Dean Koontz - Watchers

“In which case his puppies would be as smart as he is.”

“And their puppies after them, on and on, until in time you’d have a colony of intelligent golden retrievers, thousands of them all over the world.”

They were silent again.

Finally she said, “Wow.”

Travis said, “He’s right.”

“What?”

“It is something worth thinking about.”

Vince Nasco had never anticipated, back in November, that he would need a full month to get a whack at Ramon Velazquez, the guy in Oakland who was a thorn in the side of Don Mario Tetragna. Until he wasted Velazquez, Vince would not be given the names of people in San Francisco who dealt in false ID and who might help him track down Travis Cornell, the woman, and the dog. So he had an urgent need to reduce Velazquez to a hunk of putrefying meat.

But Velazquez was a goddamn shadow. The man did not make a step without two bodyguards at his side, which should have made him more rather than less conspicuous. However, he conducted his gambling and drug enterprises — infringing on the Tetragna franchise in Oakland — with all the stealth of Howard Hughes. He slipped and slithered on his errands, using a fleet of different cars, never taking the same route two days in a row, never meeting in the same place, using the street as an office, never staying anywhere long enough to be made, marked, and wiped out. He was a hopeless paranoid who believed everyone was out to get him. Vince couldn’t keep the man in sight long enough to match him with the photograph that the Tetragnas had supplied. Ramon Velazquez was smoke.

Vince didn’t get him until Christmas Day, and it was a hell of a mess when it went down. Ramon was at home with a lot of relatives. Vince came at the Velazquez property from the house behind it, over the high brick wall between one big lot and the other. Coming down on the other side, he saw Velazquez and some people at a barbecue on the patio near the pool, where they were roasting an enormous turkey — did people barbecue turkeys anywhere but in

California? — and they all spotted him immediately though he was half an acre away. He saw the bodyguards reaching for weapons in their shoulder holsters, so he had no choice but to fire indiscriminately with his Uzi, spraying the entire patio area, taking out Velazquez, both bodyguards, a middle-aged woman who must have been somebody’s wife, and an old dame who had to be somebody’s grandmother.

Ssssnap.

Ssssnap.

Ssssnap.

Ssssnap.

Ssssnap.

Everyone else, inside and outside of the house, was screaming and diving for cover. Vince had to climb the wall back into the yard of the house next door — where nobody was home, thank God — and as he was hauling his ass over the top, a bunch of Latino types at the Velazquez place opened fire on him. He barely got away with his hide intact.

The day after Christmas, when he showed up at a San Francisco restaurant owned by Don Tetragna, to meet with Frank Dicenziano, a trusted Family capo who answered only to the don himself, Vince was worried. The fratellanza had a code about assassinations. Hell, they had a code about everything — probably even bowel movements — and they took their codes seriously, but the code of assassination was maybe taken a little more seriously than others. The first rule of that code was: You don’t hit a man in the company of his family unless he’s gone to ground and you just can’t reach him any other way. Vince felt fairly safe on that score. But another rule was that you never shot a man’s wife or kids or his grandmother in order to get at him. Any hit man who did such a thing would probably wind up dead himself, wasted by the very people who had hired him. Vince hoped to convince Frank Dicenziano that Velazquez was a special case — no other target had ever eluded Vince for a month — and that what had happened in Oakland on Christmas Day was regrettable but unavoidable.

Just in case Dicenziano — and by extension, the don — was too furious to listen to reason, Vince went prepared with more than a gun. He knew that, if they wanted him dead, they would crowd him and take the gun away from him before he could use it, as soon as he walked into the restaurant and before he knew the score. So he wired himself with plastic explosives and was prepared to detonate them, wiping out the entire restaurant, if they tried to fit him for a coffin.

Vince was not sure if he would survive the explosion. He had absorbed the life energies of so many people recently that he thought he must be getting close to the immortality he had been seeking — or was already there — but he could not know how strong he was until he put himself to the test. If his choice was standing at the heart of an explosion. or letting a couple of Wiseguys pump a hundred rounds into him and encase him in concrete for a dunk in the bay. he decided the former was more appealing and, perhaps, offered him a marginally better chance of survival.

To his surprise, Dicenziano — who resembled a squirrel with meatballs in his cheeks — was delighted with how the Velazquez contract had been fulfilled. He said the don had the highest praise for Vince. No one searched Vince when he entered the restaurant. At a corner booth, as the first men in the room, he and Frank were served a special lunch of dishes not on the menu. They drank three-hundred-dollar Cabernet Sauvignon, a gift from Mario Tetragna.

When Vince cautiously raised the issue of the dead wife and grandmother, Dicenziano said, “Listen, my friend, we knew this was going to be a hard hit, a demanding job, and that rules might have to be broken. Besides, these people were not our kind of people. They were just a bunch of wetback spics. They don’t belong in this business. If they try to force their way into it, they can’t expect us to play by the rules.”

Relieved, Vince went to the men’s room halfway through lunch and disconnected the detonator. He didn’t want to set the Plastique off accidentally now that the crisis was past.

At the end of lunch, Frank gave Vince the list. Nine names. “These people— who are not all Family people, by the way — pay the don for the right to operate their ID businesses in his territory. Back in November, in anticipation of your success with Velazquez, I spoke to these nine, and they’ll remember that the don wants them to cooperate with you in any way they can.”

Vince set out the same afternoon, looking for someone who would remember Travis Cornell.

Initially, he was frustrated. Two of the first four people on the list could not be reached. They had closed up shop and gone away for the holidays. To Vince, it seemed wrong that the criminal underworld would take off for Christmas and New Year’s as if they were schoolteachers.

But the fifth man, Anson Van Dyne, was at work in the basement beneath his topless club, Hot Tips, and at five-thirty, December 26, Vince found what he was after. Van Dyne looked at the photograph of Travis Cornell, which Vince had obtained from the back-issue files of the Santa Barbara newspaper. “Yeah, I remember him. He’s not one you forget. Not a foreigner looking to become an instant American like half my customers. And not the usual sad-assed loser who needs to change his name and hide his face. He’s not a big guy, and he doesn’t come on tough or anything, but you get the feeling he could mop up the floor with anyone who crossed him. Very self-contained. Very watchful. I couldn’t forget him.”

“What you couldn’t forget,” said one of the two bearded boy wonders at the computers, “is that gorgeous quiff he was with.”

“For her, even a dead man could get it up,” the other one said.