One Door Away From Heaven Page 8

  “I know all the becauses. No need to list them.”

  Sometime during the two days she’d known Leilani, Micky arrived, as though by whirlwind, in a strange territory. She’d been journeying through a land of mirrors that initially appeared to be as baffling and as unreal as a funhouse, and yet repeatedly she had encountered reflections of herself so excruciatingly precise in their details and of such explicit depth that she turned away from them in revulsion or in anger, or in fear. The clear-eyed, steel-supported girl, larky and lurching, seemed at first to be a fabulist whose flamboyant fantasies rivaled Dorothy’s dreams of Oz; however, Micky could get no glimpse of yellow bricks on this road, and here, now, in the lingering sour scent of warm beer, in this small kitchen where only a trinity of candle flames held back the insistent sinuous shadows, with the sudden sound of a toilet flushing elsewhere in the trailer, she was stricken by the terrible perception that under Leilani’s mismatched feet had never been anything other than the rough track of reality.

  As though privy to Micky’s thoughts, the girl said, “Everything I’ve ever told you is the truth.”

  Outside: a shriek.

  Micky looked to the open window, where the last murky glow of the drowning twilight radiated weak purple beams through black tides of incoming night.

  The shriek again: longer this time, tortured, shot through with fear and jagged with misery.

  “Old Sinsemilla,” said Leilani.

  Chapter 8

  LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after the close call in Colorado, with the house fire and the hideous screams still vivid in memory, the motherless boy relaxes behind the steering wheel of a new Ford Explorer, while the harlequin dog sits erect beside him in the passenger’s seat, listening to a radio program of classic Western tunes—at the moment, “Ghost Riders in the Sky”—as they sail through the Utah night, four feet above the highway.

  Sometimes, from the side windows, depending on the encroaching landscape, they are able to see the starry sky, low near the horizon, but nothing of the greater vault above, where ghost riders would be likely to gallop. The windshield provides a view only of another—and unoccupied—Explorer ahead, plus the underside of the vehicles on the upper platform of this double-deck automobile carrier.

  In the late afternoon, they had boarded the auto transport in the immense parking lot of a busy truck stop near Provo, while the driver lingered over a slice of pie in the diner. The door of one of the Explorers opened for the boy, and he quickly slipped inside.

  The dog had continued to be an instinctive conspirator, huddling quietly with his master, below the windows, until the pie-powered trucker returned and they ventured out upon the road again. Even then, in daylight, they had slouched low, to avoid being seen by passing motorists who might signal the driver about his stowaways.

  With some of the money taken from the Hammond farmhouse, the famished boy had purchased two cheeseburgers at the truck stop. Soon after the truck began to roll, he’d eaten one sandwich and fed the other, in pieces, to the mutt.

  He had been less generous with the small bag of potato chips. They were crisp and so delicious that he groaned with pleasure while eating them.

  This apparently had been an exotic treat to the dog, as well. When first given a chip, he turned the morsel on his tongue, as though puzzled by the texture or the taste, warily tested the edibility of the offering, then crunched the salty delicacy with exaggerated movements of his jaws. The hound likewise had savored each of three additional tidbits that his young master was conned into sharing, instead of wolfing them down.

  The boy had drunk bottled water from the container, but this had proved more difficult for the dog, resulting in splashed upholstery and wet fur. In the console between the seats were molded-plastic cupholders, and when the boy filled one of these with water, his companion lapped it up efficiently.

  Since decamping from the Colorado mountains, they had journeyed wherever a series of convenient rides had taken them.

  For now, they travel without a destination, vagabonds but not carefree.

  The killers are exceptionally well trained in stalking, using both their natural skills and electronic support, so resourceful and cunning that they are likely to track down their quarry no matter how successful the boy might be at quickly putting miles between himself and them. Although distance won’t foil his enemies, time is his ally. The longer he eludes that savage crew, the fainter his trail becomes—or at least this is what he believes. Every hour of survival will bring him closer to ultimate freedom, and each new sunrise will allow a slight diminishment of his fear.

  Now, in the Utah night, he sits boldly in the Explorer and sings along with the catchy music on the radio, having pretty much learned the repeating chorus and also each verse as he first heard it. Ghost riders in the sky. Can there be such things?

  Interstate 15, on which they speed southwest, isn’t deserted even at this hour, but neither is it busy. Beyond the wide median strip, traffic races northeast toward Salt Lake City, with what seems like angry energy, as knights might thunder toward a joust, lances of light piercing the high-desert darkness. In these nearer southbound lanes, cars overtake the auto transport and, from time to time, large trucks pass, as well.

  The digital readout on the radio, powered by the car’s battery, emits a glow, but the faint radiance is insufficient to illuminate the boy or to draw the attention of any motorist rocketing by at seventy or eighty miles per hour. He’s not concerned about being seen, only about losing the comforting music when the battery eventually dies.

  Cozy in the dark SUV, in the embracing scent of new leather and the comforting smell of the damp but drying dog, he isn’t much interested in those passing travelers. He’s peripherally aware of them only because of their roaring engines and their wind wakes, which buffet the transport.

  “Ghost Riders in the Sky” is followed by “Cool Water,” a song about a thirst-plagued cowboy and his horse as they cross burning desert sands. After “Cool Water” comes a spate of advertisements, nothing to sing along with.

  When the boy looks out the window in the driver’s door, he sees a familiar vehicle streaking past, faster than ever it had gone when he and the dog had ridden in the back of it among horse blankets and saddles. The white cab features a spotlight rack on the roof. Black canvas walls enclose the cargo bed. This appears to be the truck that had been parked along the lonely county road near the Hammond place, less than twenty-four hours ago.

  Of course, that vehicle hadn’t been unique. Hundreds like it must be in use on ranches across the West.

  Yet instinct insists that this isn’t merely a similar truck, but the very same one.

  He and the dog had abandoned that wheeled sanctuary shortly after dawn, west of Grand Junction, when the driver and his associate stopped to refuel and grab breakfast.

  This auto carrier is their third rolling refuge since dawn, three rides during a day in which they have ricocheted across Utah with the unpredictability of a pinball. After all this time and considering the haphazard nature of their journey, the likelihood of a chance encounter with the saddlery-laden truck is small, though it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

  A coincidence, however, is frequently a glimpse of a pattern otherwise hidden. His heart tells him indisputably what his mind resists: This is no random event, but part of the elaborate design in a tapestry, and at the center of the design is he himself, caught and murdered.

  The brow of the cab gleams as white as skull bone. One loose corner of black canvas flaps like the Reaper’s robe. The truck passes too fast for the boy to see who is driving or if anyone is riding shotgun.

  Supposing he had glimpsed two men wearing cowboy hats, he still couldn’t have been sure that they were the same people who had driven him out of the mountains and west through Grand Junction. He has never seen their faces clearly.

  Even if he could have identified them, they might no longer be innocent horsemen transporting ornate saddles to a rodeo or a s
how arena. They might have become part of the net that is closing around him, straining the dry sea of the desert for the sole survivor of the massacre in Colorado.

  Now they are gone into the night, either unaware that they have passed within feet of him—or alert to his presence and planning to capture him at a roadblock ahead.

  The dog curls on the passenger’s seat and lies with his chin on the console, eyes glimmering with the reflected light of the radio readout.

  Stroking the mutt’s head, rubbing behind one of the floppy ears and then behind the other, the frightened boy takes comfort from the silken coat and the warmth of his friend, successfully repressing a fit of the shivers, though unable entirely to banish an inner chill.

  He is the most-wanted fugitive in the fabled West, surely the most desperately sought runaway in the entire country, from sea to shining sea. A mighty power is set hard against him, and ruthless hunters swarm the night.

  A melodic voice arises from the radio, recounting the story of a lonesome cowpoke and his girlfriend in faraway Texas, but the boy is no longer in the mood to sing along.

  Chapter 9

  BANSHEES, SHRIKES TEARING at their impaled prey, coyote packs in the heat of the hunt, werewolves in the misery of the moon could not have produced more chilling cries than those that caused Leilani to say, “Old Sinsemilla,” and that drew Micky to the open back door of the trailer.

  To the door and through it, down three concrete-block steps, onto the lawn in the last magenta murk of twilight, Micky proceeded with caution. Her wariness didn’t halt her altogether, because she was certain that someone in terrible pain needed immediate help.

  In the yard next door, beyond the sagging picket fence, a white-robed figure thrashed in the gloaming, as though ablaze and frantic to douse the flames. Not a single tongue of fire could be seen.

  Micky crazily thought of killer bees, which might also have caused the shrieking figure to perform these frenzied gyrations. With the sun down, however, this was not an hour for bees, not even though the baked earth still radiated stored heat. Besides, the air wasn’t vibrating with the hum of an angry swarm.

  Micky glanced back at the trailer, where Leilani stood in the open doorway, silhouetted against faint candleglow.

  “I haven’t had dessert yet,” the girl said, and she retreated out of sight.

  The apparition in the dark yard next door stopped squealing, but in a silence as disconcerting as the cries had been, it continued to turn, to writhe, to flail at the air. Its diaphanous white robe billowed and whirled as though this were a manic ghost that had no patience for the eerie but tedious pace of a traditional haunting.

  When she reached the swagging fence, Micky could see that the tormented spirit was of this earth, not visiting from Beyond. Pale and willowy, the woman spun and swooned and jerked erect and spun again, barefoot in the crisp dead grass.

  She didn’t seem to be in physical pain, after all. She might have been working off excess energy in a frenetic freestyle dance, but she might just as likely have been suffering some type of spasmodic fit.

  She wore a silk or nainsook full-length slip with elaborate embroidery and ribbon lace on the wide shoulder straps and bodice, as well as on the deep flounce that hemmed the skirt. The garment appeared not merely old-fashioned but antique, not feminine in a liberated contemporary let’s have-hot-sex style, but feminine in a frilly post-Victorian sense, and Micky imagined that it had been packed away in someone’s attic trunk for decades.

  Exhaling explosively, inhaling in great ragged gasps, the woman flung herself toward exhaustion, whether by fit or fandango.

  “Are you all right?” Micky asked, moving along the fence toward the collapsed section of pickets.

  Apparently neither as a reply nor as an expression of physical pain, the dancing woman let out a pathetic whimper, the fearful sound that a miserable dog might make in a cage at the animal pound.

  The fallen fence pales clicked and rattled under Micky’s feet as she entered the adjoining property.

  Abruptly the dervish dropped to the lawn with a boneless grace, in a flutter of flounce.

  Micky hurried to her, knelt at her side. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  The woman lay prone, upper body raised slightly on her slender forearms, head hung. Her face was an inch or two from the ground and hidden by glossy cascades of hair that appeared to be white in the crosslight of the moon and the fading purple dusk, but that probably matched Leilani’s shade of blond. Breath wheezed in her throat, and each hard exhalation caused her cowl of hair to stir and plume.

  After a hesitation, Micky put a consoling hand on her shoulder, but Mrs. Maddoc didn’t respond to the touch any more than she had reacted to Micky’s questions. Tremors quaked through her.

  Remaining at the stricken woman’s side, Micky looked across the fence and saw Geneva at the back door of the trailer, standing on the top step, watching. Leilani remained inside.

  Reliably off-center, Aunt Gen waved gaily, as though the trailer were an ocean liner about to steam out of port on a long holiday.

  Micky wasn’t surprised to find herself returning the wave. After a week with Geneva, she’d already absorbed a measure of her aunt’s attitude toward the bad news and the sorrier turns of life that fate delivered. Gen met misfortune not simply with stoic resignation, but with a sort of amused embrace; she refused to dwell on or even to lament adversities, and she remained determined instead to receive them as though they were disguised blessings from which unexpected benefits would arise in time. Part of Micky figured this approach to hardship and calamity worked best if you’d been shot in the head and if you confused sentimental cinema with reality, but another part of her, the newly evolving Micky, found not only solace but also inspiration in this Gen Zen. This evolving Micky returned her aunt’s wave.

  Geneva waved again, more exuberantly, but before Micky could become involved in an Abbott and Costello routine involving gestures instead of banter, the fallen woman at her side whimpered pitiably, more than once this time. Her thin cold plaints melted into a moan of abject misery, and the moan quickly dissolved into weeping—not the genteel tears of a melancholy maiden, but wretched racking sobs.

  “What’s wrong? What can I do?” Micky worried, although she no longer expected a coherent reply or even any response whatsoever.

  At the Maddocs’ rented mobile home, drapery-filtered lamplight glowed dark sour orange, less welcoming than the baleful fire in a menacing jack-o’-lantern. The draperies were shut tight, and no one watched from any window. Beyond the open back door lay a deserted kitchen dimly revealed by the face of an illuminated wall clock.

  If Preston Maddoc, alias Dr. Doom, was at home, his disinterest in his wife’s extreme distress couldn’t have been more complete.

  Micky squeezed the woman’s shoulder reassuringly. Although she believed it was the fabrication of Leilani’s pyrotechnic imagination, she used the only name that she knew: “Sinsemilla?”

  Whip-quick, the woman snapped her head up, blonde tresses lashing the air. Her face, half revealed in the gloom, drew taut with shock; the startled eyes flared so wide that white shone around the full circumference of each iris.

  She threw off Micky’s hand and scooted backward in the grass. A last sob clogged her throat, and when she tried to swallow it, the thick cry resurged, although not as a sob anymore, but as a snarl.

  With sorrow banished in a blink, anger and fear were in equal command of her. “You don’t own me!”

  “Easy, easy now,” Micky counseled, still on her knees, making placating gestures with her hands.

  “You can’t control me with a name!”

  “I was only trying to—”

  Fury fired her rant, which grew hotter by the word: “Witch with a broomstick up your ass, witch bitch, diabolist, hag, flying down out of the moon with my name on your tongue, think you can spellcast me with a shrewd guess of a name, but that’s not going to happen, no one’s the boss of me or ever will be
, not by magic or money, not with force or doctors or laws or sweet talk, nobody EVER the boss of me!”

  In response to this wild irrationality, with the potential for violence implicit in this woman’s nuclear-hot anger, Micky realized that only silence and retreat made sense. Rocking knee to knee in the prickly grass, she edged backward.

  Evidently inflamed by this movement even though it represented a clear concession, Sinsemilla spun to her feet with such agitation that she seemed to flail herself erect: skirt flounce churning around her legs, hair tossing like the deadly locks of an enraged Medusa. In her furious ascension, she stirred up an acrid cloud of dust and a powder of dead grass pulverized by a summer of hammering sun.

  Through clenched teeth that squeezed each sibilant into a hiss, she said, “Hag of a witch bitch, sorcerer’s seed, you don’t scare me!”

  Having risen from her knees as Sinsemilla whirled upright, Micky sidled toward the fence, reluctant to turn her back on this neighbor from the wrong side of Hell.

  A thieving cloud pocketed the silver-coin moon. At the western horizon, as the last livid blister of light drained off the heel of night, Micky glimpsed enough of a resemblance between this crazed woman and Leilani to be convinced against her will that they were mother and daughter.

  When brittle wood cracked and she felt a picket underfoot, she knew that she’d found the passage in the fence. She wanted to glance down, afraid the pickets might trip her, but she kept her attention on her unpredictable neighbor.

  Sinsemilla seemed to shed her anger as suddenly as she’d grown it. She adjusted the shoulder straps on her full-length slip, and then seized the roomy skirt in both hands and shook it as if casting off bits of dry grass. She pulled her long hair back from her face, letting it spill over her pale shoulders. Arching her spine, rolling her head, spreading her arms, the woman stretched as languorously as a sleeper waking from a delicious dream.