Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (28 page)

Rachel watched the animals with Joe’s binoculars. “Ten of them left,” she said. “They’re all emaciated.”

“Oh, man, it ticks me off when I think about anybody dumping dogs out here instead of taking them to a shelter. What the hell’s wrong with people?”

“Maybe they think they’re giving the animals a chance to live,” Rachel said. “But out here on their own, they’ll starve to death.”

Joe didn’t answer but his hands tightened on the steering wheel, and Rachel could hear his teeth grinding.

The dogs, frightened by the vehicles, picked up speed and sprinted through fallow fields. The animals ranged from small to medium sized, all of them mutts. A few showed traces of recognizable breeds in their head or body shapes, but nothing about them was special. Disposable dogs, Rachel thought, the kind that would be difficult to find new homes for once they got past the cute puppy stage.

“They can’t keep running like this,” Rachel said. “They’re in such bad shape, I’m amazed they’ve lasted this long.”

“Shit!” Joe exclaimed. “Look at that!”

Jolted, Rachel took her eyes off the dogs and looked up ahead, where Joe pointed. An old SUV had stopped on the road in the other lane, and four men piled out of it. All of them carried shotguns.

Tom’s car lurched to a stop with a screech of tires. Joe pulled up behind the cruiser. Tom threw open his door and jumped out, drawing his gun.

The four men ignored Tom and lined up along the road, aiming their shotguns at the fleeing dogs.

“Oh god,” Rachel moaned. She couldn’t sit still while this happened. She reached for the door handle.

“Oh no you don’t.” Joe grabbed her arm. “You stay right where you are. Let Tom handle this.”

Rachel watched, hands clamped over her mouth, as Tom took a stance on the road, raised his gun, and shouted at the men. They all looked around but didn’t lower their weapons. One of the men, Rachel saw, was Ellis, the goon who’d stopped her at the Hall property. Joe powered down his window in time for them to hear Ellis yell at Tom, “We’re takin’ care of this once and for all. Stay out of our way, Bridger.”

“Get back in your car and get out of here,” Tom said.

“Go to hell,” Ellis said.

“I’ll shoot that damned gun out of your hands if I have to. You might lose a few fingers.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Ellis sneered.

“I never make a threat unless I’m ready to back it up.”

In the silence that followed, nobody moved. Tom kept his weapon trained on the four men. They stared back at him with their shotguns raised.

Rachel’s lungs burned from lack of air. She gulped in a breath.

“Joe?” Tom called without looking around.

Joe leaned out his window. “Yeah, Captain?”

“Follow the dogs. Don’t lose them. I’ll catch up with you.”

“No!” Rachel cried. “We can’t leave Tom here alone!”

“He knows what he’s doing,” Joe said.

Rachel’s heart banged in her chest as Joe pulled the van around the cruiser and drove on past the men. She twisted in her seat to keep Tom in sight.

“There’s a patch of woods up ahead,” Joe said. “If the dogs go in there, we’ll lose them.”

She couldn’t look at the dogs. She couldn’t take her eyes off Tom.

Joe checked the rearview mirror. “Looks like he got through to them.”

The men were climbing back into the SUV. Rachel thought she might faint with relief. “Oh, thank god,” she gasped.

“What did you expect?” Joe asked. “Those guys know we saw them. We could identify every one of them. They wouldn’t have let us go if they planned to shoot Tom.”

“My head knows that,” Rachel said, her heart still racing, her mouth dust-dry, “but they scared the hell out of me anyway.”
Calm down, calm down, he’s safe,
she told herself.

“Watch the dogs,” Joe said. “We don’t want to lose them.”

She faced forward and made herself focus on the pack of animals streaking toward the woods.

They had left the farms behind and entered an area where trees and brush crowded the pavement, leaving no clear space on either side for the dogs to run. Rachel expected them to vanish into the woods. But suddenly they veered onto the road in the path of the van. Joe slammed on his brakes, throwing Rachel forward against her seat belt.

The dogs ran on the road for half a mile. Glancing in the rearview mirror, Rachel saw Tom’s cruiser close behind the van. Their energy drained, their tongues lolling, the dogs now moved at little more than a trot. Joe and Tom slowed their vehicles to stay with them.

We’re killing these poor animals,
Rachel thought. The dogs were using up their pitifully low reserves of energy and strength.

Abruptly the whole pack cut to the left. Then they were gone.

Joe braked, and Rachel jumped out. “Where did they go?” she called to Tom, who had stopped behind the van. “Where are they?”

Getting out of the cruiser, Tom pointed across the road.

Rachel’s gaze followed, and she realized with a start where they were. Indian Mountain loomed before them.

“Do you see it?” Tom said. He pointed to an opening at the base of the mountain, a narrow hole no more than three feet high and wide that was visible only because the leaves had dropped from the wild bushes around it. Beyond the opening, Rachel saw nothing but darkness.

“Is that the cave—”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Where we found her.”

Her.
Holly’s mother, or at least part of her. Rachel shuddered. “The dogs are living in there?”

“Looks like it. They went straight for it. They could hole up here during the day and nobody would ever bother them.”

“Well,” Joe said, “we need to bother them now. Y’all got any ideas about how to get them out of there?”

Tom shook his head. “Joe, a dogcatcher’s supposed to know these things.”

“Well, heck, I never had to get a whole pack of dogs out of a cave before. Cut me some slack, will you?”

“I think we’re all about to have a learning experience,” Rachel said. “How deep is the cave?”

“About thirty feet,” Tom said, “if I remember right. It’s low all the way, high enough for a bear to walk in, but not for a man to stand upright.”

“Obviously we’re not going in after them,” Rachel said. “We have to make them come out.”

“Any chance we could get some more of your men to help?” Joe asked.

“No. Most of them are still searching the woods at the dogfighting site, and the rest are following up tips about Hall’s murder.”

“We can do this by ourselves,” Rachel said, “but we have to get them out of the cave.” She looked at Joe. “Don’t you carry food to use as a lure for strays?”

“Yeah, I’ve got some real stinky stuff dogs always go for when they’re hungry,” Joe said. “And I’ve got two big traps we can set up. We can bait the traps and put them at the mouth of the cave. Unless they all try to get at the food at once, we could trap a couple at a time and move them to cages.”

“You don’t have enough cages for all of them, though,” Rachel pointed out. “We’ll have to tie some of them up in the van for transport.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Tom said. “I think you ought to plan on coming out here more than once.”

“No,” Rachel said. “I’m not leaving a single dog out here to get shot. My goal is to get them all, and damn it, that’s what we’re going to do. I don’t want to hear any more talk about giving up, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”

“And don’t make fun of me.”

“No, ma’am. Wouldn’t think of it, ma’am.”

Rachel gave him a grudging grin. “Just watch your attitude, pal, or you’ll pay a price at home.”

Tom laughed. “All right,” he said, “let’s do this thing.”

They moved their vehicles out of sight down the road. Tom and Joe unfolded the wire traps while Rachel emptied canned food into two bowls.

“Whew,” Tom said. “That stuff smells like a dead skunk.”

“The worse it stinks, the more they like it,” Joe said.

“No more talking,” Rachel said. She placed the food inside the cages. “Let them think we’re gone.”

Moving silently, Joe and Rachel placed the traps in the opening of the cave. The three of them withdrew, hid behind trees across the road, and waited for the sound of the spring-loaded traps to snap shut. Twenty minutes passed. Thirty minutes.

Rachel was beginning to lose hope when she heard the first
clank,
followed immediately by
the second
.
She shot a look at Joe, who grinned back at her.
Yes.

Stepping out from behind her tree, she saw two dogs the size of beagles circling inside the traps, pawing at the steel mesh.

Tom and Joe ran across the road, snatched up the traps, and raced back to Joe’s van. They lifted the traps with the dogs into the back, clambered in after them, and swung the doors shut. A couple of minutes later the doors opened and Tom and Joe jumped out with the empty traps. While Rachel climbed into the van, Joe baited the traps again. He and Tom carried them back to the cave mouth.

Rachel stayed in the van with the two scared dogs. Both of them shrank away from her, but when she poured bottled water through the wire screen into the bowls attached to the inside, the dogs eagerly lapped it up. She refilled the dishes and they drank again. She knew they were hungry, but they were also agitated, and she didn’t want to offer them food until they were in pens at the sanctuary and wouldn’t have to be moved again.

Forty-five minutes passed before Tom and Joe returned with two more dogs. Now the van’s cages were full.

The next two dogs were captured more quickly, and left in the traps. They had to shift gears now.

“We’ll have to dart the last four,” Rachel said. She sat with her legs hanging out the back of the van.

“You sure you don’t want to take these in and come back another time?” Tom asked. “We’ve been out here a long time.”

“No,” Rachel said. “Even if nobody shoots them, they might move somewhere else. It could take us forever to find them again.”

“Okay, then,” Joe said, “let’s get ready for some excitement.”

They didn’t have any more food bowls, and Rachel didn’t want to risk reaching into the traps to retrieve the ones they’d used for bait. She improvised, tearing off pieces of a fold-up state map she found in the van. When Joe protested, she said, “I’ll buy you a new one, for heaven’s sake.”

She placed the first scrap of paper inside the opening of the cave, with a spoonful of the smelly canned food on it. She spaced out the rest of the paper, moving farther from the cave and spreading them wide, a dollop of food on each, to give Joe a clear shot with the dart gun.

“You really think this is gonna work?” Joe whispered when they retreated to the woods across the road.

Rachel shrugged. She’d trapped wild animals, but she’d never caught feral dogs before. This was the only way she could think of to get them out in the open.

The dogs in the van remained quiet. They’d all taken water, and as the afternoon had worn on and they calmed down Rachel had given them hard dog biscuits to gnaw on.

She and Tom and Joe settled in to wait, hidden among the trees. Rachel peeked out from behind her tree every few minutes, checking for activity at the cave opening. Fifteen minutes passed, thirty, forty. Then she spotted movement at the mouth of the cave. A dog poked his head out, looked one way, then the other. His tongue swiped his lips. He’d eaten the first bit of food.

A second dog appeared beside the first.

Rachel held her breath.

The first dog ventured farther out, hesitant, pausing again and again to scan his surroundings. The second dog hung back. Behind it, in the shadows, Rachel saw the remaining two.

“Come on, come on,” Rachel whispered. “Come and get it.”

With its tail tucked between its hind legs, the first dog slunk toward a scrap of paper with food on it. With one more look around, he gulped the food, then jumped back.

Joe raised the dart gun, but Rachel shook her head and held up a hand to stop him. If he darted one dog now, the three timid ones might never emerge. She wanted all four of them out in the open.

Gradually the other three crept from the cave, alert and scared but drawn by the odor of the food. Rachel gave Joe a hand signal.

The first dog was eating when the dart hit him. He jerked at the sting but made no sound, and the other dogs seemed unaware of what had happened.

Joe reloaded quickly.

The second dog yelped when the dart went in and spun around, trying to get at the object dangling from his flank.

The other two shied away, searching for a threat, but they didn’t run back into the cave.

The first two dogs wobbled and sank to the ground.

The third dog let out a piercing yowl when the dart hit him. The little black and white mutt with him took off, straight back into the cave.