One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 57

MAYBE PRESTON STOPPED to play blackjack in Hawthorne's small casino, or maybe he found a good point of observation from which to study the spectacular panoply of stars that brightened the desert sky, hoping to spot a majestic extraterrestrial cruise ship on an aerial tour of jerkwater towns. Or maybe he took so long to return with dinner because he paused to kill some poor wretch who had ugly thumbs and therefore was fated to lead a life of substandard quality.

When at last he arrived, he brought paper bags from which arose ravishing aromas. Submarine sandwiches packed with meat and cheese and onions and peppers, drenched in dressing. Pints of fabulous potato salad, macaroni salad. Rice pudding, pineapple cheesecake.

For old Sinsemilla, her ever thoughtful husband had provided a tomato-and-zucchini sandwich, with bean paste and mustard, on a whole-wheat roll, a side order of pickled squash seasoned with sea salt, and carob-flavored tofu pudding.

Due to the long day on the highway, all the wicked scheming, the drugs snorted, the drugs smoked, the drugs eaten, and the chasers of tequila, dear Mater was unfortunately too unconscious to eat dinner with her family.

Valiant Preston proved himself to be as much of an athlete as he was an academic. He muscled the motherthing's limp body off the galley floor and carried her into their bedroom at the back of the motor home, where she could more discreetly lie in a disreputable sprawl. As she was borne away, old Sinsemilla made no more sound and exhibited no more proof of life than would have a sack of cement.

Dr. Doom remained in their boudoir for a while, and although the door stood open, Leilani didn't venture one step toward that ominous threshold to see what might be up. She assumed he would be turning down the bedclothes, lighting a stick of strawberry-kiwi incense, undressing his enchantingly comatose bride, and in general setting the stage for a session of connubial bliss utterly unlike anything that the late Dame Barbara Cartland, prolific writer of romance novels, had ever imagined in the more than one thousand love stories that she had produced.

Leilani took advantage of Preston's absence to open the sofabed in the lounge, which was already fitted with sheets and a blanket, and to poke through the bags of sandwich-shop food, taking her fair share of the tastiest stuff. She retreated to her bed with dinner and with the novel about evil pigmen from another dimension, eating and pretending to read with great absorption in order to avoid having to sit with the pseudofather at the table.

Her worries about being forced to share a menacing little dinner for two with Preston Maddoc, alias Jordan Banks, possibly with black candles and a bleached skull on the table, proved to be unfounded. He opened a bottle of Guinness and settled down alone at the dinette, extending no invitation to join him.

He sat facing her, perhaps twelve feet away.

Relying on peripheral vision, Leilani knew that from time to time, he looked at her, perhaps even stared for extended periods; however, he said not a single word. In fact, he hadn't spoken to her since lunch in the coffee shop west of Vegas. Because she had openly claimed that he killed her brother, Dr. Doom was pouting.

You might think that homicidal maniacs wouldn't be thin-skinned. Considering their crimes against their fellow human beings, against humanity itself, you might suppose that they would expect to have their motives questioned and even to be insulted on occasion. Over the years, however, Leilani's experience with Preston indicated that homicidal maniacs had feelings more tender and more easily bruised than those of girls in early adolescence. She could almost feel the hurt and the sense of injustice radiating from him.

He knew, of course, that he had killed Lukipela. He didn't suffer from amnesia. He hadn't murdered and buried Luki while in a fugue state. Yet he seemed to feel that Leilani had shown woefully bad manners by referring to this sad, gruesome business at lunch and in front of a stranger, and by calling into question his veracity in the matter of the extraterrestrial healers and their Luki-lifting levitation beam.

She was certain that if she looked up from her pigmen book and apologized, Preston would smile and say something like, Hey, that's all right, pumpkin, everybody makes mistakes, which was too creepy to contemplate, although she couldn't seem to stop contemplating it.

At this very moment, his inamorata awaited him, as slack as sludge, as aware and alert as a block of cheese. The sweet prospect of romance cheered him sufficiently that he didn't sit brooding like a mad Russian over dinner. The doom doctor ate quickly and returned to the bedroom, closing the door behind him this time, leaving the dinette littered with bags, deli containers, and dirty plastic spoons, confident that Leilani would clean up after him.

Immediately, she hopped out of bed, fetched the TV remote, and switched on a humorless sitcom. She turned the sound up only as loud as she was permitted to have it at night; but the volume, although low, would be sufficient to screen any expressions of passion that she might otherwise be able to hear from the room at the far end of the motor home.

While the wizard-baby breeder lay insensate and while Preston remained preoccupied with unthinkable acts back there in the love nest of the damned, Leilani lifted the foot of her mattress, at the right-hand corner, pulled the two strips of tape off the ticking, and gingerly felt inside the hole. She located the small plastic bag in which, months ago, she'd stowed the knife to ensure that it wouldn't gradually work deeper into the padding.

The package didn't feel as it should. The size, the shape, and the weight were all wrong.

The plastic hag was clear. Extracting it from beneath the mattress, she saw at once that it contained not the knife that she had hidden, not a knife at all, but the penguin figurine that had belonged to Tetsy, that Preston had brought home because it reminded him of Luki, and that Leilani had left in the care of Geneva Davis.