Free One Door Away from Heaven by Dean Koontz Page A

congressman’s minions coiled in a car outside, waiting to follow the woman, Noah must avoid being seen.
    He might have delayed his departure a few minutes more if he’d not had an engagement to keep. Visiting hours at the Haven of the Lonesome and the Long Forgotten were drawing toward a close, and a damaged angel waited there for him.

Chapter 7
    SO HER BROTHER was on Mars, her hapless mother was on dope, and her stepfather was on a murderous rampage. Leilani’s eccentric tales were acceptable conversation over dinner in an asylum; but in spite of how looney life could sometimes be here in Casa Geneva, and though the relentless August heat withered common sense and wilted reason, Micky decided that they were setting a new standard for irrationality in this trailer where genteel daffiness and screwball self-delusion had heretofore been the closest they had come to madness.
    “So who did your stepfather kill?” she asked nevertheless, playing Leilani’s curious game if for no reason other than it was more amusing than talking about a miserable day of job-hunting.
    “Yes, dear, who did he whack?” Aunt Gen asked with bright-eyed interest. Perhaps her occasional confusion of real-life experiences with the fantasies of the cinema had prepared her to relate to the girl’s Hitchcockian-Spielbergian biography with less skepticism than the narrative aroused in Micky.
    Without hesitation, Leilani said, “Four elderly women, three elderly men, a thirty-year-old mother of two, a rich gay-nightclub owner in San Francisco, a seventeen-year-old high-school football star in Iowa—and a six-year-old boy in a wheelchair not far from here, in a town called Tustin.”
    The specificity of the answer was disconcerting. Leilani’s words struck a bell in Micky’s mind, and she recognized the sound as the ring of truth.
    Yesterday in the backyard, when Micky admonished the girl not to invent unkind stories about her mother, Leilani had said,
I couldn’t make up anything as weird as what is.
    But a stepfather who had committed eleven murders? Who killed elderly women? And a little boy in a wheelchair?
    Even as instinct argued that she was hearing the clear ring of truth, reason insisted it was the reverberant gong of sheer fantasy.
    “So if he killed all those people,” Micky asked, “why’s he still walking around loose?”
    “It’s a wonderment, isn’t it?” the girl said.
    “More than a wonderment. It’s impossible.”
    “Dr. Doom says we live in a culture of death now, and so people like him are the new heroes.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I don’t explain the doctor,” Leilani said. “I just quote him.”
    “He sounds like a perfectly dreadful man,” Aunt Gen said, as though Leilani had accused Maddoc of nothing worse than habitually breaking wind and being rude to nuns.
    “If I were you, I wouldn’t invite him to dinner. By the way, he doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t allow this. But he’s out tonight.”
    “I’d rather invite Satan than him,” said Geneva. “You’re welcome here anytime, Leilani, but he better stay on his side of the fence.”
    “He will. He doesn’t like people much, unless they’re dead. He isn’t likely to chat you up across the backyard fence. But if you do run into him, don’t call him Preston or Maddoc. These days he looks a lot different, and he travels under the name Jordan—‘call me Jorry’—Banks. If you use his real name, he’ll know I’ve ratted on him.”
    “I won’t be talking to him,” said Geneva. “After what I’ve just heard, I’d as soon smack him as look at him.”
    Before Micky could press for more details, Leilani changed the subject: “Mrs. D, did the cops catch the guy who robbed your store?”
    Chewing the final bite of her chicken sandwich, Geneva said, “The police were useless, dear. I had to track him down myself.”
    “That’s so completely radical!” In the gathering shadows that darkened but didn’t cool the kitchen, in