Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

In trying to yank her foot away from Old Yeller, Polly pulled it out of the sandal, and the dog at once made off with the prize, stopping at the front corner of the motor home to look back and to adjust her grip until the shoe dangled from her mouth by one thin strap. The dog swung the sandal teasingly back and forth. Cass said, "She's inviting you to play," and Polly said, "Yeah, well, the way I interpret it, even cute as she is, she's asking me to drop-kick her over that string of Christmas lights," and for once Earl's maniacal smile almost seemed appropriate.

With the hose nozzle set securely in the fuel port and with at least five minutes required to fill the big tank, Cass's hands were free, and Polly had complete confidence in her sister's ability to deal with the likes of Earl Bockmnn, even if he might have this day received word from the Guinness Book of World Records that he had displaced the late Jeffrey Dahmer in the category of Most Severed Heads Kept in a Single Refrigerator. Hobbling, she pursued Old Yeller around the front of the Fleetwood, to the starboard flank, where the dog bounded through the open door and up the steps, into the motor home.

By the time Polly got inside, the sandal lay discarded on the floor of the lounge, directly under the only interior light that had been left burning, while in the kitchen area just beyond the lounge, the dog sprang onto the dining-nook booth, craned her neck across the table, and snatched the packet of playing cards in her teeth. As Polly picked up the sandal, Old Yeller returned to the lounge, shook the packet until the lid flap came untucked, and scattered the cards across the carpeted floor.

As one who had been raised in a rural community where cows and hogs and chickens provided examples of deportment and dignity seldom matched by human beings, as one who'd worked in a multimillion-dollar stage show where the two elephants, four chimps, six dogs, and even the python had been more amenable than sixty-six of the seventy-four dancers in the cast, Polly considered herself an animal lover, and she also qualified as an astute enough observer of animal conduct to know that Old Yeller was acting out of character and that something uncanny was happening. She didn't scold, therefore, and didn't begin at once to clean up the mess, as ordinarily she would have done, but gave the dog room and dropped to her knees to watch.

Half the cards had spilled faceup on the floor, and Old Yeller began to paw through these, making selections frantically and yet with clear deliberation, until she sorted out two clubs, two hearts, and one spade. The suits of the chosen cards were of no consequence, but the numbers on them were meaningful, because using her nose and her paws, the dog lined them up side by side in correct numerical order—3 of spades, 4 of clubs, 5 of hearts, 6 of clubs, 7 of hearts — and then grinned at Polly expectantly.

Gymnastic dogs balancing on rolling beachballs and walking on parallel bars, pyrophilic dogs leaping through flaming hoops, tiny dogs riding the backs of big dogs as those mounts raced and leaped through obstacle courses, mortified dogs in pink tutus dancing on their hind feet: In Vegas, Polly had seen trained dogs do impressive stunts, but she had never until now seen any mutt exhibit advanced numerical aptitude, so even as she watched Old Yeller paw the 6 of clubs into place and nose the 7 of hearts in line immediately after it, she muttered the name of the loathsome movie star not once but twice, made eye contact with this furry mathematician, shivered with a delicious sense of wonder, and said what Lassie must have been sick to death of hearing during her long years with Timmy on the farm: "You're trying to tell me something, aren't you, girl?"

INTENDING NO OFFENSE to Romulus, Tarzan, and HAL 9000, Cass judged Earl Bockman's social skills to be worse than those of a child nursed in infancy by wolves, subsequently adopted by a tribe of apes, and later educated entirely by machines.

He was stiff. Self-conscious. Fidgety. His facial expressions were seldom appropriate to what he happened to be saying, and every time he appeared to recognize an instance of this inappropriateness, he resorted to the same cartoon-cat-caught-at-the-canary-cage smile that he seemed to think was folksy and reassuring.

Worse yet, Earl was a droner. Each pause in conversation longer than two seconds made him nervous. He rushed to fill every brief silence with the first thing that came into his head, which reliably proved to be something tedious.

Cass decided that Maureen, Earl's wife and reputed peach, must be either a saint or as dumb as a carrot. No woman would stay with this man unless she was a religiosity who hoped to purify her soul through suffering or had no detectable cerebral function.

Leaning against the motor home, waiting for the tank to fill, Cass felt as if she were a condemned prisoner with her back pressed to the executioner's wall. Earl was a one-man firing squad, the bullets were his words, and boredom the method of execution.

And what was the story with the watch? No better skilled at surreptitious action than at conversation, Earl aimed the gadget at various points in the night around them. He even dropped to one knee to tie a shoelace that appeared to be tied perfectly well before he decided to tend to it, obviously as an excuse to direct the lace of the wristwatch toward the space under the Fleetwood.

Maybe he suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Maybe he was compelled to aim his wristwatch ceaselessly at people and things, just as some obsessives washed their hands four hundred times a day, and just as others counted the socks in their dresser drawers or the plates in the kitchen cupboards once every hour.

At first he'd been a little bit of a sad case, but then quickly he'd become amusing.

He wasn't amusing anymore.

Increasingly, he gave Cass the creeps.

During the three years she'd been married to Don Flackberg — film producer, younger brother of Julian — Cass moved in the highest levels of Hollywood society, where she had eventually calculated that of the entire pool of successful actors, directors, studio executives, and producers, 6.5 percent were sane and good, 4.5 percent were sane and evil, and 89 percent were insane and evil. In accumulating the experience to make this assessment, she had learned to recognize a series of eye expressions, facial ticks, and body-language quirks, as well as other physical and behavioral tells that unfailingly alerted her to the maddest of the mad and to the most monstrously wicked of the wicked before she fell prey to them. Following three minutes of observation, she believed that Earl Bockman, a simple pump jockey and grocer, was every bit as insane and evil as any of the richest and most highly honored members of the film community whom she had ever known.

IN THE DARKNESS behind the crossroads store, between the moon-drizzled faux Corvette and the Explorer stuffed with corpses, Curtis keeps a watch on the back door of the building and on both the north and the south corners, around either of which epic trouble might come at any moment.

Most of his attention, however, is reserved for the boy-dog bond that he's exploiting now more intensely than ever before. He is here with a dry breeze whispering through the prairie grass at his back, but he is also — and more completely — with his sister-become inside the motor home, dazzling Polly with canine arithmetic and then with an instrument more complicated than playing cards.

When he's sure that Polly understands his message, that she is alarmed, and that she'll act to save herself and her sister, Curtis retreats from the dog and from the motor home. Now he lives only here in the warm breath of the prairie, in the cold light of the moon.

These hunters always travel in pairs or squads, never alone. The fact that both of the mom-and-pop cadavers in the SUV were stripped of clothes indicates that in addition to the man out at the pumps, a killer masquerading as the chestnut-haired woman waits in the store.