One Door From Heaven

flushed.
        Holding the cane by the wrong end, Preston raised it overhead.
        The Toad lay stunned, perhaps disoriented, but then his eyes cleared, and when he saw what was coming, he spoke with tremulous emotion and with obvious relief: "Thank you."
        "You're welcome," Preston assured him, and hammered the wolf's head into the center of the man's brow. More than once. Maybe half a dozen times. The cane cracked but didn't come apart.
        When he was certain that he had killed the Toad, he threw the damaged walking stick on the bed beside the binoculars. Later, he would wipe both objects clean of fingerprints.
        He intended ultimately to burn down this great pile of tinder. No evidence would be likely to survive the flames. But he was a careful man.
        Quickly, Preston selected another cane. A polished-brass serpent formed the handle, inset with faceted red-glass eyes.
        He suppressed the madcap urge to select a jaunty straw hat in which to court the lady of the hour. In addition to being a service to humanity and to Mother Earth, killing was fun, but one must never lose sight of the fact that it was also serious business, fraught with risk and frowned upon by many.
        Out of the dead toad's boudoir, along the trash-packed upstairs hall, to the bottle-decorated back stairs and down. Through the foul kitchen, onto the enclosed porch where a thousand and yet a thousand bottles glimmered darkly as if the coming storm were pent up in them and soon to be uncorked.
        Outside, he hurried across a backyard that was more dirt than scattered bunch-grass, careful to keep the house between him and the position in the woods from which the entirely useless Ms. Bell-song maintained surveillance.
        Most likely she expected to follow him into Nun's Lake, staying at a distance to avoid being spotted. Once she'd found where he had parked the motor home, she evidently intended to watch and wait- and seize the first opportunity to spirit Leilani away, out of Idaho, to Clarissa the Goiter and her sixty parrots in Hemet.
        The stupid slut. Fools, the lot of them. They thought that he knew nothing, but he knew all.
        Beyond the barren yard lay a thriving field of shoulder-high weeds. He had to stoop only slightly to disappear among them.
        Heading east, he plunged through wild grass, milkweed. Cover was provided, too, by scattered cornstalks that had been cultivated long in the past and that had gone wild generations ago, but that still raggedly, stubbornly ruled the field.
        He hurried parallel to the distant road, intending eventually to turn north, cross the road beyond her view, and then turn west. He would circle behind the useless Micky Bellsong and club her to the ground with the serpent cane.
        The glowering sky pressed lower by the minute, black clouds like knotted fists, full of cruel power. No thunder yet, but thunder soon. And eventually lightning would score the sky and cast hot reflections on the brass serpent, perhaps even as it struck-and struck. But in spite of the dazzling flash and rumble soon to descend, Preston Maddoc knew that the halls of Heaven were deserted, and that no one occupied those heights to look down on what he did, or to care.

Chapter 65
        
        THE MOTHERLESS BOY is troubled, and he doesn't trouble easily. He sits on one of the sofas in the lounge of the Fleetwood, petting Old Yeller, who lies across his lap, while the twins continue to brood over maps in the dining nook.
        Advance preparation had left Curtis with considerable knowledge regarding most of the Earth species he would be likely to encounter on his mission. Consequently he knows a great deal about dogs, not solely what he absorbed from the astonishing number of canines that he's seen in 9,658 movies, but from specific flash-feed instruction he has received regarding the flora and fauna of this planet.
        Sister-become has numerous admirable qualities, not the least of which is her nose. Its shape, pebbly texture, and shiny blackness contribute to her beauty, but more important, her sense of smell is perhaps twenty thousand times more sensitive than that of any human being.
        If the enormous motor home in which he saw the radiant girl also contained hunters of the kind that were encountered at the crossroads store in Nevada, the dog would have detected their unique scent, would have recognized it instantly, and would