4 Woof at the Door (8 page)

Hank Atkinson came sprinting through the gate after her. “Are you women all right?”

Their pregnant Samoyed trotted along behind them on a long leash.

“We found Sammy,” Paige said, giving me a weak smile as she pushed a handful of brown hair behind her ear. “Just like you said, she was with Hank all along.”

“Never mind about the damned dog!” Beverly yelled at Paige. “Where are the police! Why aren’t they here yet?”

“For God’s sake, Beverly! I just called them thirty seconds ago!”

In the background, I heard the screech of tires as someone threw on the brakes. Meanwhile, Beverly gaped at Paige and cried, “Thirty seconds ago? What are you talking about! You left here at least five minutes ago and you said that—”

Hank interrupted, “Beverly, please calm down. If Ty’s dead, who cares if the police are here in five minutes or in fifteen?” Hank, I noticed, had changed clothes since I’d last seen him. He was now wearing gray sweatpants and a T-shirt.

Beverly was angrier than I’d ever seen her. She towered over Paige Atkinson, who backed up in the face of her fury. “Allida was nearly killed by a wolf! Whatever problems you might have with me, you had no right to—”

“Hank?” The male voice came from the other side of the fence. The gate banged open, and a man I’d never seen before approached. Probably another neighbor.

Great. The troops had arrived after the fact and were determined to start up another war.

“Damian,” Hank said. “I thought you were out of town.”

I did a double-take. This was the wolf’s owner. He was in his late thirties or so and had such a large, muscular build he even dwarfed Hank’s powerful frame. He had a cleft in his chin and wore tight-fitting jeans and yellow T-shirt. His hair was light brown on the sides and sun-bleached on the top.

“I was, but I checked my phone messages and turned around,” he said. “Someone named Allida Babcock left me a message about you and my wolf. Now I can’t find Larry Cunriff anywhere, and Atla is missing.”

“Atla?” he repeated.

“My wolf! She’s missing!” He looked angry enough to flatten Hank with one punch. “She’s my least well-mannered animal. She’s not used to being around humans. She’s dangerous. Do you have her?”

“Of course I don’t have—”

“She’s in there,” I said. All along, I’d assumed the wolf was a he, but then, I’d had other things on my mind than checking for the wolf’s gender.

“In someone’s house?” Damian hollered.

“She’s tied to the handles of the refrigerator. I don’t know how long that will hold, though.”

“Christ!” He knelt and pushed at the doggie door. “I can’t fit through that door.” He rocked back on his knees and pointed at me. “You! Get in there and unlock the door! I need to get my wolf in a cage before she or someone else gets hurt.”

“Too late for that,” Hank said. “Seems your wolf already killed Ty Bellingham.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Damian murmured. He grabbed both of my shoulders. His blue eyes seemed to see right through me. “Please, just let me inside the house so I can try and get her out of there! If I have to break a window, she might go completely berserk.”

He was right. “I’ll crawl through and unlock the door for you.”

I got down on my elbows and knees to crawl through the small dog door. I couldn’t. For the first time in my life, I was paralyzed with fear. I felt furious with myself for my weakness. There was no reason for me to feel this now. The wolf was securely tied. I’d already faced that horrifying scene in the kitchen once.

I could hear Atla’s frantic struggle inside. He needed to get her out of there before she choked herself on the chain or ripped the handles clear off the refrigerator and freezer doors.

“Get in there! You’re the only person small enough to fit through the opening! Now go!”

I propped myself up and vented at Damian. “Look it, buster! I don’t know you from Adam, but you’re a complete jerk!”

“Lady, that’s what my ex-wife used to say, but it isn’t getting us anyplace right now!”

Police sirens were growing louder. They would break through the kitchen door and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the wolf dead. For Atla’s sake, I had to act now. Whatever had happened tonight, it wasn’t her fault. Some fool had brought her here. Who? Ty?

I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and wriggled through the door, mentally telling myself not to look at anything, just to stand up and immediately throw the locks on the back door.

I got in and stood up. The smell of blood and death made me gag.

Atla was whining, definitely still breathing, despite her choke collar. My back was to her as I threw the locks, determined to do this fast. From deeper inside the house, Doobie was still thrashing about and trying desperately to get through the bedroom door.

Just as I fumbled with the last lock, there was a strange noise from the direction of the refrigerator.

It sounded for all the world like a bolt ripping loose from the door handle.

Chapter 7

The lock was stuck. I leaned against the door and finally forced its turn-style mechanism open. I turned to check on Atla. A blur of gray came at me. A hot-poker shock of pain raced up my arm as Atla sank her teeth into my left hand. I screamed in agony. The door bashed into me, and Damian rushed into the room.

“Atla, no!” he yelled. She instantly released her grip on me, which sent another shock wave of hideous pain through my body. Damian grabbed hold of her leash just above the collar and was strong enough to lift her front paws off the ground.

I took a couple of staggering steps, my vision blurred with pain. I gripped myself tightly around the wrist. I looked at the injury. She’d caught me in the fleshy part of my hand. The puncture wounds had begun to bleed. The pain was searing and relentless.

“You okay?” Damian asked, straining as the wolf started to pull him toward Ty.

In the corner of my vision, a quick view of the shocked faces outside the door registered on me. “What happened?” a female voice called. Beverly’s voice, I realized.

“I’m okay,” I immediately shot back. A by-product of my being small and young-looking for my age was that I couldn’t tolerate being coddled, even when it was justified.

“I’ve got to get her out front to my van,” Damian managed to tell me, straining with his physical effort at keeping the wolf under control. He paled when he and the snarling wolf reached the far side of the kitchen. “Oh, Jeez,” he murmured, staring down at Ty’s body. Frenzied by being near the body, Atla snapped at Damian, who held so tight to the leash that only her back paws were on the ground.

In a remarkable show of strength, Damian managed to half lift the struggling wolf through the beaded entranceway. “Get the front door for me,” he barked over his shoulder. “I’ve got to load her into the van and get her caged. Now. Before the police burst in here and shoot her.”

In a strange, almost out-of-body state, I managed to obey, stepping around the body and after Damian and the wolf. We crossed the living room. He held his wolf at bay as I staggered past him toward the door. The room was dark, the heavy curtains on all windows drawn tightly shut. The room was empty. No bean bags, lamps, collectibles. Had the house been burglarized?

Working with my good hand, I got the locks to operate and looked back into the room as I pulled open the front door. Along the wall of cinderblock shelves, the stereo and TV were still in place. A tripod was set up in the back corner, no camera in sight.

Outside, Damian was instructing a pair of startled officers and another pair of male paramedics to let him pass. “Just let me get her locked up. The van’s got a built-in cage.” Damian’s vehicle was a dark blue and again had tinted windows, similar to the steel gray van that Larry Cunriff had used a few hours earlier.

One paramedic opened the back doors of the van for him and then dashed aside. Damian was strong enough to hurl the wolf up and into the van.

I made my way down the steps toward them in a dazed state. Beverly had rounded the house and was on the sidewalk talking to one of the officers. When she saw me, she trotted toward me, ignoring the policeman beside her telling her to stop. In the corner of my vision, I could see the Atkinsons heading through the gate with yet another uniformed officer.

Feeling faint, I shut my eyes for a moment and saw a vision of Atla, her blood-soaked ruff and paws.

Beverly rushed to my side. “Allida! What happened to you? You’re bleeding!”

“The wolf bit me. Not bad, though. I’m current on my tetanus vaccinations. I’ll be all right.”

She yanked off the long-sleeve blouse that she’d been wearing jacket-style over her T-shirt and wrapped it around my hand. The policeman had stepped beside us. “Officers? She needs medical attention.”

“Miss?” one of the officers said. “We need to speak to you. Would you come with us, please?”

I glanced down at my injured hand, which was throbbing. Blood was already soaking through Beverly’s blouse. “Okay, but could you give me a ride to the emergency room while we’re at it?”

The next couple of hours passed in that same kind of semi-conscious state my brain seems to put itself into when I’ve got a really bad flu. The EMTs put some butterfly bandages on my wound, then took me to the emergency room at Boulder Community Hospital. Although having policemen as companions won me a lot of strange looks and a pariah-like treatment from my fellow patients, it didn’t seem to get me a doctor any sooner.

Despite my trauma, the officers asked me questions, and I answered them, while garnering random images from my surroundings. A nurse was criticizing the EMTs over something about my butterfly bandages. The family in the cubicle next to mine, distraught over their little boy’s head injury. The loud, elderly woman on the other side of me complaining in a thick German accent about how slow the doctor was in arriving. The pervasive masking odor of antiseptic that I was certain was now permanently embedded in my nostrils.

Then the doctor came bearing bad news. A wolf can’t be observed for a mere ten days for rabies the way domestic animals can. I would have to undergo both the two rabies immune globulin shots—today’s and in another three days—plus the full set of vaccinations. This meant a total of five vaccine applications; three this week, then one in two weeks, and my last in four weeks. That meant treatments to the wound itself as well as turning my butt into a pin cushion for extremely long needles.

Once my stitches were in place, my hand bandaged, and I was able to sit without crying out, the officers took me to the station house on 30th Street. We went through the very same lengthy set of questions that I’d already answered while in the hospital. I told them, once again, that it was clear to me that Ty Bellingham’s death had come not from teeth or claws, but from a knife. The police, in turn, made it clear that, for my own safety in case a killer had hoped Ty’s death appeared to be from the wolf, I was not to share this observation with anyone.

Eventually, I’d talked my throat raw. Then it was all I could do to convince them that I was capable of driving myself, if they could just bring me back to my car in front of the Bellinghams’ house.

An officer drove me in a patrol car. There was still no sign of Cheshire’s orange VW. The property was now surrounded with yellow crime-scene plastic tape, its perimeter teeming with onlookers. Having arrived in a squad car, four or five people rushed toward me and started shouting questions at me. A microphone was shoved in my face and the shutter of a camera clicked. I said nothing, kept my head down, got into my car, and drove away without a glance in my rearview mirror or any real thought of where to go now.

I was a couple of blocks away before a realization hit me: I had told Beverly Wood that Ty had been stabbed to death. There was no harm there, though. She was a friend. I’d just have to tell her not to repeat this.

The thought of Beverly allowed me to gradually make the connection that I was supposed to be at the softball game. The game had started at six forty-five, and was now probably half over.

I wouldn’t be any good to my team anyway. My thumb was throbbing despite the anesthetic. If the key to mankind’s success was opposable thumbs, I was halfway toward being a lower life form. Certainly a life form that did not play softball.

My mind and emotions in a tailspin, I drove toward the ball fields. I needed to tell Russell what had happened. Otherwise he might think that our minor spat had kept me from even showing.

I drove right through the red light on Valmont and was extremely lucky that my only consequence was a blast from another car’s horn and its driver’s one-finger salute. My heart raced, shocked at my having made such a potentially dangerous mistake, but at least this jarred me back to full alert. All I wanted to do was go to sleep and forget today had ever happened. The thing was, though, every time I closed my eyes, I had a vision of the wolf, Atla. Each time, I felt a horrible rush of fear that rattled me to the core.

All that kept me going was the image of myself in Russell’s arms. The hell with being strong; I’d never been as frightened in my life as I’d been in that kitchen. If Russell proved willing to console me, I would let him. I arrived at the ball fields east of town, parked, started up the long sidewalk toward the back field.

Stazio Field was a tribute to concrete and chain-link fences. Other than the softball fields themselves, there was remarkably little grass, the xeriscaping featuring heavily mulched gardens and lots of rocks. It’s a peculiar part of town, just outside the major population centers, and isolated by its geography—trees and craggy hills were the gravel pits are located. A softball island, of sorts. The lights were already on, though they weren’t necessary. It was barely even dusk.

The field my team used was the closest to the parking lot, and I walked up the paved hill along the fence. Our team was up to bat. In a bizarre coincidence, Hank Atkinson’s team was playing against us. They were all wearing their Hank’s Security Systems T-shirts, which all bore their team name: The Wolves. Hank was their pitcher. I scanned our dugout as I neared and saw Beverly and Tracy. It finally dawned on me that Beverly would have told everyone about my close encounter with the wild kingdom.