Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

Aunt Gen and Micky, however, had seen Leilani. They had looked at her. They had listened. She was real to them, and she loved them for seeing her.

If they had been hurt because of her.

Lying awake until the TV timer went off, and then closing her eyes to block out the faintly luminous sun god's sleepy smile, she worried up numerous possible deaths for them. If Preston had killed Gen and Micky, then Leilani would kill him somehow, and it wouldn't matter if she had to sacrifice herself to get him, because life would not be worth living anymore, anyway.

"YOUR WORK is so exciting. If I could live my life again, I'd be a private investigator, too. You call yourselves dicks, don't you?"

"Maybe some do, ma'am," Noah Farrel said, "but I call myself a PI. Or used to."

Even in the morning, two hours before noon, the August heat prowled the kitchen, as though it were a living presence, a great cat with sun-warmed fur, slinking among the table legs and chairs. Noah felt a prickle of sweat forming on his brow.

"In my twenties," said Geneva Davis, "I fell passionately in love with a PI. Though I must admit I wasn't worthy of him."

"I find that hard to believe. You would've been quite a catch."

"You're sweet, dear. But the truth is, I was something of a bad girl in those days, and like all his kind, he had a code of ethics that wouldn't bend for me. But you know about PI ethics."

"Mine are tied in knots."

"I sincerely doubt that. How do you like my cookies?"

"They're delicious. But these aren't almonds, ma'am."

"Exactly. They're pecans. How's your vanilla Coke?"

"I think it's a cherry Coke."

"Yes, I used cherry syrup instead of vanilla. I've had vanilla Cokes with vanilla two days in a row. This seemed a nice change."

"I haven't had a cherry Coke since I was a kid. I'd forgotten how good they taste."

Smiling, indicating his glass with a nod of her head, she said, "And what about your vanilla Coke?"

Having sat at Geneva Davis's kitchen table for fifteen minutes, Noah had adapted to the spirit of her conversation. He raised his glass as if in a toast. "Delicious. You said your niece phoned you?"

"Seven this morning, yes, from Sacramento. I worried about her staying there overnight. A pretty girl isn't safe in a town where there's so many politicians. But she's on the road now, hoping to make Seattle by tonight."

"Why didn't she fly to Idaho?"

"She might not be able to grab Leilani right away. Might have to follow them somewhere else, maybe for days. She preferred her own car for that. Plus her budget's too tight for planes and rental cars."

"Do you have her cell-phone number?"

"We aren't people who have cell phones, dear. We're church-mouse poor."

"I don't think what she's doing is advisable, Mrs. Davis."

"Oh, good Lord, of course it's not advisable, dear. It's just what she had to do."

"Preston Maddoc is a formidable opponent."

"He's a vicious, sick sonofabitch, dear, which is exactly why we can't leave Leilani with him."

"Even if your niece doesn't wind up in physical danger up there, even if she gets the girl and brings her back here, do you realize what trouble she's in?"

Mrs. Davis nodded, sipped her drink, and said, "As I understand it, the governor will make her suck down a lot of lethal gas. And me, too, no doubt. He's not a very nice man, the governor. You'd think he would let us alone after already tripling our electricity bills."

Mopping his brow with a paper napkin, Noah said, "Mrs. Davis—"

"Please call me Geneva. That's a lovely Hawaiian shirt."

"Geneva, even with the very best of motives, kidnapping is still kidnapping. A federal offense. The FBI will get involved."

"We're thinking of hiding Leilani with all the parrots," Geneva confided. "They'll never find her."

"What parrots?"

"My sister-in-law, Clarissa, is a sweet tub of a woman with a goiter and sixty parrots. She lives out in Hemet. Who goes to Hemet? Nobody. Certainly not the FBI."

"They'll go to Hemet," he solemnly assured her.

"One of the parrots has a huge vocabulary of obscenities, but none of the others is foul-mouthed. The garbage-talking bird used to be owned by a policeman. Sad, isn't it? A police officer. Clarissa's been trying to clean up its act, but without much success."

"Geneva, even if the girl isn't making up all this stuff, even if she's in real danger, you can't take the law into your hands—"

"There's lots of law these days," she interrupted, "but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?"

This was a different woman from the one with whom he had been speaking a moment ago. Her green eyes were flinty now. Her sweet face hardened as he wouldn't have thought possible.

"If Micky doesn't do this," she continued, "that sick bastard will kill Leilani, and it'll be as if she never existed, and no one but me and Micky will care what the world lost. You better believe it'll be a loss, too, because this girl is the right stuff, she's a shining soul. These days people make heroes out of actors, singers, power-mad politicians. How screwed up are things when that's what hero has come to mean? I'd trade the whole self-important lot of 'em for this girl. She's got more steel in her spine and more true heart than a thousand of those so-called heroes. Have another cookie?"

Lately, Noah's preferred sources of sugar were all liquid and came with an alcohol component, but he felt the need for a metabolic kick-start to hold his own with this woman and to get his most urgent point across to her. He took another cookie from the plate.

Geneva said, "Have you found any record of Maddoc's marriage to Leilani's mother?"

"No. Even with Internet resources, it's a big country. In a few states, if you have a convincing reason and some friends in the right places, you could arrange an in-camera marriage, in the privacy of a judge's chambers, with the license issued and properly tiled but not published. That's not easy to track. More likely, they were hitched in another country that'll marry foreign nationals. Maybe Mexico. Or Guatemala's a good bet. A lot of resources could be saved if Leilani would tell us where the wedding took place."

"We were going to ask exactly that when she came to dinner the second time. But we didn't see her again. I guess the mother's real name and proof that the brother existed aren't any easier to track than the marriage license."

"Not impossible. But, again, it would help if I could speak to Leilani." Frustrated, he put down the unbitten second cookie. "I'm sitting here listening to myself talk like I'm completely on-board for this, and that's not the case, Geneva."

"I know it'll be expensive, and Micky didn't give you much—"

"That's not the problem."

"— but I have a little equity in this house that I could borrow against, and Micky's going to get a good job soon, I know she is."

"It's hard to get a good job and keep it when you're on the run from the FBI. Listen, that's the point. If I do any work for you, knowing that your niece intends to snatch this girl from her legal parents, then I'm aiding and abetting a kidnapping."

"That's ridiculous, dear."

"I'd be an accessory to a felony. It's the law."

"The law is ridiculous."

"In fact, to protect myself from any chance of being charged as an accessory, once I've given back your three hundred bucks, which I've brought with me, I have to go directly to the authorities and warn them what your niece is intending to do up there in Idaho."