Dean R. Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

ONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN A Bantam BookDecember 2001

Book design by Virginia Norey

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is

entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any

information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from

the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Koontz, Dean R. Dean Ray

One Door Away From Heaven

Dean Koontz

ISBN 0-553-80137-6

1. Physically handicapped children-Fiction.

2. Unidentified flying object cults-Fiction.

3. Missing children-Fiction.

4. Problem families-Fiction.

5. Female friendship-Fiction.

6. Girls-Fiction. I. Tide.

PS3561.O55O542001

81354-dc21 2001049952

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a

rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other

countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York

10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BVG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to Irwyn Applebaum, who has encouraged me "to take the

train out there where the trains don't usually go," and whose character as

both a publisher and a man has restored my lost faith in the publishing

industry, or business, or folly, or whatever else it might accurately be

called.

To Tracy Devine, my editor, who never panics when, far past my deadline, I

want to take yet more time to do draft number forty before turning in the

script, whose editorial eye has twenty-ten vision, who is graciousness

personified, who makes every phase of the work a delight-and who will think

that this dedication is too effusive and in need of cutting. Well, this time

she's wrong.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. -James Thurber

Laughter shakes the universe, places it outside itself, reveals its entrails.

,

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently, there

must be a beverage.

-Woody Alien

In the end, everything is a gag, -Charlie Chaplin

Unextinguished laughter shakes the skies. - Homer, The Iliad

Funny had better be sad somewhere.

-Jerry Lewis

Chapter 1

THE WORLD IS FULL of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time

can't mend fractured hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.

Currently, sunshine was Micky Bellsong's medication of choice, and southern

California in late August was an apothecary with a deep supply of this

prescription.

Tuesday afternoon, wearing a bikini and oiled for broiling, Micky reclined in

a lounge chair in her aunt Geneva's backyard. The nylon webbing was a nausea-

inducing shade of green, and it sagged, too, and the aluminum joints creaked

as though the lawn furniture were far older than Micky, who was only twenty-

eight, but who sometimes felt ancient.

Her aunt, from whom fate had stolen everything except a reliable sense of

humor, referred to the yard as "the garden." That would be the rosebush.

The property was wider than it was deep, to allow the full length of the house

trailer to face the street. Instead of a lawn with trees, a narrow covered

patio shaded the front entrance. Here in back, a strip of grass extended from

one side of the lot to the other, but it provided a scant twelve feet of turf

between the door and the rear fence. The grass flourished because Geneva

watered it regularly with a hose.

The rosebush, however, responded perversely to tender care. In spite of ample

sunshine, water, and plant food, in spite of the regular aeration of its roots

and periodic treatment with measured doses of insecticide, the bush remained

as scraggly and as blighted us any specimen watered with venom and fed pure

sulfur in the Satanic gardens of Hell.

Face to the sun, eyes closed, striving to empty her mind of all thought, yet

troubled by insistent memories, Micky had been cooking for half an hour when a

small sweet voice asked, "Are you suicidal?"

She turned her head toward the speaker and saw a girl of nine or ten standing

at the low, sagging picket fence that separated this trailer space from the

one to the west. Sun glare veiled the kid's features.

"Skin cancer kills," the girl explained.

"So does vitamin D deficiency."

"Not likely."

"Your bones get soft."

"Rickets. I know. But you can get vitamin D in tuna, eggs, and dairy products.

That's better than too much sun." \

Closing her eyes again, turning her face to the deadly blazing heavens, Micky

said, "Well, I don't intend to live forever."

"Why not?"

"Maybe you haven't noticed, but nobody does."

"I probably will," the girl declared.

"How's that work?"

"A little extraterrestrial DNA."

"Yeah, right. You're part alien."

"Not yet. I have to make contact first."

Micky opened her eyes again and squinted at the ET wannabe. "You've been

watching too many reruns of The X-Files, kid."

"I've only got until my next birthday, and then all bets are off." The girl

moved along the swooning fence to a point where it had entirely collapsed. She

clattered across the flattened section of pickets and approached Micky. "Do

you believe in life after death?"

"I'm not sure I believe in life before death," Micky said.

"I knew you were suicidal."

"I'm not suicidal. I'm just a wiseass."

Even after stepping off the splintered fence staves onto the grass, the girl

moved awkwardly. "We're renting next door. We just moved in. My name's

Leilani."

As Leilani drew closer, Micky saw that she wore a complicated steel brace on

her left leg, from the ankle to above the knee.

"Isn't that a Hawaiian name?" Micky asked.

"My mother's a little nuts about all things Hawaiian."

Leilani wore khaki shorts. Her right leg was fine, but in the cradle of steel

and padding, her left leg appeared to be malformed.

"In fact," Leilani continued, "old Sinsemilla-that's my mother- is a little

nuts, period."

"Sinsemilla? That's a ..."

"Type of marijuana. Maybe she was Cindy Sue or Barbara way back in the

Jurassic period, but she's called herself Sinsemilla as long as I've known

her." Leilani settled into a hideous orange-and-blue chair as decrepit as

Micky's bile-green lounge. "This lawn furniture sucks."

"Someone gave it to Aunt Geneva for nothing."

"She ought to've been paid to take it. Anyway, they put old Sinsemilla in an

institution once and shot like fifty or a hundred thousand volts of

electricity through her brain, but it didn't help."

"You shouldn't make up stuff like that about your own mother."

Leilani shrugged. "It's the truth. I couldn't make up anything as weird as

what is. In fact, they blasted her brain several times. Probably, if they'd

done it just once more, old Sinsemilla would've developed a taste for

electricity. Now she'd be sticking her finger in a socket about ten times a

day. She's an addictive personality, but she means well."

Although the sky was a furnace grate, although Micky was slick with coconut-

scented lotion and sweat, she'd grown all but oblivious of the sun. "How old

are you, kid?"

"Nine. But I'm precocious. What's your name?"

"Micky."

"That's a name for a boy or a mouse. So it's probably Michelle. Most women

your age are named Michelle or Heather or Courtney."

"My age?"

"No offense intended."

"It's Michelina."

Leilani wrinkled her nose, "too precious."

" Michelina Birdsong."

"No wonder you're suicidal."

"Therefore-Micky."

"I'm Klonk."

"You're what?"

"Leilani Klonk."

Micky cocked her head and frowned skeptically. "I'm not sure I should believe

anything you tell me."

"Sometimes names are destiny. Look at you. Two pretty names, and you're as

gorgeous as a model-except for all the sweat and your face puffy with a

hangover."

"Thanks. I guess."

"Me, on the other hand-I've got one pretty name followed by a clinker like

Klonk. Half of me is sort of pretty-"

"You're very pretty," Micky assured her.

This was true. Golden hair. Eyes as blue as gentian petals. The clarity of

Leilani's features promised that hers was not the transient beauty of

childhood, but an enduring quality.

"Half of me," Leilani conceded, "might turn heads one day, but that's balanced

by the fact that I'm a mutant."

"You're not a mutant."

The girl stamped her left foot on the ground, causing the leg brace to rattle

softly. She raised her left hand, which proved to be deformed: The little

finger and the ring finger were fused into a single misshapen digit that was

connected by a thick web of tissue to a gnarled and stubby middle finger.

Until now, Micky hadn't noticed this deformity. "Everyone's got

imperfections," she said.

"This isn't like having a big schnoz. I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I

refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants."

"You want people to be afraid of you?"

"Fear implies respect," Leilani said.

"So far, you're not registering high on my terror meter."

"Give me time. You've got a great body."

Disconcerted to hear such a thing from a child, Micky covered her discomfort

with self-deprecation: "Yeah, well, by nature I'm a huge pudding. I've got to

work hard to stay like this."

"No you don't. You were born perfect, and you've got one of those metabolisms

tuned like a space-shuttle gyroscope. You could eat half a cow and drink a keg

of beer every day, and your butt would actually tighten up a notch."

Micky couldn't remember the last time that she'd been rendered speechless by

anyone, but with this girl, she was nearly befuddled into silence. "How would

you know?"

"I can tell," Leilani assured her. "You don't run, you don't power walk -"

"I workout."

"Oh? When was your last workout?"

"Yesterday," Micky lied.

"Yeah," said Leilani, "and I was out waltzing all night." She stamped her left

foot again, rattling her leg brace. "Having a great metabolism is nothing to

be ashamed about. It's not like laziness or anything."

"Thanks for your approval." "Your boobs are real, aren't they?" "Girl, you are

an amazing piece of work."

"Thanks. They must be real. Even the best implants don't look that natural.

Unless there's major improvement in implant technology, my best hope is to

develop good boobs. You can be a mutant and still attract men if you've got

great boobs. That's been my observation, anyway. Men can be lovely creatures,

but in some ways, they're pathetically predictable." "You're nine, huh?"

"My birthday was February twenty-eighth. That was Ash Wednesday this year. Do

you believe in fasting and penitence?"

With a sigh and a laugh, Micky said, "Why don't we save time and you just tell

me what I believe?"

"Probably not much of anything," Leilani said, without a pause. "Except in

having fun and getting through the day."

Micky was left speechless not by the child's acute perception but by hearing

the truth put so bluntly, especially as this was a truth that she had so long

avoided contemplating.

"Nothing wrong with having fun," said Leilani. "One of the things I believe,

if you want to know, is that we're here to enjoy life." She shook her head.

"Amazing. Men must be all over you."

"Not anymore," Micky said, surprised to hear herself reply at all, let alone

so revealingly.

A lopsided smile tugged at the right corner of the girl's mouth, and

unmistakable merriment enlivened her blue eyes. "Now don't you wish you could

see me as a mutant?"

"What?"

"As long as you think of me as a handicapped waif, your pity doesn't allow you

to be impolite. On the other hand, if you could see me as a weird and possibly

dangerous mutant, you'd tell me none of this is my business, and you'd hustle

me back to my own yard."

"You're looking more like a mutant all the time."

Clapping her hands in delight, Leilani said, "I knew there must be some

gumption in you." She rose from her chair with a hitch and pointed across the

backyard. "What's that thing?"

"A rosebush."

"No, really."

"Really. It's a rosebush."

"No roses."

"The potential's there."

"Hardly any leaves."

"Lots of thorns, though," Micky noted.

Squinching her face, Leilani said, "I bet it pulls up its roots late at night

and creeps around the neighborhood, eating stray cats."

"Lock your doors."

"We don't have cats." Leilani blinked. "Oh." She grinned. "Good one." She

hooked her right hand into an imitation of a claw, raked the air, and hissed.

"What did you mean when you said 'all bets are off'?"

"When did I say that?" Leilani asked disingenuously.

"You said you've only got until your next birthday, and then all bets are

off."

"Oh, the alien-contact thing."

Although that wasn't ;in answer, she turned away from Micky and crossed the

lawn in steel-stiffened gait.

Micky leaned forward from the angled back of the lounge chair. "Leilani?"

"I say a lot of stuff. Not all of it means anything." At the gap in the broken

fence, the girl stopped and turned. "Say, Michelina Bellsong, did I ask

whether you believe in life after death?"

"And I was a wiseass."

"Yeah, I remember now."

"So...do you?" Micky asked.

"Do I what?"

"Believe in life after death?"

Gazing at Micky with a solemnity that she hadn't exhibited before, the girl at

last said, "I better."

As she negotiated the fallen pickets and crossed the neglected sun-browned

lawn next door, the faint click-and-squeak of her leg brace faded until it

could have been mistaken for the language of industrious insects hard at work

in the hot, dry air.

For a while after the girl had gone into the neighboring house trailer, Micky

sat forward in the lounge chair, staring at the door through which she had

disappeared.

Leilani was a pretty package of charm, intelligence, and cocky attitude that

masked an aching vulnerability. But while remembered moments of their

encounter now brought a smile to Micky, she was also left with a vague

uneasiness. Like a quick dark fish, some disturbing half-glimpsed truth had

seemed to dart beneath the surface of their conversation, though it eluded her

net.

The liquid-thick heat of the late-August sun pooled around Micky. She felt as

though she were floating in a hot bath.

The scent of recently mown grass saturated the still air: the intoxicating

essence of summer.

In the distance rose the lulling rumble-hum of freeway traffic, a not

unpleasant drone that might be mistaken for the rhythmic susurration of the

sea.

She should have grown drowsy, at least lethargic, but her mind hummed more

busily than the traffic, and her body grew stiff with a tension that the sun

couldn't cook from her.

Although it seemed unrelated to Leilani Klonk, Micky recalled something that

her aunt Geneva had said only the previous evening, over dinner. . . .

'CHANGE ISN'T EASY, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing how you

think. Changing how you think means changing what you believe about life.

That's hard, sweetie. When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it

even when we want so bad to change, because the misery is something we know.

The misery is comfortable."

To her surprise, sitting across the dinette table from Geneva, Micky began to

weep. No racking sobs. Discreet, this weeping. The plate of homemade lasagna

blurred in front of her, and hot tears slid down her cheeks. She kept her fork

in motion throughout this silent salty storm, loath to acknowledge what was

happening to her.

She hadn't cried since childhood. She'd thought that she was beyond tears, too

tough for self-pity and too hardened to be moved by the plight of anyone else.

With grim determination, angry with herself for this weakness, she continued

eating even though her throat grew so thick with emotion that she had

difficulty swallowing.

Geneva, who knew her niece's stoic nature, nevertheless didn't seem surprised

by the tears. She didn't comment on them, because she surely knew that

consolation wouldn't be welcome.

By the time Micky's vision cleared and her plate was clean, she was able to

say, "I can do what I need to do. I can get where I want to go, no matter how

hard it is."

Geneva added one thought before changing the subject: "It's also true that

sometimes-not often, but once in a great while-your life can change for the

better in one moment of grace, almost a sort of miracle. Something so powerful

can happen, someone so special come along, some precious understanding descend

on you so unexpectedly that it just pivots you in a new direction, changes you

forever. Girl, I'd give everything I have if that could happen for you."

To stave off more tears, Micky said, "That's sweet, Aunt Gen, but everything

you have doesn't amount to squat."

Geneva laughed, reached across the table, and gave Micky's left hand an

affectionate squeeze. "That's true enough, honey. But I've still got about

half a squat more than you do."

STRANGELY, here in the sunshine, less than a day later, Micky couldn't stop

thinking about the transforming moment of grace that Geneva had wished for

her. She didn't believe in miracles, neither the supernatural sort that

involved guardian angels and the radiant hand of God revealed nor the merely

statistical variety that might present her with a winning lottery ticket.

Yet she had the curious and unsettling sensation of movement within, of a

turning in her heart and mind, toward a new point on the compass.

"Just indigestion," she murmured with self-derision, because she knew that she

was the same shiftless, screwed-up woman who had come to Geneva a week ago

with two suitcases full of clothes, an '81 Chevrolet Camaro that whiffered and

wheezed worse than a pneumonic horse, and a past that wound like chains around

her.

A misdirected life couldn't be put on a right road quickly or without

struggle. For all of Geneva's appealing talk of a miraculous moment of

transformation, nothing had happened to pivot Micky toward grace.

Nevertheless, for reasons that she could not understand, every aspect of this

day-the spangled sunshine, the heat, the rumble of the distant freeway

traffic, the fragrances of cut grass and sweat-soured coconut oil, three

yellow butterflies as bright as gift-box bows-suddenly seemed full of meaning,

mystery, and moment.

Chapter 2

IN A FAINT and inconstant breeze, waves stir through the lush meadow. At this

lonely hour, in this strange place, a boy can easily imagine that monsters

swim ceaselessly through the moon-silvered sea of grass that shimmers out

there beyond the trees.

The forest in which he crouches is also a forbidding realm at night, and

perhaps in daylight as well. Fear has been his companion for the past hour, as

he's traveled twisting trails through exotic underbrush, beneath interlaced

boughs that have provided only an occasional brief glimpse of the night sky.

Predators on the wooden highways overhead might be stalking him, leaping

gracefully limb to limb, as silent and as merciless as the cold stars beneath

which they prowl. Or perhaps without warning, a hideous tunneling something,

all teeth and appetite, will explode out of the forest floor under his feet,

biting him in half or swallowing him whole.

A vivid imagination has always been his refuge. Tonight it is his curse.

Before him, past this final line of trees, the meadow waits. Waits. Too bright

under the fat moon. Deceptively peaceful.

He suspects this is a killing ground. He doubts that he will reach the next

stand of trees alive.

Sheltering against a weathered outcropping of rock, he wishes desperately that

his mother were with him. But she will never be at his side again in this

life.

An hour ago, he witnessed her murder.

The bright, sharp memory of that violence would shred his sanity if he dwelt

on it. For the sake of survival, he must forget, at least for now, that

particular terror, that unbearable loss.

Huddled in the hostile night, he hears himself making miserable sounds. His

mother always told him that he was a brave boy; but no brave boy surrenders

this easily to his misery.

Wanting to justify his mother's pride in him, he struggles to regain control

of himself. Later, if he lives, he'll have a lifetime for anguish, loss, and

loneliness.

Gradually he finds strength not in the memory of her murder, not in a thirst

for vengeance or justice, but in the memory of her love, her toughness, her

steely resolution. His wretched sobbing subsides.

Silence.

The darkness of the woods.

The meadow waiting under the moon.

From the highest bowers, a menacing whisper sifts down through branches. Maybe

it is nothing more than a breeze that has found an open door in the attic of

the forest.

In truth, he has less to fear from wild creatures than from his mother's

killers. He has no doubt that they still pursue him.

They should have caught him long ago. This territory, however, is as unknown

to them as it is to him.

And perhaps his mother's spirit watches over him.

Even if she's here in the night, unseen at his side, he can't rely on her. He

has no guardian but himself, no hope other than his wits and courage.

Into the meadow now, without further delay, risking dangers unknown but surely

countless. A ripe grassy scent overlays the more subtle smell of rich, raw

soil.

The land slopes down to the west. The earth is soft, and the grass is easily

trampled. When he pauses to look back, even the pale moonlamp is bright enough

to reveal the route he followed.

He has no choice but to forge on.

If he ever dreamed, he could convince himself that he's in a dream now, that

this landscape seems strange because it exists only in his mind, that

regardless of how long or how fast he runs, he'll never arrive at a

destination, but will race perpetually through alternating stretches of moon-

dazzled meadow and bristling blind-dark forest.

In fact, he has no idea where he's going. He's not familiar with this land.

Civilization might lie within reach, but more likely than not, he's plunging

deeper into a vast wilderness.

In his peripheral vision, he repeatedly glimpses movements ghostly stalkers

flanking him. Each time that he looks more directly, he sees only tall grass

trembling in the breeze. Yet these phantom out runners frighten him, and

breath by ragged breath, he becomes increasingly convinced that he won't live

to reach the next growth of trees.

At the mere thought of survival, guilt churns a bitter butter in his blood. He

has no right to live when everyone else perished.

His mother's death haunts him more than the other murders, in part because he

saw her struck down. He heard the screams of the others, but by the time he

found them, they were dead, and their steaming remains were so grisly that he

could not make an emotional connection between the loved ones he had known and

those hideous cadavers.

Now, from moonlight into darkling forest once more. The meadow behind him. The

tangled maze of brush and bramble ahead.

Against all odds, he's still alive.

But he's only ten years old, without family and friends, alone and afraid and

lost.

Chapter 3

NOAH FARREL WAS SITTING in his parked Chevy, minding someone else's business,

when the windshield imploded.

Noshing on a cream-filled snack cake, contentedly plastering a fresh coat of

fat on his artery walls, he suddenly found himself holding a half-eaten treat

rendered crunchier but inedible by sprinkles of gummy-prickly safety glass.

Even as Noah dropped the ruined cake, the front passenger's-side window

shattered under the impact of a tire iron.

He bolted from the car through the driver's door, looked across the roof, and

confronted a man mountain with a shaved head and a nose ring. The Chevy stood

in an open space midway between massive Indian laurels, and though it wasn't

shaded by the trees, it was sixty or eighty feet from the nearest streetlamp

and thus in gloom; however, the glow of the Chevy's interior lights allowed

Noah to see the window-basher. The guy grinned and winked.

Movement to Noah's left drew his attention. A few feet away, another

demolition expert swung a sledgehammer at a headlight.

This steroid-inflated gentleman wore sneakers, pink workout pants with a

drawstring waist, and a black T-shirt. The impressive mass of bone in his brow

surely weighed more than the five-pound sledge that he swung, and his upper

lip was nearly as long as his ponytail.

Even as the last of the cracked plastic and the shattered glass from the

headlamp rang and rattled against the pavement, the human Good & Plenty

slammed the hammer against the hood of the car.

Simultaneously, the guy with the polished head and the decorated nostril used

the Iug-wrench end of the tire iron to break out the rear window on the

passenger's side, perhaps because he'd been offended by his reflection.

The noise grew hellish. Prone to headaches these days, Noah wanted nothing

more than quiet and a pair of aspirin.

"Excuse me," he said to the bargain-basement Thor as the hammer arced high

over the hood again, and he leaned into the car through the open door to pluck

the key from the ignition.

His house key was on the same ring. When he finally got home, by whatever

means, he didn't want to discover that these behemoths were hosting a World

Wrestling Federation beer party in his bungalow.

On the passenger's seat lay the digital camera that contained photos of the

philandering husband entering the house across the street and being greeted at

the door by his lover. If Noah reached for the camera, he'd no doubt be left

with a hand full of bones as shattered as the windshield.

Pocketing his keys, he walked away, past modest ranch-style houses with neatly

trimmed lawns and shrubs, where moon-silvered trees stood whisperless in the

warm still air.

Behind him, underlying the steady rhythmic crash of the hammer, the tire iron

took up a syncopated beat, tattooing the Chevy fenders and trunk lid.

Here on the perimeter of a respectable residential neighborhood in Anaheim,

the home of Disneyland, scenes from A Clockwork Orange weren't reenacted every

day. Nevertheless, made fearful by too much television news, the residents

proved more cautious than curious. No one ventured outside to discover the

reason for the fracas.

In the houses that he passed, Noah saw only a few puzzled or wary faces

pressed to lighted windows. None of them was Mickey, Minnie, Donald, or Goofy.

When he glanced back, he noticed a Lincoln Navigator pulling away from the

curb across the street, no doubt containing associates of the creative pair

who were making modern art out of his car. Every ten or twelve steps, he

checked on the SUV, and always it drifted slowly along in his wake, pacing

him.

After he had walked a block and a half, he arrived at a major street lined

with commercial enterprises. Many businesses were closed now, at 9:20 on a

'Tuesday night.

The Chevy-smashing shivaree continued unabated, but distance and intervening

layers of laurel branches filtered cacophony into a muted clump-and-crackle.

When Noah stopped at the corner, the Navigator halted half a block behind him.

The driver waited to see which way he would go.

In the small of his back, bolstered under his Hawaiian shirt, Noah carried a

revolver. He didn't think he would need the weapon. Nevertheless, he had no

plans to remake it into a plowshare.

He turned right and, within another block and a half, arrived at a tavern.

Here he might not be able to obtain aspirin, but ice-cold Dos Equis would be

available.

When it came to health care, he wasn't a fanatic about specific remedies.

The long bar lay to the right of the door. In a row down the center of the

room, each of eight plank-top tables bore a candle in an amber-glass holder.

Fewer than half the stools and chairs were occupied. Several guys and one

woman wore cowboy hats, as though they had been abducted and then displaced in

space or time by meddling extraterrestrials.

The concrete floor, painted ruby-red, appeared to have been mopped at least a

couple times since Christmas, and underlying the stale-beer smell was a faint

scent of disinfectant. If the place had cockroaches, they would probably be

small enough that Noah might just be able to wrestle them into submission.

Along the left wall were high-backed wooden booths with seats padded in red

leatherette, a few unoccupied. He settled into the booth farthest from the

door.

He ordered a beer from a waitress who had evidently sewn herself into her

faded, peg-legged blue jeans and red checkered shirt. If her breasts weren't

real, the nation was facing a serious silicone shortage. "You want a glass?"

she asked. "The bottle's probably cleaner." "Has to be," she agreed as she

headed for the bar.

While Alan Jackson filled the jukebox with a melancholy lament about

loneliness, Noah fished the automobile-club card out of his wallet, he

unclipped the phone from his belt and called the twenty-four-hour help-line

number.

The woman who assisted him sounded like his aunt Lilly, his old man's sister,

whom he hadn't seen in fifteen years, but her voice had no sentimental effect

on him. Lilly had shot Noah's dad in the head, killing him, and had wounded

Noah himself-once in the left shoulder, once in the right thigh-when he was

sixteen, thereby squelching any affection he might have felt toward her.

"The tires will probably be slashed," he told the auto-club woman, "so send a

flatbed instead of a standard tow truck." He gave her the address where the

car could be found and also the name of the dealership to which it should be

delivered. "Tomorrow morning's soon enough. Better not send anyone out there

until the Beagle Boys have hammered themselves into exhaustion."

"Who?"

"If you've never read Scrooge McDuck comic books, my literary allusion will be

lost on you."

Arriving just then with a Dos Equis, the cowgirl waitress said, "When I was

seventeen, I applied for a character job at Disneyland, but they turned me

down."

Pressing END on his phone, Noah frowned. "Character job?"

"You know, walking around the park in a costume, having your photo taken with

people. I wanted to be Minnie Mouse or at least maybe Snow White, but I was

too busty."

"Minnie's pretty flat-chested."

"Yeah, well, she's a mouse."

"Good point," Noah said.

"And their idea was that Snow White-she ought to look virginal. I don't know

why."

"Maybe because if Snow was as sexy as you, people would start to wonder what

she might've been up to with those seven dwarves- which isn't a Disney sort of

thought."

She brightened. "Hey, you probably got something there." Then her sigh vented

volumes of disappointment. "I sure did want to be Minnie."

"Dreams die hard."

"They really do."

"You'd have made a fine Minnie."

"You think so?"

Dean R. Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: