Strangers (5 page)

Zeller’s words came at Michael in a flurry, repeating only that Dusty was gone and adding little to that.
Just the facts, asshole,
Michael thought.

He quietly interrupted Zeller’s monologue. “When did you discover he was missing, Brad?”

“See I went out,” Brad replied. “I wasn’t gone fifteen minutes. I just drove over to the White Eagle so I’d have some coffee in the morning. Dusty didn’t want to come in the house, so I let him stay out back. What could it hurt? And he wasn’t there when I came back.”

Michael nodded. “I see,” he said. Then he asked, “Are you sure, Brad? Maybe you did bring him in…”

“I’m old, Michael,” Zeller snapped, “and sometimes I drink more than I should. But I’m not senile and I’m not a drunk. I know I left Dusty out back.”

Michael raised a placating hand. “Brad,” he said smoothly, “All I’m saying is, well, sometimes I’m so damned sure I left my keys on the table or the dresser, okay? It’s like I can actually see myself putting them down, but they wind up right in my pants pocket.”

“Sure,” Zeller said.

“It won’t be a big deal for us to check the house, Brad. Hell, Dusty might be snoring under your bed right now, playing a joke on us. Let’s look around, just to satisfy me.”

“All right,” Zeller sighed.

Zeller wasn’t hoping, not yet—Michael saw that—but it was possible the old shithead was starting to feel he had a chance for hope. Good
;
that would make it better. Let him think everything just might work out okay. There was probably a stupid bastard on the
Titanic
who thought that way three seconds before he was treading ice water.

They searched the house the dog and man shared. Dusty was not in it.

At Michael’s suggestion, they went to the backyard. Michael said he was looking for a place where Dusty might have burrowed under the fence.

“Uh-uh,” Zeller said, an edge to his voice. “He’s not a roamer. Never has been.”

“Brad,” Michael said softly, “I’m only trying to help.”

“Yeah, I know,”
Brad
said pinching the bridge of his nose, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “You’re helping me and I’m spitting at you like a fighting tomcat.”

“Forget it,” Michael said. He clapped Brad on the shoulder.
Want to play the “Getting warmer-colder game,” Brad, old buddy, old pal?
he
thought. “Let’s drive around the neighborhood, maybe we’ll spot him,” he said.

In the silvery dusk, Brad slowly drove his eight-year-old Dodge Dart down Walnut. He stopped at the corner where a group of junior high school age—perhaps younger—boys and girls stood in the artificially casual attitudes of young people striving to maintain their images within the clique. They all had cigarettes in their mouths or hands.

Michael leaned his head out the window and asked them. No, they hadn’t seen a black and white dog.

Brad pulled away, muttering, “Brats smoking like that right out in the open.”

Michael knew Brad was talking to hear
himself
talk and to keep himself from thinking about his “lost” dog. Michael said, “I catch
my
kids with a cigarette, I’ll set the seat of their pants smoking.”

Zeller shook his head. “Kids acting like that, that’s modern times. It was different when I was a kid, you know? Hell, I bet you didn’t act that way either.”

“No,” Michael said, “people used to think I was a pretty good kid.” The ironic honesty tightened the corners of his mouth.

Yes, You’re a good boy, aren’t you? That’s what you want them to think.
It was Jan Pretre who spoke to him across all the years, Jan’s voice reverberating in the echo chamber of memory.

They drove around the neighborhood until dusk had changed to dark. Disconsolately, Zeller said, “We’re not going to find him, Michael. Not now.”

“We’ll keep looking if you want, Brad.”

“No, no use. Let’s head back.”

Turning into his drive, Zeller switched off the headlamps and braked the car. He twisted the ignition key. The Dart dieseled a sputtering instant before it died.

Zeller didn’t move. Staring straight ahead, he said, “You know
,
I really don’t believe this. Dusty’s gone and I don’t know what happened.”

Want some food for thought?
Michael mused.
Good
,
tough gristle and sinew you can chew on?
He said, “I don’t know either, but maybe someone…” He paused, as though he’d had an idea but dismissed it, or decided it was nothing he wanted to say after all.

“Go on,” Brad said tonelessly.

“Okay,” Michael sighed. “You do hear about dognappers grabbing animals for scientific labs so they can do experiments, dissect them…” He stopped there as though the idea were too ghastly to contemplate.

“Yeah,” Zeller said. “I don’t want to believe that. I
don’t
believe it.”

“Nah, me either,” Michael said, making sure ‘his voice was loud and emphatic—too loud and
too
emphatic. “It’s a stupid idea and I don’t know why I even said it. Just forget it, okay?”

“It’s young dogs they want for stuff like that. Dusty’s old. He’s no good for them. He’s…”

“Like I said, Brad, a stupid idea. Don’t even think about it,” Michael said.

Zell said nothing. He pushed open the car door, the dome light a sudden, sickly yellow glow. He turned his head and said, “I’m going to have a drink. Want to have one with me?”

“Sure, Brad,”
Michael
said. “A beer.”

Zeller had a shot of Seagram’s Imperial and chased it with another and then he poured a third. Sitting at the kitchen table, Michael said, “You give the police a call, Brad. There’s no real crime in Park Estates so they have plenty of time to look for lost pets. I’ll bet they find him.”

Zeller nodded. “I will call the cops.” He lifted the shot glass with leprous white fingers. “But they won’t find my dog. Dusty’s gone and that’s all. That’s what I feel.”

“Don’t you think that way, Brad,” Michael said. He finished the Old Milwaukee. “You can’t give up hope.”

Michael rose. Zeller gazed at him, eyes anguished under the bright alcoholic sheen. Michael put a hand on Zeller’s shoulder. “You’ll see, it’ll be okay,” he said.

Then he added something he truly believed. “You’ll see Dusty again,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

— | — | —

THREE

BETH WAS upset to hear there was no sign of Dusty. She wished there was something they could do for Brad, something more…

Michael assured her he, too, was concerned. “Brad’s so attached to that dog, it would just destroy him if anything happened.”

There’d been two calls while Michael was out, Beth informed him: her mother and Vern Engelking. Beth had said, “yes” to the invitation to the cookout Vern and Laura were having on Saturday, Labor Day weekend. Oh, and while Vern said it was nothing important, there was something about business, so if Michael wanted to call back, that would be okay.

“Guess I will get back to Vern,” Michael said with a realistic sigh. “If I don’t, I’ll be wondering what it could be, and”—he smiled at Beth—“I don’t want anything on my mind, now except us.”

Michael went upstairs to the room he’d made his office. He turned on the overhead light and closed the door. He looked at the file cabinets and the magazine rack with its copies of
Fortune, Time, Newsweek
and
US News and World Report,
the bland seascape hanging on the wall, the desk with its digital calendar-clock pen holder, the adding machine, the portable manual typewriter.

No question about it, he thought, he had the ordinary at-home office of a white-collar nonentity. From the desk, he took the ordinary photo. There they were, he and Beth and the kids, pressed under no-glare glass, a picture taken last year at the lake. The sky was blue, the water more so; they all wore the lop-sided smiles of “family togetherness time,” preserved in the orange tone of Kodachrome. People said Kim resembled Beth and that Marcy was “100 percent
his
girl,” but he couldn’t see it. The children looked like children, period—like small nothings who might someday grow up to be big nothings—if he let them.

Michael sat in the swivel desk chair, not reaching for the telephone. He relaxed. Here, with only himself, he
was
himself and no one else.

I am a Stranger,
he thought, relishing the affirmation of his power and guile. Then he telephoned the Stranger who was the president of Superior Chemical Company.

“Michael,” Vern Engelking boomed cheerfully, “I’m so pleased you and your lovely family will be attending our little get-together. We’ll drink beer—lemonade for the’ wee ones, of course—eat hamburgers charred to carbon on the Weber kettle, and have a marvelous time.”

“Right,” Michael laughed dryly. “There was business you wanted to discuss?”

“A trifling matter,” Vern said, “but it seems our suspicions regarding Herb Cantlon have sadly proven correct. That’s the basic gist of the report Eddie Markell’s provided me. Herb is utterly unethical, a viper at the bosom of Superior Chemical.”

“He’s ripping us off,” Michael said.

“Indeed,” Vern agreed. “We’ll have to terminate him.”

“Yes.” Michael’s grin was wide.

“We’ll arrange the details with Eddie in the near future. I’m afraid we’ll have to punish Herb Cantlon rather severely.”

Michael laughed. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

Vern Engelking chuckled, too. “Well, now you have
two
festive occasions to look forward to, our party and Herb Cantlon. I hope this brightens your evening. Goodnight, Michael, and see you tomorrow.”

“Goodnight,” Michael said, and hung up the phone.

Not
the
call, he reflected, but a call, promising a new chance to again know the exquisite pleasure, the thrill of near-omnipotence that came from killing.

In the living room, Beth sat at the end of the sofa encircled by the light of the end table lamp. While Michael had been with Zeller, she’d put on her pastel green baby-doll pajamas.

“Nothing urgent?” she asked, as Michael sat down. Her small foot spanned the distance between them to press against the side of his thigh.

“Vern? No, no big deal. A price change on paper towels, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Beth said.

“You said your mom called,” Michael said.

“How’s she doing?”

Mom was all right, Beth told him, but her pressure was still too high. The doctor had her on new medication and wanted her to take it easier. At age sixty-eight, Claire Wynkoop still put in a forty plus hour week as the librarian in Belford, the small town sixty miles to the south where Beth had been raised. “Mom refuses to slow down,” Beth said, “or even to
sit
down long enough to consider slowing down.”

Michael patted Beth’s calf. “Don’t worry, honey,” he assured her, “your mom’s one tough lady. She’ll outlive us all.” Then with an amused smile, he asked, “Mom have any earthshaking predictions?”

Beth laughed, but she did not really find the question funny. Unlike Michael, she did not think ridiculous her mother’s modest claims to have occasional psychic intuitions of the future. No, Mom had never foretold a Political assassination, air disaster, or erupting volcano, but… Two years ago, Kim, then a first-grader, had broken her wrist in a schoolyard tumble and the call from Mom came only seconds after the one from the school nurse: “Kim is hurt. I know that. How bad is it?”