Watchers

in the woods that day.”
    “But there’s no danger of it finding him, surely. Not after you brought him this far north.”
    “No danger,” Travis agreed. “I don’t think Einstein understands how far we came from where I found him. Whatever was in the woods couldn’t track him down now. But I’ll bet the people from that lab have mounted one hell of a search. It’s them I'm worried about. And so is Einstein, which is why he usually plays at being a dumb dog in public and reveals his intelligence only in private to me and now you. He doesn’t want to go back.”
    Nora said, “If they find him . .
    “They won’t.”
    “But if they do, what then?”
    “I’ll never give him up,” Travis said. “Never.”
     
     
8
    By eleven o’clock that night, Deputy Porter’s headless corpse and the mutilated body of the construction foreman had been removed from Bordeaux Ridge by the coroner’s men. A cover story had been concocted and delivered to the reporters at the police barricades, and the press had seemed to buy it; they had asked their questions, had taken a couple of hundred photographs, and had filled a few thousand feet of videotape with images that would be edited down to a hundred seconds on tomorrow’s TV newscast. (In this age of mass murder and terrorism, two victims rated no more than two minutes’ airtime: ten seconds for lead-in, a hundred seconds for film, ten seconds for the well-coiffed anchorpersons to look respectfully grim and saddened—then on to a story about a bikini contest, a convention of Edsel owners, or a man who claimed to have seen an alien spacecraft shaped like a Twinkie.) The reporters were gone now, as were the lab men, the uniformed deputies, and all of Lemuel Johnson’s agents except Cliff Soames.
    Clouds hid the fragment moon. The kliegs were gone, and the only light came from the headlamps of Walt Gaines’s car. He had swung his sedan around and aimed his lights at Lem’s car, which was parked at the end of the unpaved street, so Lem and Cliff would not have to fumble around in the dark. In the deep gloom beyond the headlamps, half-framed houses loomed like the fossilized skeletons of prehistoric reptiles.
    As he walked toward his car, Lem felt as good as he could feel under the circumstances. Walt had agreed to allow federal authorities to assume jurisdiction without a challenge. Although Lem had broken a dozen regulations and had violated his secrecy oath by telling Walt the details of the Francis Project, he was sure Walt could keep his mouth shut. The lid was still on the case, a bit looser than it had been, perhaps, but still in place.
    Cliff Soames reached the car first, opened the door, and got in on the passenger’s side, and as Lem opened the driver’s door he heard Cliff say, “Oh, Jesus, oh God.” Cliff was scrambling back out of the car even as Lem looked in from the other side and saw what the uproar was about. A head.
    Teel Porter’s head, no doubt.
    It was on the front seat of the car, propped so it was facing Lem when he opened the door. The mouth hung open in a silent scream. The eyes were gone.
    Reeling back from the car, Lem reached under his coat and pulled his revolver.
    Walt Gaines was already out of his car, his own revolver in hand, running toward Lem. “What’s wrong?”
    Lem pointed.
    Reaching the NSA sedan, Walt looked through the open door and let out a thin, anguished sound when he saw the head.
    Cliff came around from the other side of the car, gripping his gun, with the muzzle pointed straight up. “The damn thing was here when we arrived, while we were in the house.”
    “Might still be here,” Lern said, anxiously surveying the darkness that crowded them on all sides, beyond the beams from the patrol car’s headlights.
    Studying the night-swaddled housing development, Walt said, “We’ll call in my men, get a search under way.”
    “No point to it,” Lem said. “The thing will take off if it sees your men returning . . . if it’s not gone already.”
    They were standing at the edge of Bordeaux Ridge, beyond which lay miles of open land, foothills and mountains, out of which The Outsider had come and into which it could disappear again. Those hills, ridges, and canyons were only vague forms in the meager glow of the partial moon, more sensed than Seen.
    From somewhere down the unlighted street came a loud clatter, as if a pile of lumber or shingles had been knocked over.
    “It is here,” Walt said.
    “Maybe,”