One Door Away From Heaven (28 page)

Better move.

Leaving the pistol on the ground now that there’s no need to worry about Gabby getting possession of it, Curtis climbs into the Mountaineer once more. He has never driven a vehicle like this. But the principles of its operation are obvious, and he’s sure that he can handle it reasonably well, though most likely not with the skill of Steve McQueen in
Bullitt
or with the aplomb of Burt Reynolds in
Smokey and the Bandit.

He is about to move from petty crimes to the commission of a major felony. Car theft. That’s how the authorities will view it.

From his perspective, however, it’s actually the unauthorized
borrowing
of a vehicle, because he has no intention of keeping the Mountaineer. If eventually he abandons it in as good a condition as he found it, his moral obligation will largely consist of making an apology to Gabby and compensating him for gasoline, time, and inconvenience. Because he doesn’t relish coming face-to-face with the caretaker again, he hopes that his soul won’t be tarnished too much if he makes both the apology and the payment by mail.

Height proves to be a problem. Curtis Hammond, a bit on the shorter side for a ten-year-old boy, can command a clear view of the terrain ahead or exercise full and easy control of the brakes and the accelerator, but not both at the same time. By slouching a little and stretching his right foot as might a leaping ballet dancer reaching for an on-point landing, he’s able to proceed with a half-obstructed view and with compromised pedal control.

This slows him, however, and establishes a pace that seems more suitable to a funeral procession than to a run for freedom.

While he wants to put as much territory as possible between himself and his pursuers, he must remember that time, not distance, is his primary ally. Only by faithfully being Curtis Hammond hour after hour, day after day, is he likely to escape detection forever. Certain adjustments would allow him to handle the Mountaineer more easily, but if he were to indulge in them, he’d be more visible to his enemies the next time they came scanning in his vicinity. Which will be soon.

Mom’s wisdom. The longer that you wear a disguise, the more completely you
become
the disguise. To maintain a credible deception, a fugitive must never slip out of character, not even for a moment. Establishing a new identity isn’t merely a matter of acquiring a convincing set of ID documents; you aren’t safe from discovery just because you look, talk, walk, and act in character. Establishing a new identity with total success requires you to
become
this new person with your every fiber, every cell—and for every minute of the day, when observed and unobserved.

Even in death, Mom remains the ultimate authority on this stuff, as well as a universal symbol of courage and freedom. She will be honored long after her passing. Even if she hadn’t been his mom, he would conduct himself according to her advice; but as her son, he has a special obligation not just to survive but also to live by her teachings and eventually to pass them along to others.

Grief comes to him once more, and for a while he travels in its company.

He dares not continue southwest, for eventually the valley must bring him to the interstate, which will be patrolled. He came out of the east. The ghost town lies north. Therefore, he has little choice but to cross the width of the valley, heading due west.

Although he’s in no danger of setting a land-speed record, and although he sometimes progresses in fits and starts as he cranes his neck to see over the steering wheel or ducks his head to peek between it and the top of the dashboard, he discovers that the salt flats are negotiable terrain. When he reaches the slope of the western valley wall, however, he realizes that he can’t go farther in this fashion.

Here, the saltless land doesn’t have an accommodating natural glow. Visibility already limited by the boy’s height immediately declines to a condition not much better than blindness. Switching on the SUV headlights will provide no solution—unless he wants to call attention to himself and thereby commit suicide.

Furthermore, the rising land will be rocky and uneven. Curtis will need to react to conditions more quickly with both the brake pedal and the accelerator than he’s been able to do thus far.

He shifts into park and sits high, gazing at the route ahead, stymied by the challenge.

His sister-becoming provides the solution. During the slow ride across the last of the salt flats, Old Yeller sat in the passenger’s seat, decorating the side window with a pattern of nose prints. Now she stands in her seat and gives Curtis a meaningful look.

Maybe because grief is weighing on his mind, maybe because he’s still rattled by his strange encounter with the caretaker, Curtis is embarrassingly slow on the uptake. At first he thinks that she simply wants to be scratched gently behind the ears.

Because she will never object to being scratched gently behind the ears or virtually anywhere else, Old Yeller accepts a minute of this pleasantness before she turns away from Curtis and, still with hind legs on the seat, places her forepaws on the dashboard. This puts her in a perfect position to see the route ahead.

This boy-dog relationship would be worthless if Curtis still failed to get her drift, but he understands what she has in mind. He will operate the controls of the SUV, and she will be his eyes.

Good pup!

He slides far enough down in his seat to plant his right foot firmly on the accelerator and to be able to shift it quickly and easily to the brake pedal. He is also in a satisfactory position to steer. He just can’t see out of the windshield.

Their bonding is not complete. She is still his sister-becoming rather than his sister-become; however, their special relationship grew considerably in that scary moment when each of them saw both of their lives flashing before their eyes.

Curtis shifts the SUV out of park, presses the accelerator, and steers up the relatively easy slope of the valley wall with the eyes of his dog to guide him. Together they gain confidence during the ascent, and they function in perfect harmony by the time they reach the top.

He halts on the ridge, sits up, and through his own eyes looks northeast. The fighting at the ghost town seems to have ceased. The scalawags and the worse scalawags have realized that neither of them has captured their quarry. No longer battling each other, they are turning their attention once more to the search for boy and dog.

The running lights of
two
helicopters float in the sky. A third is approaching from farther in the east. Reinforcements.

Slouching in his seat once more, Curtis drives down off the ridge, heading farther west into unknown territory that Old Yeller scouts for him with unwavering diligence.

He drives as fast as seems prudent, keeping in mind that his sister-becoming could be hurt if he hits the brakes suddenly at too high a speed.

They need to make good time, however, because he can’t expect the dog to be his eyes as long as he would like. Curtis requires no rest. Old Yeller will eventually need to sleep, but Curtis has never slept in his life.

After all, he must remember that he and his sister-becoming are not merely members of different species with far different physical abilities and limitations. More significantly, they were born on different worlds.

Chapter 33

THURSDAY’S CHILD has far to go, according to the old nursery rhyme, and Micky Bellsong was born on a Thursday in May, more than twenty-eight years ago. On this Thursday in August, however, she was too hungover to go as far as she’d planned.

Lemon vodka diminishes mathematical ability. Sometime during the night, she must have counted the fourth double shot as a second, the fifth as a third.

Staring at the bathroom mirror, she said, “Damn lemon flavoring screws up your memory.” She couldn’t tweak a smile from herself.

She had overslept her first job interview and had risen too late to keep the second. Both were for positions as a waitress.

Although she had experience in food service and liked that work, she hoped to get a computer-related position, customizing software applications. She had compressed three years of instruction into the past sixteen months and had discovered that she possessed the ability and the interest to do well in this work.

In fact, the image of herself as a software-applications mensch was so radically in opposition to the way she’d led her life to date that it formed the center of her vision of a better future. Through the worst year of her existence, this vision had sustained her.

Thus far, seeking to make the dream real, she’d been thwarted by the perception among employers that the economy was sliding, dipping, stalling, coming under a shadow, cooling, taking a breather before the next boom. They had a limitless supply of words and phrases to convey the same rejection.

She hadn’t begun to despair yet. Long ago, life had taught her that the world didn’t exist to fulfill Michelina Bellsong’s dreams or even to encourage them. She expected to have to struggle.

If the job hunt took weeks, however, her resolution to build a new life might prove to be no match for her weaknesses. She had no illusions about herself. She
could
change. But given an excuse, she herself would be the greatest obstacle to that change.

Now the face in the mirror displeased her, before and after she applied the little makeup she used. She looked good, but she took no pleasure in her appearance. Identity lay in accomplishment, not in mirrors. And she was afraid that before she accomplished anything, she’d again seek solace in the attention her looks could win her.

Which would mean men again.

She had nothing against men. Those who destroyed her childhood weren’t typical. She didn’t hold the entire male gender responsible for the perversions of a few, any more than she would judge all women by Sinsemilla’s example…or by the example she herself had set.

Actually, she liked men more than she should, considering the lessons learned from her experiences with them. She hoped one day to have a rewarding relationship with a good man—perhaps even marriage.

The trick lay in the word
good.
Her taste in men was not much better than her mother’s. Committing herself to the dead-wrong type of man, more than once, had led to her current circumstances, which seemed to her like the burnt-out bottom of a ruined life.

After dressing for a three o’clock job interview—the only one of the day that she would be able to keep and the only one related to her computer training—Micky ate a hangover-curing breakfast at eleven o’clock, while standing at the kitchen sink. She washed down B-complex vitamins and aspirin with Coke, and finished the Coke with two chocolate-covered doughnuts. Her hangovers never involved a sick stomach, and a blast of sugar cleared her booze-fuzzed thoughts.

Leilani was right when she guessed that Micky had a metabolism tuned like a space-shuttle gyroscope. She weighed only one pound more than she had weighed on her sixteenth birthday.

While she stood at the sink, eating, she watched Geneva through the open window. With a garden hose, Aunt Gen hand-watered the lawn against the depredations of the August heat. She wore a straw hat with a wide brim to protect her face from the sun. Sometimes her entire body swayed as she moved the hose back and forth, as though she might be remembering a dance that she had attended in her youth, and as Micky ate the second doughnut, Geneva began to sing softly the love theme from
Love in the Afternoon,
one of her favorite movies.

Maybe she was thinking about Vernon, the husband whom she’d lost too young. Or maybe she was remembering her affair with Gary Cooper, when she’d been young and French and adored—and Audrey Hepburn.

What a wonderfully unpredictable world it is when being shot in the head can have an upside.

That was Geneva’s line, not Micky’s, an argument for optimism when Micky grew pessimistic.
What a wonderfully unpredictable world it is, Micky, when being shot in the head can have an upside. In spite of an embarrassing moment of confusion now and then, it’s delightful to have so many glamorous and romantic memories to draw upon in my old age! I’m not recommending brain damage, mind you, but without my quirky little short circuit, I would never have loved and been loved by Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, and I’d certainly never have had that wonderful experience in Ireland with John Wayne!

Leaving Aunt Gen to her fond memories of John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart, or possibly even of Uncle Vernon, Micky left by the front door. She didn’t call “Good morning” through the open window, because she was embarrassed to face her aunt. Although Geneva knew that her niece had missed two job interviews, she would never mention this new failure. Gen’s bottomless tolerance only sharpened Micky’s guilt.

Last evening, she’d left the Camaro’s windows open two inches; nevertheless, the interior was sweltering. The air conditioning didn’t work, so she drove with the windows all the way down.

She switched on the radio, only to hear a newsman describing, in excited tones, a government-enforced blockade affecting a third of Utah, related to an urgent search for some drug lords and their teams of heavily armed bodyguards. Thirty powerful figures in the illegal drug trade had gathered secretly in Utah to negotiate territorial boundaries as Mafia families had done decades ago, to plan a war against smaller operators, and to devise strategies to overcome importation problems created by a recent tightening of the country’s borders. Having learned of this criminal conclave, the FBI moved in to make mass arrests. They were met with an unusual level of violence instead of with the usual volleys of attorneys; the battle had been as fearsome as a clash of military factions. Perhaps a dozen of these drug kingpins were now on the run with highly sophisticated weaponry and with nothing to lose, and they posed a serious threat to the citizenry. Most of these details had not been released by the FBI but had been obtained from unnamed sources.
Crisis,
the reporter said, using the word repeatedly and pronouncing it as if he found those two syllables as delectable as a lover’s breast.

When it wasn’t about natural disasters and lunatics shooting up post offices, the news was an endless series of crises, most of which were either wildly exaggerated or entirely imaginary. If ten percent of the crises that the media sold were real, civilization would have collapsed long ago, the planet would be an airless cinder, and Micky would have no need to look for a job or worry about Leilani Klonk.

She punched a preset button, changing stations, found more of the same news story, punched another button, and got the Backstreet Boys. This wasn’t exactly her style of music, but the Boys were fun and likely to facilitate her hangover cure.

No news is good news
—which is true no matter which of the two possible interpretations you choose to make of those five words.

Cruising up the freeway ramp, remembering Leilani’s term from their conversation the previous evening, Micky said, “Proud to be one of the twelve-percenters,” and found her first smile of the day.

She had three and a half hours before her interview, and she intended to use this time to get Child Protective Services involved in the girl’s case. Last night, when she and Geneva had discussed Leilani, the girl’s predicament seemed irresolvable. This morning, either because time brought a better perspective or because too much lemon vodka followed by chocolate doughnuts inspired a measure of optimism, the situation seemed difficult, but not beyond hope.