WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

the house, with Einstein close behind him. The kitchen was large enough to serve

also as the dining room, yet it was cozy: oak walls, a Mexican-tile floor,

beige-tile counters, oak cabinets, a hand-textured plaster ceiling, the best

appliances. The big plank table with four comfortable padded chairs and a stone

fireplace helped make this the center of the house.

There were five other rooms—an enormous living room and a den at the front of

the first floor; three bedrooms upstairs—plus one bath down and one

up. One of the bedrooms was theirs, and one served as Nora’s studio where she

had done a little painting since they moved in—and the third was empty, awaiting

developments.

Travis switched on the kitchen lights. Although the house seemed isolated, they

were only two hundred yards from the highway, and power poles followed the line

of their dirt driveway.

“I’m having a beer,” Travis said, “You want anything?”

Einstein padded to his empty water dish, which was in the corner beside his food

dish, and scooted it across the floor to the sink.

They had not expected to be able to afford such a house so soon after fleeing

Santa Barbara—especially not when, during their first call to Garrison Dilworth,

the attorney informed them that Travis’s bank accounts had, indeed, been frozen.

They had been lucky to get the twenty-thousand-dollar check through. Garrison

had converted some of both Travis’s and Nora’s funds into eight cashier’s checks

as planned, and had sent them to Travis addressed to Mr. Samuel Spencer Hyatt

(the new persona), care of the Marin County motel where they had stayed for

nearly a week. But also, claiming to have sold Nora’s house for a handsome

six-figure price, he had sent another packet of cashier’s checks two days later,

to the same motel.

Speaking with him from a pay phone, Nora had said, “But even if you did sell it,

they can’t have paid the money and closed the deal so soon.”

“No,” Garrison had admitted. “It won’t close for a month. But you need the cash

now, so I’m advancing it to you.”

They had opened two accounts at a bank in Carmel, thirty-odd miles north of

where they now lived. They had bought the new pickup, then had taken Garrison’s

Mercedes north to the San Francisco airport, leaving it there for him. Heading

south again, past Carmel and along the coast, they looked for a house in the Big

Sur area. When they had found this one, they had been able to pay cash for it.

It was wiser to buy than rent, and it was wiser to pay cash rather than finance

the house, for fewer questions needed to be answered.

Travis was sure their ID would stand up, but he saw no reason to test the

quality of Van Dyne’s papers until necessary. Besides, after buying a house,

they were more respectable; the purchase added substance to their new

identities.

While Travis got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, twisted off the cap,

took a long swallow, then filled Einstein’s dish with water, the retriever went

to the walk-in pantry. The door was ajar, as always, and the dog opened it all

the way. He put one paw on a pedal that Travis had rigged for him just inside

the pantry door, and the light came on in there.

In addition to shelves of canned and bottled goods, the huge pantry contained a

complex gadget that Travis and Nora had built to facilitate communication with

the dog. The device stood against the rear wall: twenty-eight one-inch-square

tubes made of Lucite, lined up side by side in a wooden frame; each tube was

eighteen inches tall, open at the top, and fitted with a pedal-release valve at

the bottom. In the first twenty-six tubes were stacked lettered tiles from six

Scrabble games, so Einstein would have enough letters

to be able to form long messages. On the front of each tube was a hand-drawn

letter that showed what it contained; A, B, C, D, and so on. The last two tubes

held blank game tiles on which Travis had carved commas—or apostrophes—and

question marks. (They’d decided they could figure where the periods were

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *