One Door From Heaven

shoe, SHOE!
        A light suddenly flares across boy and dog, dog and boy.
        Startled, Curtis looks up. The beam is bright.
        Oh, Lord, he's in trouble now.

Chapter 29
        
        SEVENTEEN YEARS AFTER they had healed, the bullet wound in Noah's left shoulder and the wound in his right thigh began to ache, as though he were afflicted with psychosomatic rheumatism.
        Called out of bed, summoned from a bad dream into a waking nightmare, he drove south first on freeways and then on surface streets, pushing the rustbucket Chevy to its limits. Traffic was light at this hour, some streets deserted. For the most part, he ignored stop signs and speed limits, as if he were back in uniform, behind the wheel of a black-and-white.
        Pain popped in the old gunshot wounds as if surgical stitches had just burst, when in fact they had been removed by a doctor half a lifetime ago. Noah glanced down at his shoulder, at his thigh, convinced that he would see blood seeping through his clothes, that his scars had become strange stigmata, reminders not of the love of God, but of his own guilt.
        Aunt Lilly, his old man's sister, had shot the old man first, because he was the danger, pumped one round in his face at point-blank range, and then she had shot Noah twice, just because he was there, a witness. She'd said, "I'm sorry about this, Nono," because Nono was a pet name that some in the family had called him since he was a child, and then Lilly had opened fire.
        If your entire family is engaged in a highly profitable criminal enterprise, a disagreement among relatives can occasionally involve a subject much more serious than how best to divide up grandmamma's porcelain collection when she dies without a will. Manufacturing methamphetamine in convenient tablet, capsule, liquid, and powder forms for distribution without prescription was as illegal back then as it is seventeen years later. If you're able to identify interested consumers, establish distribution, and protect your territory from competitors, meth can be as profitable as cocaine, and because there's no import risk involved, because you can cook it yourself from easily obtainable ingredients, the business is comparatively hassle-free. The family that cooks together, however, does not in this case necessarily stay together, because meth churns off floods of dirty money that can corrupt even blood relationships.
        At sixteen, Noah hadn't been in the business, but he had been around it for as long as he could remember. He never actually pushed the crap, didn't distribute it or collect the cash, never did the street work. But he knew the fine points of cooking; he became a full-fledged meth chemist. And he capped up a lot of bulk flashpowder over the years, filled countless little plastic bags with capsules in street units, and topped off a lot of ozer bottles with injectable liquid, earning spending money like other kids might earn it from mowing lawns and raking leaves.
        His father had plans for him, intended to groom him to run the shop one day, but not until he was finished with school, because the old man believed in the value of an education. Noah always knew that his dad was a sleazebag, and however you might describe the nature of their relationship, you would never use the word love with a straight face. Obligation, shared history, family duty-and in Noah's case, fear-bound them together. Yet his dad took genuine pride in Noah's skill as a cooker and in his willingness to do scut work like bagging and bottling. Funny, but even though you knew that your old man was walking slime, a cancer on humanity, you nonetheless felt a strange satisfaction when he said he was proud of you. After all, whatever else he might be, he was still your dad; the President of the United States was never going to say he was proud of you, and you weren't likely ever to be taken under the wing of a committed high-school coach or teacher like Denzel Washington might play in the movies, so you took your attaboys where you could get them.
        Even as the old man, face-shot, hit the floor in a full-dead flop, and even as Aunt Lilly said, "I'm sorry about this, Nono," Noah ran for his life. Her first round missed him, the second tore through his shoulder, the third chopped his thigh.
        By then, however, he had reached the front door and opened it, shot kicked him outside, onto the front porch, where he dropped and rolled