Authors: Nancy Kress
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Medical, #General, #Science Fiction, #Suspense, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #Fiction
Dogs (37 page)
» 71
Ellie Caine sat on the edge of her bed. Ten in the morning, she hadn't slept at all, and she couldn't stop shaking. No matter what she didâanother blanket, warm milk, wineâshe couldn't stop shaking.
She had shot and killed a man.
He had been going to shoot her, that man on his knees in the black ski mask. She was sure of that. He'd raised his gun and was bringing it up to point at her. So her shooting had been self-defense. But it had happened while she was committing a crime herself, so didn't that make it some sort of felony? Could she go to prison?
Who had he been?
When the doorbell rang, Ellie screamed and jumped. But it wasn't the police. Two Maryland Guards stood there with dog cages.
“Ellie Caine?”
“Yesâ¦.”
“Are you harboring any of the four dogs licensed to you, ma'am? The Greyhounds?”
“No.” None of them had come home, not her beloved Song nor Chimes nor Music. Other dogs had come home, but not hers.
The soldier's gaze pushed hers. “Are you sure, ma'am?”
“I don't have my dogs.”
“We have an emergency warrant to search.”
“Go ahead,” Ellie said, while a complicated wash of emotions went through her. Indignation. Grief. But, most of all, relief.
They had come for the dogs, not for her.
This time.
Steve Harper heard the knock on the door but didn't move. The people outside, cops or Guard or FBI, weren't looking for dogs; he didn't have a dog. They were looking for him. The door wasn't locked and if they had a warrant, they'd come in. If they didn't, they'd go away. It didn't really matter.
He and Keith had blown up Tent A, but the world was still full of dogs. He could hear them barking somewhere out there, filling up newscasts on TV the endless subject of endless debates by talking heads. The world would always be full of dogs. Steve knew that now. And some peopleâenough peopleâwould always value the lives of dogs over the lives of children.
The brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey's small body
⦠No.
Steve couldn't think about that image anymore. Couldn't struggle any more. He was so tired inside.
Another knock on the door.
Let them take him. He'd done all he could. If they had a warrant, they'd come in. If they didn't, they'd go away.
He heard the doorknob turn.
Jess sat by Cami Johnson's hospital bed. Late afternoon sunlight slanted across the floor. Cami was still in a semi-coma, but the doctor had told him that it would end soon. The other dog-bite victims, the ones infected earlier than Cami, had already woken up. Unlike the dogs, the infected humans didn't die. Although God alone knew what was going on in their brains.
Jess put his hands flat on his knees and stared at the clumsy homemade bandage, the bitten nails. How was he going to tell Cami about Billy?
How was Jess himself going to manage without Billy, his only real friend?
“Don't nap too long, Billy.”
“Catch you later, dude."
When Cami woke up, Jess was going to need the right words. He didn't have them, not for her and not for himself. The only sentence that kept coming to his mind, over and over, was completely selfish, not concerned with Billy at all. Or maybe it was.
I need to change my life.
On the hospital bed, Cami stirred and her eyelids fluttered like blue-veined butterflies.
“She's alive! She's alive!”
“Allen, be careful! Your footâAllen, do you hear me?”
“Susie's alive!”
Amy Levy smiled wearily. It had been worth it, then, after allâall those phone calls and all that fake blustering.
“This is Mrs. Peter Levy, my husband is an attorney with Dalton, Arendt, Carruthers, and Levy, and I'm calling to find outâ
”
Yes, worth it, to see Allen's face like that.
Peter had called, finally, from D.C. He professed concern for his wife and son in what was practically a war zone, but it was too little concern too lately professed. Probably he was at his little tart's place. Anger and outrage and fear for the future boiled through Amy, but for this moment she pushed them all aside to savor Allen's joy.
He shouted, “When can we see her? When can we have Susie back?”
“We don't know that yet, honey. I told you.”
“But you could make more calls and make them tell you!”
“Allenâ”
“Susie's alive!”
» 75
Jess stood on the porch of the Cape Cod and took a deep breath. In the twilight, porch lights were coming on along Farley Street but Tessa's light, he noted, had burned out. Leaves from last autumn littered corners of her porch, but tulips bloomed in the front yard. Feeling like a manipulative fool, Jess nonetheless unlatched the cage at his feet, lifted the wiggling little dog into his arms, and rang the doorbell.
“Minette! Oh, Minette!”
The poodle, barking frantically, leapt from him to Tessa. Tessa hugged her and turned awayâto hide tears? This was an unexpected side of her. Uninvited, Jess stepped inside. “I thought I'd bring her myself. The dogs are all being released today.”
“Thank you.” She turned backâno tears after all. He admitted disappointment. Still, she said, “Would you like a cup of coffee? Or a beer?”
“Beer would be great.”
She led him through the living room to the kitchen. No more cardboard boxes and, given the state of neglect outside, the rooms looked quite nice in an exotic, non-cozy sort of way. Straight curtains of some rough brown material, a gorgeous Oriental rug that looked wickedly expensive, one sofa and one chair with straight, low lines. Smaller rugs hung on the white walls. Instead of a coffee table she had a wide copper tray on a tripod, its intricate design inlaid with what looked like gold. The tray was surrounded by bright floor cushions. Despite the TV and a bookcase, this was definitely not your usual Tyler décor, which ran to plaid sofas and wreaths of dried flowers.
The kitchen was more familiar: American coffee pot on the counter, notes and cartoons stuck on the refrigerator with magnets, a package of Doritos open on the table. Jess glanced at the empty dog dishes on the floor.
“I never did put them away,” Tessa confessed. She filled the bowls with kibble and water but Minette wouldn't leave her lap. As she and Jess sat at the table with their beers, the tiny dog pressed into Tessa as if trying to burrow into her belly.
“I heard you went back to work at the FBI,” Jess said.
She paused with the beer halfway to her mouth. “How did you hear that?”
He smiled. “It's a small town. People talk all the time. You leave the house every morning before seven dressed in a dark pantsuit, you head toward D.C., you come home after eight at night. That's all it takes.”
“Jesus Christ, federal intelligence should only be that good.” She grinned at him over the edge of her beer glass and his heart skipped a beat.
“So are you at the FBI again?”
“Yes. I discovered I'm not the type to sit around Tyler and bake cookies.”
Like there could ever have been any doubt. “So you're moving back to D.C.?”
“No. I like Tyler. Despite the gossips.”
“Long commute.”
“I can manage,” she said stiffly. Somehow this had become a verbal contest, not at all what Jess intended. He held out his glass. “Can I have another beer?”
“Sure.” She got him one from the fridge, and he noted the way her trim ass moved in her tight jeans. She was fitter than he was, richer, better educated, probably smarter, and certainly a better shot. But she was the only woman who'd stirred him at all since Elizabeth walked out. He pressed on.
“Your husband was Arabic, wasn't he?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why do you say that?”
“You asked me once if I read Arabic, and Agent Maddox got really interested when I told him that. Also, you have all those things in the living roomâ¦Look, I don't know what happened with you during the dog plague, why you took my truck and disappeared, or where you went after that, orâ¦anything. And I don't care. I was just asking to make conversation.”
She nodded. Her eyes lost that hard look and hope sprouted in him. He said, “Tessa, would you have dinner with me?”
She took a long time to answer. “Yes, my late husband was Arabic. His name was Salah. He was killed five months ago by a drunk driver. I loved him very much.”
The hope withered.
“Tessaâ”
“Don't, Jess. Pleaseâ¦don't.” She hesitated, weighing something in her mind, and apparently decided on honesty. Although he had no doubt she was capable of elaborate, perfectly delivered lies if she so chose.
“You don't want to get involved with me, Jess. Apart from the fact that my husband has been dead for only five monthsâ¦Christ, there
is
no âapart' from that. Not for me. How can I explain it so youâ¦Since Salah's death, every day has been like striding along the street and all of a sudden you step in a pothole and go down. Again and again. Sometimes it's just a little stumble and it's relatively easy to get up without much pain. Other times it's pure torture. But it keeps happening, over and over, and you get so you half expect the ground to not hold under your feet. The damn
ground
isn't trustworthy any more. Yet there's no place else to walk.”
She stared into her beer, stroking Minette with one hand. “And there's something else, too. During the dog-plague investigation, for reasons I won't go into, I came to doubt everybody. I doubted my boss and the Bureau. I doubted my sister-in-law overseas. I even doubtedâbriefly but it happenedâmy dead husband. Do you understandâ
I doubted Salah
. I can't trust my own judgment in personal matters, and I don't want anyone else trusting it, either. I don't want the responsibility. Can you understand that?”
He could. All at once, he saw why she'd returned to work in D.C. It wasn't because she was bored baking cookies in Tyler. It was because she needed impersonal work, twelve-hour days of it, to protect her against feeling and emotion. That was also the reason she was staying in Tyler. Her friends, her old life of emotional connections, was in D.C.
Jess spoke, and it felt like an enormous risk, a lot more dangerous than rounding up infected dogs. “I know something about relying on work to blunt pain. I know becauseâ¦well, I did the same thing after my wife walked out on me. It didn't work so well.”
She looked up from Minette. “You were married?”
“Yes, until Elizabeth left with my best friend. Besides Billy, I mean. I thought my life was over except for my job. I went on thinking that for a real long time. But now I know better.”
“How?”
It seemed a genuine question, not mere chatter. Jess tried to give a genuine answer. “Billy. Billy's death. I need to⦔ Christ, it was hard to find the right words! “â¦to connect again.”
“Starting with me?”
“I like you, Tessa.”
She looked away, and Jess knew how much of an ass he'd made of himself. So he said, as lightly as he could manage, “I talked to Joe Latkin this afternoon, when the dog release was okayed.”
“Oh?” Her tone held relief at the change of subject. “What did he say about a vaccine or a cure?”
“They're working on it. He told meâ” Jess concentrated, retrieving Latkin's exact words “âthat the CDC has finished sequencing the plague virus. He said that it's very similar to both the 1918 Spanish influenza and to avian flu, with alterations in justâ¦let me seeâ¦in thirty-eight of the virus's 4,400 amino acids. He said for the already infected, the CDC's best shot was drugs to slow down viral replication, based partly on the antibodies of a dog with natural immunity. While alsoâ¦let me think⦠oh yeah, while also managing the virus as it mutates. He also said that we're charmed that the transmission vector was dog bites, and not airborne like the 1918 epidemic. ”
“'Charmed'?” Tessa said. She tried to smile. “That was Latkin's word?”
“Yes.”
“The virus is still in the saliva of the people who were bitten. And in their brains.”
“Yes,” Jess said. “Thanks for the beer.”
“You're welcome.”
She walked him to the door. He managed to avoid looking at her. As he left he said, “See you around, Tessa.”
“Wait. Jessâ¦I would like to have dinner with you.”
“You would?”
“Yes.” Her eyes met his straight on. “But just dinner. It's still too soon for me toâ¦just dinner. Are there any good restaurants in Tyler?”
“No. But we can drive to Frederick. On Saturday?”
“Okay.”
A cool breeze stirred the dead leaves on the porch. It ruffled Tessa's dark hair as she stood on tiptoe and kissed him briefly on the cheek. Warmth surged through him.
At the curb he looked back, but she'd already gone inside. However, he saw Minette at the window, barking silently behind the glass, wagging her negligible tail with sheer pleasure at being alive and being home.
