Crunch Time

“Sorry for the accommodations,” I muttered as I chased the last four puppies, who’d decided that they didn’t like me after all. I finally corralled them all into the box. I dashed to the van, placed this second puppy box on the floor of the passenger side, and jumped in.

“Hit the gas!” I yelled to Yolanda. As she backed out of the garage, I stared into the night to see if I could see the bald man. The fire, which was now raging, lit only the long grass, trees, and rocks on Ernest’s property. “Hurry!” I called to Yolanda.

Alas. We had barely turned out of Ernest’s driveway when the strobe lights of not one but two police cars lit the street in front of us.

“What the hell?” I asked. “Where were they, in the neighborhood?”

The police cars blocked the roadway, so Yolanda pulled over. I looked behind us. Ernest’s house was completely ablaze.

A barrel-shaped uniformed cop approached us, shining a blinding flashlight at us. When he was some distance away, he called, “What are you doing at this house?”

“Getting my belongings,” Yolanda cried.

“It’s okay,” I said as relief washed through me. “We know this guy. Remember Sergeant Boyd? He’s great.”

“Getting your belongings?” Boyd shone the light into the van. When he saw me, he said, “Goldy? What the hell are you doing here?” He directed the flashlight at Yolanda. “Yolanda? Is that you?”

“Yes.” But her voice wavered, as if she weren’t quite sure who she was.

“Please listen,” I begged Boyd. “Yolanda and her aunt are Ernest McLeod’s friends. They were living here.”

Boyd exhaled. “Anybody in the house now?”

“No, thank God. But a bald man threw two Molotov cocktails at Ernest’s greenhouse! He may still be around here.”

“Armed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Description?”

I did the best I could, but the enveloping mist and darkness, plus my surprise at the bald man’s actions, made it hard to recall details beyond “sort of hefty, maybe tall.”

Boyd nodded anyway and spoke into his radio to officers fanning into the field around Ernest’s house. Then he put his hand on Yolanda’s shoulder. Romantic sparks had flown between these two when Boyd had come out to the spa to help me the previous month. Now he said gently, “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said, staring straight ahead.

“Hang in there.”

I said, “Do you know if the fire trucks are on their way?”

“Hold on.” Boyd again spoke into his radio, and received a reply that the fire engines would arrive in less than ten minutes. Boyd clipped the flashlight onto his belt and rubbed his scalp. His once-black hair was turning to gray at the sides, but he still wore it in an unfashionable crew cut.

“Where were you guys?” I asked. “Why weren’t investigators inside the house? I called and called, but nobody answered.”

Boyd ignored my question and looked back at Ferdinanda. “Yolanda, would you introduce me to your aunt?”

I smiled. Apparently, courting rituals took precedence over the deliberate setting of a house on fire and the destruction of evidence. But when Yolanda patiently went through introductions, she seemed to calm down.

Finally, Boyd said, “The team in the house got a call that shots had been fired five miles away. It’s the next neighborhood over, and they were the closest cops. They couldn’t find anything, but then they got another call. More shots fired. So they called us, and a couple more of us raced up here. We kept looking in that neighborhood and in this one, but we didn’t find anything.”

The puppies whimpered at me, and I patted them.

“Did you take anything else?”

“No,” I said guiltily, keeping my eyes on the puppies. It felt, of course, as if that big bud of marijuana was burning a hole in my jacket pocket. But I didn’t want to tell Boyd about it in front of Yolanda and Ferdinanda. I needed to tell Tom about it first, I decided.

Boyd rubbed his forehead. “Do you know where Tom is now?”

I said, “He’s supposed to be at Southwest Hospital.”

“Why there?”

“He’s, uh, with John Bertram,” I said, trying to avoid giving the reason.

“What happened?” asked Boyd, his voice on edge.

“I hit him with my baton!” called Ferdinanda from the back. I heard the unmistakable sound of Ferdinanda snapping her weapon open. She thrust it through the window at Boyd, who jumped back. “You be nice to Yolanda, or I’ll hit you, too!”

I put my head in my hands. It was going to be a long night.

5

We missed the fire engines arriving, although we could hear their approach behind the screeching of Ernest’s alarms. As smoke and ash billowed from Ernest’s house, Boyd stepped away from Yolanda’s van long enough to call the sheriff’s department.

A few of the dogs were still whining. The rest had slumped against each other and fallen asleep. One of the ones who were awake climbed the cardboard directly in front of me. This puppy was crying and looking so pathetically unhappy that I brought him up in my lap. He, or maybe it was a she—I wasn’t going to check in the poor light—liked having his back rubbed, I discovered. Within a couple of minutes, he’d stretched lengthwise on my thighs, his nose over my knees, his little legs splayed out so that his paws just touched my stomach. Like his pals, he succumbed to slumber.

Boyd pocketed his cell and came back to the van. “Goldy, we’re going to your house,” he announced. His expression was unreadable.

I sighed. I didn’t know whether going back to our place was a good thing or a bad thing, but I couldn’t bear to watch Ernest’s hand-built house being consumed by fire. To make matters worse, the smoke was making Ferdinanda cough.

I asked Yolanda to head back toward our place, and she pulled to the left, off the shoulder. Ferdinanda smokes cigars, I reminded myself as she coughed relentlessly. The old van’s engine ground in protest as Yolanda hung a U. Ferdinanda was gagging; I thought she was going to be ill. It was the cigars, I told myself. Still, I was too tired to talk about the perils of smoking. Like the puppy in my lap, I was too exhausted to think.

As Yolanda piloted the van down the street away from Ernest’s house, Ferdinanda stopped coughing. Oddly, hunger made my stomach cramp. Ferdinanda and Yolanda had missed dinner, too, but too much had been going on to think about eating. My mind jumped to my usual worry: Where was Arch? He had his own car, a used VW, but I vaguely remembered that he wasn’t driving it at the moment. No matter what, he had not checked in, and that was anxiety-producing.

I so wanted to talk to Tom. I debated dislodging the beagle and reaching for my cell but reasoned that we’d be home momentarily and I could find out exactly where he was.

We hadn’t gone a hundred yards in the direction of town when Boyd flashed us with his strobe lights. Yolanda shook her head and pulled over to the dirt shoulder on our right.

When Yolanda rolled down her window, thick smoke billowed in.

“Okay,” said Boyd, who was barely visible, “the fire trucks are asking us not to go down this way. They need access to the hydrants, and they’re blocking off all traffic into the neighborhood. We need to take the service road.”

“What service road?” Yolanda asked.

“Follow me.”