One Door From Heaven

shirts and shoes.
        Of course, this is a little cottage on wheels, not a castle. It doesn't afford as many hiding places as a titled lord's domain: no receiving rooms or studies, no secret passageways, no dungeons deep or towers high.
        Coming in, he'd known the risks. What he hadn't realized, until now, was that the motor home has no back door. He must leave the same way he entered-or go out of a window.
        Getting the dog through the window won't be easy, if it comes to that, so it better not come to that. Escape-with-canine isn't a feat that can be accomplished in a flash, while the startled owners stand gaping in the bedroom doorway. Old Yeller isn't a Great Dane, thank God, but she's not a Chihuahua, either, and Curtis can't simply tuck her inside his shirt and scramble through one of these less than generous windows with the agility of a caped superhero.
        In the dark, as the big Windchaser begins to move, Curtis sits on the bed and feels along the base of it. Instead of a standard frame, he discovers a solid wooden platform anchored to the floor; the box springs and the mattress rest upon the platform, and even the thinnest slip of a boogeyman couldn't hide under this bed.
        The motor-home horn blares. In fact the noisy night sounds like a honk-if-you-love-Jesus moment at a convention of Christian road warriors.
        Curtis goes to the window, where the drapes have already been drawn aside, and peers out at the truck-stop parking lot. Cars and pickups and SUVs and a few RVs nearly as big as this one careen across the blacktop, moving recklessly and fast, in total disregard of marked lanes, as if the drivers never heard about the courtesy of the road. Everyone's hellbent on getting to the interstate, racing around and between the service islands, terrorizing the same hapless folks who only moments ago escaped death under the wheels of the runaway SWAT transport.
        Over bleating horns, screeching tires, and squealing brakes, another sound flicks at the boy's ears: rhythmic and crisp, faint at first, then suddenly rhythmic and solid, like the whoosh of a sword cutting air; and then even more solid, a whoosh and a thump combined, as a blade might sound if it could slice off slabs of the night, and if the slabs could fall heavily to the blacktop. Blades, indeed, but not knives. Helicopter rotors.
        Curtis finds the window latch and slides one pane aside. He thrusts his head out of the window, cranes his neck, looking for the source of the sound, as a slipstream of warm desert air cuffs his face and tosses his hair.
        Big sky, black and wide. The brassy glare from sodium arc lamps under inverted-wok shades. Stars burning eternal. The motion of the Windchaser makes the moon appear to roll like a wheel.
        Curtis can't see any lights in the sky that nature didn't put there, but the helicopter is growing louder by the second, no longer slicing the air but chopping it with hard blows that sound like an ax splitting cordwood. He can feel the rhythmic compression waves hammering first against his eardrums, then against the sensitive surfaces of his upturned eyes.
        And-chuddaboom!-the chopper is right here, passing across the Windchaser, so low, maybe fifteen feet above Curtis, maybe less. This isn't a traffic-monitoring craft like the highway patrol would use, not a news chopper or even a corporate-executive eggbeater with comfortable seating for eight, but huge and black and fully armored. Bristling, fierce in every line, turbines screaming, this seems to be a military gunship, surely armed with machine guns, possibly with rockets. The shriek of the engines vibrates through the boy's skull and makes his teeth ring like an array of tuning forks. The battering downdraft slams him, rich with the stink of hot metal and motor oil.
        The chopper roars past them, toward the complex of buildings, and in its tumultuous wake, the Windchaser accelerates. The driver is suddenly as reckless as all the others who are making a break for the interstate.
        "Go, go, go!" Curtis urges, because the night has grown strange, and is now a great black beast with a million searching eyes. Motion is commotion, and distraction buys time, and time-not mere distance-is the key to escape, to freedom, and to being Curtis Hammond. "Go, go, go!"

Chapter 19
        
        BY THE TIME that Leilani rose from the kitchen table to leave Geneva's trailer, she was