Dog Tags (3 page)

He shrugs. “Beats me. A dog got loose, and the alert went out for all cars in the area. You’d think it was Osama bin Laden.”

At least fifteen people, mostly cops and the rest animal control officers, have cornered a German shepherd whose back is literally
against the wall of a building. He is an absolutely beautiful dog, well built and powerful, with two of the coolest ears I’ve
ever seen.

Two of the officers are pointing guns at him. They are strange-looking weapons, and I assume they’re some kind of stun guns.
Even in his cornered position, the dog does not seem afraid, or even hostile. In fact, he almost looks bored.

I certainly don’t want to see this dog hurt, so I yell, “Relax, everyone! Calm down! No reason to hurt that dog!”

One of the officers says, “Who the hell is that? Get him out of here.”

I take out my cell phone and point it in the general direction of the dog and the officers surrounding him. “I’m videotaping
this,” I say. “Anything happens to that dog, it’s going viral.”

Of course, I barely know how to use the cell phone, and I can’t imagine it has video capabilities, but it’s dark out, and
the officers would have no way of knowing that.

This time the officer is more insistent. “Get him out of here.”

Two officers move toward me, including the one Laurie knows. “That dog is not going to hurt anyone,” Laurie says. Then she
yells out to the others, “Just put a damn leash on him. Give one to me and I’ll do it.”

As I’m being led away, one of the animal control officers approaches the dog with a leash, and the dog calmly lets him slip
it around his neck. The officer then leads the docile dog away toward an animal control van.

When I get to the car I look back and see Laurie talking to some of the officers. Having been in the Paterson Police Department
for a number of years, she pretty much knows everybody.

When she finally joins me at the car, I ask, “What was that about?”

She shrugs. “Nobody seems to know, but it was made very clear that the dog was not to get away.”

We get in the car. “I don’t see how Kevin could leave this kind of excitement. You don’t see drama like this in Bangladesh.”

J
ERRY
H
ARRIS HAD ALWAYS TAKEN PRIDE IN HIS WORK.
Since that work usually consisted of theft and murder, he understood that most people would have trouble understanding the
gratification he felt when a job was accomplished smoothly.

But Jerry realized that sometimes events beyond his control got in the way, and that’s what had just happened. First there
was that dog, and then that other lunatic who attacked him. It seemed like they had been waiting to make their move, though
he had no idea who they were or why they were there.

So when it was time to report back to his employer exactly what had transpired, he felt some regret that he couldn’t claim
total success. It wasn’t a complete failure, the target was effectively eliminated. But the point of the operation, securing
the envelope, simply did not happen.

Jerry sat in his car at three in the morning behind a strip mall in Hackensack, the meeting place that had been designated
last week, when he had been hired. At that time he had been given one hundred thousand dollars, in cash, with the promise
of another hundred to follow the successful completion of the job.

The second hundred, Jerry understood, would now be the subject of a negotiation.

A Lexus pulled up alongside him, and his employer got out. It irked Jerry that he did not even know the man’s name, or what
his interest was in all of this.

Jerry had mentally nicknamed him Smooth, since he conveyed a calm, unruffled demeanor. He wore expensive clothes and jewelry,
with a watch that probably cost more than Jerry’s car. “Smooth” was obviously used to getting what he wanted, but that wasn’t
going to happen this time.

It might be unpleasant, but Jerry would handle it. He’d handled a lot tougher situations before.

Smooth entered the car and sat in the passenger seat without saying a word. His real name was Marvin Emerson, called M by
the few people who knew him well. Not even Marvin himself really remembered if that started because it was his first initial,
or the sound at the beginning of “Em-erson”. In any event, he had never given his name or nickname to Jerry, and saw no reason
to do so now.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” said Jerry.

“Please report on the evening’s events.”

“Well, we had a bit of a problem. It’s going to sound nuts, but right after the guy gave me the envelope, I put a bullet in
him, but then this dog comes out of nowhere and grabs the envelope and runs off with it.”

“A dog…,” M said. It was a way to prompt Jerry to finish the story, although M already knew everything that happened. He’d
had a person in place, hidden across the street, who saw the entire thing.

“Yeah, and then some guy comes charging at me as I was trying to shoot the dog. He grabbed the gun, and I got the hell out
of there.” Jerry decided to leave out the part about getting kneed in the groin; it was humiliating and would cast him in
a bad light.

“That’s quite a story,” M said. “Did you know this man?”

Jerry shakes his head. “Never saw him before. But the guy who gave me the envelope won’t ever bother you again.”

“The envelope is what was important. I thought I conveyed that to you.”

“Hey come on, I did the best I could. How could I know that dog would do that? For all I know, you set it up.”

“You’ll get the remainder of the money when I get the envelope,” M said.

Jerry was now annoyed. “That’s bullshit. How the hell am I going to get the envelope now? I don’t know where the damn dog
went. You tell me where it is, and I’ll go get it.”

By now M was convinced that Jerry was telling the truth—that he really had no more knowledge of the dog or the other man than
he said.

So he reached into his pocket, and in one remarkably swift motion took out a gun and shot Jerry in the right temple.

It didn’t give him pleasure, or make him feel better. Jerry was a loose end that had to be removed, no more, no less. But
killing him did not solve M’s problem; only finding the envelope would do that.

M got out of the car and signaled across the street to two men who would come over and do the cleanup, getting rid of the
body and car so that they would never be found.

M then got into his own car and drove away, already focusing on the next step, which had to be getting his hands on that dog,
and the guy who owned it.

F
OR THE LAST THREE WEEKS,
I
HAVE BEEN LIVING A NIGHTMARE.

Charlie’s, the greatest sports bar in the history of the civilized world, has been undergoing renovations. They chose to do
it now because it’s July, and except for baseball there isn’t much going on in the sports world. Apparently they ignored the
fact that in the heat of summer there is plenty going on in the beer world.

Vince, Pete, and I generally spend at least three evenings a week at Charlie’s. It used to be five, until Laurie moved back
here from Wisconsin, where she briefly lived for a miserable year. It’s not that she objects to my being out with my friends;
it’s just that I’d rather spend time with her than them. Of course, I would never tell them that.

Sports, lubricated by beer, is the glue that holds us together. But I sometimes wonder if they would be my friends, if I would
have any male friends, without sports. It represents at least 70 percent of what we talk about.

My attitude toward sports has evolved as I’ve grown older. For years I wanted to play professionally, though down deep I knew
that was never going to be a realistic possibility. Then I got to the point
where I lived vicariously through modern athletes, and that was reasonably satisfying.

Now, approaching forty and fading fast, I think I’m embarking on a new phase. I’m going to start living vicariously through
someone who is already living vicariously through an athlete. It should be far less exhausting. All I have to do is find someone
to fill the role; I think this is why men have sons.

The renovation is scheduled to last for six weeks, although I have no idea why they would be doing it at all. Charlie’s is
perfect, and in my experience perfection is generally a tough thing to improve upon.

So we have been spending our time at The Sports Shack, an upscale restaurant-bar located on Route 4 in Teaneck. It has a ski-lodge-impersonation
motif, and it operates under the assumption that if you have enough TVs, and a gimmicky enough decor, everything else will
take care of itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The hamburgers aren’t thick enough, the french fries aren’t crisp enough, and unless you tell them otherwise every single
time, they serve the beer in a glass. Clusters of TVs sometimes all show the same baseball game, when there are plenty of
others to choose from, and the other night one of the TVs was tuned to a
Best of the X Games
retrospective.

Best of the X Games
? Now, there’s a show that should run all of ten seconds. In any event, what is it doing in a sports bar? What is happening
to the country I love?

But here we sit, drinking our beer, eating our food, and watching our games, thereby trying to restore a sense of order out
of this chaos.

Tonight Pete is late in arriving, and Vince is in a bad mood because the Mets are losing. He would also be in a bad mood if
the Mets were winning, or if they were not playing, or if there were no such thing as the Mets.

He stares in the direction of the bar. “Do you see that?” he asks, then shakes his head. “Unbelievable.”

I look over there but don’t see anything that would be considered difficult to believe. “What are you talking about?”

“That guy is in a three-piece suit. With a tie.”

“So?”

“So?” he sneers. “So it’s supposed to be a sports bar. What’s next, flowers on the tables? That smelly stuff in a pot?”

“You mean potpourri?”

He looks at me like a bug he found in his soup. “Yes, Mr. Foo-Foo. That’s exactly what I mean.”

Pete arrives, and not a moment too soon. Vince is harder to handle one-on-one than LeBron James. Pete doesn’t say hello; for
some reason greetings have never been a part of the relationship among the three of us. We don’t say good-bye, either. Or
How was your day?

“I need a favor” is the first thing Pete says to me.

“Dream on,” I say, though we both know that I will do whatever he asks. Since I am a criminal defense attorney, Pete’s job
as a police lieutenant makes him a valuable source of information for me, and I call upon him all the time. He grumbles, but
he always comes through.

Even if that weren’t the case, I would do whatever Pete needs. Doing favors fits squarely within our definition of friendship,
and to refuse one would be highly unusual. But pretending to resist is a necessary part of the process.

“Actually, I’m doing you a favor,” he says. “I’ve got you a client.”

“Just what I need,” I say. I am independently wealthy, a result of inheritance and a few major victorious cases. Since hard
work in general, and hard legal work in particular, is not my idea of a good time, I rarely take on new clients.

“You read about the murder in Edgewater last night?” Pete asks.

“Was it on the sports page?”

Vince chimes in with “You’re an asshole.” I can’t decide if he says that because it was on the front page of his newspaper
and he’s annoyed that I didn’t see it, or because he just thinks I’m an asshole and thought this was a good time to remind
me. Probably both.

“I read about it,” I say.

“The guy they arrested for it is Billy Zimmerman. We graduated from the academy together, and we were even partners for a
while.”

“An ex-cop?” I ask, and immediately regret the question.

“Wow, you figured that out all by yourself?” Pete asks. “Just from what I said about him going to the academy and being my
partner? You are really sharp.”

“Get to the favor part,” I say.