Watchers

no,” Teel said. “But let’s do it.”
    Ken still did not believe anything was wrong at Bordeaux Ridge. The pickup could have been left behind at the end of the day. After all, other equipment remained on the tract overnight: a couple of Bob-cats on a long-bed truck, a backhoe. And it was still likely that the reported screaming had been kids playing.
    They grabbed flashlights from the car because, even if electric service to the tract had been connected, there were no lamps or ceiling lights in the unfinished structures.
    Resettling their gunbelts on their hips more out of habit than out of any belief that they would need weapons, Ken and Teel walked through the nearest of the partially framed houses. They were not looking for anything in particular, just going through the motions, which was half of all police work.
    A mild and inconstant breeze sprang up, the first of the day, and blew sawdust ghosts through the open sides of the house. The sun was falling rapidly westward, and the wall studs cast prison-bar shadows across the floor. The last light of the day, which was changing from gold to muddy red, imparted a soft glow to the air like that around the open door of a furnace. The concrete pad was littered with nails that winked in the fiery light and clinked underfoot.
    “For a hundred and eighty thousand bucks,” Tee! said, probing into black corners with the beam of his flashlight, “I’d expect rooms a little bigger than these.”
    Taking a deep breath of sawdust-scented air, Ken said, “Hell, I’d expect rooms as big as airport lounges.”
    They stepped out of the back of the house, into a shallow rear yard, where they switched off their flashes. The bare, dry earth was not landscaped. It was littered with the detritus of construction’: scraps of lumber, chunks of broken concrete, rumpled pieces of tarpaper, tangled loops of wire, more nails, useless lengths of PVC pipe, cedar shingles discarded by roofers, Styrofoam soft-drink cups and Big Mac containers, empty Coke cans, and less identifiable debris.
    No fences had yet been constructed, so they had a view of all twelve backyards along this street. Purple shadows seeped across the sandy soil, but they could see that all the yards were deserted.
    “No signs of mayhem,” Tee! said.
    “No damsels in distress,” Ken said.
    “Well, let’s at least walk along here, look between buildings,” Teel said. “We ought to give the public something for their money.”
    Two houses later, in the thirty-foot-wide pass-through between structures, they found the dead man.
    “Damn,” Teel said.
    The guy was lying on his back, mostly in shadow, with only the lower half of his body revealed in the dirty-red light, and at first Ken and Teel didn’t realize what a horror they’d stumbled across. But when he knelt beside the corpse, Ken was shocked to see that the man’s gut had been torn open.
    “Jesus Christ, his eyes,” Teel said.
    Ken looked up from the ravaged torso and saw empty sockets where the victim’s eyes should have been.
    Retreating into the littered yard, Tee! drew his revolver.
    Ken also backed away from the mutilated corpse and slipped his own gun out of his holster. Though he had been perspiring all day, he felt suddenly damper, slick with a different kind of sweat, the cool, sour sweat of fear.
    PCP, Ken thought. Only some asshole stoned on PCP would be violent enough to do something like this.
    Bordeaux Ridge was silent.
    Nothing moved except the shadows, which seemed to grow longer by the second.
    “Some angel-dust junkie did this,” Ken said, putting his fears about PCP into words.
    “I was thinking the same thing,” Teel said. “You want to look any farther?”
    “Not just the two of us, by God. Let’s radio for assistance.”
    They began to retrace their steps, warily keeping a watch on all sides as they moved, and they did not go far before they heard the noises. A crash. A clatter of metal. Glass breaking.
    Ken had no doubt whatsoever where the sounds came from. The racket originated inside the closest of the three houses that were nearing completion and that would serve as sales models.
    With no suspect in sight and no clue as to where to begin looking for one, they would have been justified in returning to the patrol car and calling for assistance. But now that they’d heard the disturbance in the model home, their training and instinct required them to act more boldly. They moved toward the back of the house.
    A