Watchers

the master bedroom. Sufficient light was provided by another digital clock with green numerals and the soft glow of a night-light coming through the open bathroom door. Dr. and Mrs. Hudston were both asleep. Vince killed her first— Ssssnap.
    —without waking her husband. She slept in the nude, so after he received her sacrifice, he put his head to her bare breasts and listened to the stillness of her heart. He kissed her nipples and murmured, “Thank you.”
    When he circled the bed, turned on a nightstand lamp, and woke Dr. Hudston, the man was at first confused. Until he saw his wife’s staring, sightless eyes. Then he shouted and grabbed for Vince’s arm, and Vince clubbed him over the head twice with the butt of the gun.
    Vince dragged the unconscious Hudston, who also slept in the nude, into the bathroom. Again, he found adhesive tape, with which he was able to bind the doctor’s wrists and ankles.
    He filled the tub with cold water and wrestled Hudston into it. That frigid bath revived the doctor.
    In spite of being naked and bound, Hudston tried to push up out of the cold water, tried to launch himself at Vince.
    Vince hit him in the face with the pistol and shoved him down into the tub again.
    “Who are you? What do you want?” Hudston spluttered as his face came up out of the water.
    “I’ve killed your wife and your son, and I’m going to kill you.”
    Hudston’s eyes seemed to sink back into his damp, pasty face. “Jimmy? Oh, not Jimmy, really, no.”
    “Your boy is dead,” Vince insisted. “I blew his brains out.”
    At the mention of his son, Hudston broke. He did not burst into tears, did not begin to keen, nothing as dramatic as that. But his eyes went dead— blink—just that abruptly. Like a light going out. He stared at Vince, but there was no fear or anger in him any more.
    Vince said, “What you’ve got here is two choices: die easy or die hard. You tell me what I want to know, and I let you die easy, quick and painless. You get stubborn on me, and I can draw it out for five or six hours.”
    Dr. Hudston stared. Except for bright ribbons of fresh blood that banded his face, he was very white, wet and sickly pale like some creature that swam eternally in the deepest reaches of the sea.
    Vince hoped the guy wasn’t catatonic. “What I want to know is what you have in common with Davis Weatherby and Elisabeth Yarbeck.”
    Hudston blinked, focused on Vince. His voice was hoarse and tremulous “Davis and Liz? What are you talking about?”
    “You know them?”
    Hudston nodded.
    “How do you know them? Go to school together? Live next door at one time?”
    Shaking his head, Hudston said, “We. . . we used to work together at Banodyne.”
    “What’s Banodyne?”
    “Banodyne Laboratories.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “Here in Orange County,” Hudston said. He gave an address in the city of Irvine.
    “What’d you do there?”
    “Research. But I left ten months ago. Weatherby and Yarbeck still work there, but I don’t.”
    “What sort of research?” Vince asked.
    Hudston hesitated.
    Vince said, “Quick and painless—or hard and nasty?”
    The doctor told him about the research he had been involved with at Banodyne. The Francis Project. The experiments. The dogs.
    The story was incredible. Vince made Hudston run through some of the details three or four times before he was finally convinced the story was true.
    When he was sure he had squeezed everything out of the man, Vince shot Hudston in the face, point-blank, the quick death he’d promised.
Ssssnap.
    Back in the van, driving down the night-draped Laguna Hills, away from the Hudston house, Vince thought about the dangerous step he had taken. Usually, he knew nothing about his targets. That was safest for him and for his employers. Ordinarily he didn’t want to know what the poor saps had done to bring so much grief on themselves, because knowing would bring him grief. But this was no ordinary situation. He had been paid to kill three doctors—not medical doctors, as it turned out now, but scientists—all of them upstanding citizens, plus any members of their families who happened to get in the way. Extraordinary. Tomorrow’s papers weren’t going to have enough room for all the news. Something very big was going on, something SO important that it might provide him with a once-in-a-lifetime edge, with a shot at money so big he would need help to count it. The money might come from selling the forbidden knowledge