Ricky, his mouth open in a growl, his teeth bared. Then, with shocking speed, the dog leaped across the area, throwing all hundred-plus pounds against the chain-link fencing that kept him contained. The force of the attack nearly knocked Ricky over. Brutus fell back, now frothing with rage, then again thrust at the steel chains, his teeth clacking against the metal.
Ricky moved quickly, rapidly threading the bicycle lock around the twin posts of the kennel door, snatching his hands back before the animal had time to seize one, then securing it, spinning the lock combination and dropping it. Brutus immediately tore at the black rubber-encased steel of the chain. “Screw you,” Ricky whispered in a mocking tough guy accent. “At least you ain’t going nowhere.” Then he rose up and jumped over to the front of the kennel office. He thought he had only a few seconds left before the owner finally responded to the growing racket and din of arousal. Ricky assumed the man would be armed, but wasn’t sure of this. Perhaps his confidence in Brutus at his side would minimize his own need for weapons.
He thrust the crowbar into the doorjamb and snapped out the lock with a creaking, splintering noise as the wood broke. It was old, and showed some warping with age and broke easily. Ricky guessed that the kennel owner didn’t keep much of value in the office anyway, and didn’t really envision a burglar testing Brutus. The door swung open, and Ricky stepped inside. He swung the backpack around to his front, stuffed the crowbar inside and removed his pistol, quickly chambering a round.
Inside was an opera of dog anxiety. The racket filled the air, making it hard to think, but giving Ricky an idea. Clicking on his flashlight, he raced down the musty, foul-smelling corridor where all the dogs were penned, stopping to open each cage as he ran past.
Within seconds, Ricky was surrounded by a leaping, barking tangle of breeds. Some were terrified, some were overjoyed. Smelling, yelping, confused but all aware they were free. Some three dozen dogs, of all different shapes and sizes, unsure what was happening, but more or less determined to be a part of it nonetheless. Ricky was counting on that basic dog-think that doesn’t really understand all that much, but wants to be included in whatever is happening nevertheless. The sniffing and snuffling that flowed around and between his legs made him smile right through the nervousness of what he was doing. Surrounded by the pack of leaping, bouncing animals, Ricky returned to the kennel office. He was waving his arms, shooing the animals along, like some wildly impatient Moses at the edge of the Red Sea.
He saw the floodlight click on outdoors and heard a door slamming.
The kennel owner, he thought, finally roused by the racket, wondering what the hell has gotten into all the animals and not yet fully understanding that there might be a threat involved. Ricky counted to ten. Enough time for the man to approach Brutus’s pen. He heard a second noise, above the roused dogs: The man was trying to open the Rottweiler’s cage. A rattle of chain metal links and then a curse, as the man slowly grasped that the cage wasn’t about to open.
It was at that moment that Ricky threw open the front door to the kennel office.
“Okay, guys, you’re free,” he said, waving his arms. Nearly three dozen dogs bolted through the door, heading toward the warm New Jersey night, their voices raised in a confused song of joyous freedom.
He heard the kennel owner swearing wildly, and then Ricky stepped out into the darkness himself, remaining in a shadow at the edge of the spotlight’s arc.
The man had been bowled over by the rush of animals, knocked back and down to one knee by the wave of dogs. He scrambled up, partially regaining his feet, searching for his balance. He was trying to catch them at the same time that they were jumping all over him, knocking him about. A welter of mixed beastly emotions-some dogs afraid, some joyous, some confused, all uncertain what was going on, knowing only that it was far out of the ordinary routine of kennel life, and eager to take advantage of it, whatever it was. Ricky smiled wickedly. It was, Ricky surmised, a pretty effective distraction.
When the kennel owner looked up, what he saw just behind the leaping, snuffling, tangled mass of animals was Ricky’s pistol leveled at his face. He gasped, rocking backward in surprise, as if the hole at the end of the barrel was as forceful as the flood of dogs.
“Are you alone?” Ricky asked just loud enough to reach past the dogs’ barking.
“Huh?”
“Are you alone? Is there anyone else in the house?”
The man caught on. He shook his head.
“Is Brutus’s buddy in the house? His brother or mother or father?”
“No. Just me.”
Ricky thrust the pistol closer to the man, close enough so that the pungent odor of steel and oil and maybe death could fill his nostrils, without needing to own a dog’s sensitive nose to understand what the potential was. “Persuading me that you’re telling the truth is important to staying alive,” Ricky said. He was a little surprised at how easy it was to threaten someone, but he had no illusion that he would be able to call his own bluff.
Behind the steel fencing, Brutus was in a paroxysm of fury. He continued to thrust himself at the metal, his teeth pressed up against the barrier. Foam streaked his jowls and his growl singed the air. Ricky eyed the dog warily. A hard thing, he thought, to be bred and raised for one single purpose, and then, when that moment came where all that training was supposed to coalesce, to be restrained by the frustration of a gate locked by a child’s bicycle chain. The dog seemed to be almost overwhelmed by impotence, and Ricky thought that it was a little bit of a microcosm for the lives of some of his ex-patients.
“It’s just me. Nobody else.”
“Good. Now we can have a conversation.”
“Who are you?” the man asked. It took a second for Ricky to remember that he’d been wearing a disguise on his first visit to the kennel. He rubbed his hand across his cheek.
I’m someone you’re going to wish you’d been more pleasant to on our first meeting, Ricky thought, but what he said was: “I’m someone you would probably rather not know,” simultaneously gesturing at the man’s face with his weapon.
It took a few seconds for Ricky to get the kennel owner where he wanted him, which was seated on the ground, with his back up against the gate to Brutus’s pen, hands out on his knees where Ricky could see them. The other dogs were wary of getting too close to the furious Rottweiler. By now, some had disappeared into the darkness and the countryside, others had collected near the owner’s feet, and still others were jumping about, playing with one another, on the gravel driveway.
“I still don’t know who you are,” the man said. He was squinting up at Ricky, trying to place him. The combination of the shadows, and the change in appearance worked to Ricky’s advantage. “What’s all this about? I don’t keep any cash here, and…”
“This isn’t a robbery, unless you think of taking information as a theft, which I used to imagine was in some ways the same,” Ricky answered cryptically.
The man shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said flatly. “What do you want?”
“A while ago, a private detective came to see you with a few questions.”
“Yeah. So what?”
“I would like the same questions answered.”
“Who are you?” the man asked again.
“I told you. But right now, all you really need to know is that I’m a man with a gun, and you’re not. And the sole means you have of defending yourself is locked behind a fence and feeling pretty damn bad about it, too, from the looks of him.”
The kennel owner nodded, but seemed, in those few moments, to gain a wary confidence and a good deal of composure. “You don’t sound much like the type who will use that thing. So maybe I won’t say a damn thing about whatever it is you’re so damn interested in. Screw you, whoever you are.”
“I want to know about the couple that died and are buried down the road there. And how you acquired this place. And especially the three kids that they adopted, that you said they didn’t. And I would like to know about the phone call that you made after my friend Lazarus came to visit you the other day. Who did you call?”
The man shook his head. “I’ll tell you this: I got paid to make that call. And it was also worth my business to try to keep that guy here, whoever the hell he was. Too bad he split. I woulda had a
