Dogs Read online

  Tessa saw that was all she was going to get from him. She walked the half-block home; he didn’t move until she’d closed her front door. Tessa turned on CNN, sat on her meditation mat, and watched for ten minutes, Minette on her lap.

  Nothing. But hadn’t the cable guy mentioned a local station.... She fiddled with the remote until she found it.

  “—since this morning. This is Tyler Community Hospital,” said a carefully made-up blonde in an unbuttoned parka, a large building behind her, “where the worst of the dog bite victims are being treated. Ten people have already died, seven of them children. Four more are in critical condition. Law enforcement authorities admit to being stymied. Specialists from the CDC in Atlanta, KJV has just learned, have now arrived in Tyler. Stay with us as we follow this breaking story. Meanwhile, the Truman High School Scorpions last night edged out the—”

  Tessa stared at the television. A plague among dogs? Dogs?

  She made a move toward the phone, then stopped. She was no longer an FBI agent. She no longer had access, or rights, to breaking knowledge about threats to the public welfare. She had made that choice.

  Bag that. This was her town, as of three weeks ago. And she didn’t need the Bureau to find out what was going on in it. Her coat was still on; she closed and locked the window, grabbed her keys and gun.

  Minette, quiet now, watched sadly as Tessa left.

  » 14

  Ed Dormund peered out the kitchen window. The Samoyeds weren’t visible anywhere in the fenced yard. They’d gone either into their dog house or around to the west side of the house, which had only one small window set into the wall of what Cora called her “crafts room.” Ed didn’t know what she actually did in there, and he didn’t care. But he cared where the dogs had gotten to.

  Cora sat slumped over coffee at the dirty kitchen table. “Stop pacing, you’re making me sick.”

  “That hangover is making you sick.”

  “Like you should talk. You drink more than I do. And if you ever hit me again I’ll—”

  “You’ll do what?” Ed was barely listening; this was old ground. Where the hell were the dogs?

  The phone rang and Cora answered. “Yeah?… Oh, hi.” She listened, laughed shortly, and said, “Yeah, right, whatever.”

  “Who was that?” Ed finally said when it was clear she wasn’t going to tell him, just to make him ask.

  “Old Man Lassiter next door.”

  “What’d he want?”

  Cora smirked, making him wait. Eventually she said, “He said he heard from somebody that there’s some kind of plague going around, a disease that turns dogs vicious, so we should keep ours locked up. Ain’t that a hoot? Some people will believe anything. Probably afraid that little Spic mutt of his will bite his finger.”

  Despite himself, Ed laughed. Then he scowled at Cora and went to see if he could spot Jake and Petey and Rex from the craft-room window.

  Del Lassiter hung up the phone. Brenda had gone back to bed after lunch. The chemo really tired her out. Del was glad she hadn’t woken when Rod Gregory had called to tell Del about the dog plague.

  A dog plague…How could such a thing happen? Was it even true? Dogs?

  Del gazed at Folly, chewing on a miniature rawhide bone on the floor. All at once the Chihuahua looked up and sniffed the air. As she rose to her feet, her entire fawn-colored body started to quiver.

  “Cold, girl?” But the kitchen wasn’t cold. Ever since Brenda had been diagnosed, Del kept the house at 78°, day and night. Chihuahuas shivered when cold, but also when excited, nervous, or scared.

  Folly sniffed the air again and began to howl.

  Ellie opened her bedroom door. The Greyhounds rushed up to her, Butterfly jumping to lay paws on Ellie’s shoulders and lick her face, the other four crowding close.

  “Good morning, good morning!”

  Morning indeed. Ellie had gone back to sleep and slept the morning away, which was disgraceful. She was on the four-to eleven shift today as work, but even so…

  Song dashed away and returned with her favorite toy, a much-slobbered-over football. Chimes licked Ellie’s hand. Music barked to go out. Ellie tried to attend to all of them at once, laughing at their antics. Scornfully she thought of her co-workers at the office, yammering on about TV shows and dates and clubbing in D.C. Who needed inane sitcoms or cheating men or noisy clubs? She had everything she wanted right here, with her precious friends whose lives she had saved.

  Ellie opened the door to let the dogs out into the backyard. Somewhere a siren began to sound, but she barely noticed.

  Steve Harper sat in his bedroom, listening to the phone ring. It was his mother, and he should answer it. She’d lost Davey, too, and he should be there for her. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything but sit here, seeing over and over again the same image, the brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey’s body…

  Steve put his hands over his face. The phone went on ringing and ringing.

  » 15

  Allen Levy sat watching TV in the family room, waiting for 3:00, the remains of his lunch on a plate beside him. At 2:57, his mother bustled in, "Allen, it's time for my show."

  “Oh, Mom, pleeeessssse! I’m right in the middle of Star Wars! Look!”

  “You’ve seen it before, and you know I only watch this one show, Allen. Star Wars can wait an hour.”

  “No, it can’t, I haven’t seen it before, we never got the DVD, Jimmy gave it to me! Pleeeessse! I’m so bored!”

  Mrs. Levy frowned. “This isn’t like you, Allen. As I said, I only watch one show every day and—”

  “Then can I go outside to play? It’s so nice out, look!”

  Allen pointed to the window, but his mother just kept gazing at him. He tried to look pathetic. Finally she sighed. “All right, I’ll watch TV upstairs. But you stay right here, you hear me? And turn it down a bit.”

  “Thanks, Mom!” Allen turned back to the screen and inched toward it happily. He didn’t touch the sound. On screen, the Sith blew up something.

  When his mother had gone upstairs, he waited a few minutes. She didn’t come down. She’d been watching her afternoon show, which seemed to involve grown-ups crying and screaming at each other a lot, as long as Allen could remember. It was very important to her. Allen crept quietly from the family room to the basement door.

  He couldn’t hear Susie through the door. All night he’d heard her, whimpering and barking because she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, at the foot of Allen’s bed. Instead she was locked in the basement, where it was dark and cold. She might even have eaten all her food by now. Allen’s mother said she’d given Susie a lot of food, but his mother didn’t always tell him the truth. Just last week she said Allen couldn’t go over to his friend Jimmy’s to play because Jimmy’s mother had the flu, but the truth was that Jimmy’s mother was drunk again. Jimmy had told him later.

  “Susie,” Allen whispered through the door. Nothing. He tried again, louder, hoping the noise from Star Wars covered him. “Susie!” Still nothing.

  What if she really was sick from this dog disease? Then they should take her to the doctor, get her the right medicine. Not just leave her lying alone down there on the cement floor! What if she was dying, all alone?

  Tears filled Allen’s eyes. He tried the doorknob, but the cellar door was locked. Quickly, before he could think about it, he opened the front door and slipped outside.

  It was cold out but not too bad, and anyway he didn’t care. The sun was warm. Allen rounded the house, ducked behind the bushes, and put his face smack up against a basement window.

  Susie lay on an old blanket his father must have put there, and for a heart-freezing moment Allen thought she was dead. But then she heard him, jumped to her feet, and gazed upward at the small window, her short tail wagging joyously. Through the glass, Allen heard her give her happy bark.

  But her water dish was empty. That wasn't right! Dogs had to have water
, everybody knew that. And Allen’s father wasn’t due home until after dark. Allen put his hand on the window glass, hesitated, and then pushed. The window, too, was locked.

  Again he thought he might cry. Breaking a window was a sin, for sure. But so was punishing a dog that hadn’t done anything wrong, that might even die if she didn’t get water. Which sin was bigger?

  Well, duh.

  He went back inside, then returned. It took only one swing with his baseball bat to break a different window, one in the laundry part of the cellar, which was separate from the part Susie was in. Allen held his breath but his mother didn’t come. Even from outside he could hear Star Wars playing loudly. With the blanket he’d brought from the house wrapped around his arm, he pushed all the rest of the broken glass away from the window, then dropped the blanket over the pieces of glass on top of the dryer. That’s the way they did it on Law & Order. Allen slid onto the dryer and jumped onto the floor.

  Susie was thrilled to see him! He hugged her, filled her water dish, and gave her the Cheerios he’d saved in his pocket from breakfast. Then he left the cocker spaniel in her part of the basement, carefully closed the door to the laundry-room part, and wriggled back up through the window.

  A half-hour later his mother came downstairs. “How you doing, sweetie? Is Star Wars over?”

  “Oh, I turned it off,” Allen said. “It was boring.”

  » 16

  In the early winter dusk Jess pulled the truck into the parking lot of the Cedar Springs Motel. The motel had no cedars and no springs. What it did have was the CDC. The motel was located just outside town on what passed for a highway, which made it easy to reach from D.C.—or, at least, as easy as anything else in Tyler. The motel’s wide parking lot overflowed with vehicles. The largest was the mobile lab, which had extended itself with an accordion-like structure to twice its traveling length. It looked intimidating, like some giant metallic worm.

  In a field across the road, kept there by two scowling cops, were reporters from KJV-TV and a few newspapers. So far, Jess noted, no national media, although that wouldn’t be far behind. “Goddamn vultures,” Billy said, without rancor. “But hey, look at that babe with the microphone—isn’t that Annie Farnham from the ten o’clock news?”

  “I don’t know,” Jess said. “If it is, she probably knows more than we do at this point.”

  “Well, that’s why we’re here, right? Check in, get all the poop? And drop off the dogs, of course. Man, even in that coat, she’s got tits out to here.”

  One of the cops—Jess saw that it was young Brian Carby—waved the animal-control truck through. Jess threaded his way among the huge CDC mobile lab, a sheriff’s patrol car, and a black stretch limo with D.C. plates that hadn’t been there on his last trip in. He parked behind the motel. Any dogs in the back of the truck that hadn’t already been snarling and barking started up again.

  “I’m going to find out if the protocol’s changed,” Jess said to Billy. “Can you start unloading the smaller cages by yourself?”

  “Sure thing.” Billy pulled on thickly padded handler’s gloves and hopped out. “Still put the cages in rooms 10 and 11?”

  “Far as I know,” Jess said, although rooms 10 and 11 had been filling up fast. “We’re going to need more help, Billy. Maybe we can get some citizen volunteers, like we did for that deer thinning two years ago. How about Miguel Del Toro? He breeds dogs.”

  “He got bit this morning.”

  “Jesus,” Jess said. He went along the back of the motel to room 1, designated “critical-incident headquarters,” a term that sounded to Jess as if the dogs were all hostages. The double beds had been removed and tables brought in from other rooms. Computers, faxes, and printouts covered most surfaces.

  “Jess,” Dr. Latkin said, looking as fresh and intense as he had this morning, “I’m glad to see you. Any changes out there?”

  What had he expected to change? Jess said, “No. We just brought in sixteen more dogs. Six benign but on the street, four from reported bites, six who haven’t bitten anybody but are showing unusual signs of aggression, so their owners called in. Billy’s putting them in rooms 10 and 11.”

  “No space left. The animal control people we borrowed from Flatsburgh were just here. We’re using rooms 8 and 9 now, 8 for infected, 9 for benign.”

  “I’ll tell Billy.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Dr. Latkin said. “I want to see the infected dogs. We have a new symptom. First, though, let me introduce you to Joanne Flaherty from the White House. Joanne, this is the Tyler animal control officer, Jess Langstrom.”

  Jess shook hands, studying her. Thirties, carefully groomed, overdressed for Tyler in the sort of expensive red suit Jess associated with Nancy Reagan. Undoubtedly she had come in the limo, which was also overdressed for Tyler, and that was her uniformed driver reading the Post in the corner. Jess had never heard of Joanne Flaherty, which meant exactly nothing. “From the White House” could mean anything from the Chief of Staff down to a run-of-the-mill flunky. Although if she had an important title, Latkin would probably have used it.

  She said, “I’m here at the direct request of Terence Porter, Mr. Langstrom. He’d like my assessment of your situation here in Tyler, and I’d like yours.”

  Reasonable, straight-forward…except that Jess had never heard of Terence Porter and this woman’s tone was so self-important, her smile so condescending. It conveyed that the president was waiting breathlessly in the Oval Office for Joanne Flaherty’s report, and that Jess was incredibly fortunate that his opinion would be part of it. She…oh, shit, those perceptions all might just be Jess himself. His own prejudices. He didn’t like politicians.

  “Ms. Flaherty, I don’t know what I can tell you that Dr. Latkin hasn’t. I think it’s only going to get worse here. There are a lot of dogs in Tyler, and I hear a lot of them snarling and barking, shut up in garages and basements. People will call for us to go get them, or the dogs will get loose, or the owners will get bitten when they try to feed them. We’re running out of room to put the ones we have rounded up. I think—oh, shit!”

  Ms. Flaherty and Dr. Latkin both looked startled by Jess’s outburst, as well they might. A television sat in one corner, volume on mute, and Jess had seen Billy walk on screen, pounced on by the blonde KJV-TV reporter. Jess said, “Excuse me, that’s my assistant, he shouldn’t be talking to reporters, I didn’t tell him that because I never thought he—”

  “Saul,” Dr. Latkin said to a young man hovering nearby, “get that animal control officer away from that reporter. Now.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Ms. Flaherty said, surprising both Jess and Dr. Latkin, who stared at her from his pale eyes. “Media attention on this is inevitable, I’m afraid. Mr. Langstrom, Dr. Latkin said it’s your recommendation that we quarantine Tyler. Is that true?”

  She leaned forward slightly on the balls of her feet, Jess noticed, almost like a fighter ready for a bout. She wanted not only media attention but a quarantine—why? It was almost enough to turn him away from the idea, but that was dumb. He said carefully, “I think it would be very difficult to do, but things will be more difficult if any of these dogs infect animals from Flatsburgh or Linville and the infection—is it an infection, Doctor?”

  Latkin said, “We haven’t isolated the pathogen from any of the dogs’ brains yet, but we’ve only had nine hours so far.”

  Joanne Flaherty said, “Do you want more people on this, Doctor?”

  Latkin blinked. Of course he wanted more people, Jess thought—government agencies always wanted more people on their projects. More people meant more support, more budget, more importance.

  “If you think that’s possible, Joanne.”

  “It may be. And once again, Mr. Langstrom, do you agree with Dr. Latkin that a quarantine is necessary here?”

  “Yes,” Jess said, at the same moment that Latkin said, “I’m not sure I’m ready to go on record at this point as definitely—”

  “Good,” sh
e said. “Doctor, may I see the mobile lab now? I have to be back in Washington in an hour and a half. The White House is expecting me.”

  Which, again, could mean anything. Jess didn’t like Joanne Flaherty. Not that it mattered; he would never see her again. He walked to the TV and turned up the volume just in time to hear Billy say, “Got her right between the eyes, Annie. At least one ol’ bitch won’t be biting any more kids. And your pretty little self is safer, too.” Billy grinned lasciviously and Jess groaned.

  “Please tell me who’s in charge here,” another voice said, and Jess turned to see another woman stride into the room, followed by a furious and very young sheriff’s deputy that Jess didn’t recognize.

  “I’m sorry, sir, she just kept on walking and I didn’t want to…says she’s FBI.”

  “No, I said a ‘former FBI agent’ and now a citizen of Tyler and a dog owner, so naturally I want straight information and not rumors,” the woman said. She had short black hair with gel-goop in it; the hair looked even blacker against her pale skin. Her gaze passed dismissingly over Joanne Flaherty and lighted unerringly on Latkin, which amused Jess. “Are you the principal investigator from the CDC?”

  “Dr. Joseph Latkin. But this is a restricted area, ma’am. You’ll have to leave.”

  “Certainly,” Tessa said, “as soon as you tell me what’s going on here, and how I can best help. Are you deputizing citizens? I’m a former FBI agent with firearms training. Have you got a police officer to run my creds? Where’s the critical-incident commander?” She held out various papers and a passport.

  Latkin, irritated, said, “No one is deputizing citizens, ma’am, and—” at the same moment that Jess said, “I am.”

  He wasn’t sure why he did it. They did need extra help, and an ex-FBI agent would be as good as anyone, maybe better. But mostly it was because he disliked Joanne Flaherty and because even Latkin, with his take-charge demeanor after less than a day in Tyler, was getting to Jess. Or maybe he was just tired.