She had been hit hard on the back of the neck. She wondered about spinal injury.
She refused to weep. She had the knife.
The killer came to her, stooped, and extracted the knife from her hand. She was amazed at how easily it slipped from her fingers, even though she clutched it ferociously, as if it hadn’t been a knife at all but a sliver of melting ice.
“Bad girl,” he said, and rapped the flat of the blade against the top of her skull.
He continued with the cleanup.
While trying not to think about spinal injuries, Chyna managed to get her hand around a fork.
He returned and took that away from her too. “No,” he said, as though he were training a recalcitrant puppy. “No.”
“Bastard,” she said, dismayed to hear a slur in her voice.
“Sticks and stones.”
“Fucking bastard.”
“Oh, very pretty,” he said scornfully.
“Shithead.”
“I should wash your mouth out with soap.”
“Asshole.”
“Your mother never taught you words like that.”
“You don’t know my mother,” she said thickly.
He hit her again, a hard chop to the side of the neck this time.
Then Chyna lay in darkness, listening worriedly to her mother’s distant gay laughter and strange men’s voices. Shattering glass. Cursing. Thunder and wind. Palm trees thrashing in the night over Key West. The quality of the laughter changed. Mocking now. Crashes that weren’t thunder. And the skittery palmetto beetle over her bare legs and across her back. Other times. Other places. In the vapory realm of dreams, the iron fist of memory.
7
Shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, after dealing with the woman and washing the flatware, Mr. Vess sets loose the dogs.
At the back door, at the front door, and in his bedroom, there are call buttons that, when pushed, sound a soft buzzer in the kennel behind the barn. When the Dobermans have been sent there with the word crib, as they were sent earlier, the buzzer is a command that at once returns them to active patrol.
He uses the call button by the kitchen door and then steps to the large window by the dinette to watch the backyard.
The sky is low and gray, still shrouding the Siskiyou Mountains, but rain is no longer falling. The drooping boughs of the evergreens drip steadily. The bark on the deciduous trees is a sodden black; their limbs—some with the first fragile green buds of spring, others still barren—are so coaly that they appear to have been stripped by fire.
Some people might think that the scene is passive now, with the thunder spent and the lightning extinguished, but Mr. Vess knows that a storm is as powerful in its aftermath as in its raging. He is in harmony with this new kind of power, the quiescent power of growth that water bestows on the land.
From the back of the barn come the Dobermans. They pad side by side for a distance, but then split up and proceed each in his own direction.
They are not on attack status at this time. They will chase down and detain any intruder, but they will not kill him. To prime them for blood, Mr. Vess must speak the name Nietzsche.
One of the dogs—Liederkranz—comes onto the back porch, where he stares at the window, adoring his master. His tail wags once, and then once again, but he is on duty, and this brief and measured display of affection is all that he will allow himself.
Liederkranz returns to the backyard. He stands tall, vigilant. He gazes first to the south, then west, and then east. He lowers his head, smells the wet grass, and at last he moves off across the lawn, sniffing industriously. His ears flatten against his skull as he concentrates on a scent, tracking something that he imagines might be a threat to his master.
On a few occasions, as a reward to the Dobermans and to keep them sharp, Mr. Vess has turned loose a captive and has allowed the dogs to stalk her, forgoing the pleasure of the kill himself. It is an entertaining spectacle.
Secure behind the screen of his four-legged Praetorian Guard, Mr. Vess goes upstairs to the bathroom and adjusts the water in the shower until it is luxuriously hot. He lowers the volume of the radio but leaves it tuned to the swing-music program.