Dogs

  Allen was sure his mother would rush past him now toward the stairs, but she didn’t. He heard the phone in the kitchen make its faint musical notes and then she said shakily, “Linda? It’s me. You won’t believe the scene we just…I can’t take any more of this, I really can’t, he—”

  Allen crept back upstairs and dressed as fast as he could. In his parents’ bathroom he balanced on the laundry hamper and took the drug bottle from the top shelf of the medicine cabinet, behind the Listerine. He put it in his pocket. In his own room he added a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that Jimmy had given him. Allen wasn’t allowed candy at his house. Silently he padded back downstairs in his socks. His mother was still on the phone with her friend, so he couldn’t use the kitchen door. Easing open the front door, Allen winced at the noise it made. But she didn’t notice.

  “—bad enough about his sluts, but at least at home he used to treat me as if—”

  The morning was colder than yesterday. Allen shivered as he slipped around the house to the broken window. Probably all the heat in the house was rushing out the window and heating the whole outdoors—that’s what his father said whenever his mother opened a window. But this was different. This was an emergency.

  He slid down onto the dryer and then jumped to the floor. A shard of glass pierced his foot and he cried out. But he could take care of that later. Right now Susie was what mattered.

  She lay beside her empty dishes on the old blanket. Daddy hadn’t even given her more water! Well, she wouldn’t need it now. Allen crouched behind her, petting her long silky ears, and she wagged her tail and put her head on his knee. It was then that he noticed her eyes: sort of unfocused and covered with white stuff like spilled milk.

  “Poor Susie, you’re getting so old,” he whispered, hugging her fiercely. “But I still love you, Suze.”

  Susie licked his hand. Allen took the candy from his pocket and unwrapped it. Susie got eagerly to her feet, tail wagging harder. “Just a minute, Suze. Good dog.”

  He opened the pill bottle: PHENOBARBITAL. How much should Susie have? Allen wasn’t even sure how many his mother took to put herself to sleep. However, Susie was a lot smaller than his mother. He better start with one and see what happened.

  He poked the pill into the peanut butter cup and Susie gobbled it eagerly. Allen sat stroking her until she fell asleep. Then he pushed her onto the blanket and dragged it across the basement to the tall filing cabinet in the corner. The bottom drawer, labeled TAX INFO 2000-2005, was full of papers. Allen cleaned them out and stuffed them into a box with fake Christmas garlands. He lifted Susie in her blanket into the drawer and closed it, leaving a tiny slit for air. She just fit. And with her eyes closed, he couldn’t see that weird milky white stuff in her eyes.

  He was careful to leave the laundry-room door open. When the pound people came, they’d think that Susie had escaped through the window. Allen climbed through it himself, crept quietly through the bushes, and sneaked back inside the house.

  Sometimes his mother slept for ten hours after she took those pills. Maybe by that time the pound people would have come and gone. If not, Allen would think up something else.

  He was good at thinking things up. The way he figured it, he had to be, or he’d never get his own way in this house. Not at all, ever.

  » 20

  Jess and Tessa walked up the porch of the old farmhouse and rang the bell. Jess noticed that she put the extra-large cage on the floor of the porch and held her hands loose and free, even though he’d told her there was no danger here. Sunlight flashed suddenly on her wedding ring. Did her husband know she’d volunteered for this deputizing? Did he mind?

  The door was opened by a little girl with bright red hair in pigtails. She took one look at the cages and burst into loud wails. “No, no, you can’t take them! Nnooooo!”

  An old woman hobbled from the kitchen. “Jess, I’m sorry, I told her, but she—oh, dear!”

  Jess knelt down and tried to put his arms around Hannah but she pushed him away. “You can’t take them!”

  “I have to, dear heart,” he said gently. “But I promise I’ll watch over them with extra special care. And maybe it will only be for a little while.”

  Hannah cried, “You’re mean and I hate you! I hate you forever!” and ran out of the room.

  “I am sorry, Jess. I tried to explain it to her, but…I did try.”

  “It’s all right, Aunt Kitty,” Jess said. His throat hurt. “Where are they?”

  “In the basement. I thought it best.”

  “Come on, Tessa,” Jess said, leading the way. He drew his gun, just in case, but Aunt Kitty had said there was no change in behavior, and what Aunt Kitty didn’t know about living creatures wasn’t worth knowing.

  “‘Aunt Kitty’?” Tessa said behind him. He heard the cage thump against the stairwell wall and guessed she was carrying it one-handed, the other still free.

  “My great aunt. Hannah was visiting her great-grandma when FEMA put up this quarantine, and now she can’t return to her parents, who are frantic in D.C. Aunt Kitty told me all this on the phone this morning. She—there you are, Missy!"

  The collie lay in a big, low-sided box beside the furnace, nursing four mongrel puppies. She wagged her tail at Jess, regarding him trustingly from big eyes the color of caramels. The eyes were unclouded. Missy let him pick up all four puppies, which looked like the father might have had some German shepherd in him, and transfer them to a towel on the floor of the cage. Then Missy followed them inside, lay down, and resumed nursing.

  “Too bad they’re not all this docile,” Tessa said.

  “Then we wouldn’t have a plague, would we? There, Missy, good girl, good dog.”

  Tessa said abruptly, “Do you have a dog?”

  “No.”

  “I do.”

  Jess rose so fast that Missy shifted uneasily. “You have a dog? And you didn’t think to mention this before? Where is it?”

  “I’m mentioning it now,” Tessa said evenly. “It’s in my house. She’s a toy poodle, about as menacing as a gerbil, and she has not encountered any other dogs in Tyler since I moved her three weeks ago. Zero. Zilch. None.”

  “That doesn’t exempt you from bringing her in with the others, as I suspect you know very well. Was that why you volunteered to be deputized? So you could evade the rules?”

  “If I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t be telling you about her now, would I? She’s not on your county list because she’s still licensed in D.C. Don’t tell me how to obey the law, Jess Langstrom. I was an FBI agent.”

  “But you’re not now, are you?” he said pointedly. She turned and walked up the stairs.

  He followed with the cage, set it in the truck with Schnapps and Applejack, and went back inside. Tessa sat at the kitchen table with Aunt Kitty, completing the quarantine form. Aunt Kitty said, “Would you two like some coffee and cake before you go on? I just baked it this morning.”

  “I’m sorry, we can’t,” Jess said. “Short on time.”

  “And temper,” Tessa added sweetly. “Good-bye, Mrs. Jamison. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

  “You too, dear.”

  In the truck Tessa demanded, “What was that all about in there?”

  “Nothing,” Jess said shortly. “Forget it.”

  They drove in silence, Jess wondering: What had all that been about in there? Yes, she hadn’t told him upfront about her dog. Yes, years of Billy had made him suspicious of even simple omissions because they usually meant greater omissions. Yes, he realized that his insistence on deputizing her, just to get back at an officious politician and an M.D., who made him feel inferior, had been childish, and the realization made him feel dumb. But all that wasn’t really it. The problem was that Jess was attracted to her, and not only was she married, but he didn’t want to be attracted to anybody. Not since Elizabeth, not ever again.

  “What is this place?” Tessa said as he stopped the truck at the road. “I don’t see a house.”

&
nbsp; “It’s back there.” Jess waved at the faint dirt track leading back from a battered mailbox. “Here is the place we meet my partner.”

  She looked confused, as well she might. A very dirty white van pulled up, Billy at the wheel with a man beside him. From the van, unlike Jess’s truck, came howling and barking. Billy jumped out, grinning. “Hey, Jess, how you doing so far? This is Ken Pilton from Flatsburgh, he’s a new vet. Hey, Tessa.”

  Through the truck window Tessa gave Billy a do-I-know-you look. He didn’t know her but obviously had heard about her, and that was enough for Billy. Ken Pilton, a nervous and bespectacled man in his early twenties, got out behind Billy. Jess took one look at him and made his decision. “Okay, Dr. Pilton, you stay here. You, too, Tessa—stay with the truck. We’ll take the van. If we need you to do anything we’ll call, so keep near the radio. If we don't come out in ten minutes, notify Sheriff DiBella. You got that?”

  Pilton nodded. Tessa looked stony. Jess got behind the wheel.

  Billy said, “You really think ol’ Vic’s going to open fire? He’s nuts but he ain’t that nuts.”

  “Are you positive about that?”

  “No. Damn, if he lets those Rottweilers loose on us I’m gonna just purely enjoy plugging them. You remember when one of them mauled his girlfriend, that brunette waitress, last year?”

  “I remember,” Jess said. “Put on your helmet, Billy.”

  In full gear, they pulled up to Victor Balonov’s ramshackle house. Rumors about Balonov formed one of Tyler’s chief entertainments. A Russian immigrant, he was supposed to be former KGB, supposed to have tried to assassinate President Clinton in 1994, supposed to have been descended from tsarist royalty. Six four, three hundred pounds, he spoke broken English at the top of his lungs. The fish-and-game boys had arrested him twice for shooting deer out of season. At the second arrest, Balonov had set a Rottweiler on Sam Fields, which is how Jess became involved. The county list showed Balonov as owning two more Rottweilers, but Jess wouldn’t have been surprised to find one, or three, or ten.

  The dogs were clearly audible in the basement of the house. Jess and Billy waited in the van for Balonov to appear. When he didn’t, they called out, then waited some more.

  “Maybe the dogs got him already,” Billy said.

  “Maybe.” It would solve a lot of problems. Finally Jess called through his bullhorn in his most soothing voice—although it was hard to sound soothing through a bullhorn—“Mr. Balonov, I’m Jess Langstrom from Animal Control. Please come out so we can talk to you.”

  Victor Balonov, in a parka suitable for crossing the Siberian tundra, finally appeared on the porch. Negligently, as if an afterthought, a twelve-gauge shotgun dangled from his right hand. From inside the van Jess repeated, “Mr. Balonov, I’m Jess Langstrom from Animal Control, and as you probably know we have orders from the government to bring in all dogs until this quarantine is over. Your animals will be well treated and will be returned to you when this is over. My partner and I have cages in the back, safe and clean. The dogs will be treated with every respect."

  “Yes, I know this,” Balonov said in his heavy accent.

  “You agree to let us take the dogs?”

  “Yes. These dogs, a demon has entered into them.”

  This was a new wrinkle. Billy whistled low between his teeth. Jess, feeling helpless, said, “A demon?”

  “Sometimes it happens, da? The demons of hell, they entered into pigs in the Bible.”

  Jess vaguely remembered something about possessed pigs in one of the Gospels—hadn’t Jesus driven them off a cliff or something? This whole scene was starting to feel unreal. He said, “Mr. Balonov, please toss the shotgun off the porch into the bushes.”

  Balonov rose and Jess tensed. Billy had his gun already drawn. But Balonov tossed his weapon over the rotting porch rail into a mass of thorny, spindly, leafless rose bushes that might be either dormant or dead.

  “Thank you,” Jess said, and climbed reluctantly out of the van, Billy following. Keeping his eyes on Balonov every second, Jess opened the back of the van. Immediately the infected dogs within redoubled their snarling and barking, which caused the dogs inside the house to increase theirs. Over the noise Jess called, “How many dogs do you have, Mr. Balonov?”

  “I have two. Two dogs with demons!”

  Billy pulled out two cages. Balonov let them get halfway to the front steps before he pulled out a semi-automatic and fired.

  Jess and Billy hit the ground rolling. Jess made it behind the truck, but Billy screamed, hit somewhere. Jess pulled out his own gun and took aim. He missed; he’d never been the shot that Billy was. Victor Balonov fired twice more at Billy, who kept rolling, and missed both times. How many rounds did the gun hold? Maybe eight, maybe ten. Jess fired again, missed. Now Balonov leapt down the steps, running toward Billy; he wouldn’t miss again. “And demons in people!” Balonov shouted, and aimed. Jess, desperate, dodged around the truck to squeeze off another shot. No time, he didn’t have enough time—

  Balonov froze in midair, looking almost comical in his surprise, and toppled over onto Billy.

  Jess looked at his gun. He hadn’t fired.

  Then he was running toward them just as Billy, cursing and shouting, was struggling out from under Balonov’s motionless bulk, and Tessa was saying calmly from where she stood at the side of the house, “It’s all right, Jess, he’s dead.” She stood in perfect regulation shooting stance, legs apart and two hands steady on her gun, the winter breeze gently ruffling her shiny black hair.

  » 21

  The bastards were coming for all the dogs and taking them away!

  Ed Dormund scowled at the TV. That tit-heavy reporter, Annie Farnham, had just made the announcement on KJV-TV. Every dog in Tyler was supposed to be hauled off to God-knew-where, so the government could do whatever it wanted with them. And no people who left town could return. It was a goddamn fascist state, that’s what it was. What was next, concentration camps for everybody who owned a pet?

  Not if Ed Dormund had anything to say about it.

  “I paid three hundred bucks for each of my dogs!” he said aloud, before he knew he was going to say anything at all.

  “What?” Cora said blearily. “Can’t you turn that damn TV down?”

  “Nag, nag, nag. Go back in the bedroom if you don’t like it.”

  “I got as much right to be here as you do.” She plopped onto the sofa.

  Ed ignored her. Outside, Jake and Petey and Rex had started to bark and snarl again. Ed didn’t like to admit even to himself that he was afraid to open the door.

  But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that these dogs were his, and no pansy government was going to take them away. Ed knew his rights. This was supposed to be a free country, right?

  Just let them try.

  Del Lassiter opened the door to the two animal control officers. Brenda was asleep again, and Del hadn’t told her what was happening. Time enough when she felt a little stronger.

  He let the men in and handed over Folly, who looked miniscule in the cage they put her in. The Chihuahua looked at him reproachfully and started to shiver. Del had to turn away to hide the tears in his eyes.

  The desk officer looked up as Steve Harper walked into the barracks. Steve saw the feelings flicker over Giametti’s face: surprise then pity then the embarrassment people felt talking to somebody whose kid had died. Steve didn’t give Giametti time to say anything dumb.

  “I’m back for duty, Jack.”

  “But I thought—”

  “I’m back for duty.” Steve hoped his tone would end any objections here and now. He had to get back to work or go nuts, had to have something to do besides stare at the image in his brain. The brown mastiff, a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey’s body…

  “Well, sure, okay,” Giametti said uneasily. “We can use you. I’ll call the sheriff.”

  “Good,” Steve said.

  Ellie Caine drove home a
s fast as she could, pushing red lights, peeling into her driveway. She’d heard the news at work and had instantly left her desk and raced to the parking lot.

  It couldn’t be true! No one would be so cruel as to take away her greyhounds, who had already had such crappy lives, to put them in cages. Maybe even euthanize them. Maybe even experiment on them! Ellie had read what happened to animals in so-called medical experiments.

  The four greyhounds swarmed around her. Ellie looked frantically around her tiny house. Where could she hide them, where…?

  There was no place. She didn’t even have a basement.

  Ellie dropped to the floor and hugged Song, Chimes, Music, and Butterfly. Sensing her distress, they pressed into her body, licking her face and hands. Her babies, her friends. To be staked out, shot up with ketamine, vivisected…

  No.

  Ellie got to her feet. The dogs followed her through the kitchen into the backyard. At the far corner, under the maple tree, was a gate giving onto open fields and then the woods along Black Creek. Ellie led the dogs through the gate, then darted back into the yard and locked them out.

  For a moment she hesitated. How could they survive outside her care? She could feed them at night, of course, but rescued dogs had all sorts of strange issues. Kept in dog runs from an early age, they weren’t exposed to the normal things that other dogs adjusted to. Song freaked out whenever he saw a ceiling fan, reacting as if it were a giant bird of prey. Chimes attacked all laundry baskets. Music was terrified of sloping land. How would they—

  There was no choice.

  “Run!” she cried, and the greyhounds, obeying a call familiar from their puppyhood and intoxicated by the sudden freedom, streaked joyously over the brown field toward the woods.

  » 22

  Cami woke on a strange, hard bed, and somehow her bedroom was filled with people—how could that be? How had they gotten in, and what if they were burglars? She cried out and tried to sit up.