Dean Koontz - Watchers

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” he said.

“No.”

Perhaps because he found her pretty, he chose to explain. “I’ve only ever told one person before, and he made fun of me. His name was Danny Slowicz, and we both worked for the Carramazza Family in New York, biggest of the five Mafia Families. Little muscle work, once in a while killing people who needed killed.”

Nora felt sick because he was not merely crazy and not merely a killer but a crazy professional killer.

Unaware of her reaction, switching his gaze from the rain-swept road to her face, he continued. “See, we were having dinner in this restaurant, Danny and me, washing down clams with Valpolicella, and I explained to him that I was destined to lead a long life because of my ability to acquire the vital energies of people I wasted. I told him, ‘See, Danny, people are like batteries, walking batteries, filled with this mysterious energy we call life. When I off someone, his energy becomes my energy, and I get stronger. I’m a bull, Danny,’ I says. ‘Look at me — am I a bull or what? And I got to be a bull ‘cause I have this Gift of being able to take the energy from a guy.’ And you know what Danny says?”

“What?” she asked numbly.

“Well, Danny was a serious eater, so he kept his attention on his plate, face in his food, until he scarfs a few more clams. Then he looks up, his lips and chin dripping clam sauce, and he says, ‘Yeah, Vince, so where’d you learn this trick, huh? Where’d you learn how to absorb these life energies?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s my Gift,’ and he said, ‘You mean like from God?’ So I had to think about that, and I said, ‘Who knows where from? It’s my Gift like Mantle’s hitting was a gift, like Sinatra’s voice was a gift.’ And Danny says, ‘Tell me this — suppose you waste a guy who’s an electrician. After you absorb his energy, would you all of a sudden know how to rewire a house?’ I didn’t realize he was putting me on. I thought it was a serious question, so I explained how I absorb life energy, not personality, not all the stuff the guy knows, just his energy. And then Danny says, ‘So if you blew away a carnival geek, you wouldn’t all of a sudden get the urge to bite the heads off chickens.’ Right then I knew Danny thought I was either drunk or nuts, so I ate clams and didn’t say any more about my Gift, and that’s the last time I told anyone until I’m here telling you.”

He had called himself Vince, so now she knew his name. She did not see what good it would do her to know it.

He had told his story without any indication that he was aware of the insane black humor in it. He was a deadly serious man. Unless Travis could deal with him, this guy was not going to let them live.

“So,” Vince said, “I couldn’t risk Danny going around telling anyone what I’d told him, because he’d color it up, make it sound funny, and people would think I was nuts. The big bosses don’t hire crazy hit men; they want cool, logical, balanced guys who can do the work clean. Which is what I am, cool and balanced, but Danny would have had them thinking the other way. So that night I slit his throat, took him to this deserted factory I knew, cut him into pieces, put him in a vat, and poured a lot of sulfuric acid over him. He was a favorite nephew of the don’s, so I couldn’t take a chance of anyone finding a body that might be traced back to me. Now, I got Danny’s energy in me, along with a lot of others.”

The gun was in the glove box.

Some small hope could be taken from the knowledge that the gun was in the glove box.

While Nora was visiting Dr. Weingold, Travis whipped up and baked a double batch of chocolate cookies with peanut-butter chips. Living alone, he had learned to cook, but he had never taken pleasure in it. During the past few months, however, Nora had improved his culinary skills to such an extent that he enjoyed cooking, especially baking.

Einstein, who usually hung around dutifully throughout a baking session, in the anticipation of receiving a sweet morsel, deserted him before he had finished mixing the batter. The dog was agitated and moved around the house from window to window, staring out at the rain.

After a while, Travis got edgy about the dog’s behavior and asked if something was wrong.

In the pantry, Einstein made his reply.

I FEEL A LITTLE STRANGE.

“Sick?” Travis asked, worried about a relapse. The retriever was recovering well, but still recovering. His immune system was not in condition for a major new challenge.

NOT SICK.

“Then what? You sense. The Outsider?”

NO. NOT LIKE BEFORE.

“But you sense something?”

BAD DAY.

“Maybe it’s the rain.”

MAYBE.

Relieved but still edgy, Travis returned to his baking.

The highway was silver with rain.

The daytime fog grew slightly thicker as they drove south along the coast, forcing Nora to slow to forty miles an hour, thirty in some places.

Using the fog as an excuse, could she slow the truck enough to risk throwing open her door and leaping out? No. Probably not. She would have to let their speed drop below five miles an hour in order not to hurt herself or her unborn child, and the fog simply was not dense enough to justify reducing speed that far. Besides, Vince kept the revolver pointed at her while he talked, and he would shoot her in the back as she turned to make her exit.

The pickup’s headlamps and those of the few oncoming cars were refracted by the mist. Halos of light and scintillate rainbows bounced off the shifting curtains of fog, briefly seen, then gone.

She considered running the truck off the road, over the edge in one of the few places where she knew the embankment to be gentle and the drop endurable. But she was afraid she would misjudge where she was and, by mistake, drive off the brink into a two-hundred-foot emptiness, crashing with terrible force into the rocky coastline below. Even if she went over at the right point, a calculated and survivable crash might knock her unconscious or induce a miscarriage, and if possible she wanted to get out of this with her life and the life of the child within her.

Once Vince started talking to her, he could not stop. For years he had husbanded his great secrets, had hidden his dreams of power and immortality from the world, but his desire to speak of his supposed greatness evidently had never diminished after the fiasco with Danny Slowicz. It was as if he had stored up all the words he had wanted to say to people, had put them on reels and reels of mental recording tape, and now he was playing them back at high speed, spewing out all this craziness that made Nora sick with dread.

He told her how he had learned of Einstein — the killing of the research scientists in charge of various programs under the Francis Project at Banodyne. He knew of The Outsider, too, but was not afraid of it. He was, he said, on the brink of immortality, and gaining ownership of the dog was one of the final tasks he had to complete in order to achieve his Destiny. He and the dog were destined to be together because each of them was unique in this world, one of a kind. Once Vince had achieved his Destiny, he said, nothing could stop him, not even The Outsider.

Half the time, Nora didn’t understand what he was saying. She supposed that if she did understand it, she would be as insane as he clearly was.

But though she did not always grasp his meaning, she knew what he intended to do to her and to Travis once he had the retriever. At first, she was afraid of speaking about her fate, as if putting it into words would somehow make it irrevocable. At last, however, when they were no more than five miles from the dirt lane that turned off the highway and led up to the bleached-wood house, she said, “You won’t let us go when you’ve got the dog, will you?”