Watchers

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