One Door From Heaven

which he'd moved it. Surefooted, he went to the door.
        If earlier the snake had spoken to Leilani, while coiled upon her mother's bed or from its refuge under the chest of drawers, this would have been its voice, not wickedly sibilant but a honeyed croon: "I would never have caused her pain, Leilani. I'm the enemy of pain. I've devoted my life to relieving it."
        When Preston opened the bedroom door, a ghostly portal of light appeared on the wall opposite him, as before, and his phantom form on that threshold, looking back at her. Then his shadow appeared to cross into another reality, distorting as it went, and a slab of blackness swung shut upon the exit he had taken.
        Leilani wished that the shadow show represented reality and that Preston had indeed stepped out of this world and forever into another place better suited to him, perhaps a world in which everyone would be born dead and therefore could never be subjected to pain. He was but a wall or two away, however, still sharing the breath of life with her, still abiding under the same vault of stars that were, to her, filled with wonder and mystery, but that were, to him, nothing more than distant balls of fire and cataclysm.

Chapter 28
        
        CURTIS HEARS OR SMELLS or senses tarantulas springing out of sand tunnels, swarming away from his feet, and he hears or smells or senses rattlesnakes wriggling out of his path or coiling to shake a warning at him in maraca code, frightened rodents scampering away from him and from the feeding snakes, prairie dogs bolting into their burrows, startled birds erupting into flight from nests in the hollow arms of half-dead cactuses, lizards slithering liquid-quick across sand and stone from which still radiates the stored heat of the fierce sun long set, hawks circling high above, and coyotes ranging singly and in packs far to the left and to the right of him. These things might be figments of his imagination rather than real presences perceived through a mystical sharing of the dog's keen senses, but the night seems to bustle with life.
        Old Yeller leads him, as never Lassie led Timmy, up slopes and down, into ravines and out, fast and faster. Cactus groves are mazes of needles at night. Layers of small round stones and smaller gravel, quarried out of the original rock strata and piled into ridges by the massive moving glaciers of an ancient ice age, provide treacherous passage to more welcoming terrain.
        They have put additional distance between themselves and the pair of SUVs, which continue to prowl in their wake, now more than one hill away. Once, a search flare had gone up, casting an unearthly bluish brilliance across a wide swath of the landscape, but it had been safely behind Curtis and the dog.
        Initially to the rear of the SUVs but soon parallel with them, the helicopter has tacked west to east, east to west, back and forth across the field of search, proceeding steadily north by indirection. The chopper is most likely equipped with a powerful searchlight that would make the gear on the two SUVs seem like mere votive candles by comparison. Yet the craft conducts its maneuvers without this aid, from which Curtis infers that they have sophisticated electronic tracking packages aboard.
        Not good.
        Infrared tracking might be of only limited use to them right now, because the land itself is shedding so much stored heat from the day that the body heat of living creatures on the move will not be clearly readable against the background glare. If their computer technology is sufficiently advanced, however, good analytic software could screen out background thermals-thus revealing coyotes, dogs, and running boys.
        More worrisome: If they possess open-terrain motion-detection equipment, conditions are ideal for its use, because the night is not merely windless but again dead calm. Furthermore, mule deer move in small herds, coyotes hunt in packs or on occasion singly, while a boy and his dog are by definition a twosome, presenting a unique and at once identifiable signature on the search scope.
        Regardless of the resources that the FBI and the military may bring to bear, other enemies roam the desert, more dangerous than those legitimate authorities. The killers from Colorado are urgently monitoring other search scopes for the unique energy signal of the boy who would be Curtis Hammond. Their return to the game, a short time ago, was