering wheel, Gabby shouts at him, “Tarnation, I ain’t havin’ no biscuit-eater pissin’ in my new Mercury!”

“All we had was frankfurters, sir, and then some orange juice,” Curtis replies reassuringly as, not without difficulty, he clambers into the passenger’s seat with the dog in his arms.

“Spinnin’ syphilitic sheep! What for you bringin’ her in the front seat, boy?”

“What for shouldn’t I, sir?”

As he pushes a button on a remote-control unit to put up the garage door, and starts the engine, the caretaker says, “Iffen God made little fishes, then passengers what has a tail ought to load up through the
tail
gate!”

Pulling shut the passenger’s door, Curtis says, “God made little fishes, sure enough, sir, but I don’t see what one has to do with the other.”

“You got about as much common sense as a bucket. Better hold tight to your mongrel ’less you want she should wind up bug-spattered on the wrong side of the windshield.”

Old Yeller perches in Curtis’s lap, facing front, and he locks his arms around the dog to hold her in place.

“We gonna burn the wind haulin’ ass outta here!” Gabby loudly declares as he shifts the Mountaineer out of park.

Curtis takes this to be a warning against the likelihood that they’re going to experience flatulence, but he can’t imagine why that will happen.

Gabby tramps on the accelerator, and the Mountaineer shoots out of the garage, under the still-rising door.

First pinned back in his seat, then jammed against the door when the caretaker turns west-southwest almost sharply enough to roll the SUV, Curtis remembers the applicable law and raises his voice over the racing engine: “Law says we have to wear seat belts, sir!”

Even in the weak light from the instrument panel, the boy can see Gabby’s face darken as though someone from the gov’ment were throttling him at this very moment, and the old man proves that he can rant and drive at the same time. “Whole passel of politicians between ’em ain’t got a brain worth bug dust! No scaly-assed, wart-necked, fly-eatin’, toad-brained politician an’ no twelve-toed, fatassed, pointy-headed bureaucrat ain’t goin’ to tell
me
iffen I got to wear a seat belt nor iffen I
don’t
got to wear one, as far as that goes! Iffen I want to stand on these brakes an’ bust through the windshield with my face, damn if I won’t, an’ no one can tell me I ain’t got the right! Next thing them power-crazy bastards be tellin’ us the law says wear a jockstrap when you drive!”

While the caretaker continues in this vein, Curtis turns in his seat as best he can, still holding on to Old Yeller, and looks back, to the east and north, toward the embattled ghost town. It’s a light show back there, violent enough to make even Wyatt Earp hide in the church. When the shootout ends, whatever historical society oversees this site is going to be hard-pressed to restore the town from the splinters, bent nails, and ashes that will be left.

He remains amazed that the FBI is aware of him and of the forces pursuing him, that they have intervened in this matter, and that they actually think they have a chance of locating him and taking him into protective custody before his enemies can find and destroy him. They must know how outgunned they are, but they’ve plunged in nonetheless. He can’t help but admire their kick-butt attitude and their courage, even though they would eventually subject him to experiments if they had custody of him long enough.

Gabby can drive even faster than he can talk. They are
rocketing
across the salt flats.

To avoid drawing unwanted attention, they’re traveling without headlights.

Failure to employ headlights between dusk and dawn is against the law, of course, but he decides that to broach this subject with Gabby would qualify as poor socializing. Besides, Curtis has, after all, broken the law himself more than once during his flight for freedom, though he’s not proud of his criminality.

The clouded sky casts down no light whatsoever, but the natural fluorescence of the land ensures that they aren’t driving blind, and fortunately Gabby is familiar with this territory. He avoids whatever roads might cross this desolate valley and stays on the open land, so there’s no risk of turning a bend and ramming head-on into innocent motorists, with all the unfortunate physical and moral consequences that would ensue.

The salt flats glow white, and the Mercury Mountaineer is white, so the vehicle shouldn’t be easily visible from a distance. The tires spin up a white plume behind them, but this is a wispy telltale, not a thick billowing cloud, and it quickly settles.

If FBI agents or the worse scalawags are using motion-detection gear to sweep the flats either from a point atop the valley crest or from an aerial platform, then Gabby might as well not just turn on the headlights but fire off flares, as well, because this white-on-white strategy won’t be clever enough to save them from being turned into buzzard grub like the man who had come tumbling in flaming ruin between the buildings.

“…hogtie ’em with one of their aggravatin’ seat belts, douse ’em with some bacon grease, throw ’em in a root cellar with maybe ten thousand half-starved
STINK BUGS,
an’ just see how all-fired safe the God-mockin’ bastards feel then!” Gabby concludes.

Seizing this opportunity to change the subject, Curtis says, “Speakin’ of stink, sir, I ain’t farted, and I don’t think I’m goin’ to, neither.”

Though he doesn’t reduce their speed and might even accelerate a little, the old caretaker shifts his attention away from the salt flats hurtling toward them. He fixes Curtis with a look of such open-mouthed bewilderment that for a moment it prevents him from talking.

But only for a moment, whereafter he smacks his lips together and gets his tongue working again: “Judas humpin’ hacksaws in Hell! Boy, what the blazes did you just say an’ why’d you say it?”

Disconcerted that his well-meaning attempt at small talk has excited something like outrage from the caretaker, Curtis says, “Sir, no offense meant, but
you’re
the one who first said about burnin’ the wind and haulin’ ass.”

“Here’s that spit-in-the-eye-malefactor side of you what ain’t a pretty thing to see.”

“No offense, sir, but you
did
say it, and I was just observin’ that I ain’t farted, like you expected, and you ain’t neither, and neither ain’t my dog.”

“You keep sayin’
no offense,
boy, but I’m tellin’ you right now, I’m bound to take some offense iffen your dog starts fartin’ in my new Mercury.”

This conversation is going so badly and they are tearing across the salt flats at such a scary speed that changing the subject seems to be a matter of life and death, so Curtis figures the time has come to compliment Gabby on his celebrity lineage. “Sir, I dearly loved
Helldorado, Heart of the Golden West,
and
Roll on Texas Moon.
”

“What in tarnation’s wrong with you, boy?”

The dog whines and twitches in Curtis’s lap.

“Look ahead, sir!” the boy exclaims.

Gabby glances at the onrushing salt flats. “Just tumbleweed,” he says dismissively as an enormous prickly ball bounces off the front fender, rolls across the hood, over the windshield, and spins front to back across the roof with a clitter-click like skeleton fingers clawing at the underside of a coffin lid.

Nervously but valiantly making another effort to establish better rapport with the caretaker, Curtis says, “
Along the Navajo Trail
was really a fine movie, and
The Lights of Old Santa Fe.
But maybe the best of them was
Sons of the Pioneers.
”