Red Dog (4 page)

He did. I served him a generous pour, four fingers, which seemed appropriate, given the circumstances. I still had his gun in my waistband. I didn't want his gun, and I didn't want him having it. I had my own gun, and—to be honest—I don't like the wicked things, anyway. More guns meant more trouble, so it was always best to keep their numbers to a minimum, if possible. I walked to the back door and opened it and tossed the Colt as hard as I could
over my head, onto the grassy overburden that served as the house's roof.

“I'll be back in twenty,” I said.

“Ten's better.”

“Fifteen, then,” I said. “Life is a series of compromises.”

“This is like one albino telling another albino he's got a pale dick.”

And that's where I left him at 7:30
P.M.
on a quiet Sunday evening at Loves Corner. When I set off to find Wesley Tremble, the one-thumbed, dog-thieving owner of the Classic Country Showroom was slumped against the cabinets in his porno robe like an old drunk left out in the sun to blister and rot. But I'll be danged if he looked like any country music song I'd ever heard.

More like a dirge.

O
N MY WAY TO CONFRONT THE TREACHEROUS BAR-BACK,
I
phoned Anci to tell her a little of what had happened. I smooth-talked past that business about Reach's thumb, on account of not wanting to give her nightmares, and I didn't tell her about his robe for the same reason. A father has to think of such things. She was just as surprised as me about the dog, though.

“I already had it written down in my notebook as a hustle,” she said. “Guess I got ahead of myself.”

“I guess we both did.”

“So why'd he take the dog?” she said. “It don't make no sense. Even if the Cleaveses really do owe him a debt. There are better ways to get your money back, some of them even legal.”

“I don't know,” I said. “People don't always think things through as much as you might imagine. So maybe it's that. General foolishness. I can ask him more about it later, comes to running him to the hospital.”

“Do that. Meantime, I got editing to do.”

I left her to her editing. I drove back west on 146 and
then south a few miles before I found the address near the Brown Barrens nature preserve. This was a tiny nothing of a frame house on a pea-gravel lane up a hill and beneath the district's water tower, which the county had painted yellow and decorated with a giant smiley face. I didn't know what there was to smile about or who to smile at. There wasn't much out that way, except Tremble's house and a sprawling timberland and, far away to the south, some turkey buzzards circling a bald knob of hilltop like a black halo. There was a late-model Honda in the drive with one of those “Coexist” bumper stickers you see time to time and a big silverberry drooping pitifully in the yard like it was waiting for an armed passerby to put it out of its misery. There wasn't a dog anywhere that I could see. I tucked Lew's thick gloves in my back pocket again along with a pair of the tranquilizer sticks and got down from the truck and walked up to the front door. I knocked a couple of times and waited until it opened with a frigid exhale from the air-conditioning inside. A young woman in a nightshirt was behind the screen.

She said, “Hot enough?”

It was hot enough, but she didn't let me answer. She pushed open the door and turned and padded back into the house without bothering to ask my sign or what I did for dollars. I followed.

“He's in bed sleeping,” she said over her shoulder. “Surprise, surprise.”

She was in her early twenties with one of those ragged haircuts looks like a drunk person done it. Her freckled nose was pierced silver, her hazel eyes so bored they might have
belonged to a clothes mannequin. Her cheeks held a scattering of freckles, too, in case her nose wanted more, and her right ear had one of them big holes in it the kids did then. Gauges, I think they're called. Her bare arms and legs were covered in tattoos.

The rest of the place was plenty interesting, too. There was a sofa and a TV on a big painted console and a couple of posters on the walls, and there was a forest of pot plants growing everywhere there was space to put them. I tell you, it was a sight. They were on the floor and on the little divider wall between the living room and kitchenette. They were on top of the TV set and stereo and on the arms of the sofa. An ancient turntable had been switched on, and one of them was spinning in slow circles on that. The ceiling was fitted with maybe a half dozen banks of CFLs nestled inside metal hoods and suspended from silver chains. Their light and their buzzing sound filled what was left of the space to fill.

“This is something else,” I said.

“What is?” she said.

“Nothing. What time's he usually wake up?”

“Wes? Depends.”

“On?”

“His aura, mostly.”

That was sensible enough. Guy had a bad enough aura, he might not want to get out of the sheets. He might want to lie down in a culvert ditch or a lonely patch of red clover, or walk screaming into a forest. There were any number of possibilities.

I said, “Can you wake him?”

She nodded, but instead of waking him she flopped down on the sofa and said, “I don't know you,” which seemed like something she should have thought of before, but I was too polite to say so. She picked up a one-hitter and tamped down the bowl with a blackened thumb and touched fire to it with a lighter on a cord around her neck. “Don't remember your face none, neither. What's your name?”

“Slim.”

“Funny name.”

“I never stop laughing about it.”

“I'm Star-Child,” she said. She handed me the pipe. I turned it around in my hand and gave it right back.

She said, “It's quality shit, ain't it?”

“Seriously?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. My head hurt. “That your real name? Star-Child, I mean?”

“No. Duh. Actually it's Tiffany. Tiffany Scruggs.”

“Believe it or not, it's better than Star-Child. You live here with Wes?”

“I live here with Wes,” she said. She didn't look excessively thrilled about it. “I'll go get him up. Might take a minute, aura he's having. While I'm gone, you decide how much you want. And be precise about it.”

“I promise to be precise.”

“I'm serious now. Wes hates any kind of dickering.”

“I promise not to dicker.”

She looked at me and my promises a moment longer
and then nodded at the three of us and tottered out of the room, grabbing the doorframe a little as she rounded the corner. I got up from my seat and made a quick search of the space. There was some secondhand furniture and a pile of video games and some CDs of bands I'd never heard of and a guitar on a stand. I went into the kitchen and opened the utility room door and checked the pantry for dog food cans but found only canned SpaghettiOs and some sudden memories of my own wayward youth. I went to the window above the sink and parted the blinds and took a peek at the backyard. There was more dead grass and some patches of bare earth where even the dead grass didn't want to live anymore and a crooked apple tree without any apples on it. There was an outbuilding, too, a yellow tin and fiberglass shed under not so much as a stipple of shade. In that weather, basically a sweatbox.

“Surely not,” I said to myself.

But also maybe so. Maybe even surely so. Nobody ever went broke overestimating the cruelty of people. Just heartbroke. I pushed open the sliding door and stepped out of the kitchen and into the heat. I crossed the lawn and unchained the shed and opened it, and there she was in a ball on the dirt floor. A red dog. And not just any red dog. A sixty-five-dollar red dog.

“Excuse me, ma'am, you wouldn't happen to be Shelby Ann Cleaves, would you?”

She was too weak to use her voice maybe. She lifted her bony head to look at me through clouded eyes, and the knob of her docked tail twitched. I don't guess she'd have
lasted much longer. It was as hot as a coal stove in there, and there wasn't any food that I could see. Her water dish was as dry as the inside of a mummy, and she'd done her business all over the floor. The smell of it made my eyes water. I don't imagine Shelby Ann was any too happy about it, either. I squatted down and scratched the red fur behind her ears, she licked my hand, and we became friends. I had half a water bottle in my truck, so I went back and got that now and brought it to the shed to fill up her bowl. She lapped it down immediately and looked up at me with sad eyes for more, hopeful but not expectant.

I said, “Wait here just one more minute, darlin'. I'm gonna go shove my foot up someone's ass.”

I stormed out of the shed. I left the door open and walked quickly across the yard and into the house again. There was a boy in the kitchen now, a skinny thing in tighty-whities and nothing else with a pistol in his hand. He pointed it at my head.

I didn't let him pull the trigger. I grabbed his arm and twisted until the gun dropped from his hand. I kneed him in the gut, causing him to bend over, and I hammered the back of his head so that his face bounced off the kitchen counter and he fell to the floor. He tried to rear up and turn again toward me but I pulled out the tranquilizer needles and stuck them in his ass. Both of them. He moaned and struggled around a little for a moment and then fell still. I took the stickpins out of his butt and just then Star-Child came into the room with the corner of her T-shirt in her mouth.

I said, “Just FYI, your boyfriend's a dick.”

“Is he dead? Is that poison?”

“No. Just some sleep stuff. He's like to be out for a while.”

“Oh.”

“Try not to sound so disappointed,” I said, and she looked at me and then quickly at her feet and blushed. I softened my voice. “You don't have to stay here, you know? And not just here-here. Here in this kind of life, I mean. There's all kinds of things you can do instead.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Law school?”

“Drugs are more honest.”

I said, “Okay. That's a point for you. How about business classes, then? Or computers? Or anything other than this mess.”

“It ain't that easy for everybody.”

She was right about that, anyway. I thought about my sixty-five-dollar fee and rang up the hospital bills I'd narrowly avoided so far. Sixty-five dollars wouldn't even cover the hospital parking. I looked at the boy snoozing on the floor and worried about a sore back.

I said, “Help me with him, will you?”

She agreed to help. Probably she was feeling guilt over plotting to murder me. She took Wesley's bare feet and together we carried him through the house and into a room down the hall where we dumped him unceremoniously on the bed. After that I collected the firearms and bullets, Wes
ley's piece and a shotgun I found in the bathroom near the fixture.

“Why on earth would he keep a thing like that in there?” I asked her.

“Some people can't ever relax.”

She said there weren't any more firearms in the house, and I believed her. I took it all to the shed and deposited it in a handy wheelbarrow. Then I unclasped Shelby Ann's collar and leash and carried her to the truck. She probably could have walked, but I elected not to risk it. Locking her in the dog box didn't seem right, not after what'd been done to her, so I buckled her up in the front seat next to me.

“For safety,” I told her, and climbed behind the wheel.

I pulled out of the drive and turned south and then east past the tinderbox that the preserve was turning itself into. Along the way, I stopped at a convenience store and bought a can of dog chow, some more bottled water, and some disposable bowls. I turned the radio on low and the AC up as high as it'd go. An old Don Williams number came on—“If Hollywood Don't Need You,” a favorite—and I ended up singing along with it a little while Shelby Ann downed her meal and three dishes of the water. She was filthy and undernourished, but near as I could tell she didn't actually appear to be physically injured. Beneath her leather collar was a shaved rectangle with a tiny row of XXXs stitched into her skin, but the incision had healed some time ago and the stitches were clean. After a while, I started the truck and we moved on.

It was a little before nine when we returned to the Classic Country Showroom, and the dark was finally coming on for real.

“I'll be back in a minute,” I said to Shelby Ann. You talked to enough crazy people in your life, talking to a dog didn't seem like much to throw on the pile. “I only ask that you not judge me by the company I bring.”

I left her in the cab with the engine running and the air conditioner on and walked up to Reach's house and went inside. I called out, but he didn't answer. The light was on in the kitchen, which I didn't remember from before, it still being daylight and all when I'd left. That gave me pause. Pause and anxiety. For a moment, I worried Reach had somehow slipped his cuff and set up a machete ambush, but the machete was back with the fireplace tools where I'd returned it following our scrape.

“Reach?” I said. Nothing. I made for the kitchen. I was starting to worry.

I shouldn't have worried. He was still on the floor in his robe and still cuffed to the pipe under the sink. But that was all he was, all he'd ever be. Someone had shot him in the face at close range, blown his head all over the walls and kitchen cabinets. Blood filled the little holes in the mesh of the window screens, the keyhole in the handcuffs. The ones I'd slapped on him. I couldn't even look at the chasm in his face, that grotesque second mouth, or in the one in the back of his head, much larger.

So I stood not looking at them for a moment, hoping I'd be able to control the shaking in my hands long enough
to call the cops. Somehow, I managed it, but as soon as they arrived in a squealing herd of prowlers, I sort of wished I hadn't. Maybe they'd been without a murder for too long. Or maybe they were just inexperienced in such things. Probably that last thing. You imagine there wasn't much in the way of murders out there. The cops were so excited by it all, they walked all over the forensics and arrested the first thing in sight, as though on impulse.

“Christ Almighty,” one of them said, a kid in a thin mustache. “This guy's insides are out. And I bet you've got a perfectly reasonable explanation, right?”

He dangled his cuffs in front of me like a silver noose.

“Damn it all,” I said. “I was going to take him to the hospital.”

“Well, you can take him, but I don't know it will do any good.”

The other deputies tittered their appreciation. Mustache ate it up.

“Nice guys finish last, son,” he said, though he was almost young enough to be mine.

“At least they finish.”

The deputy agreed. But he slapped the cuffs on me anyway.