Ginny let her babble a little longer, until the words started to dry up, and the shaking stopped. Shana was a mess, Parsifal cuddled on her lap despite the dirty looks the nurses kept throwing her, but when Ginny suggested that she go home, Shana refused. “I told you I’d give him a place to stay, and he needs it even more now, right? He saved my life, Ginny, getting me out of there.”
Ginny decided not to point out that Shana wouldn’t have been in danger if she hadn’t been talked into giving Deke a place to stay. Instead, she patted her on the shoulder, made sure she had enough coffee, and went to talk to someone in charge, who directed her to where Deke was being examined.
By the time she found him, he’d been put in a corner of the ER, drapes pulled around him to give the illusion of privacy, and the doctor was long gone. She pulled the drape closed behind her and went to his bedside. “Hey.”
“Hospital?” He didn’t even open his eyes. She guessed that the sounds and smells were enough to clue him in.
“Yeah. What do you remember?”
“Fire. House.” His voice was scratchy, like he’d been shouting. Smoke inhalation, she guessed. “How bad?”
“I don’t know.” She hadn’t bothered asking. “But probably bad enough that even when we solve this, you’re not going to be living there again any time soon.” She paused. “I’m sorry.” He might not have had a lot, but everything he’d had was probably now either burnt, or sodden from the firefighters’ hoses. She should call Tonica, let him know everyone was okay, have him maybe check and see if anything could be salvaged. He had to have at least one friend in the fire department, right? She tried to remember if any of the regulars at Mary’s had fire department patches on their jackets, but her brain—usually good with that sort of thing—drew a blank.
“Your friend, what’s-’er-name, Shana?” Deke asked, bringing her attention back to the moment at hand.
“She’s okay. She’s in the waiting room. Won’t leave without you. We’re just waiting for them to release you.” Personally, she thought he should stay longer, but doubted he would agree. He probably didn’t have the money for a hospital stay, anyway.
His eyes opened then, but he just stared at the ceiling. “And the dog?”
“Parsifal’s okay, too. You guys are lucky the handyman was there; he called the fire department right away.”
“Handyman?” He turned his head to look at her then. They must have washed his face when he was admitted. There was a bad bruise forming over one cheekbone, but otherwise he looked like he’d come straight from the shower, his sparse gray hair slicked back against his scalp, his eyes wide and the pupils overly large.
“Yeah, Shana said that’s who dragged you away from the fire and called the fire department. The landlord had told him the place would be empty, so he went over to make sure everything was secure, and… well, he saw the fire start.” Ginny hesitated. “How did the fire start, Deke?”
“I didn’t do it.”
Ginny had known that would be his first reaction: when something went wrong, he immediately assumed everyone would blame him.
“I know,” she said. She didn’t know any such thing, but Shana would have said something if she’d seen Deke light a match, right? And a house fire would need more than a match; it would need fuel, at least a can of accelerant, based on what she’d seen on television. “But you had to have seen something, heard something?”
“Stop badgering him, blondie.” Seth’s growl came from behind her, but he moved quickly to stand between her and the bed, as though he was protecting Deke from her. “You done enough. Or rather you ain’t done enough.”
“What?” Their usual antagonistic relationship, muted once Seth had asked for help, flared back at the hated nickname, much less the way he was talking to her. “How—”
“He near got killed!”
She could feel herself starting to splutter. “Are you blaming me for this? For the fact that his house blew up? Seriously?” She managed to keep her voice down, remembering where they were, but the urge to punch him in the nose was near irresistible.
“We just went back to get some things,” Deke said, lifting a hand enough to grab at Seth’s arm. “Wasn’t her fault any more’n it was yours. It was my fault, for being dumb enough to say anything.”
“Deke.” Seth looked at Deke’s hand on his arm, and then sighed, all the bluster sliding out of him. “Do you know what happened? Do you know who set the fire?”
Deke closed his eyes again, turning his head away. “No. Don’t matter. House is gone, they done with me. I want to go now. Can we go?”
“Yeah.” Ginny wanted to know what Deke knew, or thought he knew, but there was something so… defeated about the older man, she couldn’t bring herself to push. And she wasn’t sure Seth would let her, anyway. The sooner she got them somewhere safe, where they could figure this out without snarling at each other, the better. “Let me go find a nurse, and we can get you checked out.”
The call had come in around seven, the not-a-cell-phone tone of the bar’s landline unusual enough that everyone at the bar stopped and looked at it. Stacy had answered, and yelled for Seth. Seth had listened for a couple of minutes and then gone pale, muttering something about needing to go, an emergency. And then he’d said the words that made Teddy’s blood cool with fear: “That damned idiot Deke.”
He’d gotten a text from Ginny about half an hour later, and been utterly unsurprised to hear that whatever had happened had involved her friend, too. That was just how their luck went. Ginny was en route to the hospital, and would let him know what was going on once she knew.
And that had been the last he’d heard.
Not that he was stressing about it. They were all big kids and could handle themselves in an emergency and he’d stopped riding in to solve everyone’s problems years ago.
And none of that had any bearing on why he took a break halfway through the night, went outside, and called his cousin.
He got her voice mail. Of course.
“It’s Theo. My schedule’s kind of crazy, but if we can schedule a group Skype one afternoon before five p.m., I’ll do my best to make it.”
He looked at the front of the bar, the warm lights spilling out through the front window, noise rushing out every time someone opened the door, and shook his head. He’d spent the past decade running away from responsibility. Looked like it had finally caught up to him.
Mary’s closed at 2 a.m. on Sundays, officially. One of the bonuses of being manager, though, was deciding when you really closed. Teddy had made it an article of faith that anyone wandering into a bar after 1 a.m. was not the kind of patron you wanted to have, and if the bar happened to empty out before one, well, he had no guilt at all about turning off the lights and closing up shop. Tonight had been one of those nights: busy as hell until around midnight, and then dead, as everyone suddenly realized they had to go to work the next morning.
“And that’s all she wrote, folks,” he said, stretching his arms over his head and feeling things crack pleasantly along his spine. “We are done.”
“You are the bestest boss ever,” Stacy said. “No matter what I say.”
Teddy was already closing out the registers. “Yeah, I’ll remind you about that next time you’re bitching about the work schedule.”
It was their usual banter, undercut by the worry neither of them was talking about. They hadn’t gotten any updates, and calling Ginny’s cell phone had only gotten her voice mail.
He left Stacy to the cleanup, focusing his attention on balancing the till. Patrick went over the week’s receipts every Monday, but the neater he left things, the fewer headaches everyone had.
They’d settled into a quiet routine, the clink of bottles and the swing and thud of the fire door as Stacy took the recycling to the bins out back mingling with the shuffle and thwack of bills being bound together. He did a f
inal count, and then put the money into the safe.
And only then did he let the worry creep from the back of his brain to the front. He didn’t want to call again, assuming that whatever was going on took all their attention, but the moment he got Stacy into her car and on her way home, he was going to.
When his cell phone rang at the stroke of 1 a.m., he grabbed it like it was a lifeline. “Mallard. Is everything okay?”
If it hadn’t been she would have called. That was Mallard all the way through: if there’s trouble you know about it. Her silence meant that everything was under control. He’d clung to that thought all night, but up until now he hadn’t realized that he didn’t believe a word of it.
“Yeah.” Her voice came through, exhausted but clear. He could almost see her, leaning against the backseat of a cab, her eyes half closed and the look on her face she got when she was holding back a yawn because someone—probably her mother—had told her once that yawning was impolite, and she couldn’t quite break herself of the habit. “Yeah. Shana is okay, a couple of scratches. Deke got treated for being banged up—the blast threw him back and he must have landed on a rock or something—plus they both had some smoke inhalation, but they’re fine. So’s Parsifal.”
He hadn’t even thought about the dog. “What the hell happened?”
“House fire. Started while they were in it, just managed to get out. And no, I don’t know what or how. I didn’t really think it was time to be interrogating the firefighters, okay?”
“A fire?” His mind flitted around half a dozen possibilities, and settled on one. “You think it was arson?”
“Maybe. Probably. It would… I don’t know. Nobody knows. I’m exhausted and I just want to go home and sleep for about six hours, okay? I ended up taking Parsifal back with me. He was all sorts of traumatized by the noise and all the people, and Shana really wasn’t up to dealing with them both.”
He thought about teasing her about her one-dog-only stance, but decided it was too late, and they were both too tired. Tomorrow, though. Definitely tomorrow.
“Oh,” she added, “and Seth fired us.”
“Seth can’t fire us,” he said automatically. “He hasn’t even paid us.”
“Huh.”
Proof that she was exhausted: that’s the sort of thing Gin Mallard always thought of.
“Where’s Deke? Does Seth—”
“Seth got sent home when he growled at a nurse. Shana’s car is being held as part of the scene, don’t ask me why, so Deke and Shana are on their way to the ferry terminal, courtesy of Seattle’s finest and a squad car that probably smells of vomit. Everyone’s accounted for, poppa bear.”
He ignored the slam, and bit down the other questions he had: she didn’t know; if she did she’d be telling him. Everyone was safe, that was the thing to focus on right now. “How are you getting home?” Please, God, don’t let her be taking mass transit at this hour.
“Car service. Almost there.”
“Good. Sleep, Mallard. This will make sense in the morning.”
“It better,” she said sleepily, her voice still managing to be tart. “Because right now it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
10
The alarm clock went off half an hour early. That had been intentional: Ginny had thought an extra thirty minutes might give her a leg up. What it gave her was the desire to pull her pillow and the covers over her head and sleep for another hour.
Georgie, obviously convinced that she had overslept and therefore failed her morning responsibilities, put her paws up on the side of the bed and burrowed her own wrinkled snout under the pillow, attacking Ginny’s face with more than the usual enthusiasm, trying to power-wash her owner into wakefulness.
“Oh God, Georgie, stop.” Ginny wiped her arm across her face, both to ward off Georgie’s affection and to remove some of the inevitable slobber.
The shar-pei dropped back to the floor and sat on her haunches, a look of expectation clear on her face. “Time to get up, Mom!” she seemed to be saying. “The buzzing thing said so!”
Ginny groaned, letting everything that had happened yesterday drop back into her head, then sat up, turning off the alarm clock and reaching for the glass of water by her bedside. She blinked the sleep away from her eyes, and saw Parsifal on the doggy bed in the corner, staring at her with hopeful eyes and a quivering backside. Which, on a puppy that small, meant pretty much all of him was quivering.
No matter the crisis, a dog’s bladder took priority. Well, almost-first.
“Let me start the coffee first,” she told them. “Then walkies. Then… everything else.”
The sun was about as awake as she was, the sky outside her windows still a dark blue as the light slowly reached the western side of the city. The dogs seemed content to wait at her feet, so she quickly checked her phone as the coffeemaker worked its magic. Other than a text from Shana saying that they’d made it to her house safely, there were no new messages. Ginny decided to take that as a good sign, not a bad one.
She checked the wee pad she’d put down the night before, knowing that Parsifal’s bladder control might not be able to last that long, but it looked unmarked. She probably should check the doggy bed and make sure he hadn’t done anything objectionable to it overnight.
That could wait, though. She poured herself a cup of coffee and felt her brain wake up a little with the first sip, then set the cup down, and told Georgie, “Leash, sweetie. Go get your leash.”
She’d not gotten the new leash from Shana, in all the chaos of last night. Parsifal made do with one of Georgie’s old leashes; despite being ragged, it would hold against the puppy’s weight. He clearly didn’t like it, but once he figured out that they were all going outside, he submitted without further wiggling.
Normally this would be a quick walk—in her neighborhood, the other dog owners were mostly office workers who didn’t have time to chat in the morning, not the way they would in the evening—but Parsifal walked slowly, and wanted to smell everything.
Not that slow and early was all bad, since the earlier hour meant that she’d have the chance to see different dogs—and different owners—from the usual. Ginny wasn’t, by her own admission, a networking monster; she was busy enough with the clients she had, and her reputation among satisfied clients was always her best PR, but in one of their discussions about work, Rob had reminded her that you couldn’t ever rest on your laurels, not if you wanted to look more than a year down the road. So, if she happened to have a few of her business cards in her pocket, along with the dog treats and poo bags… well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? You never knew when your next client might show up.
At five thirty in the morning, though, the neighborhood was weirdly quiet. They’d made it around the corner before encountering another dog and owner. Parsifal cowered a little behind Georgie’s legs, while the shar-pei immediately went nose-to-nose with the four-legged stranger.
“Okay, that is the silliest puppy I’ve seen in a while,” the owner said, laughing at Parsifal. “But a handsome shar-pei, there.”
“Isn’t she, though?” Ginny said. “And Parsi’s… well, he’s never going to win any beauty contests, no, any more than yours will.”
The man laughed, not at all offended. “Yeah, Cassie’s not what you’d call pretty. But I love her, anyway.” The dog, an unholy mix of several somethings, with a rough black coat and bullet-shaped head over oversized legs, looked up at her owner as though she knew she was being discussed. “And she looks hard-core tough enough that I can leave her tied up outside the store or the library and not worry that someone’s going to steal her away. The number of missing-dog signs I’ve seen lately, it’s enough to make you want to buy one of those guaranteed bike locks for the leash, you know?”
“Yeah. I guess.” Ginny studied Georgie, who was now sniffing at the other dog’s hindquarters with great di
gnity. She’d seen the signs, but hadn’t paid much attention to them. In light of what she’d learned, recently, that was a mistake. “I leave Georgie outside of Mary’s, I never thought…”
“Downtown’s probably safe enough, and shar-peis probably aren’t on the shopping list—too large, and they can lay down a fierce bite, I bet. But be careful. You don’t want her ending up in a lab somewhere, and someone could scoop that puppy up and walk away with him in their pocket.”
He sounded serious enough to take seriously. Ginny bit her lip. “No. You’re right.” She paused, then knelt to offer her hand, palm down, for Cassie to sniff. “I had always thought that was urban legend, labs that don’t ask questions about where their test animals come from. Like dogs being stolen for fights, that kind of thing.”
“If there’s a crappy thing humanity can do to animals, assume someone’s doing it,” Cassie’s owner said.
Despite the topic, Ginny almost smiled. “That sounds like the voice of experience. You a cop?”
He laughed, gently roughhousing Cassie’s ears. “That obvious, huh? Retired, Chicago. Came out here a few years ago, exchanging the cold for the damp. But the instincts die hard, if they die at all.”
The dogs had finished their social exchanges and were clearly interested in moving on. Ginny raised a hand in farewell and let Georgie pull her on to the next interesting smell, Parsifal now looking back with longing, once the threat of a stranger was gone.
Her smile faded. “He’s probably exaggerating,” she said. “At least a little bit. Someone at the shelter would have mentioned something like that, if it was a serious problem, right? Or at the vet’s office when we brought you in, right, Parsi?”
The dogs, intent on smelling the urine puddle another dog had left behind, didn’t comment.
Still. She hadn’t been down to the shelter in a while, and the vet’s office was in a different neighborhood. Either way, the topic was too close to the case at hand for her to ignore, not when it fell into her lap like that. An uptick in stolen dogs, puppies abandoned in a basement—all right, one puppy, and other dogs presumably missing… Had Parsifal been stolen from someone? Was there a little girl or boy out there missing their puppy?
L.A. Kornetsky - Gin & Tonic 03 - Doghouse Page 14