Gun Shy (2 page)

I thrust my hand into my pocket again and brought out a fist filled with cheese and hot dog cubes. “Okay,” I said, and moved toward the door.

“Hold on a minute.” My uncle withdrew from his pocket a small tin of mentholated salve and snapped off the lid. “Dab a little of this on your upper lip. It cuts the smell.”

I had seen big-city cops use this method on TV, but was surprised to see it in real life. “Does this stuff really work?”

“No,” said Wyn, looking sick again.

But Uncle Roe took a scoop of the greasy stuff on his fingertip and smeared it beneath my nose. I almost gagged from the strength of the eucalyptus smell, and my eyes watered. I drew in a breath through my mouth and jerked my head toward the yard. “You guys get down off the porch. Don’t crowd him.”

“No way,” said Buck immediately.

“Sorry,” agreed Uncle Roe. “You do what you have to do, but we’re staying right here.”

I hadn’t expected anything different. “At least move off to the side. I don’t want you scaring him.”

Uncle Roe said quietly, “Don’t you take any stupid chances, you hear me? I’m not having anybody get hurt here. If that dog goes for you, we’re gonna have to shoot him.”

I couldn’t stare my uncle down like I had Deke, so I didn’t even try. Besides, I knew he was right.

I said, “Everybody, just move back. Give me some room.”

In the best-case scenario, as far as the police were concerned, the dog would dash through the door the minute I opened it and race off into the woods. That would also be the worst-case scenario as far as the poor dog was concerned, and the last thing that I wanted to happen. So I eased the door open with one shoulder and slipped inside the room sideways, leaving the door open behind me just wide enough to admit daylight. Just so it didn’t look like a trap.

The tenor of the barking changed immediately when the door opened, from frantic and crazed to angry and crazed; the sound of a desperate creature who, despite my best efforts, felt trapped. The dark paneled walls reflected little light, and it took my eyes a terrifying moment to adjust to the dimness. In the endless interval until I could see again, I expected to feel sharp teeth piercing some part of my body at any moment.

While my ears were being assaulted with the cacophony of barking and my eyes were struggling to find shapes in the grayness, all the rest of my senses—taste and, yes, touch as well—were inundated by the smell. There was the sharp, unpleasant odor of urine and dog feces, of course; old wood and stale air; not to mention the sickening, now almost sweet aroma of the mentholated balm underneath my nose. But beneath all of that, in fact interwoven with it in a greasy miasma that I could almost see, was a gassy, rotting, sick-sweet odor that I could spend a lifetime trying to describe, and that I will never forget as long as I live.

Think of a raw chicken that has gone bad in the refrigerator. Think of a raccoon that has crawled under the house and died. Put them both together and imagine something ten times worse. I actually gagged on my first breath, and the only thing that kept me from bolting back out through the door was that I got my first glimpse of the dog just then. He was standing in the center of the room with his head down, his ears back and his eyes glinting, barking his furious, terrified, half-growling, half-snapping bark. I would have been a fool to turn my back on him. And I couldn’t leave him like that.

A dog’s sense of smell is at least five hundred times more acute than ours. And he had been locked up in here with this horror for at least four days. I felt right then as though I wanted to sink to my knees and apologize for the whole human race.

Instead, I lowered my chin and my eyes and turned in perfect profile to him, watching him with my peripheral vision. He was a yellow Lab. I know enough about dogs to realize that a Labrador retriever—the number one dog registered by the AKC for three years running, renowned as the perfect family pet—is just as capable of inflicting severe bite wounds as any rottweiler, Doberman or German shepherd. Their powerful jaws and muscular body type, in fact, would make them particularly suited for attack training—if only they had the aggressive personalities to match.

Everyone loves the Labrador retriever. On big screens and small, from the pages of magazines, newspapers and storybooks, they sit in rowboats and watch the sunset with their beloved masters; they rescue small children from hazardous situations; they fetch beer from the refrigerator on Super Bowl Sunday. They sell cars, houses, insurance and pet food. They are America’s dog.

So even though intellectually I knew better, I was relieved that the manic, snarling, jugular-threatening sounds I heard were, in fact, coming from a Labrador retriever. I knew retrievers. This I could handle.

Trying not to make any discernibly sudden movements, I used my thumb to flick one of the hot dog cubes toward him. He didn’t notice. I tried again. This one landed close enough to him that he could smell it, and he stopped threatening me long enough to gobble it up. Quickly, before he could recapture the manic barking cycle, I tossed several cubes behind him. He had to turn his back on me to snatch them off the floor. When he looked back at me again I was half a dozen steps closer, though I still maintained my nonthreatening profile and submissive pose. I tossed another treat behind him. He retreated to eat it. I advanced.

By the time I was close enough to stretch out an arm to touch him, I had dropped to a duck-walking crouch, and the life-threatening growls had diminished to an intermittent rumble deep in his chest that was occasionally bracketed by a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a whine. His tail was plastered against his concave belly, his eyes were ravenous and thin streams of drool dripped from both jowls. I opened up my hot dog-filled hand, and he took one cautious step closer, then another. I kept my breathing smooth and even, and I did not look at him. His hunger overcame his fear and he gobbled up the remaining treats in my hand. I turned and in a single smooth motion whipped the leash from around my neck over his head, tightening the loop around his neck.

This was the most dangerous part of the operation. I was close enough and he was fast enough that he could have easily taken a hunk out of my face or my hand if he had been so inclined. At the very least he could have gone into a wild bucking fit in which one of us was sure to be hurt. He did neither of those things.

The minute he felt the loop on his neck he looked at me, and if a dog can be said to experience emotion, I would swear the emotion that swept through his eyes was relief. This was a dog who knew what a leash was for and who associated it with good things. This surprised me, because he was not wearing a collar.

There are many good reasons for a person to leave a dog uncollared, of course—an allergy or coat breakage, a recent bath in which the collar was removed and forgotten, or the fact that the dog is minutes away from entering the conformation or agility ring. Obviously the last two instances did not apply to this dog, but I confess I am overall a little judgmental on the subject of collars. In the area in which I live, a dog without a collar usually means an owner who doesn’t have sense enough to take care of his pet.

I offered my open hand to the yellow Lab and he snuffled and licked it, searching for more hot dogs. I quickly dug out more treats and let him scarf them up while I gently stroked his ears and murmured to him reassuringly.

From outside Buck called, “Raine, you okay?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to startle the dog. Instead I murmured, “Okay, big fellow, let’s see about finding you a real meal, hmm?”

I stood up slowly, holding a cube of cheese in front of the dog’s nose to lead him toward the door. But instead of following complacently, like the good dog he had proven himself to be at heart, he suddenly turned and bolted toward the back of the house, pulling me with such force that he almost jerked me off my feet. I gave an involuntary cry —“Hey!”—which caused Buck, Roe and Wyn to come rushing through the front door with their hands on their sidearms.

I concentrated on holding on to the leash as the big Lab flung himself on the closed door of what I instinctively knew to be the bedroom. There were claw marks on the door frame and in the finish of the pine-paneled door, where he had alternately tried to dig and push his way inside to find his mistress. Now he was trying, in the best dog language he knew, to get me to open the door.

Uncle Roe demanded behind me, “You okay? Got him under control?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” I didn’t turn around, but slipped one arm around the dog’s shoulders while tugging gently on the leash, dislodging his paws from the door. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go.”

The dog gave a plaintive whine and dropped to all fours, responding reluctantly to my leash tugs as we moved away from the door and the awful truth that lay behind it.

Uncle Roe said, “Thanks, hon. Get on outside now.”

“I’m going to take the dog to the vet and have him checked out, okay?”

“Try not to touch anything on your way out.”

He was pulling on a pair of gloves, his face filled with reluctance for what he was about to do. Buck and Wyn gave me wide berth as I moved the dog past them, which was not really necessary. The Lab could not stop looking over his shoulder and was far more worried about whether to follow my lead on the leash or to try to make another run for the door than with defending himself against strangers.

For myself, I was more than anxious to be out of the cabin before the bedroom door was opened. The truth is, I have seen dead bodies before. But they are not something that I go out of my way to encounter.

In addition to my mostly full-time dog training and boarding business, I do seasonal part-time work for the forest service and am always on call, with my golden retriever, Cisco, for search and rescue work. Our little community is only a few miles away from the Appalachian Trail, in the heart of the Smoky Mountain wilderness, and most of the time the hikers, campers and lost tourists we are called to search for are found scared and hungry, but otherwise fine. Occasionally they are not. Those times when a rescue operation turns into a recovery mission are not the kind of thing you want to think about before going to bed at night. And you never, ever want to repeat the experience if you can possibly help it.

I did not intend to linger. The last thing I wanted to do was to look back inside that door when Uncle Roe opened it. But, of course, the dog saw Uncle Roe cautiously push the door open. He lunged for it. I lunged for him. And what I saw, even though it was barely a glimpse, would remain frozen in my mind forever. Not because it was so horrific, but because it was so sad.

My view was of one corner of the room. Broken glass on the floor from the window Wyn had broken. A log-frame bed covered with a polka-dotted quilt. Beside it one of those laurel-wood chairs that are so popular for their rustic appeal, but impossibly uncomfortable to sit in. Someone had chosen to sit in it, though. And she had never gotten up.

A bloated arm covered in chambray hung over the side of the chair, fingers just visible. Beneath those fingers on the floor lay a large-caliber pistol, the kind that could literally blow a person’s brains out if fired at close range. And that, I realized as I looked again at the quilt, was exactly what it had done.

I closed my fingers around the scruff of the dog’s neck and pulled him with me as I staggered, senses reeling, toward the front door. He followed without protest, as though he had been rendered as helpless as I had been by the sight.

I made my away across the small yard to my SUV, oblivious to the uniformed officers and the looks they gave me, oblivious to the flurry of activity as Buck stood on the front porch and began to relay orders, oblivious to the flashing lights and crackling radios and to everything, in fact, except the now-complacent, brokenhearted creature on the other end of the leash. I opened the back of the SUV, where I kept a wire dog crate in order to safely transport my own and other people’s dogs when I had to. When I opened the door of the crate, the yellow Lab jumped in, just as though he had been doing it all his life.

At the time, I barely noticed.

I secured the crate, closed the door of the SUV and got behind the driver’s seat. I even turned on the engine and adjusted the vents so that the dog would have plenty of fresh air. And then I just folded my arms over the top of the steering wheel and sat there, trying to breathe deeply. It was a long time before I felt steady enough to drive.

My name is Raine Stockton, and I have been around law enforcement all my life. Most people still think of me as “Judge Stockton’s daughter,” since my father was a district court judge here in Hanover County for the last thirty years of his life. My mother’s brother, Uncle Roe, has been unopposed for the post of sheriff since he first took office back in the seventies, and everyone seems to like it that way. I married Deputy Buck Lawson not once but twice, and though we currently live apart—and I keep my maiden name—we still can’t quite make up our minds whether we are better off with or without each other. When I put on my forest service uniform, people often call me “Officer,” and I don’t always correct them. I have a deep and natural respect for the work that law officers do. And after what I had witnessed today, I was more convinced than ever than I wanted no part of it.

Which is why, I suppose, I found the persistent questions of people who always assume I know more about police matters than I actually do more annoying today than usual.

To be fair, it was not Ken Withers, our local vet, who bombarded me with questions, although he was the one who probably had the most right to do so. After all, I had burst into his office without an appointment or even a phone call, dragging a strange dog and blurting out an even stranger story about his having been locked inside a cabin for days with a dead body. Doc Withers, in fact, didn’t even raise an eyebrow. He was what you might call a man of few words, who preferred to gather his information through the tools of his trade: the stethoscope, the microscope, his own expert touch and powers of observation.