Strangers

artist.
        He rang the doorbell six times, waiting half a minute between each ring, but no one came.
        Last night, when a man named Jack Twist had called him at eleven o'clock from a pay phone in Elko, claiming to have a message from Dom, and had asked him to go to a specific pay phone in Laguna for a callback in twenty minutes, Parker had still been working on a new and exciting painting that he had begun at three o'clock that afternoon. Nevertheless, deeply involved as he was with the work, he had hastened to the booth as directed. And he had agreed to the trip to Monterey without hesitation. The fact was that he had plunged into work as a means of taking his mind off Dom and the unfolding events in Elko County, for that was where he really wanted to be, neck-deep in the mystery. When Twist told him about Dom's and the priest's psychic demonstration - floating salt and pepper shakers, levitating chairs! - nothing short of World War III could have prevented Parker from going to Monterey. And now he was not going to be defeated by an empty house. Wherever the Salcoes were, he would find them, and the best place to start was with the neighbors.
        Because of the half-acre lots and walls of intervening shrubbery, he could not easily walk next door. Back in the Tempo, as he put the car in gear, he glanced at the house again, and at first he thought he saw movement at one of the downstairs windows: a slightly parted drape falling back into place. He sat for a moment, staring, then decided the movement had been a trick of fog and shadows. He popped the handbrake and drove around the second half of the circular driveway, out to the street, delighted to be playing spy again.
        

        
        Ernie and Dom parked the Jeep Cherokee at the end of the county road, and the pickup with the tinted windshield halted two hundred yards behind them. Perched on its high all-terrain tires, with goggle-eyed spotlights on its roof, it looked (Dom thought) like a big insect poised alertly on the down-sloping lane, ready to skitter toward a hidey-hole if it saw someone with a giant economy-size can of Raid. The driver did not get out, nor did the passenger, if there was one.
        "Think there's going to be trouble here?" Dom asked, getting out of the Cherokee and joining Ernie at the side of the road.
        "If they'd meant trouble, they'd already have made it," Ernie said. His breath steamed in the frigid air. "If they want to tag along and watch, that's all right by me. To hell with them."
        They got two hunting rifles - a Winchester Model 94 carbine loaded with.32 special cartridges, and a.30/06 Springfield - from the back of the Jeep Cherokee, handling the weapons conspicuously in the hope that the men in the pickup would be encouraged to remain peaceable by the realization that their quarry could fight back.
        The mountain still rose on the western side of the lane, and forest still clothed those slopes. But the land that fell away to the east had become a broad treeless field, the northern end of the series of meadows that lay along the valley wall.
        Although snow had not yet begun to fall, the wind was picking up. Dom was thankful for the winter clothes he had purchased in Reno, but he wished he had an insulated ski suit like Ernie was wearing. And a pair of those rugged laceup boots instead of the flimsy zippered pair he now wore. Later today, Ginger and Faye would stop at a sporting-goods store in Elko with a list of gear needed for tonight's operation, including suitable clothes for Dom and everyone else who did not already have them. At the moment, however, the insistent wind found entrance at Dom's coat collar and at the unelasticized cuffs of his sleeves.
        Leaving the Cherokee, he and Ernie went over the side of the road, down into the sloping meadow, continuing their inspection of the Thunder Hill perimeter on foot. The high, electrified chainlink fence with the barbed-wire overhang led out of the trees farther back; it ceased to parallel the northward course of the county road, turning east and down toward the valley floor. The snow in the meadow was ten inches deep, but still below the tops of their boots. They slogged two hundred yards to a point along the fence from which they could see, in the distance, the enormous steel blast doors set in the side of the valley wall.
        Dom saw no signs of human or canine guards. The snow on the other side of the