Isle of Dogs

  “Trooper Brazil’s not a great pilot,” Macovich whispered to the First Lady, deciding the best way to protect his turf was to set Andy up. “But he’s single and been pretty down lately. I think he’s lonely.”

  “How sad!” the First Lady whispered back. “Why, I’ll just invite him to the mansion!”

  “Oh, now that would be mighty nice, ma’am,” Macovich replied as if it were the most magnanimous thing he’d ever heard.

  Andy Brazil had no idea what he was getting himself into, Macovich thought with a thrill of vindication. The pretty white boy was going to have the stuffing ripped out of him just like the straw man the flying monkeys carried off, following the orders of their supervisor, the wicked witch of the west, or wherever she was from.

  “Well, I guess we should go,” the governor decided as his submarine plunged into murky bile spewed out by his gallbladder. “I’m not feeling well and should never have eaten that Belgian fudge cake that Trader had couriered to the restaurant and sent to the table,” he added as Andy’s antenna went up. “It’s true, Maude, I need to cut back.”

  Macovich and his fellow troopers led the First Family away to the helicopter under a cloak of protective darkness as Andy got out his cell phone. He would call the steak house immediately and insist that any leftover fudge cake be sealed in a plastic bag right away. Suddenly he remembered he had promised Hammer to tell the governor about the situation on Tangier Island. The helicopter’s engines ignited and the four blades began to turn as Andy ran toward the chopper.

  “But, Governor!” Andy shouted, “Superintendent Hammer has urgent news and must talk to you!” His words were scattered by rotor wash.

  “I smell cigarettes!” the First Lady went off like a smoke alarm as she held on to her stiffly sprayed hair, protecting it from the sudden wind.

  “Not me,” all of the troopers said at once.

  SMOKE and his road dogs were watching all this from behind the tinted glass of the black Toyota Land Cruiser that had been stolen in New York and through a series of transactions had ended up in Smoke’s possession with new plates and the vehicle identification number filed off. The pirates had been cruising when they happened upon Bellgrade Shopping Center, where Ruth’s Chris Steak House was tucked back behind old trees, and they couldn’t help but notice the huge helicopter sitting in the grass.

  None of the highway pirates had ever seen such a thing, and when the throttle was turned up to full power, Smoke and his crew gawked at beating blades and landing lights blazing as trees whipped in hurricane-force gusts.

  “Shit,” Smoke exclaimed. It was rare he showed emotion other than anger and hate. “Would you fucking look at that!”

  Cuda, Possum, and Cat sat in awed silence, the chopping of the blades thudding their eardrums and exciting their blood like lust.

  “I wonder how hard it’d be to fly one of those things,” Smoke said. “You imagine what we could do with something like that? Fuck trucks! Shit, no one could ever catch us and we could deliver the goods ourselves in half the time from here to Canada, get the middle man out of the way.”

  The helicopter lifted, flooding wildly swirling grass with dazzling light, and through an expansive passenger’s window, Smoke could just make out one of the Crimm daughters ripping open a bag of junk food, maybe chips. Then he noticed someone else. Andy Brazil was trotting back to his unmarked car. It turned Smoke to molten lava to see that son of a bitch again. When Andy had been a city cop, he and Hammer had been responsible for catching Smoke and putting him in prison. Not a day had passed in Smoke’s cell when he hadn’t entertained sadistic fantasies about what was in store for those two cops.

  “Well, well, well,” Smoke said, as the helicopter rose above trees and thundered into the sky. “Look who’s here. Maybe I ought to blow his motherfucking brains out right now.”

  “Whose brains?” Cat tore his eyes away from the bright light churning up the night. He followed Smoke’s vindictive stare to a blond trooper climbing into an unmarked car.

  “Why you want to blow his brains out now, man?” Possum protested as Smoke put the SUV in gear. “Don’t go be doing something like that with all these police around! You crazy or what? You wanna do that, I’m getting outta the car.”

  Possum was riding up front, and when he grabbed the door handle, Smoke backhanded him across the face. Cuda and Cat shrank into their seats, getting smaller and falling silent. They despised Smoke but had nowhere else to go, and were in too much trouble by now to do anything but stay in their present employment. Both Cuda and Cat had started out in street gangs, which were a dime a dozen these days. Being a pirate was like being the Mafia, Cat reassured himself as he didn’t move or blink in his seat in the Land Cruiser. Nobody messed with Smoke and his road dogs, and they went after bigger prizes than just ripping off people and ATM machines and doing drive-by shootings for fun. The other day, Smoke had taken his crew to Cloverleaf Mall and bought all of them brand-new Nikes and all the pizza and french fries they could eat in the food court.

  So he wasn’t all bad. Possum was trying to make himself feel better, too. But he was tired of being smacked around by Smoke and worrying about him hurting or killing poor little Popeye. When Possum was growing up, his daddy used to smack him around, too, and do awful things at the dinner table, stabbing steak knives into the wood and throwing food across the room. His daddy liked to shoot rabbits and send the dogs after them so he could have the pleasure of watching the small, shrieking creatures torn to bits. Possum began to stay in the basement, dropping out of school to watch TV in the dark. Over the years, he stopped growing and crept up from the basement only late at night to raid the refrigerator and the liquor bottles after his parents had quit fighting and gone to sleep.

  Possum had never caused any kind of trouble until he was able to see in the dark and sunlight hurt his eyes. Then he began to venture out of the basement after midnight and walk around Northside’s Chamberlayne Avenue, looking dreamily at cars gliding past and normal people out—people who could come and go as they pleased and didn’t have to spend their days in the basement listening to their daddy tear up the house and beat on their mama and torture animals.

  One morning at about 2:00 A.M., Possum was malingering in the parking lot of Azalea Mall, eyeing the ATM and hoping someone had forgotten to get their cash out of the little slot he was shoving a Slim Jim down, and a Land Cruiser pulled up. Possum started running, but Smoke was too fast for him. Next thing, Possum was tackled to the pavement and a white boy with dreadlocks was sticking a gun to Possum’s head and ordering him into the Land Cruiser. Possum had been a road dog ever since, and sometimes he missed the basement and thought about his mama. Once—and only once—he had called her from a pay phone.

  “I got me a good job working at night,” he told his mama. “But I can’t say where, Mama, ’cause Daddy would come get me, you know. You doing all right?”

  “Oh, honey, sometimes it ain’t so bad,” she said in that defeated, depressed tone Possum knew so well. “Please come home, Jerry,” she added, because Possum’s real name was Jeremiah Little. “I miss you, baby.”

  “Don’t you be worrying none.” Possum got a big lump in his chest as he talked inside the graffiti-scarred phone booth. “I gonna get enough money to get you out of there and we go live in some nice motel where he ain’t never gonna find us!”

  The problem with his plan, Possum had since learned, was that Smoke kept the prize money to himself. He gave cash to his dogs as needed and wouldn’t allow them to accumulate any on their own. Possum got plenty to eat and all the alcohol and pot he wanted. He wore nice basketball shoes and huge jeans that were always falling off. He was equipped with a pager, a cell phone, a handheld Global Positioning System, a gun, and his own room in the RV. But he had no savings and it was likely he never would. He thought about this as his face stung and the inside of his lip bled. Possum missed his mama and realized that Smoke was even worse than Possum’s daddy.

  “You can’
t be killing him right now,” Possum tried to reason with Smoke. “It’s better we wait and make the Big Move. Then we can blow away all them motherfuckers at once, including Popeye.”

  Smoke turned back onto Huguenot Road and sped off. “Don’t worry, I ain’t taking Brazil out tonight in front of all these people. But I’m going to get him bad when the time’s right—just like I’m gonna get that bitch Hammer. Hey. Maybe I’ll feed her fucking dog to a pit bull and leave the carcass in her yard.”

  “You do that, you ain’t got nothing to fuck with her about no more,” Possum said with feigned nonchalance. “That dog the biggest prize you got, Smoke. You know that lady cop do anything to get that dumb dog back, right? So you gotta play your cards and be patient. Maybe you could use that dog to get Hammer and Brazil at the same time. What you wanna bet Brazil knew Popeye and don’t like it none, either, that the dog disappeared, huh?”

  “Yeah. I’ll set both of them up. Fucking yeah. At the same time!” Smoke tried to follow the helicopter that was fast moving out of sight toward the lit-up city skyline. “Then we’ll take them to the clubhouse,” as he referred to their RV, “and I’ll have a shitload of time to really make them hurt bad before I blow their brains out and throw their fucking bodies in the river.”

  The road dogs knew that Smoke’s specialty as a child was to bury rabbits and chipmunks alive, jump on frogs, trap birds and throw them out windows, and do other unspeakable things to helpless creatures. It wasn’t lost on Possum that Smoke had christened each of his road dogs with an animal’s name, as if to imply what he would do to them if they ever got out of line.

  “Yeah, set ’em up.” Possum pretended to sound mean-spirited and tough. “And maybe kill some other people, too,” he added. “And maybe tell Cap’n Bonny we ain’t paying him nothing and he tries to mess with us, we shoot him and throw him in the river, too.”

  “Shut up.” Smoke smacked Possum on the ear. “I gotta find out where they park that helicopter, then we’re gonna take it. Maybe hot-wire it.”

  “You don’t got to hot-wire it,” Possum dared to offer as his ear rang with pain. “I seen something ’bout them on the Discovery Channel. All you do is push a button, they start right up. Then you lift this little handle and steer with a stick.”

  “Driving a helicopter ain’t the same as driving a truck.” Cat broke his silence. “I don’t know if we could pull it off.”

  “Find out where the state police airport is,” Smoke ordered his road dogs. “Look it up on the GPS.”

  UNIQUE didn’t need a GPS to find her way around, nor did she have one. Smoke did not supply her with special weapons and equipment, although she could get anything she wanted from him, if needed. But Unique had her own special techniques that radiated from her Darkness where the Nazi dwelled deep inside her soul. As she drove her Miata along Strawberry Street, she felt weightless and airborne. She was flying through the night, her long hair streaming behind her and the wind cool on her delicately pretty face. She parked a block from the blond undercover cop’s row house, not having a clue that he was Andy Brazil—the very cop that Smoke had just been talking about.

  Unique had not known Smoke back in the days when Andy and Hammer had arrested him, and therefore she had never seen or met either one of them, to her knowledge. Were Unique not controlled by evil, it might have seemed a remarkable coincidence that she was stalking not only Smoke’s enemy, but also Trooper Truth, and had no clue. But in fact, nothing that happened in Unique’s life was coincidental or accidental. She was guided by her Purpose, which had directed her to leave the trash bag on the undercover cop’s porch and tape an envelope to his front door.

  Twelve

  Overlooking the city from the top of one of Richmond’s seven hills was a historic row house that Judy Hammer had taken great pains to restore and furnish impeccably. She was paying bills at her antique rolltop desk, the lights of the city spread out beyond the window in a comforting circuitry that reminded her she had a tremendous responsibility to Virginians and had become a role model to women throughout the nation.

  All the same, it was no easy matter finding eligible men when one is creeping closer to sixty and carries a gun in her Ferragamo handbag. Hammer was feeling lonely and discouraged and had been terribly unnerved by seeing the photograph of Popeye on the website. It had also been another bad day in the news. A woman was suing McDonald’s for allegedly having been burned by a pickle from an improperly constructed hamburger. Then a legally blind man and his brother tried to burglarize an apartment, and the pair made the tactical error of deciding the blind brother would be the lookout. Not to mention the people who were getting blood clots from flying coach and the local police who were dredging the James River again for guns, since most suspects claimed they tossed their weapons off bridges after committing their crimes.

  Hammer was a little surprised that she hadn’t heard from Andy by now. She worried that the silence might indicate a failed connection with the governor. Perhaps he and Macovich had been unable to make contact, or if they had, the results were not helpful. Just as these thoughts were making the rounds in her mind, the telephone rang.

  “Yes,” she answered curtly, as if she hated for anyone to bother her.

  “Superintendent Hammer?” Andy’s voice traveled over the line.

  “What is it, Andy?” Hammer said.

  He was driving east on Broad Street, where surly teenagers lingered on corners and in front of boarded-up buildings, glaring at the unmarked car with all of its antennas and hidden blue lights.

  “I’m not too far from Church Hill,” Andy said as he kept up his scan of shifty-looking people. “If it’s not inconvenient,” he bravely pushed ahead, “maybe I should drop by and tell you what’s going on.”

  “Fine,” Hammer said and hung up without saying goodbye.

  Hammer did not have the genetic coding to tolerate a waste of time, and as she got older, her resentment of remote communication intensified. She could not abide the clangor of the phone when someone entered her airspace uninvited. She loathed voice mail and played it as quickly as she could before deleting it from her life, usually long before the message ended. Two-way radios were a nuisance and so was e-mail—especially instant messages from buddies she did not choose, who barged right into her cyberspace without being invited. Hammer just wanted quiet. At this stage in her life’s journey, people were beginning to make her tired and she was noticing how rarely communication relayed anything that mattered.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Hammer said when Andy was scarcely inside the front door. “Did you mention to the governor that Tangier Island is holding a dentist hostage and has declared war on Virginia because of the damn speed traps and NASCAR and possible dental fraud?”

  “I didn’t get a chance,” Andy reluctantly admitted as he settled on the sofa. “I don’t think he recognizes anyone visually, either. He thought I was military and had no idea who Macovich is. I’m just wondering if that’s the root of his problem, Superintendent Hammer. Maybe he’s legally blind and hasn’t seen you since you were sworn in because he never saw you to begin with.”

  Hammer had never considered this. “That’s ridiculous,” she decided.

  “With all due respect . . .”

  She raised a hand to silence him. Whenever anyone led off with all due respect, she knew damn well she was being lied to and was about to be dissed or annoyed. “Just say whatever it is, and cut the respect crap,” Hammer told him.

  “Someone needs to inform him that he has to do something about his vision,” Andy made the point. “Maybe you should.”

  “If I ever talk to him, I’ll tell him that and more,” Hammer said impatiently.

  Andy made her feel old. His very presence aged her by years, and she had begun reacting with avoidance and wasn’t especially warm to him anymore. She had been a strikingly handsome woman all of her life until she’d turned fifty-five, when it seemed to her she instantly accumulated body fat and wrinkles. Her upper li
p began to disappear overnight, her hair began to thin, and her breasts began to shrink, all within days. Andy, meanwhile, only got handsomer every time she saw him.

  It wasn’t fair, she thought.

  “Are you all right, Superintendent Hammer?” Andy asked. “You seem angry and kind of out of sorts all of a sudden.”

  “Just the mention of the governor puts me in a foul mood,” she evasively said.

  It was so fucking unfair, she silently complained. Men Hammer’s age dated women Andy’s age, women who thought bald heads, weathered skin, thick glasses, decreased muscle bulk, migrating hair, special pumps and pills to help raise the level of intimacy, and snoring were somehow a bonus. Oh, how women had been brainwashed, Hammer raged on in silence. Young women bragged to each other about how old their lovers were.

  Just the other day, Windy Brees had been smoking a cigarette outside in the headquarters parking lot when Hammer overheard her telling a friend about Mr. Click. Hammer had briskly walked past Windy and the friend, staring at the pavement, loaded down with files and her briefcase, pretending she was unaware of the conversation. But Windy had a voice that carried, and the entire state police force heard every word.

  “How old is Mr. Click?” Windy’s young female friend had asked enviously.

  “Ninety-one,” Windy had proudly replied. “I’m just smitten. All I do is wait by the phone.” She held up her cell phone and sighed, wishing it would trill.

  “But it’s not on,” the friend had observed. “You have to push in the power button and turn it on, otherwise it won’t ring if he calls.” She dug her own cell phone out of her purse and demonstrated.

  “Well, I’ll be!” Windy had exclaimed with renewed hope. “I wonder if he knows to turn his on? Because whenever I call his cell phone, I always get this same voice that says he’s not available, and it depresses me, because I worry he isn’t available in general and that’s why I’ve not heard from him since late last night.”