Watchers (65 page)

Crouching over the dog, Nora said, “Oh my God, Travis, my God, after all he’s come through and now he has to die like this.”

“I’m going after the son-of-a-bitching bastard,” Travis said ferociously. “It’s in the barn.”

She moved toward the door, too, and he said, “No! Call Jim Keene and then stay with Einstein, stay with Einstein.”

“But you’re the one who needs me. You can’t go after it alone.”

“Einstein
needs you.”

“Einstein is dead,” she said through tears.

“Don’t say that!” he screamed at her. He was aware that he was irrational, as if he believed Einstein would not really be dead until they
said
he was dead, but he could not control himself. “Don’t say he’s dead. Stay here with him, damn it. I’ve already hurt that fucking fugitive from a nightmare, hurt it bad I think, it’s bleeding, and I can finish it off myself. Call Jim Keene, stay with Einstein.”

He was also afraid that, in all of this activity, she was going to induce a miscarriage, if she had not already done so. Then they would have lost not only Einstein but the baby.

He left the room at a run.

You’re in no condition to go into that barn, he told himself. You’ve got to cool down first. Telling Nora to call a vet for a dead dog, telling her to stay with it when, in fact, you could have used her at your side . . . No good. Letting rage and a thirst for vengeance get the best of you. No good.

But he could not stop. All of his life he had lost people he loved, and except in Delta Force he’d never had anyone to strike back at because you can’t take vengeance on fate. Even in Delta, the enemy was so faceless—the lumpish mass of maniacs and fanatics who were “international terrorism”—that vengeance provided little satisfaction. But here was an enemy of unparalleled evil, an enemy worthy of the name, and he would make it pay for what it had done to Einstein.

He raced down the hallway, descended the stairs two and three at a time, was hit by a wave of dizziness and nausea, and nearly fell. He grabbed at the banister to steady himself. He leaned on the wrong arm, and hot pain flared in his wounded shoulder. Letting go of the railing, he lost his balance and tumbled down the last flight, hitting the bottom hard.

He was in worse shape than he had thought.

Clutching the Uzi, he got to his feet and staggered to the back door, onto the porch, down the steps, into the yard. The cold rain cleared his fuzzy head, and he stood for a moment on the lawn, letting the storm wash some of the dizziness out of him.

An image of Einstein’s broken, bloody body flashed through his mind. He thought of the amusing messages that would never be formed on the pantry floor, and he thought of Christmases to come without Einstein padding around in his Santa cap, and he thought of love that would never be given or received, and he thought of all the genius puppies who would never be born, and the weight of all that loss nearly crushed him into the ground.

He used his grief to sharpen his rage, honed his fury until it had a razored edge.

Then he went to the barn.

The place swarmed with shadows. He stood at the open door, letting the rain beat on his head and back, peering into the barn, squinting at the layered gloom, hoping to spot the yellow eyes.

Nothing.

He went through the door, bold with rage, and sidled to the light switches on the north wall. Even when the lights came on, he could not see The Outsider.

Fighting off dizziness, clenching his teeth in pain, he moved past the empty space where the truck belonged, past the back of the Toyota, slowly along the side of the car.

The loft.

He would be moving out from under the loft in a couple of steps. If the thing was up there, it could leap down on him—

That speculation proved a dead end, for The Outsider was at the back of the barn, beyond the front end of the Toyota, crouched on the concrete floor, whimpering and hugging itself with both long, powerful arms. The floor around it was smeared with its blood.

He stood beside the car for almost a minute, fifteen feet from the creature, studying it with disgust, fear, horror, and a weird fascination. He believed he could see the body structure of an ape, maybe a baboon—something in the simian family, anyway. But it was neither mostly one species nor merely a patchwork of the recognizable parts of many animals. It was, instead, a thing unto itself. With its oversized and lumpish face, immense yellow eyes, steam-shovel jaw, and long curved teeth, with its hunched back and matted coat and too-long arms, it attained a frightful individuality.

It was staring at him, waiting.

He took two steps forward, bringing up the gun.

Lifting its head, working its jaws, it issued a raspy, cracked, slurred, but still intelligible word that he could hear even above the sounds of the storm:
“Hurt.”

Travis was more horrified than amazed. The creature had not been designed to be capable of speech, yet it had the intelligence to learn language and to desire communication. Evidently, during the months it pursued Einstein, that desire had grown great enough to allow it to conquer, to some extent, its physical limitations. It had practiced speech, finding ways to wring a few tortured words from its fibrous voice box and malformed mouth. Travis was horrified not at the sight of a demon speaking but at the thought of how desperately the thing must have wanted to communicate with someone, anyone. He did not want to pity it, did not dare pity it, because he wanted to feel
good
about blowing it off the face of the earth.

“Come far. Now done,”
it said with tremendous effort, as if each word had to be torn from its throat.

Its eyes were too alien ever to inspire empathy, and every limb was unmistakably an instrument of murder.

Unwrapping one long arm from around its body, it picked up something that had been on the floor beside it but that Travis had not noticed until now: one of the Mickey Mouse tapes Einstein had gotten for Christmas. The famous mouse was pictured on the cassette holder, wearing the same outfit he always wore, smiling that familiar smile, waving.

“Mickey,”
The Outsider said, and as wretched and strange and barely intelligible as its voice was, it somehow conveyed a sense of terrible loss and loneliness.
“Mickey.”

Then it dropped the cassette and clutched itself and rocked back and forth in agony.

Travis took another step forward.

The Outsider’s hideous face was so repulsive that there was almost something exquisite about it. In its unique ugliness, it was darkly, strangely seductive.

This time, when the thunder crashed, the barn lights flickered and nearly went out.

Raising its head again, speaking in that same scratchy voice but with cold, insane glee, it said,
“Kill dog, kill dog, kill dog,”
and it made a sound that might have been laughter.

He almost shot it to pieces. But before he could pull the trigger, The Outsider’s laughter gave way to what seemed to be sobbing. Travis watched, mesmerized.

Fixing Travis with its lantern eyes, it again said,
“Kill dog, kill dog, kill dog,”
but this time it seemed racked with grief, as if it grasped the magnitude of the crime that it had been genetically compelled to commit.

It looked at the cartoon of Mickey Mouse on the cassette holder.

Finally, pleadingly, it said,
“Kill me.”

Travis did not know if he was acting more out of rage or out of pity when he squeezed the trigger and emptied the Uzi’s magazine into The Outsider. What man had begun, man now ended.

When he was done, he felt drained.

He dropped the carbine and walked outside. He could not find the strength to return to the house. He sat down on the lawn, huddled in the rain, and wept.

He was still weeping when Jim Keene drove up the muddy lane from the Coast Highway.

chapter eleven

On Thursday afternoon, January 13, Lem Johnson left Cliff Soames and three other men at the foot of the dirt lane, where it met the Pacific Coast Highway. Their instructions were to allow no one past them but to remain on station until—and if—Lem called for them.

Cliff Soames seemed to think this was a strange way to handle things, but he did not voice his objections.

Lem explained that, since Travis Cornell was an ex-Delta man with considerable combat skills, he ought to be handled with care. “If we go storming in there, he’ll know who we are as soon as he sees us coming, and he might react violently. If I go in alone, I’ll be able to get him to talk to me, and maybe I can persuade him to just give it up.”

That was a flimsy explanation for his unorthodox procedure, and it did not wipe the frown off Cliff’s face.

Lem didn’t care about Cliff’s frown. He went in alone, driving one of the sedans, and parked in front of the bleached-wood house.

Birds were singing in the trees. Winter had temporarily relaxed its hold on the northern California coast, and the day was warm.

Lem climbed the steps and knocked on the front door.

Travis Cornell answered the knock and stared at him through the screen door before saying, “Mr. Johnson, I suppose.”

“How did you . . . oh yes, of course, Garrison Dilworth would have told you about me that night he got his call through.”

To Lem’s surprise, Cornell opened the screen door. “You might as well come in.”

Cornell was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, apparently because of a sizable bandage encasing most of his right shoulder. He led Lem through the front room and into a kitchen, where his wife sat at the table, peeling apples for a pie.

“Mr. Johnson,” she said.

Lem smiled and said, “I’m widely known, I see.”

Cornell sat at the table and lifted a cup of coffee. He offered no coffee to Lem.

Standing awkwardly for a moment, Lem eventually sat with them. He said, “Well, it was inevitable, you know. We had to catch up with you sooner or later.”

She peeled apples and said nothing. Her husband stared into his coffee.

What’s wrong with them? Lem wondered.

This was not remotely like any scenario he had imagined. He was prepared for panic, anger, despondency, and many other things, but not for this strange apathy. They did not seem to care that he had at last tracked them down.

He said, “Aren’t you interested in how we located you?”

The woman shook her head.

Cornell said, “If you really want to tell us, go ahead and have your fun.”

Frowning, puzzled, Lem said, “Well, it was simple. We knew that Mr. Dilworth had to’ve called you from some house or business within a few blocks of that park north of the harbor. So we tied our own computers into the telephone company’s records—with their permission, of course—and put men to work examining all the long-distance calls charged to all the numbers within three blocks of that park, on that one night. Nothing led us to you. But then we realized that, when charges are reversed, the call isn’t billed to the number from which the call is placed; it appears on the records of the person who accepts the reversed charges—which was you.
But
it also appears in a special phone-company file so they’ll be able to document the call if the person who accepted the charges later refuses to pay. We went through that special file, which is very small, and quickly found a call placed from a house along the coast, just north of the beach park, to your number here. When we went around to talk to the people there—the Essenby family—we focused on their son, a teenager named Tommy, and although it took some time, we ascertained that it had, indeed, been Dilworth who used their phone. The first part was terribly time-consuming, weeks and weeks, but after that . . . child’s play.”

“Do you want a medal or what?” Cornell asked.

The woman picked up another apple, quartered it, and began to strip off the peel.

They were not making this easy for him—but then his intentions were much different from what they would be expecting. They could not be criticized for being cool toward him when they did not yet know that he had come as a friend.

He said, “Listen, I’ve left my men at the end of the lane. Told them you might panic, do something stupid, if you saw us coming in a group. But why I really came alone was . . . to make you an offer.”

They both met his eyes at last, with interest.

He said, “I’m getting out of this goddamn job by spring. Why I’m getting out . . . you don’t have to know or care. Just say that I’ve gone through a sea change. Learned to deal with failure, and now it doesn’t scare me any more.” He sighed and shrugged. “Anyway, the dog doesn’t belong in a cage. I don’t give a good goddamn what they say, what they want—I know what’s right. I know what it’s like being in a cage. I’ve been in one most of my life, until recently. The dog shouldn’t have to go back to that. What I’m going to suggest is that you get him out of here now, Mr. Cornell, take him off through the woods, get him somewhere that he’ll be safe, then come back and face the music. Say that the dog ran off a couple of months ago, in some other place, and you think he must be dead by now, or in the hands of people who’re taking good care of him. There’ll still be the problem of The Outsider, which you must know about, but you and I can work up a way to deal with that when it comes. I’ll put men on a surveillance of you, but after a few weeks I’ll pull them, say it’s a lost cause—”

Cornell stood up and stepped to Lem’s chair. With his left hand he grabbed hold of Lem’s shirt and hauled him to his feet. “You’re sixteen days too late, you son of a bitch.”

“What do you mean?”

“The dog is dead. The Outsider killed him, and I killed The Outsider.”

The woman laid down her paring knife and a piece of apple. She put her face in her hands and sat forward in her chair, shoulders hunched, making soft, sad sounds.

“Ah, Jesus,” Lem said.