Watchers

way?”
    “I’m not exactly sure. Maybe . . . somebody with his throat torn out. Somebody ripped to pieces. Somebody all chewed up and gouged by an animal.”
    Johnny gave him a peculiar look. “That’s strange, all right. Something like that would be in the newspapers.”
    “Maybe not,” Vince said, thinking of the army of government security agents that would be working diligently to keep the press in the dark about the Francis Project and to conceal the dangerous developments on Tuesday at the Banodyne labs. “The murders might be in the news, but the police will probably be suppressing the gory details, making them look like ordinary homicides. So from what the papers print, I won’t be able to tell which victims are the ones I’m interested in.”
    “All right. Can do.”
    “You’d also better prowl around at the County Animal Control Authority to see if they’re getting any reports of unusual attacks by coyotes or cougars or other predators. And not just attacks on people, but on livestock—cows, sheep. There might even be some neighborhood, probably on the eastern
    edge of the county, where a lot of family pets are disappearing or being chewed up real bad by something wild. If you run across that, I want to know.”
    Johnny grinned and said, “You tracking down a werewolf?”
    It was a joke; he did not expect or want an answer. He had not asked why this information was needed, and he would never ask, because people in their line of work did not poke into each other’s business. Johnny might be curious, but Vince knew that The Wire would never indulge his curiosity.
    Vince was unnerved not by the question but by the grin. The green light from the computer screens was reflected by Johnny’s eyes and by the saliva on his teeth and, to a lesser extent, by his wiry copper-colored hair. As ugly as he was to begin with, the eerie luminescence made him look like a revived corpse in a Romero film.
    Vince said, “Another thing. I need to know if any police agency in the county is running a quiet search for a golden retriever.”
    “A dog?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Cops don’t usually look for lost dogs.”
    “I know,” Vince said.
    “This dog got a name?”
    “No name.”
    “I’ll check it out. Anything else?”
    “That’s it. When can you put it together?”
    “I’ll call you in the morning. Early.”
    Vince nodded. “And depending on what you turn up, I might need you to keep tracking these things on a daily basis.”
    “Child’s play,” Johnny said, spinning around once in his black leather chair, then jumping to his feet with a grin. “Now, I’m gonna fuck Samantha. Hey! You want to join in? Two studs like us, going at her at the same time, we could reduce that bitch to a little pile of jelly, have her begging for mercy. How about it?”
    Vince was glad for the weird green lighting because it covered the fact that he had gone ghost-pale. The idea of messing around with that infected slut, that diseased whore, that rotting and festering round-heeled pump, was enough to make him sick. He said, “Got an appointment I can’t break.”
    “Too bad,” Johnny said.
    Vince forced himself to say, “Would’ve been fun.”
    “Maybe next time.”
    The very idea of the three of them going at it . . . well, it made Vince feel unclean. He was overcome by a desire for a steaming-hot shower.
    6
    Sunday night, pleasantly tired from a long day in Solvang, Travis thought he would fall asleep the moment he put his head on his pillow, but he did not. He couldn’t stop thinking about Nora Devon. Her gray eyes flecked with green. Glossy black hair. The graceful, slender line of her throat. The musical sound of her laughter, the curve of her smile.
    Einstein was lying on the floor in the pale-silver light that came through the window and vaguely illuminated one small section of the dark room. But after Travis tossed and turned for an hour, the dog finally joined him on the bed and put his burly head and forepaws on Travis’s chest.
    “She’s so sweet, Einstein. One of the gentlest, sweetest people I’ve ever known.”
    The dog was silent.
    “And she’s very bright. She’s got a sharp mind, sharper than she realizes. She sees things I don’t see. She has a way of describing things that make them fresh and new. The whole world seems fresh and new when I see it with her.”
    Though still and quiet, Einstein had not fallen asleep. He was very attentive. “When I think about all that vitality,