Now Leilani rolled onto her right side, putting her back to the door. A single sheet covered her, and she pulled it under her chin.

She had removed her leg brace for comfort, but as usual, she had kept the apparatus in bed with her. She reached out to touch it under the sheet. The metal felt cool beneath her exploring fingers.

A few times over the years, when she’d left the brace on the floor beside her bed, she had awakened to discover that it had been moved during the night. More accurately, hidden.

No game was less amusing than find-the-brace, though Sinsemilla thought it entertaining and also professed to believe that it taught Leilani self-reliance, sharpened her wits, and reminded her that life “throws more stones at you than buttered cornbread,” whatever that might mean.

Leilani never rebuked her mother for this cruelty, or for any other, because Sinsemilla would not tolerate a thankless child. When forced into this hateful game, ..she proceeded with grim determination and without comment, aware that either a harsh word or refusal to play would bring down upon her the shrillest, most accusative, and most unrelenting of her mother’s upbraidings. And in the end, she would have to find the brace anyway.

Now her open window admitted the sound of Preston at the front door. The jingle of keys. The clack as the dead-bolt lock disengaged. The quiet scrape of metal weatherstripping against the threshold as he gently closed the door behind him.

Perhaps he would visit the kitchen for a glass of water or a late-night snack.

Drawn by the red light spilling into the hall, perhaps he would go directly to the master bedroom.

What would he make of the dead snake, the discarded closet pole, and Sinsemilla’s bandaged hand?

Most likely he wouldn’t stop in Leilani’s room. He would respect her privacy and her need for rest.

On a daily basis, Preston treated her with the same kindness that always he exhibited toward neighbors and waitresses and animals. On the eve of her tenth birthday, next February, if she had not yet escaped him or devised an effective defense, he would kill her with the selfsame regret and sadness that he had shown when euthanizing the crippled cat. He might even weep for her.

He traveled silently on the matted orange shag, and she didn’t hear him coming through the house until he opened her door. No stop for water or a snack. No curiosity about the red glow in the master bedroom. Directly to Leilani.

Because her back was to him, she hadn’t closed her eyes. A pale rectangle of hall light projected on the wall opposite the entrance, and in that image of the door stood the effigy of Preston Maddoc.

“Leilani?” he whispered. “Are you awake?”

She remained dead-cat still and didn’t reply.

As considerate as ever, lest the hallway lamp wake her, Preston entered. He soundlessly closed the door behind him.

In addition to the bed, the room contained little furniture. One nightstand. A dresser. A cane chair.

Leilani knew that Preston had moved the chair close to the bed when she heard him sit on it. The interlaced strips of cane protested when they received his weight.

For a while he was mum. The cane, which would creak and rasp with the slightest shift of his body, produced no faintest noise. He remained perfectly motionless for a minute, two minutes, three.

He must be meditating, for it was too much to hope that he had been turned to stone by one of the gods in whom he didn’t believe.

Although Leilani could see nothing in the darkness and though Preston was behind her, she kept her eyes open.

She hoped he couldn’t hear her thudding heart, which seemed to clump up and down and up the staircase of her ribs.

“We did a fine thing tonight,” he said at last.

Preston Maddoc’s voice, an instrument of smoke and steel, could ring with conviction or express steadfast belief equally well in a murmur. Like the finest actor, he was able to project a whisper to the back wall of a theater. His voice flowed as molten and as rich as hot caramel but not as sweet, and Leilani was reminded of one of those caramel-dipped tart green apples that you could sometimes buy at a carnival. In his university classes, students had surely sat in rapt attention; and if he had ever been inclined to prey upon naive coeds, his soft yet reverberant voice would have been one of his principal tools of seduction.

He spoke now in a hushed tone, although not exactly a whisper: “Her name was Tetsy, an unfortunate variant of Elizabeth. Her parents were well meaning. But I can’t imagine what they were thinking. Not that they seem to think all that much. Both are somewhat dense, if you ask me. Tetsy wasn’t a diminutive, but her legal name. Tetsy—it sounds more like a little lap dog or a cat. She must have been teased mercilessly. Oh, perhaps the name might have worked if she’d been sprightly, cute, and elfin. But of course, she wasn’t any of that, poor girl.”

In Leilani’s vital coils, a chill arose. She prayed that she wouldn’t shiver and, by shivering, alert Preston to the fact that she was awake.

“Tetsy was twenty-four, and she’d had some good years. The world is full of people who’ve never known a good year.”

Starvation, disease, Leilani thought grimly.

“Starvation, disease,” Preston said, “desperate poverty—“

War and oppression, Leilani thought.

“—war, and oppression,” Preston continued. “This world is the only Hell we need, the only Hell there is.”

Leilani much preferred Sinsemilla’s screwed-up fairy tales to Preston’s familiar soft-spoken rant, even if, when Beauty and the Beast came to the rescue of Goldilocks, Beauty was torn to pieces by the bears, and the Beast’s dark side was thrilled by the bears’ savagery, motivating him to slaughter Goldilocks and to eat her kidneys, and even if the bears and the maddened Beast then joined forces with the Big Bad Wolf and launched a brutal attack on the home of three very unfortunate little pigs.

The silken voice of Preston Maddoc slipped through the darkness, as supple as a strangler’s scarf: “Leilani? Are you awake?”

The chill at the core of her grew colder, spreading loop to loop through her bowels.

She. closed her eyes and concentrated on remaining still. She thought that she heard him move on the thatched seat of the chair. Her eyes snapped open.

The cane was quiet.

“Leilani?”

Under the sheets, her good hand still rested on the detached brace. Earlier, the steel had felt cool to the touch. Now it was icy.

“Are you awake?”

She clutched the brace.

Still speaking quietly, he said, “Tetsy had more than her share of good years, so it would have been greedy for the poor girl to want still more.”

As Preston rose from the chair, the stretched cane flexed with considerable noise, as though he had been more difficult to support than would have been any man of equal size.

“Tetsy collected miniatures. Only penguins. Ceramic penguins, glass penguins, carved wood, cast metal, all kinds.”

He eased closer to the bed. Leilani sensed him hulking over her.

“I brought one of her penguins for you.”

If she threw back the sheet, rolled off her side and up, all in one motion, she could swing the brace like a club, toward that darker place in the darkness where she imagined his face to be.

She wouldn’t strike at him unless he touched her.

Looming, Preston said nothing. He must be gazing down at her, though he couldn’t possibly see anything but the vaguest shape in the gloom.

He always avoided touching Leilani, as though her deformities might be contagious. Contact with her at least disturbed him and, she believed, filled him with disgust that he struggled to conceal. When the aliens failed to come, when the time finally arrived for baking a birthday cake and for buying party hats, when he had to touch her to kill her, he would surely wear gloves.

“I brought you one little penguin in particular because it reminds me of Luki. It’s very sweet. I’ll put it on your nightstand.”

A faint click. Penguin deposited.

She didn’t want his souvenir, stolen from a dead girl.

As if this house had been built to defeat the laws of gravity, Preston seemed not to be standing by the bed, but to hang from the floor like a bat adapted to strange rules, wings furled and silently watchful, a suspensefully suspended presence.

Perhaps he was already wearing gloves.

She tightened her grip on the steel bludgeon.

After what seemed an interminable time, he broke this latest silence in a voice hushed by the importance of the news that he delivered: “We burst her heart.”

Leilani knew that he was speaking of the stranger named Tetsy, who had loved and been loved, who laughed and cried, who collected miniature animals to brighten her life, and who never expected to die at twenty-four.

“We did it without fanfare, just family. No one will know. We burst her heart, but I’m confident she felt no pain.”

How satisfying it must be to live with unshakable confidence, to know beyond doubt that your intentions are honorable, that your reasoning is always correct, that therefore the consequences of your actions, no matter how extreme, are beyond judgment.

God, take her home, Leilani thought, referring to the dead woman who had been a stranger moments ago, but to whom she herself was now forever linked through the heartless mercy of Preston Maddoc. Take her home now where she belongs.

With supreme confidence even in the darkness, he returned the cane chair to the spot from which he’d moved it. Surefooted, he went to the door.

If earlier the snake had spoken to Leilani, while coiled upon her mother’s bed or from its refuge under the chest of drawers, this would have been its voice, not wickedly sibilant but a honeyed croon: “I would never have caused her pain, Leilani. I’m the enemy of pain. I’ve devoted my life to relieving it.”

When Preston opened the bedroom door, a ghostly portal of light appeared on the wall opposite him, as before, and his phantom form on that threshold, looking back at her. Then his shadow appeared to cross into another reality, distorting as it went, and a slab of blackness swung shut upon the exit he had taken.

Leilani wished that the shadow show represented reality and that Preston had indeed stepped out of this world and forever into another place better suited to him, perhaps a world in which everyone would be born dead and therefore could never be subjected to pain. He was but a wall or two away, however, still sharing the breath of life with her, still abiding under the same vault of stars that were, to her, filled with wonder and mystery, but that were, to him, nothing more than distant balls of fire and cataclysm.

Chapter 28

CURTIS HEARS OR SMELLS or senses tarantulas springing out of sand tunnels, swarming away from his feet, and he hears or smells or senses rattlesnakes wriggling out of his path or coiling to shake a warning at him in maraca code, frightened rodents scampering away from him and from the feeding snakes, prairie dogs bolting into their burrows, startled birds erupting into flight from nests in the hollow arms of half-dead cactuses, lizards slithering liquid-quick across sand and stone from which still radiates the stored heat of the fierce sun long set, hawks circling high above, and coyotes ranging singly and in packs far to the left and to the right of him. These things might be figments of his imagination rather than real presences perceived through a mystical sharing of the dog’s keen senses, but the night seems to bustle with life.

Old Yeller leads him, as never Lassie led Timmy, up slopes and down, into ravines and out, fast and faster. Cactus groves are mazes of needles at night. Layers of small round stones and smaller gravel, quarried out of the original rock strata and piled into ridges by the massive moving glaciers of an ancient ice age, provide treacherous passage to more welcoming terrain.

They have put additional distance between themselves and the pair of SUVs, which continue to prowl in their wake, now more than one hill away. Once, a search flare had gone up, casting an unearthly bluish brilliance across a wide swath of the landscape, but it had been safely behind Curtis and the dog.

Initially to the rear of the SUVs but soon parallel with them, the helicopter has tacked west to east, east to west, back and forth across the field of search, proceeding steadily north by indirection. The chopper is most likely equipped with a powerful searchlight that would make the gear on the two SUVs seem like mere votive candles by comparison. Yet the craft conducts its maneuvers without this aid, from which Curtis infers that they have sophisticated electronic tracking packages aboard.

Not good.

Infrared tracking might be of only limited use to them right now, because the land itself is shedding so much stored heat from the day that the body heat of living creatures on the move will not be clearly readable against the background glare. If their computer technology is sufficiently advanced, however, good analytic software could screen out background thermals—thus revealing coyotes, dogs, and running boys.

More worrisome: If they possess open-terrain motion-detection equipment, conditions are ideal for its use, because the night is not merely windless but again dead calm. Furthermore, mule deer move in small herds, coyotes hunt in packs or on occasion singly, while a boy and his dog are by definition a twosome, presenting a unique and at once identifiable signature on the search scope.

Regardless of the resources that the FBI and the military may bring to bear, other enemies roam the desert, more dangerous than those legitimate authorities. The killers from Colorado are urgently monitoring other search scopes for the unique energy signal of the boy who would be Curtis Hammond. Their return to the game, a short time ago, was accompanied by the ominous pressure that thickens the air in advance of a thunderstorm, and by a subtle disturbance of the ether similar to the flux in electromagnetic fields that makes many animals anxious and alert in the moments before a major earthquake.

Spurred on by the boy’s analysis or by her own instincts, Old Yeller picks up speed, thereby demanding more of him. Running, he has sucked in and blown out enough scorching breaths to inflate one of those giant hot-air balloons. His lips are cracked, his mouth is as dry as the arid ground under his flying feet, and his throat feels

charred. Agonizing pain burns in his calves, in his thighs, but now with some effort, he begins to mask most of this discomfort, Curtis Hammond isn’t the most efficient machine of bone and muscle in the world, but he isn’t entirely at the mercy of his physiology, either. Pain is just electrical impulses traveling along a transmission grid of nerves, and for a while, his willpower can prevail over it.

The dog chases freedom, and Curtis chases the dog, and in time they top another hill and discover below them what appear to be salt flats. The land slopes gracefully down to form a broad valley, the length and width of which are not easily determined in the moonless murk; however, the level floor of the valley, eerily phosphorescent, offers a measure of relief from the previously oppressive darkness.