52 THE DOG LOVER

52

THE DOG LOVER

In the dream, Sam Crockett's face is on fire, but the flames don't concern him because he is convinced that he is safe in the presence of the fortuneteller regardless of what happens. Besides, his dogs are with him in the woman's candlelit kitchen, and they have kept him sane and happy in the years since fire took his face. The seer says, "There are dogs, and soon one even better than dogs."

The phone rings, and he wakes into an absence of flames.

Sam doesn't mind being awakened hours before he would otherwise arise to the new day, because the call is a request for him to bring his three best dogs to assist in a search. He takes great pride in his dogs.

When he hangs up the phone and turns on the light, the three German shepherds sharing the king-size bed—Sherlock, Whimsey, and Marple—grumble and snuffle and yawn. Four other shepherds occupy their dog beds in the corners of the room.

None of the seven rises from its mattress when Sam goes into his closet to dress. They lift their heads and watch attentively.

These dogs never bark unless their master issues the command to do so, which is Speak .

When he returns to the bedroom, dressed for the chase, seven tails thump seven padded surfaces, because the gear he wears is a promise that some of them will soon be engaged in an exciting hunt.

"Let's go," says Sam.

As if sprung from their beds by some mechanism, claws clicking-scrabbling on the wood floor, the shepherds follow him out of the bedroom in a more or less orderly swarm.

Years earlier, the kitchen was extended to provide an area for the watering and feeding of dogs. Before retiring for the night, Sam had set out four clean bowls full of fresh water.

Some of the shepherds will drink before eating, some after they have eaten, and others only after they have eaten and toileted. Each has his or her own ways and preferences. Dogs can be trained to be civilized and dutiful, but they can't be coerced into repressing their unique personalities, as can many human beings who will remake themselves into automatons and enchain their own souls in the name of one ideology or another.

Sam Crockett likes a few people, despises a few, and isn't sure what he thinks about most of them—but he loves all dogs.

While he starts one cup brewing in the coffeemaker and begins filling bowls with morning food for his pack, the shepherds cruise the room, savoring the smells of yesterday or exploring the contents of the toy box, or parading around with tennis balls in their mouths to suggest that a play session might be agreeable to them.

After they have eaten, Sam opens the back door, and the seven venture into the last of the night to toilet in the fenced acre that serves as the backyard. After the hunt, when it's light, he will bag the results of the morning potty session. He keeps the property clean for them, bathes them frequently, brushes their teeth three times a week, and adheres to a schedule for trimming their claws—none of which feels like work to him.

They are his children. Because of his face, he isn't likely to marry. His family is the four-footed kind.

When the dogs return to the house, he puts halters rather than collars on Sherlock, Peter Whimsey, and Miss Marple. The four who will not be going on this job—Nero, Kinsey, Travis, and Doc—use their eyes to guilt-trip Sam, but they know that there is always another hunt and that their turn will come.

During his absence, they'll use the hinged pass-through in the back door. Although he locks the house, it isn't necessary. There is no alarm to set. Kettleton is no longer the low-crime town it used to be—maybe nowhere is—but no security system can be as effective at deterring burglars as can a pack of German shepherds trained to be intolerant of intruders.

He phones his neighbor, Jessie Berkel, one of those people he likes, and leaves a voice mail. If Sam doesn't return from the hunt in a timely manner, Jessie will stop by to feed, water, and clean up after those in the pack who are staying home.

In the garage, the three dogs leap through the open liftgate into the back of Sam's SUV, lie down, and curl up for transport, as they have been trained to do. He tells them how good they are, and their attitude says, Yeah, we know.

Sam has never been to the house at which the search party is being organized, but he knows where to find it. He hasn't been told what they're seeking, although he imagines that it's competitors operating without permission of the Bead family.

Over the past four years, since returning from war and raising his shepherds, he has conducted searches at the behest of Sheriff Montrose, also for law-enforcement agencies in neighboring counties, and even for federal bureaus. He's found lost children, old folks with dementia who have wandered off, and escaped prisoners—for which he's collected rewards in addition to charging an hourly rate. Thanks to the industry and prudence of his mother, Pauline, who died while Sam was in a military hospital overseas, he doesn't urgently need the money he earns with the dogs. However, without this work, he would have no purpose and no hope.

For Belden Bead and recently for Galen Vector, Sam has used his long-tailed detectives to sniff out competition from meth labs and marijuana farms concealed in the primeval wilderness. Once he and his dogs, along with Vector's people, locate a drug operation, the sheriff's department raids the place and makes arrests.

Sheriff Montrose is aware of this work Sam does. He approves because he believes the county will remain more peaceful if drug and human-trafficking offenses, which can't be eradicated, are at least organized by one crime family. Montrose dreads intrusion by bloody-minded Central American gangs, which have been sending thousands of foot soldiers across the open border; they have a history of violent turf wars and campaigns of vengeance without regard for collateral damage wrought upon the innocent. Most likely, the sheriff also gets a slice of the action from the Bead family's operations.

Sam despises Vector as he also despised Bead, but he works with these bad guys because the targets are worse guys. The dogs love the action, and it keeps them at the top of their game. Maybe the money comes from people with dirty hands, but he and his pack don't do anything illegal to earn it. He has also been advised—not bluntly, but with discretion—that a refusal to assist Vector is likely to result in the poisoning of one or all of his dogs.

The dogs are his family. They are his life. The dogs don't care that his face is a mass of burn scars beyond repair, that he has no hair or eyebrows, that his nose is misshapen and his ears are rags of crushed cartilage pinned to his head by long-hardened cicatrices. The dogs love him, and he loves them. When Galen Vector issues a summons, Sam will do what is wanted with resentment but without regret. To keep his dogs safe, he will swallow his pride and bend his knee, which he refused to do when he was in the hands of his enemies, thousands of miles from Kettleton.

This is a time in history when it's best to endure the current shitstorm and keep faith that it won't last. America's ruling class is riddled with bad and stupid people who despise the lower classes, get rich by dealing with the nation's enemies while impoverishing their fellow citizens, and send young men into battle for a purpose ill defined, with rules of engagement that ensure the war can't be won, leaving those who fight it humiliated. Until better and wiser people wrench the country off the road to ruin, Sam Crockett faces the future with hope and gratitude, reminding himself each morning and evening that his life is short and passes like a shadow.

Eighteen years earlier, the fortuneteller had said he would endure a period of much suffering and sorrow. How right she was. She'd also said beyond that valley of misery, he would find greater happiness than he'd known before. Maybe he would. At the moment, if life gets no better than it is, that will be good enough.

Pale-gray light shoals against the dragon spine of the eastern mountains as he turns right off the county road and heads uphill. The trees shouldering the unpaved driveway recede to the left and right, encircling a large meadow, toward the back of which stands a single-story building with lights in its windows.

For some reason, though there is neither a steeple nor stained glass, the house reminds him of a church. He takes that impression seriously. He thinks it possible that ceremonies of innocence, the humble routines and kind sharing of daily existence that give life meaning, when performed often and for long enough, can confer on a house a hallowed quality. He's known such homes; he has known their opposite, where human depravity has so soiled a structure that an aura of evil shadows every room even when all the lights are lit.

Kitted for the mountains, four dark figures wait on the porch and steps. The house door is wide open behind them, as if they are fresh from some obscene violation of the home's most sacred spaces. The tableau they present chills Sam. He intuits that this search is different from all others to which Galen Vector has summoned him.

Two SUVs are parked in the front yard. He angles his Lincoln Navigator to a stop beside them.

By the time he steps to the back of the vehicle, carrying the master leash, the four men have descended from the porch and joined him. Sam knows Vector well enough to despise him, Trott well enough to be disgusted by him, and the stone-faced brothers only enough to wonder what creature birthed and raised them.

Vector seldom goes on these searches, but he is fully outfitted for this one. He has a cocked-gun quality about him, as though some offense has enraged him and he is hell-bent on retribution. As Sam opens the liftgate and calls forth Sherlock and Whimsey and Marple, Vector says, "These your best dogs? I said to bring your best."

"You know them, what they can do," says Sam. "There aren't any better. What's the hunt about?"

The dogs leap from the SUV and stand at attention. Panting with excitement, they look at the gathered men, the meadow, the house.

The master leash ends in a stainless-steel ring to which three subsidiary leashes are linked by rings of their own. As Sam crouches to attach the first of the three to the harness that Sherlock wears, Vector says, "The woman who lives here alone—she's gone missing."

"A missing person case? That's for the sheriff."

"Not this time."

"Why not?"

"Better you don't know."

Having finished the third of three connections, Sam rises to his full height. "Better for who?"

"Better for you."

"I don't think so."

"I'm not paying you to think."

Although the sun has not yet appeared, a tide of morning light breaks over the eastern mountains, transforming the scattered clouds from white to coral pink.

Sam looks at each of the four men, color coming into their dark faces and borrowed light into their eyes. He's not in their club. To them, he's a tool, nothing more. He's always known that. Previously, he has thought he's such a valuable tool—he and the dogs—that there's no risk they will, for whatever reason, dispose of him.

Each has an AR-15 slung over one shoulder, but that's nothing new. Every time they go in search of a rumored meth lab or a weed farm, though they intend only to spot it for the sheriff, there is always a chance that the competitors they mean to have evicted will see them and respond. And the deeper they go into these mountains, the more likely they are to encounter cougars, not to mention bears so large and fierce that a can of spray repellant, which provides a sense of safety in a public campground, seems woefully inadequate out there.

Frank Trott takes it upon himself to explain the stakes. "Who the bitch is and what all she done don't make no difference to you. But she maybe knows somethin' makes a damn big difference to Mr. Terrence Boschvark. Even a freakin' recluse like you gotta know that name."

The dogs are whining softly, eager to begin.

Sam says, "She ‘maybe knows something.' What if she does? What happens then?"

"Ain't nobody can't be bought," Trott says. "No matter how righteous Vida thinks she is, there's a price she'll take, most 'specially if the cost for not takin' it scares the piss outta her."

"And if this Vida says she doesn't know anything? Will you believe her? How can you be sure she's telling the truth?"

Taking off his sunglasses, revealing eyes the color of brandy, Galen Vector says, "Sam, I like to think of you as a friend of the family. In a time of trouble, a friend of the family wants to help any way he can. He doesn't want to engage in a damn debate. Those dogs know how it is. Those fine dogs are ready to run. You need to be no less ready than they are. There's no other way you can be. The war that chewed you up and spit you out and the war here and now—they're the same, just this one's not conducted with as much noise. We find her, there'll be a fat reward on top of your hourly charge, say fifty thousand."

Sam's been told he's expendable if he isn't buyable. Because he isn't done with life yet and he has an obligation to his dogs, he buckles. "Well now, that makes all the difference." Although he has no choice, he feels as if a small light inside of him has gone out. It's not the first to have been extinguished, but maybe there aren't a lot more of them still glowing.

Trott produces a pair of women's panties. "Found these pretties in her launder basket. I suspect them hounds of yours gonna take her scent. For damn sure, I ain't smelled nothin' so good in years."

Monger and Rackman make a chortling noise like a sound they heard in a zoo and imitate as though it's a natural human reaction.

The dogs are not affronted by being offered the woman's panties instead of a blouse or a scarf, and though Sam is offended on their behalf, he doesn't give voice to his irritation. The dogs possess more dignity than these four men. Sam knows that to be true, even though Vector and his companions don't, and knowing it is enough for him to accept the insult in silence. The dogs know it, too.

Ears pricked and bodies tensed, Sherlock and Whimsey and Marple gaze up at Sam expectantly. They have the scent. They know the task. When they launch, one will occasionally be distracted to the length of its leash by a false or more interesting scent, but never three at the same time; the other two will draw the stray back onto the true trail, and their feverish enthusiasm will encourage one another into a heroic search effort.

At times during the hunt, Sam will be hard-pressed to keep pace with the dogs and will rein them in, much to their consternation. He can't be burdened with a backpack and remain in adequate control of the shepherds. Vector's crew carry water for the animals and their master, as well as for themselves and Vector. Sam has only Ziploc bags filled with chunks of jerky, distributed among his many pockets, to serve as encouragements and rewards for the dogs.

As the crown of the sun rises above the eastern crests, color spreads across the sky. Darkness retreats from meadow into forest.

With the end loop around his wrist and the master leash wound twice through the palm of his hand, Sam rewards the dogs with the word they desire. "Find."

They're off. The woman's scent is everywhere, and initially the shepherds reel in concert back and forth across the yard, even into the taller grass of the meadow. Their sense of smell is thousands of times greater than Sam's, nuanced beyond human comprehension. From all the spoor laid down since the last rain, they soon finesse that which is most recent, and Sam is running with them toward the trees behind the house, toward the foothills and the mountains beyond.

The dogs neither bark nor howl, lest they alert the quarry that an urgent pursuit is underway. With restraint that's hard-learned for such ebullient and expressive creatures, they limit themselves to soft whines and whimpers of excitement, panting and snuffling as they lead Sam and the others to a break in the forest undergrowth and onto a twisting trail that deer pioneered and have maintained perhaps for centuries.

In the cool, crisp air, songbirds wake and warble. Ribbons of low mist spool among the trees, beading ferns, silvering moss, while the undergrowth rustles with life unseen. Thick columns of darkness stand everywhere, seeming to possess true substance, though as the sun ascends through the morning, most of the shadows will melt away.

Sam has always been comfortable in unpeopled woods, where there is no one to see him for the first time and gape at his ravaged face and press him with foolish questions. On this occasion, however, the forest seems fateful, as though one of the shadows will shape itself into a cloaked and spectral form, stepping forward to settle the debt it had meant to collect in Afghanistan.