One Door From Heaven

knees.
        "Curtis?" she asks again.
        "Yes, ma'am," he says, and realizes as he speaks that he hasn't told anyone his name since he chatted with Donella in the restaurant at the truck stop the previous evening.
        Warily she surveys their surroundings, as if to be certain they are not observed or overheard. A few men in the vicinity, staring at her while she's focused on Curtis, look away when she turns toward them. Perhaps she notices this suspicious behavior, for she leans closer to the boy and whispers: "Curtis Hammond?"
        Except for Donella and poor dumb Burt Hooper, the waffle-eating trucker, and the man in the DRIVING MACHINE cap, no one but Curtis's enemies could know his name.
        As defenseless as any mere mortal standing before a shining angel of death, Curtis is paralyzed in expectation of being gutted, beheaded, shredded, broken, blasted, burned, and worse, though never did he imagine that Death would arrive in dangling silver earrings, two silver-and-turquoise necklaces, three diamond rings, a silver-and-turquoise bracelet on each wrist, and navel decoration.
        He could deny that he is either the original or the current Curtis Hammond, but if this is one of the hunters that wiped out his family and Curtis's family in Colorado two nights ago, he has already been identified by his singular energy signature. In that case, every attempt at deception will prove useless.
        "Yes, ma'am, that's me," he says, polite to the end, and steels himself to be slaughtered, perhaps to the delight of
        Mr. Neary and others whom he has offended with no intention of doing so.
        Her whisper grows yet softer. "You're supposed to be dead."
        Resistance is as pointless as deception, for if she is one of the worse scalawags, she has the strength of ten men and the speed of a Ferrari Testarossa, so Curtis is road kill waiting to happen.
        Trembling, he says, "Dead. Yes, ma'am. I guess I am."
        "You poor child," she says with none of the sarcasm you might expect from a killer intending to decapitate you, but with concern.
        Surprised by her sympathy, he seizes upon this uncharacteristic suggestion of a potential for mercy, which her kind supposedly does not possess: "Ma'am, I'll freely admit that my dog here knows too much, considering that we've bonded. I won't pretend otherwise. But she can't talk, so she can't tell anyone what she knows. Whether my bones ought to be stripped out of this body and crushed like glass is something we're sure to disagree about, but I sincerely believe there's no good reason for her to be killed, too."
        The expression that overcomes the woman is one that Curtis has learned to recognize on faces as diverse as the round physiognomy of smiling Donella and the grizzled visage of grumpy Gabby. He supposes that it implies befuddlement, even bewilderment, though not complete mystification.
        "Sweetie," she whispers, "why do I get the feeling that some awesomely bad people must be looking for you?"
        Old Yeller has not assumed a submissive posture, but has risen to her feet. She grins at the woman in white, tail wagging with the wide sweep of expectancy, pleased to make this new acquaintance.
        "We better get you out of sight," whispers the angel, who now seems less likely to be assigned to the Death Division. "Safer to sort this out in privacy. Come with me, okay?"
        "Okay," Curtis agrees, because the woman has been given the Old Yeller seal of approval.
        She leads them to the door of the nearby Fleetwood American Heritage. Forty-five feet long, twelve feet high, eight to nine feet wide, the motor home is so immense and so solid in appearance that-except for its cheerful white, silver, and red paint job-it might be an armored military-command vehicle.
        In her acrylic heels, with her golden hair, the woman reminds Curtis of Cinderella, though these are sandals rather than slippers. Cinderella most likely wouldn't have worn toreador pants, either, at least not a pair that so clearly defined the buttocks. Likewise, if Cinderella's bosoms had been as large as these, she wouldn't have displayed them so prominently, because she had lived in a more modest age than this. But if your fairy godmother is going to turn a pumpkin into stylish equipage to transport you to the royal ball, you want her to dispense with the mice-into-horses bit and use her magic wand to whack the pumpkin