Paws before dying (25 page)

With Rowdy roped to the door and nothing to use as a knife, I entered the dark garage. The angry male voices still rumbled not far away. I snapped on the flashlight. Ahead was a door. God help me if this is locked, too, I thought, but the knob turned easily in my sore, tom hand. I turned around and ran the beam over Mitch, Jr.’s, Corvette, a big lime-green station wagon, a battered lawn mower, a new snowblower, and a collection of rusty garden tools, including a pair of hand-held grass shears. Back outside, I used their dull blades to saw Rowdy loose from that makeshift harness. When I’d freed him, I called him to heel and returned to the garage, to that unlocked door. I eased it open a crack and held still. Rowdy sat silently at my side. I peered in and listened.

The basement room must have been renovated in the fifties. Some long-ago do-it-yourselfer had stuck acoustic-tile squares on the ceiling and installed recessed lights. The tiles were water-stained. Some of the light fixtures dangled loose. The walls and a flight of stairs directly ahead of me, at the far end of the room, Were roughly finished in cheap knotty-pine paneling. The furniture, all painted a loud, hideous orange, consisted of some hanged-up kitchen chairs and a great many low tables that looked like discards from an unsavory cocktail lounge. The room also held a long, lumpy-looking couch and two matching chairs, all upholstered in some disgusting, furry black stuff that looked like home-dyed, overprocessed human hair.

Leah sat upright and immobile in the middle of the couch. Her arms were folded across her chest. So far as I could tell, she was unhurt. I couldn’t see Kimi. Willie Johnson had one of the human-hair chairs, and the eldest brother, the Corvette-driving, would-be suave Mitch, faced Willie from one of the orange kitchen chairs. Dale was pacing back and forth taking swigs from a can of Miller Light. One of his hands held the beer can. In the other was a black cylinder. He was shouting at his brothers, who were both shouting back at him.

Of the three louts, Mitch had the most penetrating voice and the clearest articulation. I caught his gist pretty quickly.

“One goddamned stupid mistake of yours after another,” he hollered, jabbing a finger toward Dale. The jacket of a dark suit hung over the back of his chair, his white shirt was sweat-stained, and he’d undone the knot of his red power tie. “Every damned thing you’ve ever done you’ve screwed up. And then when you screw it up, and somebody comes in and tries to unscrew it for you, do you help? Hell, no. No, not you. You don’t need anybody’s help, do you? Well, this time, I’ve had it. Let your loudmouth friends get you out of this one.” He leaned back and fiddled with his tie.

Dale crumbled his beer can in his fist, threw it against the wall, and bellowed what I took to be a defense of his loudmouth friends. After Mitch, Jr., had given him a reply that was mostly about his Corvette, his college degree, and the upward path that stretched before him in spite of Dale’s efforts to drag him and the rest of the family down, the two of them started in on their father.

“So go wake the old man,” Mitch sneered. He stood up and immediately sat down.

“Screw you, Mitch,” Dale said drunkenly. “Right. Go and suck up to the old man. And cut the crap about you always trying to help me, Mitch. In our whole life you never stood up for me once, not one time, not when I was a little kid, even. You remember Buddy, Mitch? You remember Buddy?” He stomped toward Mitch and loomed over him. His face and voice shared a raw, stupid intensity. “You stood up for me real good then, didn’t you?” I expected him to start sobbing, but instead of crying, he staggered across the room and tore another can of Mill#, Light from a six-pack that sat on top of two others on one of the orange tables. He popped open the can and upended it over his open mouth. He looked like an albino black Angus bottle-feeding itself.

“Hey, Dale, lay off that,” said Mitch, wiping sweat off his neck.

“Screw you, Mitch,” Dale mumbled.

“There are things you gotta do, little brother,” said Mitch. “Always things I gotta do, right? I always gotta do them. Ever since Buddy, right? I’m always the one’s gotta do everything, right, Mitch?” He lurched back across the room and stared at Mitch. “’Cause everything’s always my fault around here, right?”

Buddy? Some kid they’d grown up with? A fourth brother? If so, wouldn’t he have appeared on Edna’s family tree? I of all people should have guessed.

“Dale,” Mitch said soberly, pulling his neck up high and straight, “I hate to be the one to break you the news, but Buddy would’ve ended up just like Kaiser, anyways.”

So far, Willie had kept himself pretty much out of the fight except to nod and grunt occasional support for Mitch. Mostly, he’d been keeping an eye on Leah, whose body looked frozen and whose gaze was fixed ahead of her. But now he changed sides.

“Mitch, shut up,” he said. “It wasn’t Dale that was mean to Buddy. It was you.”

“Yeah,” said Dale, staggering to Willie and thumping him on the back. “And Mom and Dad didn’t do a goddamned thing but lay it all on me like always.” He sounded about eight years old. Then, to my amazement, he backed up a step and began shouting at Willie. “Yeah and after Buddy, and after they scream and yell if Kaiser sticks his nose in the house, she lets goddamned Righteous eat in the kitchen and sleep right in your bed, and does she give you that shit about fleas? Hell, no! Oh, no, ’cause it’s real different. It’s precious little Willie’s dog, right?”

“Right,” Mitch said. “Nothing’s ever your fault, is it, Dale?”

“Goddamn well not my fault,” agreed Dale, who seemed genuinely to have missed the point. “For Christ’s sake, Mitch! I only a kid.”

“Dale, this isn’t Buddy we’re talking about,” Mitch insisted. Buddy’s history.”

“Come on, Dale,” Willie added. “He’s right. We been over that a million times.”

“Well, screw you!” Dale shouted. “Screw both you! Buddy’d still be alive, you know! He’d be old, but he’d still be alive! Screw the both of you! He’d still be alive!”

“Yeah, and so would the Jew next door,” said Mitch. “That was an accident, and you know it,” Dale yelled, as if Rose’s death had been a puddle left on the floor by a puppy he’d forgotten to walk. “And it was all her own goddamned fault. I mean, it’s my dog, right? it’s
my
dog. It was none of her goddamned business. You know what she was trying to do? She was trying to take my dog away. If she’d kept her big Jew nose out of it, none of it would’ve happened.”

Why are so many gentiles timid about saying
Jew
? Because we’ve heard slime like Dale Johnson cough it up and spit it out the way he did, and that’s the truth.

But it didn’t bother Mitch. “Dale, when you do something that might or might not kill somebody, and it does, then it’s not an accident.”

“And if you’d kept your nose out of my business,” Willie added coldly, “we wouldn’t be in
this
mess.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, lemme tell you what this little bitch thought, baby brother,” said Dale, glaring at Leah. “She thought you weren’t good enough for her.” He huffed himself up and added, “Nobody treats my little brother like that, going out with a goddamned Jew and treating my little brother like shit.” He grabbed a can of beer, opened it, downed it, and reached for another.

“Dale, that’s enough,” Mitch ordered him. “There are things we gotta do. You gotta get out of here.”

“Well, screw you, you bastard! You get outta here!” Dale shouted. Finding himself near a wall, he leaned on it.

Mitch and Willie seemed to study one another. I expected them to come up with some plan that they’d try to sell to Dale, but they didn’t. Instead, Mitch turned on Willie and began laying blame on him, and Willie tried to defend himself.

“If you’d kept your goddamned mouth shut,” Mitch was yelling at Willie, but Willie interrupted him.

“If I’d kept my so-called goddamned mouth shut,” said Willie, “her and her aunt would’ve gone and got him locked up, and not just about Kaiser, either, Mitch. I had to tell him, Mitch, honest to God, like I told you, the aunt knows about Mrs. Engleman. I heard her tonight. She was asking about shock collars. And I heard Leah saying she got the pictures-Mitch, I had to tell him.”

“Shit,” Dale said, “I’m not afraid of them. I already got them good.” He laughed and waved the black cylinder around.

“Dale,” Mitch lectured him, “so her goddamned aunt’s got the pictures. What good’s that gonna do you?”

“Yeah, Dale,” Willie added. “Nobody cares about the dog now. Dale, will you listen? I told you, she was asking about shock collars, and if you turn yourself in, all’s it is is manslaughter. But you gotta do it. You gotta get that it’s serious. Nobody cares about the dog anymore.”

“Yeah,” Dale shouted painfully, “’cause it’s only
my
dog.”

“Jesus, Willie,” Mitch said. “Would you lay off dogs?”

“Yeah, lay off,” Dale said. “Goddamned well leave my dogs the hell alone. They’re my goddamned dogs, and nobody’s taking my goddamned dogs away from me.”

“So take your goddamned dog with you,” Mitch said. “Nobody’s gonna miss him. Just get the hell out of here, and I’ll take care of the rest.” The rest. Leah. Kimi. “Dale, you gotta really get it. It’s over. It’s too late.”

Mitch should have known better than to make any sudden moves, but he rose abruptly, took a couple of long strides toward Dale, and tried to snatch the black cylinder from Dale’s hand. Dale, though, was brawnier than Mitch and quicker than Mitch had anticipated. When he sidestepped, Mitch crashed into one of the coffee tables. Dale began laughing and waving the black cylinder around, then suddenly held it still and pointed it toward a corner of the room, a corner that was out of my view. His eyes brightened, and crazy as this may sound, his face softened in simple happiness. He pressed the button.

Kimi’s yelps of pain rang in my ears. Leah began screaming and screaming. Rowdy, who’d been sitting still and keeping absolutely quiet, suddenly barged ahead of me, shoved open the door, and hurled himself into the room. Unsure of his intentions and my own, I followed. What happened next was, I think, the weirdest event in the whole nightmare.

From the top of the flight of stairs came Edna’s voice. “Boys?” she called almost sweetly. “Boys? What’s going on down there?” She sounded like a den mother who’d caught her little scouts in the middle of a major pillow fight.

The effect was sudden. All three of her sons held still and stayed quiet. Dale must have taken his finger off the button on the transmitter, because Kimi stopped yelping. Then, as if prompted by someone offstage, Mitch, Dale, and Willie all began laughing.

“It’s nothing, Mom,” Mitch called. “Go to bed.”

“Well, if you boys don’t settle down,” she scolded, “you’re going to wake up your father.”

“Relax, Mom,” Dale called to her. “We’ve just caught a burglar is all. We’ve just caught a burglar!”

At the top of the stairs, a door clicked shut.

I’d used the distraction Edna offered to grab Rowdy’s collar and pull him with me toward Kimi. Miss Malamute Power, who’d never once before seemed even slightly disconcerted by anything whatsoever, was shaking. Around her neck was a thick collar encased in heavy black electrician’s tape. The shock collars—oh, pardon me, electronic trainers—I’d seen before in the catalogs and ads hadn’t looked anything like this one. It was much thicker than any collar I’d ever seen before, heavy all the way around, and I was having trouble finding a buckle. Had he taped the collar on? My fingers groped, searching for a loose piece, something to pull. Before I found anything, Dale noticed me.

He stared blearily at me, held up the transmitter, and grinned. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. I sat on the floor next to Kimi, lifted one hand rapidly upward in front of Rowdy’s nose to tell him to lie down, and then put a hand on each of my dogs. I slid the hand that rested on Kimi slowly under the tight, tight collar and felt for the plugs. There were two. I squeezed my fingers between those plugs and Kimi’s neck. I held still, waiting.

Chapter 28

DALE Johnson should have known better than to tease Edna about a burglar, and his brothers should have known better than to let him get away with it. All three should have realized that their mother had no sense of humor.

The only person facing the stairs, I saw her before the others knew she’d come back. Edna, my savior, descended very quietly. Her feet appeared first. She wore grubby green terry-cloth slippers. Her calves were scrawny. A couple of inches of black lace nightie—black lace, you never can tell—dangled below a mustard-colored rayon robe. A flesh-toned hairnet covered most of her head. She was carrying a shotgun. I was sure it was a Browning, and I thought it was an A-500 like my father’s. He bought it because he has a streak of vanity, I suppose—the A-500 is one of the Buck Specials.

Edna’s sons didn’t hear her because they’d resumed their quarrel. Mitch was arguing with both of the others and yelling at me to stay put. Mitch claimed that if Dale took off and disappeared for a while, everything could be handled, or so he told his brothers. None of them noticed Edna until she’d almost reached the bottom step. I’m not sure whether Willie or Mitch saw her first, but it was Dale, the closest to her and the one on his feet, who acted.

“Jesus Christ,” he said gently. “Mom, gimme that. Hey, I was only kidding. There’s no burglar. Mom, gimme that.”