WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

“A hundred hairs.”

“Like the dog had just been sitting there minutes before you came in.”

“Like, if I’d been two minutes sooner, I’d have set right down on the dog

himself.”

Walt turned the steaks on the barbecue. “You’re a pretty observant man, Lem,

which ought to’ve taken you far in the line of work you were in. I just don’t

understand how, with all your talents, you managed to screw up the Banodyne case

so thoroughly.”

They both laughed, as they always did.

“Just luck, I guess,” Lem said, which was what he always said, and he laughed

again.

3

When James Garrison Hyatt celebrated his third birthday on June 28, his mother

was pregnant with his first sibling, who eventually became his sister.

They threw a party at the bleached-wood house on the forested slopes above the

Pacific. Because the Hyatts would soon be moving to a new and larger house a bit

farther up the coast, they made it a party to remember, not merely a birthday

bash but a goodbye to the house that had first sheltered them as a family.

Jim Keene drove in from Carmel with Pooka and Sadie, his two black labs, and his

young golden retriever, Leonardo, who was usually called Leo. A few close

friends came in from the real-estate office where Sam—”Travis” to

everyone—worked in Carmel Highlands, and from the gallery in Cannel where Nora’s

paintings were exhibited and sold. These friends brought their retrievers, too,

all of them second-litter offspring of Einstein and his mate, Minnie.

Only Garrison Dilworth was missing. He had died in his sleep the previous year.

They had a fine day, a grand time, not merely because they were friends and

happy to be with one another, but because they shared a secret wonder and joy

that would forever bind them into one enormous extended family.

All members of the first litter, which Travis and Nora could not have borne

adopting out, and which lived at the bleached-wood house, were also present:

Mickey, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie.

The dogs had an even better time than the people, frolicking on the lawn,

playing hide-and-seek in the woods, and watching videotapes on the TV in the

living room.

The canine patriarch participated in some of the games, but he spent much of his

time with Travis and Nora and, as usual, stayed close to Minnie. He limped—as he

would for the rest of his life—because his right hind leg had been cruelly

mangled by The Outsider and would not have been usable at all if his vet had not

been so dedicated to the restoration of the limb’s function.

Travis often wondered whether The Outsider had thrown Einstein against the

nursery wall with great force and then had assumed he was dead. Or at the moment

when it held the retriever’s life in its hands, perhaps the thing had reached

down within itself and found some drop of mercy that its makers had not designed

into it but which had somehow been there anyway. Perhaps it remembered the one

pleasure it and the dog had shared in the lab—the cartoons. And in remembering

the sharing, perhaps it saw itself, for the first time, as having a dim

potential to be like other living things. Seeing itself as like others, perhaps

it then could not kill Einstein as easily as it had expected. After all, with a

flick of those talons, it could have gutted him.

But though he had acquired the limp, Einstein had lost the tattoo in his ear,

thanks to Jim Keene. No one could ever prove that he was the dog from

Banodyne—and he could still play “dumb dog” very well when he wished.

At times during young Jimmy’s third birthday extravaganza, Minnie regarded her

mate and offspring with charmed befuddlement, perplexed by their attitudes and

antics. Although she could never fully understand them, no mother of dogs ever

received half the love that she was given by those she’d brought into the world.

She watched over them, and they watched over her, guardians of each other.

At the dark end of that good day, when the guests were gone, when Jimmy was

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