wasn’t a medical doctor, but as a seasoned motor-home enthusiast, he understood the need to be prepared for minor injuries while on the road. And because Leilani understood her mother’s penchant for mishap and calamity, she had added supplies to the basic kit. She kept it always near at hand.
Red blouses still draped the lamps. The scarlet light no longer fostered a brothel atmosphere; in view of recent events in this room, the feeling was now palace-of-the-Martian-king, creepy and surreal.
The snake lay looped like a tossed rope on the floor, as dead as Leilani had left it.
Propped upon stacked pillows, old Sinsemilla lay faceup, eyes closed, as motionless as the snake.
Leilani had needed the shower, the change of clothes, and time to gather the raveled ends of herself before she had been able to return here. She hadn’t been Leilani Klonk when she hurried from this room. She’d been a frightened, angry, and humiliated girl, panicked into flight. She would not ever be that person again. Never. The real Leilani was back — rested, refreshed, ready to take care of business.
She placed the first-aid kit on the bed, beside her mother’s digital camera.
Sinsemilla snored softly. Having crashed from her chemical high, she was planted deeper than sleep, though not as deep as coma. She’d probably lie limp and unresponsive until late morning.
Leilani timed her mother’s pulse. Regular but fast. Metabolism racing to rid the body of drugs.
Although the serpent hadn’t been poisonous, the bite looked wicked. The punctures were small. No blood flowed now, but much of the surrounding soft tissue was blue-black. Probably just bruises.
Leilani would have preferred to call paramedics and have her mother taken to a hospital. Sinsemilla would then, of course, be mad-dog furious for having been subjected to university-trained doctors and Western medicine, which she despised. When she returned home, she would launch a campaign of hectoring recriminations that would last hours, days, until you prayed to go deaf and considered cutting off your ears with an electric carving knife just to change the subject.
Besides, if Sinsemilla flipped out when she woke up and found herself in a hospital, her performance might earn a transfer to the psychiatric ward.
Then Leilani would be alone with Dr. Doom.
He wasn’t a diddler. She’d told Micky the truth about that.
He did kill people, however, and though he wasn’t a hotheaded homicidal maniac, though he was a comparatively genteel murderer, you nevertheless didn’t want to be alone with him any more than you would want to be alone with Charles Manson and a chain saw.
Anyway, when the doctors learned Sinsemilla was the wife of that Preston Claudius Maddoc, the chances of their transferring her to a head-case ward would diminish to zero. They might send her home in a stretch limousine, perhaps with a complimentary heroin lollipop.
In most cases, these circumstances — drug-soaked psycho mother, dead snake, traumatized young mutant girl — would mobilize government social workers to consider placing Leilani temporarily in foster care. Already separated from Luki forever, she would be willing to risk a foster home, but this wouldn’t be handled like an ordinary case, and she wouldn’t be given that opportunity.
Preston Claudius Maddoc wasn’t an ordinary mortal. If anyone attempted to take his stepdaughter from him, powerful forces would spring to his defense. Like most district attorneys and police coast to coast, local authorities would probably decline to do battle with him.
Short of being caught on video in the act of blowing someone’s bruins out, Preston Maddoc was untouchable.
Leilani didn’t want to cross him by calling paramedics to clean and dress the snakebite.
If he began to think she was a troublemaker, he might decide to prepare a nice dirt bed for her, like the one he’d made for Lukipela, and put her to sleep in it immediately, instead of waiting any longer for the extraterrestrials to show up. Then for Sinsemilla’s delight, the doom doctor would concoct a heartwarming story about a twinkly cute spaceship, smartly tailored alien diplomats from the Parliament of Planets, and Leilani waving goodbye with an American flag in one hand and a Fourth of July sparkler in the other as she ascended in a pale green levitation beam.
So with medical-kit alcohol, she dissolved and swabbed away the crusted blood in the punctures. She applied hydrogen peroxide, too, which churned up a bloody foam. Then she worked sulfacetamide powder into the wounds with a small syringelike applicator.
A few times, Sinsemilla whimpered or groaned, although she never woke or attempted to pull away from Leilani.
If the fangs had reached the bone, infection would most likely develop regardless of these simple efforts to flush the wounds with antiseptics. Then, Sinsemilla might feel differently about seeing a university-trained doctor.
Meanwhile, Leilani did the best that she could with the skills she had and with the materials at her disposal. After using dabs of Neosporin to seal the sulfacetamide in the punctures, she bandaged the wound to keep it clean.
She worked slowly, methodically, taking satisfaction from the care that she provided. In spite of the Martian light and the dead snake, there was a peaceful quality to the moment that she savored for its rarity.
Even disheveled, in the dirty rumpled full-length slip with its squashed and filthy flounce, Sinsemilla was beautiful. She might indeed have been a princess once, in a previous incarnation, during another life when she’d not been so confused and sad.
This was nice. Quiet. Placing a nonstick cotton pad over the punctures. Opening a roll of two-inch-wide gauze bandage. Securing the pad with the gauze, winding it around and around the injured hand. Finishing it with two strips of waterproof tape. Nice. This tender, quiet caregiving was almost a normal mother-daughter moment. It didn’t matter that their roles were reversed, that the daughter was providing the mothering. Only the normality mattered. The peace. Here, now, Leilani was overcome with a pleasant if melancholy sense of what might have been — but never would be.
Chapter 26
Atthetopofthe slope, dog and boy — one panting, one gasping — halt and turn to look back toward the highway, which lies a third of a mile to the south.
If Curtis had just finished a plate of dirt for dinner, his tongue could not have felt grainier than it did now, and the plaque of dust gritting between his teeth could not have been more vile. He is unable to work up enough saliva to spit out a foul alkaline taste. Having been raised for a time on the edge of a desert more forbidding than this one, he knows that sprinting flat-out through such terrain in twenty-percent humidity, even long after sundown, is extremely debilitating. They have hardly begun to run, and already he feels parched.
On the bosom of the dark plain below, a half-mile necklace of stopped traffic, continually growing longer, twinkles diamond-bright and ruby-red. From this elevation, he can see the interdiction point to the southwest. The westbound lanes are blocked by police vehicles that form a gate, and traffic is being funneled down from three lanes to one.
North of the highway, near the roadblock, the large, armored, and perhaps armed helicopter stands in open land. The rotors aren’t turning, but evidently the engines are running, since the interior is softly illuminated. From the open double-bay doors in the chopper’s fuselage, sufficient light escapes to reveal men gathered alongside the craft. At this distance, it’s impossible to discern whether these are additional SWAT-team units or uniformed troops.
With a Grrrrrrrrr, spoken and thought, Old Yeller draws Curtis’s attention away from the chopper in the west to action in the east.
Two big SUVs, modified for police use, with racks of rotating red and blue emergency beacons on their roofs, sirens silent, are departing the interstate. They descend the gently sloped embankment and proceed westward across open terrain, paralleling but bypassing the halted traffic on the highway.
Curtis assumes they will continue past him, all the way to the roadblock. Instead, they slow to a stop at a point where a group of people apparently waits for them on the embankment approximately due south of him.
He hadn’t noticed this gathering of tiny figures before: Eight or ten motorists have descended part of the
