One Door Away From Heaven (36 page)

He remembers that Cass advised a quick shower because the motor home isn’t connected to utilities; the system is operating off the vehicle’s storage tanks and the gasoline-powered generator. Because he failed to obtain a precise definition of
quick,
he’s certain that he’s already used more water than is prudent, so he soaps up as fast as possible, rinses down, remembers his hair, pours shampoo straight from the bottle onto his head, realizes at once that he has seriously overused the product, and stands in rising masses of suds that threaten to fill the shower stall.

To dissolve the suds as quickly as possible, he cranks the water to cold again, and by the time that he finally shuts the spray off, his teeth are rattling like an electric-powered nutcracker once more. He’s sure that he has so drained the motor home’s water system that the vehicle will topple sideways out of balance or suffer some catastrophic failure resulting in great financial loss and possibly even the destruction of human life.

Out of the shower, on the bath mat, vigorously drying himself, he realizes that personal grooming is related to socializing, and he has proven time and again that he’s a lousy socializer. Yet he can’t go through life without a bath, because walking around filthy and stinky is not good socializing, either.

In addition to those worries and woes, he’s still embarrassed about being naked in the sisters’ bathroom, and now he realizes that he will have to wear nothing but a large towel until his clothes are laundered. He turns to the mirror, anxious to see if his face remains an unnatural shade of lobster, and he discovers something far worse than expected in his reflection.

He isn’t being Curtis Hammond.

“Holy howlin’ saints alive.”

In shock, he drops the towel.

More accurately: He is being Curtis Hammond but not entirely, not well, certainly not convincingly enough to pass for human.

Oh, Lord.

The face in the mirror isn’t hideous, but it is stranger than any face in any carnival freak show that ever welcomed gawking rubes into its sawdust-carpeted chambers.

In Colorado, in the farmhouse, beyond the bedroom door with the plaque announcing
STARSHIP COMMAND CENTER
, this motherless boy had found the used Band-Aid discarded on the nightstand, and the dried blood on the gauze pad had provided him with a perfect opportunity to fashion a disguise. Touching the blood, absorbing it, he’d added Curtis Hammond’s DNA to his repertoire. While the original Curtis continued sleeping, his namesake had fled out of the bedroom window, onto the porch roof, and then here to Castoria and Polluxia’s bathroom, though not directly.

Being Curtis Hammond—in fact, being anyone or anything other than himself—requires a constant biological tension, which produces a unique energy signature that identifies him to those equipped with the proper scanning technology. Day by day, however, as he adjusts to a new identity, sustaining the adopted physical form becomes easier, until after a few weeks or months, his energy signature is virtually indistinguishable from those of other members of the population that he has joined. In this case, that population is humanity.

Stepping closer to the mirror, he wills himself to be Curtis Hammond, not in the half-assed fashion revealed by the mirror, but with conviction and attention to detail.

In the reflection of his face, he watches several peculiar changes occur, but the flesh resists his command.

One slip-up like this can be disastrous. If Cass and Polly were to see him in this condition, they would know that he isn’t Curtis Hammond, that he isn’t of this earth. Then he could probably kiss their generous assistance and their root-beer floats goodbye.

As good as his motives are, he might nevertheless wind up like the stitched-together brute who escaped Dr. Frankenstein’s lab only to be pursued by torch-bearing villagers with zero tolerance for dead bodies revived in creative new formats. He couldn’t imagine Cass and Polly hunting him with torches high, howling for his blood, but there would be no shortage of others eager to take up the chase.

Worse, even a brief lapse in the maintenance of his new identity reestablishes the original biological tension and makes his unique energy signature as visible to his enemies as it would have been in the minutes immediately following his original transformation into Curtis Hammond, back in Colorado. In essence, with this lapse, he has reset the clock; therefore, he remains highly vulnerable to detection if his savage pursuers cross his path again in the next couple days.

He worriedly studies the mirror as the pleasant features of Curtis Hammond reassert possession of his face, but they return gradually and with stubborn errors of proportion.

As his mother always told him, confidence is the key to the successful maintenance of a new identity. Self-consciousness and self-doubt fade the disguise.

The mystery of Gabby’s panicky exit from the Mercury Mountaineer is solved. Racing across the salt flats, rattled by his inability to calm the ever more offended and loudly blustering caretaker, the boy had suffered a crisis of confidence and for a moment had been less Curtis Hammond than he’d needed to be.

Physical danger doesn’t shake his equanimity. Adventuring, he is comfortable in his new skin. He’s able to be Curtis Hammond with aplomb even in great jeopardy.

Although remaining poised in peril, he is seriously unnerved by socializing. The simple act of showering, with all the complications that arose, reduced him to this imperfect Curtis.

With deep chagrin, he decides that he is the Lucille Ball of shapechangers: physically agile, admirably determined, and recklessly courageous in the pursuit of his goals—but socially inept enough to entertain demanding audiences and to exasperate any Cuban-American bandleader crazy enough to marry him.

Okay. Good. He is being Curtis Hammond once more.

He finishes drying himself, all the while inspecting his body for weirdnesses, but finding none.

A beach towel has been provided as a sarong. He wraps himself in it but feels nonetheless immodest.

Until his clothes are washed and dried, he must stay with Cass and Polly; but as soon as he’s outfitted once more, he’ll slip away with Old Yeller. Now that he can be easily detected by his family’s killers—and perhaps by the FBI, as well, if they have developed the necessary tracking technology—he can’t any longer justify putting the sisters at risk.

No more people should die just because fate brings them into his life at the wrong time.

The hunters are surely coming. Heavily armed. Grimly determined. Thoroughly pissed.

Chapter 44

THE SUN WORKED PAST quitting time, and the long summer afternoon blazed far beyond the hour when bats would have taken wing in cooler seasons. At six o’clock, the sky still burned gas-flame blue, gas-flame bright, and southern California broiled.

Risking economic ruin, Aunt Gen set the thermostat at seventy-six degrees, which didn’t qualify as chilly anywhere other than in Hell. Compared to the furnace beyond the closed windows and doors, however, the kitchen was luxuriously comfortable.

While Micky brewed a large pitcher of peach-flavored iced tea and set the table for dinner, she told Geneva about Preston Maddoc, about bioethics, about killing as healing, killing as compassion, killing to increase “the total amount of happiness,” killing in the name of sound environmental management.

“Good thing I was shot in the head eighteen years ago. These days, I’d be environmentally managed into a hole in the ground.”

“Or they’d harvest your organs, make lampshades out of your skin, and feed your remains to wild animals to avoid despoiling the earth with another grave. Iced tea?”

When Leilani hadn’t arrived by 6:15, Micky was certain that something was wrong, but Geneva counseled patience. By 6:30, Geneva was concerned, too, and Micky heaped chocolate-almond cookies—sans almonds, plus pecans—on a gift plate, providing an excuse to pay a visit to the Maddocs.

The blue ceramic curve of sky, firing in a fierce kiln, offered a receptive bowl if the earth, as seemed likely, melted quick away. A long day’s interment of heat shimmered out of the ground as though spirits were fleeing up through the open gates of perdition, and the air had a scorched smell.

Perched on fence pickets at the back of Geneva’s property, near the bloomless rosebush, crows shrieked at Micky. Perhaps they were familiars of the dark witch Sinsemilla, posted to warn her of the approach of anyone who might be armed with the knowledge of her name.

At the fallen fence between properties, Geneva’s green lawn gave way to the withered brown mat that had served as Sinsemilla’s dance floor. Micky’s nerves wound tight at the prospect of coming face-to-face with either the moon dancer or the philosophical murderer.

She didn’t actually expect to meet Preston Maddoc. Leilani had told Aunt Gen that Dr. Doom would be out all evening.

The drapes were shut, the windows bright with the dragon glare of the westering sun.

Standing on the concrete steps, she knocked, waited, and raised her hand to knock again, but took the cookie plate in both hands when suddenly the knob rattled and the door opened.

Preston Maddoc stood before her, smiling, barely recognizable. His longish hair had been shorn; he wore it now in a short punkish bristle, which didn’t lend him an edgy quality, as it might have given most men, but made him look like a tousled boy. He’d shaved off his mustache, too.

“Can I help you?” he asked pleasantly.

“Uh, hi, we’re your neighbors. Me and Aunt Gen. Geneva. Geneva Davis. And I’m Micky Bellsong. Just wanted to say hello, bring you some homemade cookies, welcome you to the neighborhood.”

“That’s so kind of you.” He accepted the plate. “These look delicious. My mother, God rest her soul, made more varieties of pecan cookies than you could shake a stick at. Her maiden name was Hickory, so she took an interest in the tree that shared her family name. The pecan tree, you know, is a variety of the hickory.”

Micky hadn’t been prepared for his exceptional voice, which was full of the quiet confidence that money can buy, but which also had an appealing masculine timbre and a warmth as inviting as maple syrup spilling over golden waffles. That voice, plus his pleasant looks, made him a disarming advocate for death. She could understand how he might paint a gloss of idealism over the meanest cruelties, charm the gullible, convert well-meaning people into apologists who applauded the executioner and smiled at the musical ring of the blade meeting the chopping block in a busy guillotine.

“My name’s Jordan Banks,” he lied, as Leilani had said he would. “Everyone calls me Jorry.”

Maddoc offered his hand. Micky almost cringed as she shook it.

She had come here knowing she couldn’t mention Leilani’s failure to keep a dinner invitation. The girl’s best interests would not be served by revealing that she’d made friends next door.

Micky had hoped to see Leilani, to suggest by one indirection or another that she wouldn’t go to bed tonight until the girl could sneak out to rendezvous after Maddoc and Sinsemilla were asleep.

“I’m sorry, it’s not terribly considerate of me, keeping you here on the doorstep,” Maddoc apologized. “I’d invite you in, but my wife’s suffering a migraine, and the slightest noise in the house pierces her like a spike through the skull. During migraines, we have to whisper and pussyfoot around as if the floor’s actually a drum.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. That’s fine. I just wanted to say hello, and welcome. I hope she’s feeling better soon.”

“She can’t eat when she’s got a migraine—but she’s starved when it passes. She’ll love these cookies. Very kind. See you soon.”

Micky backed down the steps as the door closed, hesitated on the dead lawn, trying to think of another ploy to let Leilani know that she’d come here. Then she worried that Maddoc might be watching her.

Returning home, eliciting a new round of shrieks from the crows that stood sentinel on the back fence, Micky heard his mellifluous voice in her mind:
My mother, God rest her soul, made more varieties of pecan cookies than you could shake a stick at.

How smoothly the words
God rest her soul
had flowed off his tongue, how natural and convincing they had sounded—when in fact he believed in neither God nor the existence of the soul.

Hands wrapped around a glass of iced tea, Geneva waited at the kitchen table.

Micky sat, poured tea, and told her about Maddoc. “Leilani won’t be here for dinner. But I know she’ll come to see me after they’ve gone to sleep. I’ll wait for her no matter how late it gets.”

“I wondered…could she stay with Clarissa?” Aunt Gen suggested.

“And the parrots?”

“At least they’re not crocodiles.”

“If I find the public record of Maddoc’s marriage, I can get a reporter interested. He’s kept a low profile for four years, but the press would still be curious. The mystery ought to intrigue them. Why hide the marriage? Was the marriage why he left the public stage?”

“Sinsemilla—she’s a media circus all by herself,” Geneva said.

“If the press gives it some play, someone’ll come forward who knows Lukipela existed. The boy wasn’t hidden away his whole life. Even if his nutcase mother never settled in one place for long,
she’s memorable.
People who knew her even briefly are likely to remember her. Some will remember Luki, too. Then Maddoc will have to explain where the boy is.”

“How are you going to find a record of the marriage?”

“I’m brooding on it.”

“What if a lot of reporters respect Maddoc and think you just have a grudge against him? Like that Bronson woman?”

“They probably will. He gets mostly good press. But reporters have to have some curiosity, don’t they? Isn’t that their
job
?”

“You sound determined to
make
it their job.”

Micky picked up the penguin figurine, which earlier Aunt Gen had explained to her. “I won’t let him hurt Leilani. I won’t.”

“I’ve never heard you like this before, little mouse.”

Micky met Geneva’s eyes. “Like what?”

“So determined.”

“It’s not just Leilani’s life hanging by a thread, Aunt Gen. It’s mine, too.”

“I know.”