One Door From Heaven

that it opens into a larger and warmer receiving room stacked with those supplies that don't need refrigeration. Cartons of napkins, toilet tissue, cleaning fluids, floor wax.
        Logically, a receiving room should open to the outdoors, to a loading dock or to a parking lot, and beyond the next door, he finds logic rewarded. A warm breeze, free of kitchen odors and the smell of gunfire, leaps at him, like a playful dog, and tosses his hair.
        He turns right on the dimly lighted dock and sprints to the end. Four concrete steps lead down to another blacktop parking lot, which is only half as well lighted as those he's seen previously.
        Most of the vehicles back here probably belong to employees of the restaurant, the service station, the motel, and the associated enterprises. Pickup trucks are favored over cars, and the few SUVs have a desert-scorched, sand-abraided, brush-scratched look acquired by more arduous use than trips to the supermarket.
        With the container of Florida's lines! in one hand, the package of hot dogs firmly in the other, Curtis clashes between two SUVs, frantic to get out of sight before the FBI agents, the hunters in cowboy disguise, possibly the juice police, and maybe frankfurter-enforcement officers all descend on him at once, blasting away.
        Just as he plunges into the shadows between the vehicles, he hears shouting, people running - suddenly so close.
        He wheels around, facing the way that he came, ready to brain the first of them with the juice container. The hot dogs are useless as a weapon. His mother's self-defense instructions never involved sausages of any kind. After the juice, all he can count on is kicking their sex organs.
        Two, three, five men burst past the front of the parallel SUVs, a formidable pack of husky specimens, all wearing either black vests or black windbreakers with the letters FBI blazing in white across their chests and backs. Two carry shotguns; the others have handguns. They are prepared, pumped, pissed - and so intently focused on the rear entrance to the restaurant that not one of them catches sight of Curtis as they race past. They leave him untouched, and still in possession of his dangerous jug of orange juice and his pathetic wieners.
        Sucking in great lungfuls of the astringent desert air, giving it back hotter than he receives it, the boy weaves westward, using the employees' vehicles for cover. He's not sure where he should go, but he's eager to put some distance between himself and this complex of buildings.
        He rounds the tailgate of a Dodge pickup, hurrying into a new aisle, and here the loyal dog is waiting, a black shape splashed with a few whorls of white, like tossed-off scarves of moonlight floating on the night-stained surface of a pond. She is alert, ears pricked, drawn not by the frankfurters but by an awareness of her master's predicament.
        Good pup. Let's get out of here.
        She whips around - no older than she is yellow - and trots away, not at a full run, but at a pace that the boy can match. Trusting her sharper senses, assuming she won't lead them straight into any associates of the cowboys who might be - surely are - in the vicinity, or into another posse of FBI agents bristling with weapons, Curtis follows her.

Chapter 17
        
        TO EVERYONE but Noah Farrel, the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten was known as Cielo Vista Care Home. The real name of the establishment promised a view of Heaven but provided something more like a glimpse of Purgatory.
        He wasn't entirely sure why he had given the place another-and so maudlin-name by which he usually thought of it. Life otherwise had entirely purged him of sentimentality, although he would admit to an ever-dwindling but not yet eradicated capacity for romanticism.
        Not that anything about the care home was romantic, other than its Spanish architecture and lattice-shaded sidewalks draped with yellow and purple bougainvillea. In spite of those inviting arbors, no one would come here in search of love or chivalrous adventure.
        Throughout the institution, the floors-gray vinyl speckled with peach and turquoise-were immaculate. Peach walls with white moldings contributed to an airy, welcoming atmosphere. Cleanliness and cheery colors, however, proved insufficient to con Noah into a holiday mood.
        This was a private establishment with a dedicated, friendly staff.