Watchers

the bathroom, across the kitchen, out of the house, pulling the door shut behind him but leaving it unlocked, not giving a damn about security right now.
    The air was cold. Yesterday’s calm was gone. Evergreens swayed, shivered, and there was something ominous in the way their bristling, needled branches pawed at the air. Other leafless trees raised black, bony arms toward the somber sky.
    In the barn, Nora started the pickup. The engine roared. Travis cautiously descended the porch steps and went out to the driveway,
    walking as if he were carrying an armload of fragile antique china. The blustery wind stood Travis’s hair straight up, flapped the loose ends of the blanket, and ruffled the fur on Einstein’s exposed head, as if it were a wind with a malevolent consciousness, as if it wanted to tear the dog away from him.
    Nora swung the pickup around, heading out, and stopped where Travis Waited She would drive.
    It was true what they said: sometimes, in certain special moments of crisis, in times of great emotional tribulation, women are better able to bite the
    bullet and do what must be done than men often are. Sitting in the truck’s
    passenger seat, cradling the blanket-wrapped dog in his arms, Travis was in no condition to drive. He was shaking badly, and he realized that he had been crying from the time he had found Einstein on the bathroom floor. He had seen difficult military service, and he had never panicked or been paralyzed with fear while on dangerous Delta Force operations, but this was different, this was Einstein, this was his child. If he had been required to drive, he’d probably have run straight into a tree, or off the road into a ditch. There were tears in Nora’s eyes, too, but she didn’t surrender to them. She bit her lip and drove as if she had been trained for stunt work in the movies. At the end of the dirt lane, they turned right, heading north on the twisty Pacific Coast Highway toward Carmel, where there was sure to be at least one veterinarian.
    During the drive, Travis talked to Einstein, trying to soothe and encourage him. “Everything’s going to be all right, just fine, it’s not as bad as it seems, you’ll be good as new.”
    Einstein whimpered and struggled weakly in Travis’s arms for a moment, and Travis knew what the dog was thinking. He was afraid that the vet would see the tattoo in his ear, would know what it meant, and would send him back to Banodyne.
    “Don’t you worry about that, fur face. Nobody’s going to take you away from us. By God, they aren’t. They’ll have to walk through me first, and they aren’t going to be able to do that, no way.”
    “No way,” Nora agreed grimly.
    But in the blanket, cradled against Travis’s chest, Einstein trembled violently.
    Travis remembered the lettered tiles on the pantry floor: FIDDLE
    BROKE. . . AFRAID. . . AFRAID.
    “Don’t be afraid,” he pleaded with the dog. “Don’t be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
    In spite of Travis’s heartfelt assurances, Einstein shivered and was afraid— and Travis was afraid, too.
     
     
2
    Stopping at an Arco service station on the outskirts of Carmel, Nora found the vet’s address in a phone book and called him to be sure he was in. Dr. James Keene’s office was on Dolores Avenue at the southern end of town. They pulled up in front of the place at a few minutes before nine.
    Nora had been expecting a typically sterile-looking veterinary clinic and was surprised to find that Dr. Keene’s offices were in his home, a quaint two-story Country English house of stone and plaster and exposed timbers with a roof that curved over the eaves.
    As they hurried up the stone walk with Einstein, Dr. Keene opened the door before they reached it, as if he had been on the lookout for them. A
    sign indicated that the entrance to the surgery was around the side of the house, but the vet took them in at the front door. He was a tall, sorrowful-faced man with sallow skin and sad brown eyes, but his smile was warm, and his manner was gracious.
    Closing the door, Dr. Keene said, “Bring him this way, please.”
    He led them swiftly along a hallway with an oak parquet floor protected by a long, narrow oriental carpet. On the left, through an archway, lay a pleasantly furnished living room that actually looked lived-in, with footstools in front of the chairs, reading lamps, laden bookshelves, and crocheted afghans folded neatly and conveniently over the backs of some