Occasionally, of course, the Hole stuffed herself with so many contraindicated chemicals that she didn’t remember the deal any more than she remembered who she was. Those depths of indulgence rarely occurred this early in the day, but nearly always at night, when he usually arranged to be present to manage her with a whiff of this same homemade anesthetic if she could not be calmed by words or by a little physical force.
He removed the cloth from the girl’s face and threw it on the floor instead of bothering to return it to the plastic bag. She still groaned and rolled her head against the back of the seat, but the job was done: They had reached the turnoff to the Teelroy farm.
The driving wind gave way to hard shifting gusts that blew from more than one point of the compass, causing the door to rattle and bang against the side of the big Prevost, but still no one rushed to secure it.
Drenched during the few seconds that he was exposed while racing from the car to the motor home, Noah Farrel entered cautiously but without pausing to knock. He ascended the steps, stood beside the co-pilot’s seat. He listened to the door thumping behind him and to the mad drumming of the rain on the metal roof, seeking other sounds that might help him to analyze the situation, hearing nothing useful.
An unfolded sofabed occupied most of the lounge. One lamp cast light down upon three hula dolls, two motionless and one rotating its hips, and sprayed light up on a dreamily smiling painted face that filled most of the ceiling.
Disregarding the daylight, which settled as gray as a coat of wet ashes on the windows, the only additional illumination issued from the rear of the vehicle, past the open door to the bedroom. The light back there was subdued and red.
Saturday afternoon, when he’d left Geneva Davis’s place to do some final research on Maddoc and to pack a suitcase, and again this morning during his flight to Coeur d’Alene and then during his drive to Nun’s Lake, Noah mulled over numerous approaches to the problem, each depending on different circumstances that he might encounter when he arrived here. None of his scenarios included this situation, however, and after all his mulling, he was forced to wing it.
The first choice was whether to proceed silently or to announce his presence. He decided on the latter course. Affecting a jolly-fellow-camper voice, he called out, “Hello! Anybody home?” And when he got no reply, he eased past the sofabed, toward the galley. “Saw your door open in the rain. Thought something was wrong.”
More hula dolls on the dining-nook table. On the galley counter.
He glanced toward the front of the Prevost. No one had entered behind him.
Lightning flared repeatedly, and every window flickered like a television screen afflicted by inconstant reception. Ghostly faces, formed of shadows, swarmed the rain-smeared panes and peered into the motor home as though spirits strove to channel themselves from their plane of existence to this one through the transmitting power of the storm. Thunder boomed, and after the last peal had tolled to the far end of the sky, a tinny vibration lingered in the metal shell of the motor home, like the faint screaky voices of haunting entities.
Proceeding toward the back, he called out once more, “You okay, neighbor? Does anybody need help here?”
In the bathroom, hula dolls flanked the sink.
At the open bedroom door, Noah hesitated. He called out again, but received no answer.
He stepped across the threshold, out of the shadowy bath, into the crimson glow, which had been achieved by draping the lamps with red blouses.
Beside the rumpled bed, she waited, standing straight, head held high on a graceful neck, as though she were a titled lady who’d risen to grant an audience to an inferior. She wore a brightly patterned sarong. Her hair appeared windblown, but she had not been out in the storm, for she was dry.
Her bare arms hung slackly at her sides, and although her face was a mask of serenity, like the peaceful countenance of a Buddhist meditating, her eyes were as twitchy as those of a rabid animal. He’d seen this contrast before, and often in his youth. Though she didn’t appear to be amped out on meth, she was operating on a substance more potent than caffeine.
“Are you Hawaiian?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Why the shirt?”
“Comfort,” he said.
“Are you Lukipela?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did they beam you up?”
On his long trip to Nun’s Lake, during all his planning, Noah had not anticipated, under any circumstances, that he would boldly reveal his intentions either to this woman or to Preston Maddoc. But Sinsemilla — easily identifiable from Geneva’s description — reminded him of Wendy Quail, the nurse who had killed Laura. Sinsemilla didn’t resemble Quail, but in her serene face and her bird-bright busy eyes, he detected a smugness, a self-satisfaction, a self-adoration that the nurse, too, had worn as though it were the aura of a saint. Her attitude, the atmosphere in this place, the sound of the front door banging in the wind, cranked up the heat under the stew pot of his instinct, and he suspected that Micky and Leilani were someplace beyond mere trouble. He said, “Where’s your daughter?”
She took a step toward him, swayed, stopped. “Luki baby, your mommy’s glad you got healed all righteous and then got fast-grown into a whole new incarnation, been out there to the stars and seen cool stuff. Mommy’s glad, but it scares her, you comin’ back here like this.”
“Where’s Leilani,” he persisted.
“See, Mommy’s got new babies comin’, pretty babies different only in their heads, not like you used to be different, all screwed up in your hips. Mommy’s movin’ on, Luki baby, Mommy’s movin’ on and don’t want her new pretty babies hangin’ with her old gnarly babies.”
“Has Maddoc taken her somewhere?”
“Maybe you been to Jupiter and got healed up, but you still got the gnarly inside you, the little crip you used to be is still like a worm inside your spirit, and my new pretty babies will see all the sad gnarly in you ’cause they’re gonna be true wizard babies, got themselves total psychic powers.”
Until now loosely cupped at her side, Sinsemilla’s right hand tightened into a fist, and Noah knew that she held a weapon.
When he backed off a step, she rushed him. Her right arm came up, and she slashed at his face with what might have been a scalpel.
Past his eyes the keen blade arced, glimmering with red light, two inches short of a blinding cut.
He leaned away from the attack, then came in under it and seized her right wrist.
The scalpel in her left hand, unanticipated, punctured his right shoulder, which was a stroke of luck, pure good luck. She could have slashed instead of jabbed, opening his throat and one or both of his carotid arteries.
The wound registered more as pressure than as pain. Rather than struggle to disarm her, when suddenly she was spitting and screaming like a Tasmanian devil, he kicked her legs out from under her and simultaneously pushed her backward.
As she fell away, she held fast to the scalpel with which she’d scored, yanking it out of him. That was all pain, no pressure.