Click, click, click.
Ken Dimes was no coward. He was a good cop who had never walked away from
trouble. He had received two citations for bravery in only seven years on the
force. But this faceless, insanely violent son of a bitch, scurrying through the
house in total darkness, silent when he wanted to be and making
taunting sounds when it suited him—he baffled and scared Ken. And although Ken
was as courageous as any cop, he was no fool, and only a fool would walk boldly
into a situation that he did not understand.
Instead of returning to the hall and confronting the killer, be went to the
front door and reached for the lever-action brass handle, intending to get the
hell out. Then he noticed the door hadn’t merely been closed and dead-bolted. A
length of scrap wire had been wound around the handle on the fixed door and
around that on the active door, linking them, fastening them together. He would
have to unwind the wire before he could get out, which might take half a minute.
Click, click, click.
He fired once toward the hallway without even looking and ran in the opposite
direction, crossing the empty living room. He heard the killer behind him.
Clicking. Coming fast in the darkness. Yet when Ken reached the dining room and
was almost to the doorway that led into the kitchen, intending to make a break
for the family room and the patio door by which Tee! had entered, he heard the
clicking coming from in front of him. He was sure the killer had pursued him
into the living room, but now the guy had gone back into the lightless hallway
and was coming at him from the other direction, making a crazy game of this.
From the sounds the bastard was making, he seemed just about to enter the
breakfast area, which would put only the width of the kitchen between him and
Ken, so Ken decided to make a stand right there, decided to blow away this
psycho the moment the guy appeared in the beam of the light— Then the killer
shrieked.
Clicking along the hallway, still out of sight but coming toward Ken, the
attacker let out a shrill inhuman cry that was the essence of primal rage and
hatred, the strangest sound that Ken had ever heard, not the sound a man would
make, not even a lunatic. He gave up all thought of confrontation, pitched his
flashlight into the kitchen to create a diversion, turned away from the
approaching enemy, and fled again, though not back into the living room, not
toward any part of the house in which this game of cat and mouse could be
extended, but straight across the dining room toward a window that glimmered
vaguely with the last dim glow of twilight. He tucked his head down, brought his
arms up against his chest, and turned sideways as he slammed into the glass. The
window exploded, and he fell out into the rear yard, rolling through
construction debris. Splintery scraps of two-by-fours and chunks of concrete
poked painfully into his legs and ribs. He scrambled to his feet, spun toward
the house, and emptied his revolver at the broken window in case the killer was
in pursuit of him.
In the settling night, he saw no sign of the enemy.
Figuring he had not scored a hit, he wasted no time cursing his luck. He
sprinted around the house, along the side of it, and out to the street. He had
to get to the patrol car, where there was a radio—and a pump-action riot gun.
3
On Wednesday and Thursday, the second and third of June, Travis and Nora and
Einstein searched diligently for a way to improve human-canine communications,
and in the process man and dog had almost begun to chew up furniture in
frustration. However, Nora proved to have enough patience and confidence for all
of them. When the breakthrough came near sunset on Friday evening, the fourth of
June, she was less surprised than either Travis or Einstein.
They had purchased forty magazines—everything from Time and Life to McCall’s and
Redbook—and fifty books of art and photography, and had brought them to the