Cadaver Dog (9 page)

“I…I…”

“Try not to talk,” she told the man. He looked to be in his mid-30s. There were groceries in the seat next to him and spilled out in the road, too. This was the debris that Angie had seen from the top of the hill.

A very low growl ushered out of Murder’s throat, a growl she had never heard from him before, but one she recognized instantly. The completely un-animalian sound of a thick exoskeleton striking metal came from the hood of the Jeep. There was no mistaking the red and black pattern of the giant crimson wasp, or the shape of its black hooked stinger. Angie threw her water bottle at the creature. And the scariest vision she had had seen in years was that of the water bottle bouncing off the wasp’s carapace like it was nothing, and the wasp crawling closer to her and the injured driver. Bugs were supposed to be affected by objects. They were supposed to be small and crunchy and squishy at the same time, not solid and sturdy. The sound, and the realization it brought with it, somehow removed the wasp from the foreign world it came from and deposited it into her very tangible reality. Angie screamed.

Murder barked savagely at the wasp. Angie feared he would attack the bug. She didn’t know what effect that stinger would have on Murder, and she refused to gamble with his life. Her body moved with adrenaline-soaked speed. Angie pulled her pistol, a standard Beretta 92, from her holster and aimed it at the nasty creature, her hand gently shaking. The wasp only crawled closer in response, as if daring her to defy it.

She pulled the trigger and the gun screamed out fire.

Bull’s-eye.

Somehow she severed the wasp’s head from its body without blowing the wasp into a hundred pieces. Its head rolled off the car, but its carapace continued to walk, turning in circles until it collapsed under its own weight.

Behind the wasp, a young girl’s dead eyes stared back at Angie.

Chapter Seven

Angie stayed in bed the next day, only getting up to feed the dogs and let them out into the pens. She was suspended temporarily while Animal Control conducted an investigation.

She tried to eat an apple in the kitchen, but the dead girl was smashed against the other side of the table. The autopsy would show that the child was killed by the Jeep collision, but if she wasn’t already dead, Angie would have killed her with the bullet that shot the wasp. Angie tossed the apple into the trash can and cussed and wiped away her tears.

After working her dogs, she drove into Jack Calf to buy groceries. She bought salad stuffs and lemonade and ice cream because it was hot outside—at least that’s the reason she told herself. Then she stopped at the feed store to pick up dog food. She ordered four fifty-pound bags, paid for them, and then backed her F-150 up to the loading dock. A lean man with blue eyes was loading the truck and watching Angie with sideways glances. Angie stared at a truck with some fender damage. The dead girl was there. A Mississippi delta of blood drained from the bullet hole she had put in the girl’s forehead.

“Hey,” the blue-eyed man said. The word filled the air as comfortably as the man fit into his jeans.

Angie glanced at him, then looked back at the dead girl. She got in the truck and turned on the radio and waited for the blue-eyed man to finish loading her truck. He came around when he was finished, but she left before he could say anything to her.

It was like this. She tried to eat in town, but the dead girl was smashed into a corner booth, so Angie got her lunch to go. She tried shopping at the Everything’s A Buck store, but her hands started to shake when the dead girl took her money.

“Stop it,” she told the dead girl. “Stop following me. I don’t need this shit.”

The cashier didn’t know what to say. She held the instant meal in her hands for a second, waited, then placed the meal in Angie’s bags. Angie always brought her own bags.

Angie went home and put away the food, backed her truck up to the barn and unloaded the fifty-pound bags herself. Then she worked the dogs in the warehouse and in the field. They had an off-day—probably because she was having an off-day. She put them in the large pen and went to take a shower.

Angie was not a fan of showers. They gave her time to peruse her chicken legs and skinny, scarecrow face.
Stop beating yourself up, it’s not that bad
, she told herself. Or maybe it was. Her skin was a moonscape of sun spots and scars.

Half-way through the shower she saw the shadow of the dead girl on the other side of the curtain.

After toweling off and finding some comfortable sweats, Angie went back and flopped down on the couch. She turned into her pillows and tried to ignore the world and the criticisms in her head. Then the dogs started barking. This wasn’t unusual. They were dogs. But there was a lot of movement in those barks. They were coming from everywhere. And they were joyous, damnit.

One of the dogs scratched at her door.

“I’m going to kill every last one of you,” Angie threatened as she opened the door.

Murder sat at the door, his chicken in his mouth. His tail was wagging with the exuberance of an escaped convict returning home to his folks. Behind him, ten dogs were running back and forth at full speed. Another one had hiked a leg over her flower bushes. They were day lilies she had been trying to get to grow there, but she wasn’t much of a green thumb. Dogs stomping through them didn’t help, though.

“Get back in the pen!” Angie bellowed. Dogs everywhere lost about three inches of confidence and slunk back toward the pen. Even Murder retreated with them. Once all the dogs were back in the pen, she reached down for a twisty tie she kept curled around one of the fence posts for such occasion. She never knew when an owner was untruthful about his dog’s Houdini skills. As she reached down, Murder leaped up and popped the lock, then he sat back down, a big grin shining from behind his chicken. His tail wagged furiously.

She grabbed the sloppy chicken out of his mouth and held it up high. Murder yipped a mix of amusement and pain. He
hoped
she would give it back. She tossed it in the pen, and he chased it down, growling at another Labrador who thought it might be his ball.

While Murder chased his toy, Angie turned to the dead girl. She was standing in the middle of the yard with the Mississippi delta of blood on her face.

“You need to leave now,” Angie said.

“I’ll come back,” the girl said.

Angie nodded. “But not for a while.”

Angie knew that eventually the child would return. When she least expected it, Angie would see the girl. Maybe she would see the girl in a crowd, maybe sitting in a Jeep stopped at a traffic light, or maybe the girl would wait for her in the forest. Some bodies never go away.

A week later, Dr. Saracen called.

“What’s up?” She was working dogs again. This time she had two on a sit-stay command. She had a stopwatch in the other hand. Three minutes had passed.

“Good news. The king has called you back to the Crusade.”

“What are you saying?”

“Suspension’s over.”

“Oh. Good.”

“How are you and Murder doing?” Dr. Saracen asked.

“Not bad.” She pulled a tennis ball out of her pocket and rolled it between the retrievers. Nothing.

“You know how novel it was that you found the girl, right?”

Angie turned her back on the dogs. “I was just helping the robot.”

“I saw the video. You think you failed, but I think you could counter that the robot was following you until it got to the street. Did you notice that you and Murder were following a curling trail out of the storage units?”

“I think I put something like that in my write-up.”

“And did you see how the robot handled changes in direction? It follows a process of turning to different sides. Suffice it to say, that if the robot was following a curling trail all its own, I would expect it to do more of those turn-about maneuvers. But it did not.”

“Well, thanks, Henry. BOO!” she yelled as she turned on the dogs. They were as resolute as Windsor Palace guards.

“Are you working with canines?”

“Stay command. They’re doing well. So not that I don’t enjoy talking, but why the call, Henry?”

“Actually, I am trying to work myself to it. I’ve got bad news. The director wants to see you.”

“You think he’s going to cancel my contract?”

“He would not say, but his tone was very belittling.”

“Well, he does have camera evidence of my old dog not learning this new trick, and his Best New Thing Ever trailing the zombie to the bodies.”

“Yes, I think as wrong as he is, that is it.”

“Well, why put off the inevitable? Let’s get this over with.”

She hung up the phone and watched the two dogs. Checked her stopwatch. Five minutes had come and gone.

“Release.” One dog ran to her to be petted. The other dashed for the tennis ball like an addict.

Angie brought Murder with her when she went back to Animal Control to see Director Summers. This time, she didn’t have to wait to get into his office. He was eating a hamburger and fries.

“How you holding up?”

“I’m good.”

He folded up his burger and pushed it to the side of the desk. “Well, that was some serious shit out there on the road last week. No one would think less of you for leaving. The handler who was with you did. Said he couldn’t handle it. Wrangling zombies was one thing; seeing dead kids was another. It’s the kid deaths that always get them.”

“They don’t get to me.”

“That’s right. Nothing gets to you. You’re a real rattlesnake.”

“I’ve got its skin mounted on the wall at home, Mr. Summers.”

“Please, call me Mark. Catching that zombie with a child, that was a big deal. It got lots of press. Henry’s been having nerdgasms over it for the past week. You were part of that, and I wanted to thank you.”

Angie waited for the axe to fall. She didn’t have to wait long.

“I also wanted to tell you that you’ve been bumped.”

So there it was. One and done.

“Listen, after all the crap I’ve put up with, the least you can do is give me a decent chance to prove myself. Your department is the one who pulled me into this rodeo to begin with.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not firing you. I’m increasing your workload. Instead of calling you out for our county, Saguache wants to call you out, too. They don’t have a Wolf yet.”

“I’m sorry. What?”

“Congratulations, you are about to get big-time, for better or worse. A few counties heard about you and your dog. They want to add you to their call list. Normally I’d decline, but they will be paying us to use you, and I’m not going to say no to more county dollars. It costs a mint to keep Animal Control running. We need all the funding we can get.”

A slurping noise came from the side of the room. Director Summers noticed the empty space on the side of the desk. “Where’s my lunch?”

Murder stood with his front legs bowed, inhaling what he had stealthily stolen off the desk while Angie and the director were talking.

Director Summers made a move for the burger, and Murder growled without stopping.

“Did you see that? He is literally inhaling my fries. Damnit. That dog is a real son of a bitch. You two are perfect for each other.”

Angie called Murder off his aggravated assault of Director Summers’ lunch by showing him his chicken. She didn’t laugh until she was out of the office.

She was working every day now, and had to force breaks on the Animal Control offices she assisted. Most of the callouts were resolved before she arrived on scene, so she put in for a gas stipend.

The fires were getting worse, as they always did toward the peak of summer. The Cristos were experiencing record highs. Most of the time, Angie’s commute was under smoke-laden mountain skies.

The air conditioning had been running full blast in the barn and the warehouse since June. Angie had used her fans to get her through the day, but once the fires set in, she started closing windows and turning the AC on. Still, sometimes it seemed like the wildfire’s black smell was sinking into everything.

Part of her morning ritual began to include checking for wilderness fire evacuation notices on various news sites and reading wind conditions (since wind direction and speed had changed the fates of many a home owner). Fortunately, she had not been required to leave yet and the winds were pushing the fire to stay north of her, but Jack Calf, which was less than twenty miles from her, had received the orders to evacuate.

Like so many other fellow Coloradoans, she listened to the warnings and the newscasts. She never created an inventory list because most of her things she had no problem parting ways with. Her true keepsakes and everything else she needed could probably fit into a duffel bag. Everything else would be for the dogs—the food, the vitamins, the medicines, and the tonnage of collars and leashes and dog bowls and everything else that came with the job. These she would load into the back of her F-150, and then attach the trailer, which she would keep the dogs in.

Angie drove up to Thirty-Nine Mile where she helped another handler load up her small city of dogs while the fires burned up the horizon. She came home coughing and decided to make sure she had everything ready in case she received the call to evacuate. She returned all the dogs that were not her own.

The television made for good background noise while she looked for her duffel bags. She had never owned luggage. Her lifestyle necessitated lots of bags and packs. Once the woman on the television started talking, though, Angie put down her bags and watched.

“Her name is Sarah,” the bleary-eyed mother said. She was a moderately obese woman with straw-like gray hair. The mother was sitting at a row of tables with what Angie assumed were her family around her. Two siblings and a father. The husband kept his arm around the mother, but he never looked up. Police were positioned on the outskirts of the table.

In her hands, the mother held a framed photo of Sarah. Sarah was a little blond girl, no older than ten.

“Sarah Erikson. She likes jelly beans and horses.”

“Sympathy With the Devil” buzzed from Angie’s cellphone.

Angie turned on the captions and muted the volume. She guessed she wasn’t going to be packing for evacuation after all. Director Summers told her to drive out to the Harietta airfield down in Salida. There she and Murder would board a helicopter that would fly her up into the mountains to look for Sarah Erikson.

It seemed a little backwards to Angie that she would drive out of the mountains only to get into a helicopter and fly back up into them, but she did not feel like fighting. She hoped Murder was okay with flying in helicopters.

The airfield in Salida sat between mountain ranges, with the Big Baldy Mountain peak looming from the east. Angie drank from her ginger ale while she drove. (She had slipped some ginger into Murder’s drinking water before she left.)