One Door From Heaven

I'll feed her if I can. I love taking care of her. Taking care of all these special people… that's my ice cream."
        Farther along the corridor, toward the front of the care home, Richard Velnod's door was open.
        Rickster, liberator of ladybugs and mice, stood in the middle of his room, in bright yellow pajamas, savoring his ice cream while gazing out the window.
        "Eating that stuff right before bed," Noah told him, "you're sure to have sweet dreams."
        Rickster's slightly slurred voice was further numbed by the cold treat: "You know what's a really good thing? Sundays on Wednesday." At first Noah didn't get it.
        "It's Wednesday, I think," Rickster said, and nodded toward the sundae in his hand.
        "Oh. Yeah. Nice things when you don't expect them. That makes them even better. You're right. Here's to Sundaes on Wednesdays." "You turning yourself loose?" Rickster asked. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm leaving."
        With only a wistful expression, Rickster said that being able to turn yourself loose, whenever you wanted to go, was a really good thing, too, better even than Sundaes on Wednesday.
        Outside the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten, under trellises draped with bougainvillea, Noah took deep breaths of the warm night air. On the way to his car-another rustbucket Chevy-he tried to settle his nerves.
        The suspicion he'd directed at Wendy Quail had been misplaced.
        Laura was safe.
        In the days ahead, if any of Congressman Sharmer's Circle of Friends couldn't resist a little payback, they would come for Noah, not for his sister. Jonathan Sharmer was a thug wrapped in the robes of compassion and fairness that were the costume of preference among politicians, but he was still reliably a thug. And one of the few rules by which the criminal class lived-not counting the more psychotic street gangs-was the injunction against settling grudges by committing violence on family members who weren't in the business. Wives and children were untouchable. And sisters.
        The rattletrap engine turned over on the first try. The other car had always needed coaxing. The hand-brake release worked smoothly, the gear shift didn't stick much, and the clatter-creak of the aged frame and body wasn't loud enough to interfere with conversation, supposing that he'd had anyone to talk to other than himself. Hell, it was like driving a Mercedes-Benz.

Chapter 24
        
        BRUSHING WITHOUT TOOTHPASTE is poor dental maintenance, but the flavor of a bedtime cocktail isn't enhanced by a residue of Pepsodent.
        After a mintless scrubbing of her teeth, Micky retreated to her tiny bedroom, which she'd already stocked with a plastic tumbler and an ice bucket. In the bottom drawer of her small dresser, she kept a supply of cheap lemon-flavored vodka.
        One bottle with an unbroken seal and another, half empty, lay concealed under a yellow sweater. Micky wasn't hiding the booze from Geneva; her aunt knew that she enjoyed a drink before bed- and that she usually had one whether or not she enjoyed it.
        Micky kept the vodka under the sweater because she didn't want to see it each time that she opened the drawer in search of something else. The sight of this stash, when she wasn't immediately in need of it, had the power to dispirit her, and even to stir a heart-darkening cloud from a sediment of shame.
        Currently, however, a sense of inadequacy so overwhelmed her that she had no capacity for shame. In this chill of helplessness, familiar to her since childhood, an icy resentment sometimes formed, and from it she often generated a blinding blizzard of anger that isolated her from other people, from life, from all hope.
        To avoid brooding too much about her impotence in the matter of Leilani Klonk, Micky loaded the tumbler with two shots of anesthesia, over ice. She promised herself at least a second round of the same gauge, with the hope that these double-barreled blasts would blow her into sleep before helplessness bred anger, because inevitably anger left her tossing sleepless in the sheets.
        She had been drunk only once since moving in with Geneva a week ago. In fact she'd gotten through two of these seven days without any alcohol whatsoever. She wouldn't get sloppy tonight, just numb enough to stop caring about helpless girls-the one next door and the one that she herself had been not many years ago.
        After