One Door From Heaven

pressure.
        She landed on the bed and virtually bounced to her feet, not with any grace, but with the jerky energy of a jack-in-the-box.
        Noah drew the snub-nosed.38 out of the belt-clipped holster in the small of his back, from beneath his shirt. Loath to use the revolver, he was even less enthusiastic about being carved like Christmas turkey.
        He expected only more of what she'd given him thus far, more
        irrational ranting and;in even more determined effort to remake his face and anatomy, hut she surprised him by tossing aside the blades and turning away from him. She went to the dresser, and he stepped farther into the room rather than retreat from it, because he feared that she was going for a handgun. She came up with bottles of pills instead, muttering over them, letting some drop out of her hands, throwing others aside angrily, ransacking the drawer for still more bottles, until at last she found what she wanted.
        As though she had forgotten Noah, she returned to the bed and settled down on the tossed sheets, amid the torn and crumpled pages of a book. She crossed her legs and sat like a young girl waiting for her friends to arrive for a pajama party, tossed her head, and laughed insouciantly. As she popped open the bottle of pills, she chanted in a singsong voice: "I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight, I am the sun, I am the sea, I am me!" With one of the wanted pills in hand, she allowed the others to spill among the bedclothes. At last looking up at Noah, she said, "Go, go, Luki baby, you don't have a place here anymore." And then, as if never she had drawn his blood, she began to rock her head back and forth, shaking her tangled locks, and she sang again: "I am a sly cat, I am a summer wind, I am birds in flight…"
        Noah retreated, backing across the bathroom, keeping a watch on the red-lit bedroom, holding fast to the gun in his right hand, using his left hand to test the wound in his shoulder. The pain was sharp but not intolerable, and though blood had spread across the front of his shirt, the bleeding wasn't arterial. She hadn't severed any major blood vessels or punctured a vital organ. His biggest problem would be the risk of infection-assuming he got out of here alive.
        As Noah backed into the galley, the woman continued her singsong chant, celebrating her wonderfulness, which reassured him that she remained on the bed where he had left her.
        When he reached the dinette, Noah turned, intending to flee with no regard for pride.
        A young boy, a statuesque blonde, and a dog stood in the lounge, and as much as that sounded like the opening line of one of those a-priest-a-rabbi-and-a-minister jokes, Noah didn't have a smile in him. The boy had freckles, the blonde had a 9-mm pistol, and the
        dog had a bushy tail that, alter a moment, began to wag so vigorously that its burden of rain spattered opposite walls of the motor home.
        ETERNALLY WAITING Indians, guardians without power, watched him bring the Hand into the house. He dumped her on the hall floor at the entrance to the maze.
        The door had bounced open when he kicked it shut after himself. He closed it and engaged the lock.
        With his hands, he pressed some of the water out of his hair, slicking it back from his face.
        The girl lay in a sopping mound. The shiny braced leg stuck out at a severe angle from the shapeless rest of her. The runt hadn't fully regained consciousness. She muttered and sighed-and belched, which disgusted Preston no less than if she'd urinated on herself.
        He could feel the microscopic filth of this useless little cripple crawling on his hands, squirming in the webs of his fingers.
        Reluctantly, carrying her in from the Durango, he had reached the conclusion that he wasn't going to be able to spend the time with her that he had allotted. The women and the boy in the Fleetwood were a wild card. He could no longer assume that he would have a long period of privacy here in the Mad Kingdom of Teelroy.
        Now he would have to kill the Slut Queen with less finesse than planned. He no longer had the leisure for exquisitely protracted violence. In front of the girl, he would finish her friend as quickly as he might crush the skull of a rat with a shovel.
        The runt would try to avoid watching. Therefore, in addition to binding her to the armchair, he would have to fix her head