“Fine,” said Darren, pushing himself up to a kneeling position. “We’d probably better get going anyway.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, unwilling to back down.
Darren looked over at the building and shook his head sadly. “Biggest tits I ever saw,” he said, and then started to walk toward the railroad tracks.
He was bluffing. He was definitely bluffing. There was absolutely no question in my mind that he was bluffing…at least for his first two steps. Then I decided that he wasn’t bluffing at all and that if I didn’t act quickly I’d rob myself of this golden opportunity.
“Okay, okay,” I said. Darren looked back over his shoulder at me and smiled. Not the excited smile of a twelve-year-old who might get to see a naked stripper, but the smug smile of somebody who’d convinced his friend to do something against his will. It was, truth be told, a little bit unnerving. But then the smile vanished and his expression turned serious. “All right, I’ll watch your back,” he said, returning to his spot on the ground. “Just knock a few times, loud, and then run back here.”
I nodded, took a deep breath, and walked toward the building. Technically, this wasn’t as bad as stealing condoms. There was nothing illegal about knocking on the back door of a strip club and running away, at least as far as I knew. Of course, if I got caught and they called Branford Academy, I’d be screwed in a very big way.
I walked up to the door.
I raised my hand.
I looked back at Darren, who nodded his approval.
I took another deep breath.
I knocked once, twice—
The door opened.
Suddenly I found myself staring directly at a sweat-stained white T-shirt. The ugly guy, one hand out of sight behind him, looked down at me and coughed.
My first and second instincts were to run and to pass out, respectively. I did neither, and instead just stood there in shock.
“Yeah?” the guy asked.
“I…” I managed to blurt out, or at least something that sounded like that particular vowel.
“This ain’t no place for kids,” the guy said. “Whaddya want?”
“I just need to use the phone,” I heard myself say, which was a pretty good cover considering that my brain had stopped functioning.
The guy shook his head. “Can’t help ya. Go someplace else.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was movement behind the guy, and I peeked past him. A woman stood there, with long black hair. She was incredibly beautiful, was covered with a thick sheen of perspiration, and was absolutely, completely, gloriously naked. I’d seen plenty of naked women in movies and a couple of times in magazines, but this was my first time seeing one in real life. There were no surprises, anatomically, but the experience was entirely different.
I’m pretty sure I gasped.
The woman made eye contact with me, placed her hands on her hips, and winked.
The guy glanced back at her briefly, then smiled, revealing dark yellow teeth. “Get the fuck outta here, kid,” he told me as he shut the door.
I stood there for a long moment.
“Alex!” said Darren in a stage whisper. “Get over here!”
I didn’t want to go back to Darren. I wanted to cherish the memory of what I’d just seen. But I also didn’t want the ugly guy to open the door again and call the cops.
I ran back past the Dumpster, and Darren and I both ran to the train tracks. “I can’t believe you just stood there!” Darren exclaimed.
“Did you see her?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The lady!”
“No, I just saw you and the butt-scratcher. What lady?”
“The naked one.”
“She was naked?”
“Oh yeah.” “How naked?” “All the way.”
“Aw,
man
,” said Darren. “I should’ve knocked!” I grinned and nodded my head. “Yep, you should have. Sucks to be you!”
The day before classes resumed, and three days before we found the body of Killer Fang, Peter entered the room in tears.
He’d just returned from Christmas break. Jeremy had arrived several hours ago and was busy constructing a snap-together model World War II ship that his grandmother had given him, which he planned to stomp into thousands of pieces once it was complete.
“What’s wrong?” Jeremy asked.
“He’s gone,” said Peter, in between heaving sobs.
“Who?”
He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “My dog.”
“Killer Fang’s gone?” I asked. “What happened?”
It took a while, but Peter managed to explain the situation. He’d taken Killer Fang for a quick walk before his parents had to leave, and the cocker spaniel had pulled its leash out of his hands chasing after a squirrel. It ran off, they chased after it, and the dog never returned. They’d looked for it for over two hours, but with absolutely no luck.
After he calmed down, we all went out and helped him look.
No sign of Killer Fang.
His parents had spoken with the local animal shelter and would be contacted if the dog turned up. When we finally quit searching and returned to our room, Peter took out a magic marker and began making lost dog signs, working long past lights out.
Though I half expected him to spend the day in the infirmary, Peter got up the next morning and attended all of his classes. A sympathetic teacher agreed to post the signs around town, while the fact that a Branford Academy teacher could be sympathetic came as an amazing shock to the rest of us.
He ate nothing at lunch, but finished half of his dinner. During the meal, I told Jeremy all about the visit that Darren and I paid to the strip club.
“You saw
everything?
” he asked in amazement.
“Yep.”
“Upper and lower?”
“Yep.”
“And I just got a crappy model ship from my gramma.” Jeremy took a sip of milk and sulked for a moment, and then relentlessly quizzed me about the field trip for the rest of dinner.
That night, I awoke to the sound of Darren getting out of bed. He left the room, fully clothed. I lay awake for about fifteen minutes, waiting for him to return, before I fell asleep.
During breakfast the next morning, I quietly asked him where he’d gone.
“Hmmm?”
“Last night. Where’d you go?”
He scratched his lower lip. “To the club.”
“How’d you get out?”
“Walked.”
“Wasn’t there a guard?”
“Maybe.”
This didn’t make sense. If he’d dragged me out there the last time, why would he be evasive about sneaking out again?
Maybe he’d gone to somebody else’s room. Just because I wasn’t aware of him having any other friends didn’t mean that was really the case.
Why would he hide that?
I didn’t push it, but later on I did mention it to Jeremy.
“If he does it again, we need to follow him,” he insisted.
“We’ll get in trouble.”
“Only if we get caught.”
“We’ll probably get caught.”
“Darren didn’t get caught.”
“We don’t even know where he went.”
“Right! It could be really great! It might be even better than the strip club! We’ve gotta follow him!”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
“No, I—”
“Yes you do.”
Either Darren was quieter, or he didn’t leave at all, or I just slept better than usual, but the next night I fell asleep at a quarter after ten and didn’t wake up until morning.
The night after that, I awoke to a rather obnoxious finger poking me in the nose. I was not surprised to open my eyes and discover that the finger belonged to Jeremy.
“Stop it,” I said.
He poked me twice more. “He just left,” he whispered. “Hurry up and get dressed.”
I was tired and wanted to protest, but I knew that Jeremy wouldn’t relent. I got out of bed and quickly put on my clothes while Peter lay in bed, snoring softly. Jeremy opened our door just a crack and peered out into the hallway. A moment later he opened the door all the way and we left the room.
We hurried over to the stairwell and pushed open the door very carefully. I cringed at the loud squeak. Below, we heard the footsteps of somebody running down the last few stairs, followed by a door opening and closing.
Jeremy made a move to run down after him, but I tugged on the back of his shirt to stop him. “He won’t go anywhere if he knows we’re following him,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Jeremy agreed. We cautiously walked down the stairs and paused at the door to the lobby. “How long should we wait?”
“A minute, maybe?”
“We might lose him.”
“It’s up to you.”
Jeremy considered that for a second. “Let’s just go. If he catches us, we’ll make him take us with him anyway. Two against one.”
He pushed open the door and we walked into the lobby.
It was empty. Nobody at the front desk.
We began to walk silently toward the exit, moving casually as if there were absolutely no reason we shouldn’t be on our way outdoors for a pleasant evening stroll.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard some giggling coming from the small room behind the front desk. Feminine giggling. If anything, that would certainly explain the ease of Darren’s (and hopefully our) escape.
We made it outside without getting busted. There was no sign of Darren.
“We’ll just go the way we went before,” I suggested. He probably was simply on his way back to the strip club, and was perhaps a bit embarrassed by how much time he was spending in the presence of that most foul of Dumpsters.
When we reached Branford Street, we could see Darren walking several blocks up ahead. Following behind him and hoping that he didn’t decide to turn around was probably not the finest shadowing technique ever demonstrated, but we were afraid that anything more sophisticated might cause us to lose him.
Right before he reached the train tracks, he stepped off the sidewalk and ducked into some bushes.
“Is that where you went before?” asked Jeremy.
“Nope.”
“I wonder what he’s doing?”
“No idea.”
“He’s probably playing with himself.”
I laughed. “He’d at least save that for outside the club.”
“Maybe he couldn’t wait! We should probably turn back or we might see something really horrible. I’d hate to have to barf all over the place.”
“Maybe he stashed some magazines over there.”
“Maybe he stashed a
stripper
over there.”
We continued walking. “What happens if Peter wakes up and tells somebody that we’re gone?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t tell on us.”
“He wouldn’t try and get us in trouble, but he might get worried.”
Jeremy shook his head. “Nah, he won’t do anything. If he does, we’ll just say we were trying to stop Darren. We’d all get in trouble for what Darren did anyway, so we might as well be out here enjoying it, too.”
We stopped talking as we approached the thick bushes.
I motioned for Jeremy to stop. We stood there for a moment, listening to the sounds coming from the bushes. They weren’t loud, and I couldn’t quite tell what they were.
They sounded sort of…wet.
Jeremy put a finger to his lips, and together we began to walk toward the bushes as quietly as possible.
The wet sounds continued, vaguely reminding me of my mother peeling the skin off a raw chicken.
Jeremy held up three fingers, counting down.
Two…one…
“Gotcha!” Jeremy shouted as we simultaneously pushed through the bushes.
Darren cried out and threw up his hands.
A few drops of liquid hit my face.
There was a moment of absolute chaos, as Darren frantically scooted away from us, and Jeremy’s face registered pure horror at what he saw, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a smell that was far worse than the Dumpster outside the strip club.
A pair of garbage bags lay on the ground. On top of them was a furry, headless carcass.
A slit ran most of the way up its belly. Its severed tail rested on the ground. Its head, mouth wide-open in a howl, tongue missing, eye sockets filled with tiny maggots, was propped up between two rocks.
I violently threw up and then crawled out from the bushes, coughing and trying not to choke.
It took me at least thirty seconds to recover enough to focus my attention on anything but my own nausea. Darren stood there, dripping hands at his sides, panting heavily. Jeremy faced him, fists clenched.
“Is that Killer Fang?” Jeremy demanded.
“Let me tell you what happened.”
“Is that Killer Fang, yes or no?”
“Yes, but I didn’t kill him, I swear to God, I didn’t hurt him, I didn’t do anything to him.”
“You cut his head off!”
Darren glanced around to make sure there was nobody coming. His nose was starting to run and he wiped it with a bloody finger. “I didn’t do anything to him while he was alive,” Darren said in a whisper.
“Yeah, right.”
“He got hit by a car.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“He
did
,” Darren insisted. “I wasn’t looking for him; I was just going to walk around town. He was lying on the side of the road. He was already dead. I wouldn’t kill Peter’s dog. I wouldn’t do something like that.”
“But you would chop him up!” Jeremy accused, taking a step toward Darren and looking ready to beat him senseless. As horrified as I was by what had happened to Killer Fang, I also knew that getting into a fistfight over it would greatly increase the chances of our little field trip being discovered.
“Don’t hurt him,” I told Jeremy.
“How about I just cut his head and tail off and hide him in some bushes?”
In other circumstances, the “tail” comment would have been highly amusing, but here we didn’t even notice the logistical flaw. “When did you find him?” I asked.
“Night before last,” Darren said. “That time you saw me go out.”
“Why didn’t you tell Peter?”
“He would’ve been too sad.”
“You are
such
a liar!” said Jeremy. “You think he’d be too sad to know his dog was hit by a car, but not too sad to know you chopped him up?”
“I wasn’t going to tell him anything! This way, he could always think that his dog was still alive. He’d be happier.”
“Bullshit!”
“You don’t know! You don’t know what I was thinking! You’re not in my head!”
“Good thing or I’d be in a loony bin! Which is where you’re gonna be when people find out what you did!”
Darren looked at the ground. “Do we really have to tell anybody?” he asked in a soft, miserable voice.
“Yeah!” Jeremy sneered. “We’re gonna tell
everybody!
”
“Please don’t.”
“Everybody at school! Everybody you know! The whole world is gonna find out what you did! Especially everybody in the loony bin with you!”
“Please, I’ll do anything you want.”
“They’re going to put you in a straitjacket and you won’t be able to move and they’ll stick you with giant needles every day and they’ll shock you and they’ll rip out parts of your
brain
and they’ll laugh and laugh and laugh at you!”
“I didn’t hurt him. If he was alive, I would’ve got help and told Peter, I promise.”
“I think you killed him.”
“I didn’t!” Darren wailed.
“I’m gonna tell Peter you killed his dog.”
“I
didn’t!
”
“And they’re gonna jab you with so many needles that you’ll look at your arm and it’ll be nothing but holes and then they’ll strap you down and—”
“Leave him alone,” I said.
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re not helping anything. We need to get back to school before they know we’re gone.”
“We can’t just leave Killer Fang out here like this,” said Jeremy.
“I’ll bury him,” said Darren. “You guys go back so you don’t get in trouble, and I’ll bury him.”
“You just want to cut him up some more.”
Darren shook his head vigorously. “I won’t. I’ll bury him. You can take my pocketknife.”
I’d seen Darren use the blade of his pocketknife to clean his fingernails on a few occasions. It was barely an inch long, and while I wasn’t exactly an expert on such matters, it seemed that decapitating a cocker spaniel with such a small blade would be a long, incredibly difficult process. I wondered how many hours he’d spent cutting through the dog’s neck, how much effort it had taken to get through the spinal column.
“Okay,” I told Darren. “Bury him.”
“We have to show Peter what happened,” said Jeremy.
“No way. We can’t let him see Killer Fang like that. He’d die.”
“He would,” said Darren. “He’d have a heart attack.”
Jeremy held up his fist. “Shut up!”
“We’ll let Darren bury him, and we’ll go back to the room, and we’ll figure out what to do.”
“If we let him bury him, then there’s no proof.”
“There’s no proof anyway,” said Darren. “I’ll just say I found him like that.”
“Give me your pocketknife,” I said.
“Are you going to tell Peter?”
“I don’t know what we’re going to do yet.”
Darren picked up the dark red pocketknife, snapped the blade back into the handle, and gave it to me.
“See you whenever,” I said, and then turned and began to walk back the way we came.
I hoped that Jeremy would follow me, but after I’d gone about twenty feet, I stopped and looked back. He stared at Darren for a moment longer, kicked the ground angrily, and then ran over to catch up with me.
“Sick,” Jeremy muttered. “He’s totally sick.”
“I know.”
“He should go to jail. I’ll bet you anything he killed the dog.”
I shook my head. “He couldn’t catch and kill a dog like that with a pocketknife.”
“Why not? Sure he could. Maybe Killer Fang was hurt. Maybe he did get hit by a car, but it only broke his legs, and so he couldn’t get away when Darren found him. You could kill a dog with a pocketknife, easy.”
“Maybe.”
“What are we gonna do?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “What do you think Peter would do if we told him?”
“Freak out and kill Darren.”
“He won’t kill anybody.”