One Door From Heaven

appears to have the substance of a sword. Motorized, the lamp moves, and each time the slicing beam finds sagebrush or a gnarled spray of withered weeds, it cuts loose twisted shadows that leap into the night. Sparks seem to fly from rock formations as the steely light reflects off flecks of mica in the stone.
        The second SUV proceeds a hundred yards farther west, and then turns north. A searchlight flares on the roof, stabbing out from the jeweled hilt of red and blue emergency beacons.
        Paralleling each other, these two vehicles move north, toward Curtis. They grind along slowly, sweeping the landscape ahead of them with light, hoping to spot an obviously trampled clump of weeds or deep footprints where table stone gives way to a swale of soft sand.
        Sooner rather than later, they are likely to find the spoor they seek. Then they will pick up speed.
        The officers in the SUVs are operating under the aegis of one legitimate law-enforcement agency or another, and they most likely are who they appear to be. There's always the chance, however, that they might instead he more of the ferocious killers who struck in Colorado and who have pursued Curtis ever since.
        Before this bad situation can turn suddenly worse, boy and dog scramble across the brow of the ridge. Ahead, the land slopes down toward dark and arid realms.
        Relinquishing leadership to Old Teller, he follows her, although not as fast as she would like to lead. He skids and nearly falls on a cascade of loose shale, thrashes through an unseen cluster of knee-high sage, is snared on a low cactus, crying out involuntarily as the sharp spines prickle through the sock on his right foot and tattoo a pattern of pain on his ankle-all because he doesn't always proceed exactly in the dog's wake, but at times ranges to the left and right of her.
        Trust. They are bonding: He has no doubt that their relationship is growing deeper by the day, better by the hour. Yet they are still becoming what they eventually will be to each other, not yet entirely synchronized spirit to spirit. Curtis is reluctant to commit blindly and headlong to his companion's lead until they have achieved total synergism.
        Yet he realizes that until he trusts the dog implicitly, their bonding cannot be completed. Until then, they will be a boy and his dog, a dog and her boy, which is a grand thing, beautiful and true, but not as fine a relationship as that of the cross-species siblings they could become, brother and sister of the heart.
        Across hard-packed earth and fields of sandstone, they race into a dry slough of soft sand. The surefooted dog at once adapts to this abrupt change in the terrain, but because Curtis is not fully attuned to his sister-becoming, he blunders after her into the waterless bog without adjusting his pace or step. He sinks to his ankles, is thrown off-balance, and topples forward, imprinting his face in the sand, fortunately quick-thinking enough to close his eyes and his mouth before making a solid but graceless impact.
        Raising his face out of its concave image, snorting sand out of his nostrils, blowing a silicate frosting off his lips, blinking grains from his eyelashes, Curtis pushes up onto his knees. If his mother's spirit abides with him now, she is laughing, worried, and frustrated all at once.
        Old Yeller returns to him. He thinks she's offering the usual doggy commiseration, maybe laughing at him a little, too, but then he realizes that her attention is elsewhere.
        The moonless darkness baffles, but the dog is close enough for Curtis to see that she's interested in the top of the hill that they recently crossed. Raising her snout, she seeks scents that he can't apprehend. She clenches her muzzle to stop panting, pricks her ears toward whatever sound engages her.
        A flux of light throbs through the air beyond the ridge line: the moving searchlight beams reflecting off the pale stone and soil as the SUVs ascend the slope.
        Although Curtis can't prick his ears-one of the drawbacks of being Curtis Hammond instead of being Old Yeller-he follows the dog's example and holds his breath, the better to detect whatever noise caught her attention. At first he hears only the grumble of the SUVs… Then, in the distance, a flutter of sound arises, faint but unmistakable: helicopter rotors beating the thin desert air.
        The chopper might not be aloft yet, just