WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

Nora said, “If they find him . .

“They won’t.”

“But if they do, what then?”

“I’ll never give him up,” Travis said. “Never.”

8

By eleven o’clock that night, Deputy Porter’s headless corpse and the mutilated

body of the construction foreman had been removed from Bordeaux Ridge by the

coroner’s men. A cover story had been concocted and delivered to the reporters

at the police barricades, and the press had seemed to buy it; they had asked

their questions, had taken a couple of hundred photographs, and had filled a few

thousand feet of videotape with images that would be edited down to a hundred

seconds on tomorrow’s TV newscast. (In this age of mass murder and terrorism,

two victims rated no more than two minutes’ airtime: ten seconds for lead-in, a

hundred seconds for film, ten seconds for the well-coiffed anchorpersons to look

respectfully grim and saddened—then on to a story about a bikini contest, a

convention of Edsel owners, or a man who claimed to have seen an alien

spacecraft shaped like a Twinkie.) The reporters were gone now, as were the lab

men, the uniformed deputies, and all of Lemuel Johnson’s agents except Cliff

Soames.

Clouds hid the fragment moon. The kliegs were gone, and the only light came from

the headlamps of Walt Gaines’s car. He had swung his sedan around and aimed his

lights at Lem’s car, which was parked at the end of the unpaved street, so Lem

and Cliff would not have to fumble around in the dark. In the deep gloom beyond

the headlamps, half-framed houses loomed like the fossilized skeletons of

prehistoric reptiles.

As he walked toward his car, Lem felt as good as he could feel under the

circumstances. Walt had agreed to allow federal authorities to assume

jurisdiction without a challenge. Although Lem had broken a dozen regulations

and had violated his secrecy oath by telling Walt the details of the Francis

Project, he was sure Walt could keep his mouth shut. The lid was still on the

case, a bit looser than it had been, perhaps, but still in place.

Cliff Soames reached the car first, opened the door, and got in on the

passenger’s side, and as Lem opened the driver’s door he heard Cliff say, “Oh,

Jesus, oh God.” Cliff was scrambling back out of the car even as Lem looked in

from the other side and saw what the uproar was about. A head.

Teel Porter’s head, no doubt.

It was on the front seat of the car, propped so it was facing Lem when he opened

the door. The mouth hung open in a silent scream. The eyes were gone.

Reeling back from the car, Lem reached under his coat and pulled his revolver.

Walt Gaines was already out of his car, his own revolver in hand, running toward

Lem. “What’s wrong?”

Lem pointed.

Reaching the NSA sedan, Walt looked through the open door and let out a thin,

anguished sound when he saw the head.

Cliff came around from the other side of the car, gripping his gun, with the

muzzle pointed straight up. “The damn thing was here when we arrived, while we

were in the house.”

“Might still be here,” Lern said, anxiously surveying the darkness that crowded

them on all sides, beyond the beams from the patrol car’s headlights.

Studying the night-swaddled housing development, Walt said, “We’ll call in my

men, get a search under way.”

“No point to it,” Lem said. “The thing will take off if it sees your men

returning . . . if it’s not gone already.”

They were standing at the edge of Bordeaux Ridge, beyond which lay miles of open

land, foothills and mountains, out of which The Outsider had come and into which

it could disappear again. Those hills, ridges, and canyons were only vague forms

in the meager glow of the partial moon, more sensed than Seen.

From somewhere down the unlighted street came a loud clatter, as if a pile of

lumber or shingles had been knocked over.

“It is here,” Walt said.

“Maybe,” Lem said. “But we’re not going to go looking for it in the dark, not

just the three of us. That’s what it wants.”

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