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Jonathan
    Yarbeck’s corpse, with which he had unfinished business. He turned it over.
    One of the bullets that had entered the back of Yarbeck’s head had punched
    out through his throat, just under his chin. His open mouth was full of blood.
    One eye was rolled back in his skull, so only the white showed.
    Vince looked into the other eye. “Thank you,” he said sincerely, reverently. “Thank you, Mr. Yarbeck.”
    He closed both eyelids. He kissed them.
    “Thank you.”
    He kissed the dead man’s forehead.
    “Thank you for what you’ve given me.”
    Then he went into the garage, where he searched through cabinets until he found some tools. He selected a hammer with a comfortable rubberized handle and a polished steel head.
    When he returned to the quiet bedroom and put the hammer on the mattress beside the bound woman, her eyes widened almost comically.
    She began to twist and squirm, tried to wrench her hands loose of the looped adhesive tape, to no avail.
    Vince stripped out of his clothes.
    Seeing the woman’s eyes fix on him with the same terror with which she had regarded the hammer, he said, “No, please, don’t worry, Dr. Yarbeck. I’m not going to molest you.” He hung his suit jacket and shirt on the back of a chair. “I have no sexual interest in you.” He slipped out of his shoes, socks, and trousers. “You won’t have to suffer that humiliation. I’m not that sort of man. I’m just removing my clothes to avoid getting blood all over them.”
    Naked, he picked up the hammer and swung it at her left leg, shattering her knee. Perhaps fifty or sixty hammer strikes after he began, The Moment arrived.
    Sssssnap.
    Sudden energy blasted through him. He felt inhumanly alert, acutely sensitive of the color and texture of everything around him. And he felt far stronger than ever before in his life, like a god in a man’s body.
    He dropped the hammer and fell to his bare knees beside the bed. He put his forehead on the bloodied bedspread and took deep breaths, shuddering with pleasure so intense it could almost not be borne.
    A couple of minutes later, when he had recovered, when he had adjusted to his new and more powerful condition, he got up, turned to the dead woman, and bestowed kisses on her battered face, plus one in the palm of each of her hands.
    “Thank you.”
    He was so deeply moved by the sacrifice she had made for him that he
    thought he might weep. But his joy at his own good fortune was greater than his pity for her, and the tears would not flow.
    In the bathroom he took a quick shower. As the hot water sluiced the soap from him, he thought about how lucky he was to have found a way to make murder his business, to be paid for what he would have done anyway, without remuneration.
    When he had dressed again, he used a towel to wipe off the few things he had touched since entering the house. He always remembered every move he’d made, and he never worried about missing an object in the wipe-down and leaving a stray fingerprint. His perfect memory was just another part of his Gift.
    When he let himself out of the house, he discovered that night had fallen.
 
     
    THREE 1
    Throughout the early part of the evening, the retriever exhibited none of the remarkable behavior that had stirred Travis’s imagination. He kept a watch on the dog, sometimes directly, sometimes out of the corner of his eye, but he saw nothing that engaged his curiosity.
    He made a dinner of bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches for himself, and he opened a can of Alpo for the retriever. It liked the Alpo well enough, consuming the stuff in great gulps, but it clearly preferred his food. It sat on the kitchen floor beside his chair, looking at him forlornly as he ate two sandwiches at the red Formica-topped table. At last he gave it two strips of bacon.
    Nothing about its doggy begging was extraordinary. It performed no startling tricks. It merely licked its chops, whined now and then, and repeatedly employed a limited