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By Root 476 0

and temporarily lost some of her interest), was part Lab and part collie . . . a mixed breed, but a long way from being a mongrel. When Sutlin had turned it out on Bay Lane at the end of August, it had weighed eighty pounds and its coat had been glossy and sleek with health, a not unattractive mixture of brown and black (with a distinctive white collie bib on the chest and undersnout). It now weighed a bare forty pounds, and a hand passed down its side would have felt each straining rib, not to mention the rapid, feverish beat of its heart. Its coat was dull and bedraggled and full of burdocks. A half-healed pink scar, souvenir of a panicky scramble under a barbed wire fence, zigzagged down one haunch, and a few porcupine quills stuck out of its muzzle like crooked whiskers. It had found the porker lying dead under a log about ten days ago, but had given up on it after the first noseful of quills. It had been hungry but not yet desperate.

Now it was both. Its last meal had been a few maggoty scraps nosed out of a discarded garbage bag in a ditch running beside Route 117, and that had been two days ago. The dog which had quickly learned to bring Catherine Sutlin a red rubber ball when she rolled it across the living-room floor or into the hall was now quite literally starving on its feet.

Yes, but here — right here, on the floor, within sight! — were pounds and pounds of fresh meat, and fat, and bones filled with sweet marrow. It was like a gift from the God of Strays.

The onetime darling of Catherine Sutlin continued to advance on the corpse of Gerald Burlingame.

C H A P T E R E I G H T

This isn't going to happen, Jessie told herself. No way it can, so just relax.

She went on telling herself this right up to the moment when the upper half of the stray's body was cut off from her view by the left side of the bed. Its tail began to wag harder than ever, and then there was a sound she recognized — the sound of a dog drinking from a puddle on a hot summer day. Except it wasn't quite like that. This sound was rougher, somehow, not so much the sound of lapping as of licking. Jessie stared at the rapidly wagging tail, and her mind suddenly showed her what was hidden from her eyes by the angle of the bed. This homeless stray with its burdock — tangled fur and its weary, wary eyes was licking the blood out of her husband's thinning hair.

'NO!' She lifted her buttocks off the bed and swung her legs around to the left. 'GET AWAY FROM HIM! JUST GET AWAY!' She kicked out, and one of her heels brushed across the raised knobs of the dog's spine.

It pulled back instantly and raised its muzzle, its eyes so wide they showed delicate rings of white. Its teeth parted, and in the fading afternoon light the cobweb-thin strands of saliva stretched between its upper and lower incisors looked like threads of spun gold. It lunged forward at her bare foot. Jessie yanked it back with a scream, feeling the hot mist of the dog's breath on her skin but saving her toes. She curled her legs under her again without being aware that she was doing it, without hearing the cries of outrage from the muscles in her overstrained shoulders, without feeling her joints roll reluctantly in their bony beds.

The dog looked at her a moment longer, continuing to snarl, threatening her with its eyes. Let's have an understanding, lady, the eyes said. You do your thing and I'll do mine. That's the understanding. Sound okay to you? It better, because if you get in my way, I'm going to fuck you up. Besides, he's dead — you know it as well as I do, and why should he go to waste when I'm starving? You'd do the same, I doubt if you see that now, but I believe you may come around to my way of thinking on the subject, and sooner than you think.

'GET OUT!' she screamed. Now she sat on her heels with her arms stretched out to either side, looking more like Fay Wray on the sacrificial jungle altar than ever. Her posture — head up, breasts thrust outward, shoulders thrown so far back they were white with strain at their furthest points, deep triangular hollows of shadow