week, from ten in the morning until nine at night, ensuring that the puppies, in particular, with their delicate constitutions, weren’t left alone for long periods. After hours, the heat or air-conditioning wasn’t turned down to save on oil or electricity, and music was piped in to keep the little babies company. Shrew had done plenty of research after Ivy died and knew how critical it was for puppies to be kept hydrated and warm, and not to languish from loneliness.
When the store came in view just up on the left, it wasn’t at all what Shrew expected, much less what had been described in the column the Boss had written. The display window was filled with untidy shredded newspaper, and a red plastic fire hydrant was precariously tilted to one side. There were no puppies or kittens in the window, and the glass was dirty.
Tell-Tail Hearts was sandwiched between In Your Attic, which by the looks of it sold junk, and a music store called Love Notes, which was having a going-out-of-business sale. A sign hanging on the pet store’s dingy white front door read Closed, but all the lights were blazing, and on the counter was a big foil bag of take-out barbecue from Adam’s Ribs, three doors down. Parked in front was a black Cadillac sedan, with a driver in it and the engine on.
The driver seemed to be watching Shrew as she opened the front door and walked into an invisible fog of air freshener, the spray can on top of the cash register.
“Hello?” she called out, not seeing anyone.
Puppies began to bark and stir and stare at her. Kittens snoozed in beds of wood shavings, and fish fluttered lazily in tanks. A counter wrapped around three walls, and behind it, reaching almost to the water-stained ceiling, were wire cages filled with tiny representatives of every breed of pet imaginable. She avoided making eye contact with any of them. She knew better.
Eye contact led straight to the heart, and the next thing she knew, she was carrying someone home she hadn’t intended to get, and she couldn’t have all of them. And she wanted all of them, the poor, pitiful things. She needed to research her selection intelligently, ask questions, and be convinced of what would be the best choice before anyone removed a puppy from its cage and placed it in her arms. She needed to talk to the manager.
“Hello?” she called out again.
She walked tentatively toward a door in back that was slightly ajar.
“Anybody here?”
She opened the door the rest of the way. Wooden stairs led down to the basement, where she could hear a dog barking, then several others began barking. She started down, one slow step at a time, careful because the lighting was poor and she’d had too much bourbon. Walking all the way here had helped a little but not nearly enough. Her thoughts were dull and sluggish, and her nose felt numb the way it got when she was tipsy.
She found herself in a storage area that was thick with shadows and stunk like sickness, feces, and urine. Amid piled boxes of pet supplies and bags of dry food were cages filled with filthy shredded paper, and then she saw a wooden table with glass vials and syringes, and red bags with Biohazard Infectious Waste stamped on them in black, and a pair of heavy black rubber gloves.
Just beyond the table was a walk-in freezer.
Its steel door was open wide, and she saw what was inside. A man in a dark suit and a black cowboy hat and a woman in a long gray frock coat had their backs to her, their voices muffled by loud blowing air. Shrew saw what they were doing, and she wanted to get out as fast as she could, but her feet seemed stuck to the concrete floor. She stared in horror, and then the woman saw her and Shrew turned around and ran.
“Hold on!” a deep voice yelled after her. “Whoa now!”
Heavy footsteps sounded after her, and she missed a step on the stairs and whacked her shin hard. A hand grabbed her elbow, and the man in the cowboy hat was escorting her back into the bright lights of the store. Then the lady in the gray frock coat was there, too. She glared disapprovingly at her but looked too worn-out to do anything about Shrew’s transgression.
The man in the cowboy hat demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re doing sneaking around in here like that?”
His eyes were dark and bloodshot in his dissipated face, and he had big white sideburns and plenty of flashy gold jewelry.
“I wasn’t sneaking,” Shrew said. “I was looking for the manager.”
Her heart pounded like a kettledrum.
“We’re closed,” the man said.
“I came in to buy a puppy,” she said, and she started to cry.
“There’s a closed sign in the door,” he said while the woman mutely stood by.
“Your door’s unlocked. I came downstairs to tell you. Anybody could walk right in.” Shrew couldn’t stop crying.
She couldn’t stop envisioning what she’d seen in the freezer.
The man looked at the woman, as if demanding an explanation. He walked over to the front door and checked, then muttered something. It probably dawned on him that Shrew had to be telling the truth. How else would she have gotten in?
“Well, we’re closed. It’s a holiday,” he said, and she guessed him to be about sixty-five years old, maybe seventy. He had a Midwest drawl that seemed to crawl off his tongue.
She had a feeling he’d been doing the same thing she was a little earlier, drinking, and she noticed that the big gold ring he wore was shaped like a dog’s head.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I saw the lights on and came in, thinking you were open. I really am sorry. I thought I might buy a puppy, and some food and toys and things. Sort of a New Year’s present to myself.”
She picked up a can of food off a shelf.
Before she could stop herself, she said, “Wasn’t this banned in that Chinese-import melamine scare?”
“Believe you have that confused with toothpaste,” the man said to the woman in the gray frock coat, who had a lifeless jowly face and long dyed black hair straying from a barrette.
“That’s right. Toothpaste,” she said, and she had the same accent. “A lot of people got liver damage from it. Of course, they never tell you the rest of the story. Like maybe they were alcoholics, and that’s why they had liver damage.”
Shrew wasn’t uninformed. She knew about the toothpaste that had killed several people because it had diethylene glycol in it, and the man and woman knew that wasn’t what Shrew was talking about. This was a bad place—maybe the worst in the world—and she’d come at a bad time, the worst time imaginable, and she’d seen something so awful she’d never be the same.
What was she thinking? It was the evening of New Year’s Day, and no pet store in the city was going to be open, including this one. So why were they here?
After being down in the basement, she knew why they were here.
“It’s important to clear up confusion,” the man said to Shrew. “You had no business down there.”
“I didn’t see anything.” A clear indication she’d seen everything.
The man in the cowboy hat and gold jewelry said, “If an animal dies from something contagious, you do what you got to do, and you got to do it fast to make sure the other animals don’t catch it. And once you do the merciful thing, you have to deal with temporary storage. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
Shrew noticed six empty cages with their doors open wide. She wished she’d noticed them when she first walked in. Maybe she would have left. She remembered the other empty cages in the basement, and what was on the table, and then what was in the freezer.
She started to cry again and said, “But some of them were moving.”
The man said to her, “You live around here?”
“Not really.”
“What’s your name?”
She was so scared and upset, she stupidly told him, and then stupidly said, “And if you’re thinking I’m some kind of inspector for the Department of Agriculture or some animal group?” She shook her head. “I just came in to get a puppy. I forgot it’s a holiday, that’s all. I understand about pets getting sick. Kennel cough. Parvovirus. One gets it, they all get it.”
The man and woman silently looked at her as if they didn’t need to talk to come up with a plan.
