One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 22

As tasty as fresh orange juice is when lapped out of a shoe, Old Yeller nevertheless loses interest in her drink when the siren grows as loud as an air-raid warning in the immediate wake of the motor home. Curtis’s concern becomes her concern, too, and she watches him, ears pricked, body tensed, ready to follow his lead.

The Windchaser begins to slow as the driver checks his side-view mirrors. Even serial killers who keep collections of victims’ teeth at bedside for nostalgic examination will evidently pull over without hesitation for the highway patrol.

When the police cruiser sweeps past and rockets away into the night, the motor home gains speed once more, but Old Yeller doesn’t return to her juice. As long as Curtis remains uneasy, the dog will stay on guard, as well.

First the helicopter tracking the highway toward Nevada and now this patrol car following: These are signs and portents of trouble ahead. Though he may be dead, J. Edgar Hoover is no fool, and if his restless spirit guides the organization from which he so reluctantly departed, then two squads of FBI agents, and probably various other authorities, are already establishing roadblocks on the interstate both northeast and southwest of the truck stop.

Sitting on the edge of the bed once more, Curtis extracts the wadded currency from the pockets of his jeans. He smooths the bills and sorts them. Not much to sort. He counts his treasury. Not much to count.

He certainly doesn’t have enough money to bribe an FBI agent, and by far the most of them can’t be bribed, anyway. They aren’t politicians, after all. If the National Security Agency also has operatives in the field here, which now seems likely, and possibly the C1A, as well — those guys won’t sell out their country and their honor for a few wrinkled five-dollar bills. Not if movies, suspense novels, and history books can be believed. Maybe the history texts are written with political bias, and maybe some of those novelists took literary license, but you could trust most of what you saw in movies, for sure.

With his meager resources, Curtis has little hope of being able to bribe his way past even state or local authorities. He shoves the currency into his pockets once more.

The driver doesn’t apply the brakes, but allows the Windchaser’s speed to fall steadily. Not good, not good. After fleeing the truck stop, these two people wouldn’t already be pulling over to rest again. Traffic must be clotting ahead of them.

“Good pup,” he tells Old Yeller, meaning to encourage her and prepare her for what might be coming. Good pup. Stay close.

As their speed continues to fall precipitously to fifty, then below forty, under thirty, as the brakes are tapped a time or two, Curtis goes to the bedroom window.

The dog follows at his heels.

Curtis slides a pane open. Wind blusters like restless bears at the bars of a cage, but this is a mildly warm and toothless zephyr.

He boosts himself against the sill. Leaning out, he squints into the wind, toward the front of the motor home.

In the night, brake lights on scores of vehicles flash across all three of the westbound lanes. More than half a mile ahead, at the top of a rise, traffic has come to a complete stop.

As the Windchaser slows steadily, Curtis slides shut the window and takes up a position at the bedroom door. The faithful dog stays at his side.

Good pup.

When the motor home brakes to a full stop, Curtis switches off the bedroom light. He waits in darkness.

More likely than not, both sociopathic owners of the Windchaser will remain in their cockpit seats for a while. They’ll be studying the roadblock with acute interest, planning strategy in the event of a vehicle inspection.

At any moment, however, one of them might retreat here to the bedroom. If a search by authorities seems imminent, these tooth fetishists will try to gather up and dispose of their incriminating collection of grisly souvenirs.

The advantage of surprise will belong to Curtis, but he’s not confident that surprise alone will carry the day. Either of the murderous pair up front will enjoy the greater advantages of size, strength, and psychotic disregard for his or her personal safety.

In addition to surprise, however, the boy has Old Yeller. And the dog has teeth. Curtis has teeth, too, though his aren’t as big and sharp as those of the dog, and unlike his four-legged companion, he doesn’t have the heart to use them.

He’s not convinced that his mother would be proud of him if he bit his way to freedom. Fighting men and women have seldom, if ever, to his knowledge, been decorated for bravery after gnawing their way through their adversaries. Thank God, then, for his sister-becoming.

Good pup.

After the Windchaser has been stopped for a couple minutes, it eases forward a few car lengths before halting again, and Curtis uses this distraction to open the bedroom door a crack. The lever-action handle squeaks softly, as do the hinges, and the door swings outward.

He puts one eye to the inch-wide gap and studies the bathroom beyond, which separates the bedroom from the galley, lounge, and cockpit. The door at the opposite end of the bath stands less than halfway open, admitting light from the forward part of the vehicle, but he can’t see much of what lies beyond it.

Staying closer than Curtis intended, the dog presses against his legs and pushes her nose to the gap between jamb and door. He hears her sniffing. Her exceptional sense of smell brings to her more information than all five human senses combined, so he doesn’t nudge her out of the way.

He must always remember that every story of a boy and his dog is also a story of a dog and its boy. No such relationship can be a success without respect.

The dog’s tail wags, brushing Curtis’s legs, either because she catches an appealing scent or because she agrees with his assessment of the fundamental requirement of a boy-dog friendship.

Suddenly a man enters the bathroom from the front of the motor home.

In the dark bedroom, Curtis almost shuts the door in shock. He realizes just in time that the one-inch gap won’t draw the man’s attention as much as will the movement of the door closing.

He expects the guy to come directly to the bedroom, and he’s ready to use the door as a battering ram to knock this killer off his feet. Then he and the dog will dash for freedom.

Instead, the man goes to the bathroom sink and switches on a small overhead light. Standing in profile to Curtis, he examines his face in the mirror.

Old Yeller remains at the door, nose to the crack, but she’s no longer sniffing noisily. She’s in stealth mode, though her tail continues to wag gently.

Although scared, Curtis is also intrigued. There’s something fascinating about secretly watching strangers in their own home, even if their home is on wheels.

The man squints at the mirror. He rubs one finger over the right corner of his mouth, squints again, and seems satisfied. With two fingers, he pulls down both lower eyelids and examines his eyes— God knows for what. Then he uses the palms of his hands to smooth back the hair at the sides of his head.

Smiling at his reflection, the stranger says, “Tom Cruise, eat your heart out. Vern Tuttle rules.”

Curtis doesn’t know who Vern Tuttle may be, but Tom Cruise is, of course, an actor, a movie star, a worldwide icon. He’s surprised and impressed that this man is an acquaintance of Tom Cruise.

He’s heard people say that it’s a small world, and this Cruise connection sure does support that contention.

Next, the man grins at his reflection. This is not an amusing grin. Even viewed in profile, it’s an exaggerated, ferocious grin. He leans over the sink, closer to the mirror, and studies his bared teeth with unnervingly intense interest.

Curtis is disturbed but not surprised by this development. He already knows that one or both of these people are homicidal tooth fetishists.

More disturbing even than the grinning man’s obsession with his teeth is the fact that otherwise he appears entirely normal. Pudgy, about sixty, with a full head of thick white hair, he might play a grandfather if he were ever in a major motion picture; but he would never be cast as a chainsaw-wielding maniac.

Many of the same folks who say that it’s a small world have also said you can’t judge a book by its cover, meaning people as well as books, and now they are proved right again.

Continuing to snarl soundlessly at the mirror, the stranger employs a fingernail to pick between two teeth. He examines whatever is now on his finger, frowns, looks closer, and finally flicks the bit of stuff into the sink.

Curtis shudders. His fevered imagination supplies numerous chilling possibilities for what was dislodged from those teeth, all related to the well-known fact that most serial killers are also cannibals.

Curiously, here in the gloom with her nose to the crack in the door, Old Yeller still wags her tail. She hasn’t acquired Curtis’s dread of this human monster. She seems to have an opinion of her own, to which she stubbornly clings. The boy worries about the reliability of her animal instincts.

The likely cannibal clicks off the sink light, turns, and crosses the bathroom to the small cubicle that contains the toilet. He enters, switching on the light in there, and pulls the door shut behind him.

The boy’s mother used to say that a wasted opportunity wasn’t just a missed chance, but was a wound to your future. Miss too many opportunities, thus sustaining too many wounds, and you wouldn’t have a future at all.

With one killer attending to his bodily functions and the other in the driver’s seat of the Windchaser, this is an opportunity that only a disobedient, mother-ignoring boy would fail to take.

Curtis pushes open the bedroom door. You first, girl.

Tail wagging, the pooch pads into the bathroom — and straight toward the toilet cubicle.

No, pup, no, no! Out, pup, out!

Maybe the power of Curtis’s panic is transmitted to Old Yeller

along the psychic wire that links every boy in his dog, but that’s unlikely because the two of them have so recently met and therefore are still in the process of becoming a fully simpatico boy-dog unit. More likely, she’s gotten a better smell of the cunningly deceptive grandfatherly stranger in the toilet cubicle and now recognizes him for the monster that he is. Whether the psychic wire or a good nose is responsible, she changes direction and pads out of the bathroom into the galley.

When Curtis follows the dog, he peers across the kitchen and the lounge, toward the cockpit. The woman occupies the driver’s seat, her attention devoted to the stalled traffic blocking the highway.

Curtis is relieved to see that this co-killer is encumbered by a safety harness that secures her to the command chair. She won’t be able to release those restraints and clamber out of the seat in time to block the exit.

Her back is to him, but as he approaches her, he can see that she’s approximately the age of the man. Her short-cropped hair glows supernaturally white.

Chastened by her near-disastrous misreading of the grandfatherly man’s character, Old Yeller proceeds waglessly and with caution, past the dining nook, paw by stealthy paw, pussyfooting as silently as any creeping cat.

As the dog arrives at the exit and as Curtis reaches over the dog toward the door handle, the woman senses them. She’s snacking on something, and she looks up, chewing, expecting the man, startled to discover a boy and his dog. Surprise freezes her in mid-chew, with her hand halfway to her mouth, and in that hand is a human ear.

Curtis screams, and even when he realizes that the snack in her hand isn’t a human ear, after all, but merely a large potato chip, he isn’t able to stop screaming. For all he knows, she eats potato chips with human ears, the way other people eat them with pretzels on the side, or with peanuts, or with sour-cream dip.

Door won’t open. Handle won’t move. He presses, presses harder. No good. Locked, it must be locked. He rattles it up and down, up and down, insistently, to no effect.

In the driver’s seat, the startled woman comes unstartled enough to speak, but the boy can’t make out what she’s saying because the loud rapping of his jackhammer heart renders meaningless those few words that penetrate his screaming.

Curtis and the door, willpower against matter, on the micro scale where will should win: Yet the lock holds, and still the door doesn’t open for him. Magic lock, bolt fused to the striker plate by a sorcerer’s spell, it resists his muscle and his mind.

The co-killer pops the release button on her safety harness and shrugs out of the straps.

Oh, Lord, there’s just one door, the sucker’s magically locked, all his tricks are thwarted, and he’s trapped in this claustrophobic rolling slaughterhouse with psychotic retirees who’ll eat him with chips and keep his teeth in their nightstand drawer.

Fierce as she has never been before, Old Yeller lunges toward the woman. Snarling, snapping, foaming, spitting, the dog seems to be saying, Teeth? You want teeth? Take a look at THESE teeth, go fang-to-fang with ME, you psychotic bitch, and see how much you still like teeth when I’M done with you!

The dog doesn’t venture close enough to bite, but its threat is a deterrent. The woman at once abandons the idea of getting up from the driver’s seat. She shrinks away from them, and terror twists her face into an ugly knot that is no doubt the same expression she has seen on the faces of the many victims to whom she herself has shown no mercy.

Jerked up and jammed down, the lever handle doesn’t release the latch, but pulled inward, it works, revealing that it wasn’t locked. No spell had been cast on the mechanism, after all. Curtis’s failure to open it sooner wasn’t a failure of mind or muscle, but a collapse of reason, the result of runaway fear.

Although the boy is mortified by this discovery, he’s also still unable to get a grip on the tossing reins of his panic. He throws the door open, plunges down the steps, and stumbles recklessly onto the blacktop with such momentum that he crashes into the side of a Lexus stopped in the lane adjacent to the motor home.

Face to glass, nose flattened a millimeter short of fracture, he peers into the car as if into an aquarium stocked with strange fish. The fish — actually a man with a buzz cut behind the wheel, a brunette with spiky hair in the passenger’s seat — stare back at him with the lidless eyes and the puckered-O mouths that he would have encountered from the finny residents of a real aquarium.

Curtis pushes away from the car and turns just as Old Yeller, no longer barking savagely, leaps out of the motor home. Grinning, wagging her tail, aware that she’s the hero of the hour, she turns left and trots away with the spring of pride in her step.

The dog follows the broken white line that defines this lane of stopped traffic from the next, and the boy hurries after the dog. He’s no longer screaming, but he’s still sufficiently addled by fear to concede leadership temporarily to his brave companion.

He glances back into a blaze of headlights and sees the white-haired woman gazing out and down at him from behind the windshield of the Windchaser. She’s half out of her seat, pulling herself up with the steering wheel, the better to see him. From here, she might be mistaken for an innocent and kindly woman — perhaps a librarian, considering that a librarian would know how easily a book of monsters could be disguised as a sweet romance novel with just a switch of the dust jackets.

A whiff of the city has come to this high desert. The warm air is bitter with the stink of exhaust fumes from the idling engines of the vehicles that are backed up from the roadblock.

Some motorists, recognizing the length of the delay ahead of them, have switched off their engines and gotten out of their cars to stretch their legs. Not all have fled the showdown at the truck stop; and as they rub the backs of their necks, roll their shoulders, arch their spines, and crack their knuckles, they ask one another what’s-happening-what’s-up-what’s-this-all-about.

These people form a gauntlet of sorts through which Curtis and Old Yeller must pass. Twisting, dodging, the boy treats them with equal courtesy, although he knows that they may be either ministers or murderers, or murdering ministers, either saints or sinners, bank clerks or bank robbers, humble or arrogant, generous or envious, sane or quite mad. “Excuse me, sir. Thank you, ma’am. Sorry, sir. Excuse me, ma’am. Excuse me, sir.”

Eventually, Curtis is halted by a tall man with the gray pinched face and permanently engraved wince lines of a long-term sufferer of constipation. Between a Ford van and a red Cadillac, he steps in the boy’s way and places a hand on his chest. “Whoa there, son, what’s the’ matter, where you going?”

“Serial killers,” Curtis gasps, pointing toward the motor home, which is more than twenty vehicles behind him. “In that Windchaser, they keep body parts in the bedroom.”

Disconcerted, the stranger drops his restraining hand, and his wince lines cut deeper into his lean face as he squints toward the sixteen-ton, motorized house of horrors.

Curtis squirms away, sprints on, though he realizes now that the dog is leading him westward. The roadblock is still a considerable distance ahead, beyond the top of the hill and not yet in sight, but this isn’t the direction that they ought to be taking.

Between a Chevy pickup and a Volkswagen, a jolly-looking man with a freckled face and a clown’s crop of fiery red hair snares Curtis by the shirt, nearly causing him to skid off his feet. “Hey, hey, hey! Who’re you running from, boy?”

Sensing that this guy won’t be rattled by the serial-killer alert — or by much else, for that matter — Curtis resorts to the excuse that Burt Hooper, the waffle-eating trucker in Donella’s restaurant, made for him earlier. He isn’t sure what it means, but it got him out of trouble before, so he says, “Sir, I’m not quite right.”

“Hell, that’s no surprise to me,” the red-haired man declares, but the tail of Curtis’s shirt remains twisted tightly in his fist. “You steal something, boy?”

No rational person would suppose that a ten-year-old boy would roam the interstate, waiting for a police roadblock to stop traffic and provide an opportunity to steal from motorists. Therefore, Curtis assumes that this freckled interrogator intuits his larcenies dating all the way back to the Hammond house in Colorado. Perhaps this man is psychic and will momentarily receive clairvoyant visions of five-dollar bills and frankfurters filched during Curtis’s long flight for freedom.

Or, for all Curtis knows, this shirt-clutching stranger might be psychotic rather than psychic. Loony, mad, insane. There’s a lot of that going around. Dressed in sandals and baggy plaid shorts and a T-shirt that proclaims LOVE IS THE ANSWER, with his jolly freckled face, this man doesn’t appear to be a lunatic, but so many things in this world aren’t what they appear to be, including Curtis himself.

The dog goes straight for the shorts. No bark, no growl, no warning, in fact no evident animosity: Almost playful, she bounds forward, snatches a muzzleful of plaid, and jerks the stranger off his feet. The man cries out and lets go of Curtis, but Old Yeller isn’t as quick to release the shorts. She pulls them down his legs, baring his underwear. He kicks at her, but the shorts trammel him; he fails to land a foot in fur, though unintentionally he flings off one of his sandals.

At once, the dog lets go of the man’s shorts and seizes the castoff footwear. Grinning around a mouthful of sandal, she sprints westward along the broken white line, flanked by frustrated motorists in their overheating vehicles.

She’s still headed in the dead-wrong direction, but Curtis races after Old Yeller because they can’t turn back toward the Windchaser, not with so many altercations likely to be rejoined if they do. They can’t cross the median strip and attempt to hitchhike east, either, because the traffic whizzing past in that direction will be halted by another roadblock somewhere beyond the truck stop.

Their only hope lies in the vastness of the high desert to the north of the interstate, out there where the black sky and the black land meet, where the sharper facets of quartz-rich rocks reflect the glitter of stars. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, and tarantulas will be more hospitable than the merciless pack of hunters to which the two cowboys had belonged — to which they still belong if they survived the fire-fight in the restaurant kitchen.

The FBI, the National Security Agency, and other legitimate authorities won’t kill Curtis immediately upon identifying him, as will the cowboys and their ilk. Once he’s in custody, however, he won’t be allowed to go free. Not ever.

Worse: If he’s in custody, those vicious hunters who killed his family — and the Hammond family, too — will sooner or later learn his whereabouts. Eventually they will get to him no matter in what deep bunker or high redoubt he’s kept, regardless of how many heavily armed bodyguards are assigned to protect him.

Ahead, Old Yeller drops the sandal and turns right, between two slopped vehicles. Curtis follows. The dog lingers on the shoulder of the highway until the boy catches up with her. Then, untroubled by I he possibility of capture or snakebite, frisky with the prospect of new terrain and greater excitement, tail raised like a flag, she leads the charge down the gently sloped embankment from the elevated interstate.

If Curtis could trade this particular swell adventure for a raft and a river, he would without hesitation make the swap. Instead, he lights out for the Territory, chasing the clever mutt, hurrying away from the carnival blaze of blockaded traffic and across a gradually rising wasteland of sand, scrub, shale. Weathered stone sentinels loom like the Injuns who probably stood here to watch wagon trains full of nervous settlers wending westward when the interstate had been de-lined not by pavement and signposts but by nothing more than landmarks, broken wagon wheels of previous failed expeditions, and the scattered bones of men and horses stripped of flesh by vultures, vermin. Curtis and Old Yeller go now where both the brave and the foolish have gone before them, in ages past: boy and dog, dog and boy, with the moon retiring behind blankets of clouds in the west and the sun still fast abed in the east, sister-becoming and her devoted brother racing north through the desert darkness, into darkness deeper still.