I’m just removing my clothes to avoid getting blood all over them.”
Naked, he picked up the hammer and swung it at her left leg, shattering her
knee. Perhaps fifty or sixty hammer strikes after he began, The Moment arrived.
Sssssnap.
Sudden energy blasted through him. He felt inhumanly alert, acutely sensitive of
the color and texture of everything around him. And he felt far stronger than
ever before in his life, like a god in a man’s body.
He dropped the hammer and fell to his bare knees beside the bed. He put his
forehead on the bloodied bedspread and took deep breaths, shuddering with
pleasure so intense it could almost not be borne.
A couple of minutes later, when he had recovered, when he had adjusted to his
new and more powerful condition, he got up, turned to the dead woman, and
bestowed kisses on her battered face, plus one in the palm of each of her hands.
“Thank you.”
He was so deeply moved by the sacrifice she had made for him that he
thought he might weep. But his joy at his own good fortune was greater than his
pity for her, and the tears would not flow.
In the bathroom he took a quick shower. As the hot water sluiced the soap from
him, he thought about how lucky he was to have found a way to make murder his
business, to be paid for what he would have done anyway, without remuneration.
When he had dressed again, he used a towel to wipe off the few things he had
touched since entering the house. He always remembered every move he’d made, and
he never worried about missing an object in the wipe-down and leaving a stray
fingerprint. His perfect memory was just another part of his Gift.
When he let himself out of the house, he discovered that night had fallen.
THREE
1
Throughout the early part of the evening, the retriever exhibited none of the
remarkable behavior that had stirred Travis’s imagination. He kept a watch on
the dog, sometimes directly, sometimes out of the corner of his eye, but he saw
nothing that engaged his curiosity.
He made a dinner of bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for himself, and he
opened a can of Alpo for the retriever. It liked the Alpo well enough, consuming
the stuff in great gulps, but it clearly preferred his food. It sat on the
kitchen floor beside his chair, looking at him forlornly as he ate two
sandwiches at the red Formica-topped table. At last he gave it two strips of
bacon.
Nothing about its doggy begging was extraordinary. It performed no startling
tricks. It merely licked its chops, whined now and then, and repeatedly employed
a limited repertoire of sorrowful expressions designed to elicit pity and
compassion. Any mutt would have tried to cadge a treat in the same fashion.
Later, in the living room, Travis switched on the television, and the dog curled
up on the couch beside him. After a while it put its head on his thigh, wanting
to be petted and scratched behind the ears, and he obliged. The dog glanced
occasionally at the television but had no great interest in the programs.
Travis was not interested in TV, either. He was intrigued only by the dog. He
wanted to study it and encourage it to perform more tricks. Although he tried to
think of ways to elicit displays of its astonishing intelligence, he could come
up with no tests that would reliably gauge the animal’s mental capacity.
Besides, Travis had a hunch that the dog would not cooperate in a test. Most of
the time it seemed instinctively to conceal its cleverness. He recalled its
witlessness and comical clumsiness in pursuit of the butterfly, then contrasted
that behavior with the wit and agility required to turn on the patio water
faucet: those actions appeared to be the work of two different animals. Though
it was a crazy idea, Travis suspected that the retriever did not wish to draw
attention to itself and that it revealed its uncanny intelligence only in times
of crisis (as in the woods), or if it was very hungry (as when it had opened the