Dogs (15 page)
Authors: Nancy Kress
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Medical, #General, #Science Fiction, #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #Fiction
Careless, Ellen, careless. I could be a thief.
She shoved the window open, hoping no neighbors called the cops, and pulled hard at the screen. It came away in her hand. Dropping it to the shrubbery below, Tessa oozed around the corner of the house and through the opening.
Two children lay asleep in the room, the baby in his crib and Tessa's three-year-old niece, Sally, in a toddler bed. The little girl didn't stir.
Carefully Tessa opened the door and crept down the half-flight of stairs. She couldn't see the living room from the hallway, which was good because it meant the babysitter couldn't see her. But light from the living room faded after she turned the corner and eased down the second half-flight, and she reached the basement level in darkness. Two rooms here, a large space land-mined with toys and child-sized furniture and, beyond, Jim's study.
It had to be there. It had to be.
Inside the study she closed the door and risked the light. Jim was not a methodical man. But even so, this was the logical place, and not among the piles of papers and books and rolled-up architectural drawings. Tessa opened the desk drawers, one after another, rifling efficiently through each. In the lower right drawer, she struck pay dirt.
Halfway back up the stairs, and the phone rang. The babysitter leapt off the couch and raced for the kitchen, on the other side of the hallway.
Tessa had no time. She slipped silently into the miniscule powder room, not daring to close the door, and pressed herself against the wall.
“Hello?” the girl said eagerly. “Blakely residence, Emily speaking!⦠Oh, hello, Mrs. Blakely.”
Despite herself, Tessa grinned. The girl's disappointment was so unhidden, so artless. She'd been expecting some acned Romeo and instead had gotten Ellen.
“No, nobody's called, Mrs. Blakely, not your sister or anybody⦠The kids are all fine. They're asleepâ¦okay. Bye.” She dragged back to the living room.
And then started up the stairs.
Tessa caught her breath. She'd left the window in the kids' room open, planning to be only a moment, knowing that cold air seldom broke the sound sleep of the very young. Now Emily would see the window and the missing screen and, if she had half the sense she was born with, call the cops. Tessa bolted for the kitchen door.
Hand on the knob, however, she decided to risk waiting. Maybe the girl wouldn't notice the open window behind its filmy curtains, wouldn't go far enough into the room to feel the cold air coming in. Or maybe she'd think it had been open all along. There was probably a phone in Jim and Ellen's bedroom, but Emily wouldn't use that one. Babysitters didn't trespass into the master bedroom. She'd come back downstairs, use the kitchen phone to call 911â¦
Tessa slipped behind the open powder-room door and waited.
Emily came back downstairs, went into the living room, and resumed watching TV.
Ellen should get a more observant babysitter. Well, eventually Tessa might be able to tell her sister that.
When she was sure Emily was settled, Tessa crept back upstairs and out the window, awkwardly closing it behind her. She couldn't do anything about the screen, but screens fell out all the time. She hoped. Lightly she got to the ground, retrieved coat and laptop, and began running again. Not badâthe first of Maddox's agents hadn't shown up.
She caught another hitch on Route 15. This trucker was headed north but north was all right to leave Frederick. He could leave her at the big truck stop just before the Pennsylvania line, and she'd easily be able to pick up an anonymous ride back to Baltimore and BWI.
“I gotta have more coffee,” the trucker said fifteen minutes later. They were the first words he'd spoken. Tessa didn't know why such silent types picked up riders at all, but they usually did. Perhaps they just wanted another body in the cab, mute evidence that they were not the only breathing life in a world of moving metal.
She said, “If you find a Starbucks, I'll treat.”
He snorted. “I don't need no designer coffee."
“Listenâ¦do you have a cell phone?"
He glanced at her suspiciously. “Yeah, why? You need to call somebody?”
“Sort of. Does your cell phone have data service on your calling plan?”
“Have
what?”
“I mean, can you access the Internet from your cell phone?”
He peered at her. “Girlie, what do you think this is, a fucking war room? I got calls on my calling plan, period.”
“There's a Starbucks!”
He sighed and pulled onto the exit. Tessa bought him a double mocha latte and a cheese Danish. She opened the laptopâstill some battery leftâand accessed her email account through the Web. Jess would have told Maddox that Tessa took a laptop with her. Maddox might communicate with her this wayâand vice-versa.
But her one new message was not from Maddox.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: dogs
Nice try, Tessa. Ruzbihan wasn't helpful enough, you couldn't reach Aisha, and so you're preparing for the worst. What did you take from your sister's house? Not a gun, you already have one. My guess is a passport. The two of you look so much alikeâand “Ellen Blakely” wouldn't be on a no-fly list, would she? But we're partners in this, you and I, you know that. I can't let you back out now. It wouldn't be fair. Not after all that Salah and I meant to each other. And where are you trying to go? To Aisha? You're right; she knows a lot. But not enough.
Check out 1 Kings 21:23.
Fondly,
Richard
He had been there.
In the video arcade, listening to her call Ruzbihan, trying to call Aisha. He had been there, close enough to listen, and she hadn't noticed him, hadn't been looking⦠He had to have followed her from Tyler, followed KESSEL SHORT-TERM MOVING. And followed her run through the darkness to Ellen's houseâ¦
Despite her training, Tessa shuddered. She had never been undercover, had always worked counter-terrorism from the open. But she should have noticed him, among the masses of kids seething around the arcade. She hadn't been wary enough, hadn't expected to be followed except possibly by Maddox's men.
She didn't even know what Ebenfield looked like.
“Anything good on that contraption?” said the silent trucker.
“No,” she said numbly. “Nothing good at all.”
At midnight he sat in a dingy motel room north of Route 70. In the ashtray beside his laptop there burned a stick of incense, a smoky and pungent smell, not altogether pleasant. But he needed it. It distracted from that other smell, the necessary but terrible one, the price he had to pay. There was always a price. The incense was also supposed to help with the itching, at least that's what they'd said in Mogumbutuno, but the man hadn't found that to be true. Not everything they said was true.
The laptop screen showed no reply to his email.
That was all right. She'd reply when she was ready. He'd lost her after Frederick, lost her physically, but that was all right, too. There was no way she could truly escape him. No way any of them could. He was owed this.
The man leaned forward to relight the incense, which had gone out. When he did so, he caught a glimpse of his own face reflected in the computer screen. He closed the laptop so quickly that the sound echoed in the small room.
Soon.
» 30
Cami woke before dawn, still lying on the gurney in the hospital corridor. The lights hadn't been turned up yet and the hallway had that night hush, broken only by the soft pinging of monitors and the even softer breathing of other patients on other gurneys. In the distance Cami, whose hearing seemed preternaturally sharp, picked up the footsteps of rubber-soled nurses' shoes, fading even as she listened.
And then another sound: a child whimpering.
Slowly Cami sat up. Her head felt clear and nothing hurt. Her leg was in a heavy cast, which suggested a serious fracture. For the first time she could recall the attack: Captain springing at her, her own reflexive kick and scream, the powerful jaws closing on her leg even as she stared, unable to either look away or stop screaming, and Mr. Anselm's bloody body. Then people behind her, shouts, a gunshot. Then nothing.
I went into shock
, she thought, and felt obscurely ashamed. She was a nurse, after all.
A fracture would not keep her in the hospital very long. It might be followed by long physical therapyâCami knew just how much that could involveâbut that she was still here suggested other possibilities. Were they monitoring her for infection? Or did this dog plague lead to something in humans that couldâ¦she didn't know. Maybe nobody knew yet.
Tears blurred her vision. She was about to get severe with herself when she suddenly noticed two more things. The first was writing on her white cast. Small writing, upside down to her sight, in red pen. Cami squinted and twisted until she could make it out:
Your asleep. Back later!âBilly
She smiled even as the second thing distracted her: that faint sound of a child whimpering.
Cami inched her legs over the edge of the gurney. That was, of course, the great thing about a rigid cast: your limb was safe from further injury, unless you fell hard. She wasn't going to fall. There was a wheelchair not far from her gurney. Carefully, holding herself up against the wall, Cami reached it, plopped herself down, and wheeled slowly away.
The little girl lay on a gurney parked just inside a room with three other children. Between the two regular beds a woman sat asleep in a chair, head thrown back and mouth open, one hand touching each child in the beds. A second gurney had been shoved in the far corner and on it an older child, to judge from the dim outline under the blanket, also slept. But no one sat with this little girl. What was wrong with some parents?
“Hi, sweetheart, do you need anything?” Cami whispered.
The little girl, who looked about four, ignored her, sobbing softly. One half of her head was bandaged, covering her right cheek and eye. Cami could visualize what lay beneath and her whole body, even inside the cast, seemed to give a little shudder, like something touched by an electric current.
“My name is Cami, what's yours?”
“Poo-poo,” the girl moaned, and Cami was about to become indignant at the absent parents all over again, but then she spotted the mangy stuffed kitten on the floor. Laboriously she bent and fished at it until she caught one ear.
“Poo-poo,” the child said, snatched it from Cami, and stuck it under the covers.
“Poo-poo just fell off the bed. He's fine. Where's your mommy, honey?”
“Dead,” the little girl said, with such stark finality that Cami was startled. “Snowy ate my mommy.”
"Ate
â¦Snowy isâ¦wasâ¦your dog?” Fresh horror filled her.
“Snowy got dead, too.” The whimpering began again.
A movement from the other bed caught her attention. A boy, nine or ten, rolled over and stared from suspicious brown eyes. “Stop bothering her!”
“I'm not bothering, I'mâ¦are you her brother?”
“Yeah. Go away.”
“I'm a nurse.”
“Oh.” He seemed to consider this. “Then why are you in a wheelchair?”
The woman hanging onto the other two childrenâ
hanging on for dear life
is the way Cami thought of itâgave a sudden loud snore. Cami said over the noise, “A dog bit me.”
Captain leaping and herself kicking and Mr. Anselm's body
â¦
“Us, too,” the boy said. “What kind of dog was yours? Did anybody shoot it?”
Cami pushed away her own memory and looked more closely at the boy, now sitting up on his gurney. One arm was in a plaster cast. His face had a sickly, pale shininess, and his eyes gleamed feverishly. She recognized what she was looking at. This child was caught in his memory of the attack, enmeshed in it, in danger of being crushed by it.
“What kind of dog?”
the boy demanded, and Cami said, “Mostly collie.”
“Ours was a Newfoundland. Heâ”
Dear God, those animals were huge.
Snowy ate my mommy
. And the children trying to interfere, trying to stop the attackâ¦.
“âbit her on the neck and bit her on the head and bit her on the shoulder andâ”
The little girl whimpered louder. These children should not be together right now, even though that was standard protocol. But right now they had vastly different psychological needs, theyâ
“âon the back and on theâ”
“What's your name?” Cami said firmly. “Tell me your name.”
“Jason.”
“Where's your father?”
“No father.”
“Okay, Jason, you come with me. I need you toâ¦to push me down the hall. And you can tell me about Snowy, as much as you like.”
Jason climbed easily out of his bed and walked over. Up close, his eyes shone even more wildly, darting around the room. Cami said to the girl, “You hold Poo-poo and I'll be back soon. Okay?”
She didn't answer, just lay there whimpering, eyes closed.
Cami got Jason out of the room. She started to push the wheels of her chair but Jason seized the chair with his good hand, nearly tipping her over. Strength, she suspected, born of almost intolerable tension. She said emphatically, “Be careful, Jason. Wheel me this way. It's a short distance and then you can tell me what happened. All of it."
“Okay!”
She guided him toward the meditation chapel at the end of the hall, hoping that it wasn't filled with gurneys. With the hope came another feeling: an easing of her own horror. This child needed her. That steadied her, always steadied her. It was why she'd become a nurse.
If she could help him and his little sister, Cami herself might be all right.
