One Door From Heaven

days, weeks, even months to penetrate. Instead of fifteen minutes, using his best software, Trevor required twenty-six, which impressed him; he wanted to know the codemaker's identity.
        Preston couldn't understand what was so impressive about the code having resisted analysis for just an additional eleven minutes. He withheld the Hand's name and made no mention of her relationship to him. He professed to have found the journal on a park bench and to have developed a keen curiosity about it because of its mysterious-looking contents.
        Trevor also said that the text on the sample page was "amusing, acerbic but full of gentle humor." Preston had read it several times, and although he was relieved to discover that nothing in it required him to paste patches on his original park-bench story, he hadn't been able to find anything to smile about. In fact, using the translation bible that Trevor provided, Preston secretly studied the entire journal-a few pages every morning when Leilani showered, odd bits and pieces as other opportunities arose-and found not one amusing line, cover to cover. In the year since, continuing to sneak peeks at the girl's self-important scribblings, he'd not been charmed into even a faint smile by any of her observations in subsequent entries. In fact, she'd revealed herself to be a disrespectful, mean-spirited, ignorant little smartass who was as ugly inside as out. Evidently, Trevor Kingsley had a degenerate sense of humor.
        These past few days, as the journal entries revealed that the Hand was scheming to save herself, Preston made careful preparations to overcome her resistance with ease when he was ready to take her to a suitably secluded killing ground. He didn't know when and in what circumstances he might need to overpower her, and while he hadn't any concern that she could effectively resist him, lie didn't want to give her a chance to scream and perhaps draw the attention of someone who would intervene on her behalf.
        Since Friday, when they had driven east from California, he'd been carrying a folded, one-quart Hefty OneZip plastic bag in the left back pocket of his pants. The bag could be closed airtight by means of a small plastic slide-seal device built into it. Inside the OneZip was a washcloth saturated in a homemade anesthetic that he had produced by combining carefully measured quantities of ammonia and three other household chemicals. In his life's work, he had used this concoction to assist in a few suicides. When inhaled, it caused instantaneous collapse into unconsciousness; sustained application resulted in respiratory failure and in the rapid destruction of the liver. He intended to use this anesthetic only to ensure against resistance and induce unconsciousness, because as a killing weapon, it was too merciful to excite him.
        Nun's Lake lay one mile ahead.

Chapter 71
        
        OLD SINSEMILLA, wearing a sarong in a bright Hawaiian pattern, sat among the disheveled bedclothes, leaning back against mounds of pillows. She'd torn the pages out of her worn copy of In Watermelon Sugar and scattered this enlightening confetti across the bed and floor.
        She wept but with fury, red-faced and tear-streaked and shaking. "Somebody, some bastard, some sick freak screwed around with my book, screwed it all up, and it's not right, it's not fair."
        Leilani cautiously approached the bed, looking for pet-shop boxes and the equivalent. "Mother, what's wrong?"
        With a snarled curse that tied her face in red knots of anger, Sinsemilla snatched handfuls of torn pages off the rumpled sheets and threw them in the air. "They didn't print it right, they got it all wrong, all backwards, they did it just to mess with me. This page where that page should be, paragraphs switched around and sentences backwards. They took a beautiful thing, and they turned it into just a bunch of shit, because they didn't want me to understand, they didn't want me to get the message." Mere tears gave way to wretched sobs and with her fists she pounded her thighs, struck herself again and again, hard enough to bruise. And maybe she hit herself because on some level she understood that the problem wasn't the book, that the problem was her stubborn insistence to find the meaning of life in this one slim volume, to demand that broth be stew, to acquire enlightenment as easily as she daily attained escape through pills, powders, and