Mercy Dogs

by Tyler Dilts

  You felt bad, told her not to worry about knocking no matter what time it was. The two of you chatted for a few minutes, then the question.

  “What happened when you got hurt?”

  “Rob didn’t tell you?”

  “Only that you got shot and retired early.” She can see the weight of it on you and it looks like she’s sorry she’s asked. “It’s okay. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “No, it’s all right.” You smile at her, but it feels awkward. Still, though, you want to answer. “I figured you would have Googled it.”

  “I thought about it, but that seemed kind of intrusive.”

  You nod, a little surprised. “I got shot in the head.”

  “Oh my god.”

  You raise your finger to the little scar on your cheek. “It went in the back, came out here.”

  “That’s from a bullet?”

  You nod.

  “It’s so small.”

  You turn your head and tap your finger on the indentation in the back of your skull. “Feel this.”

  She gently rubs her fingertips over it. Her eyes widen but she doesn’t say anything. You try to remember the last time anybody who wasn’t a doctor touched you like that and draw a blank.

  “Does it still hurt?”

  “Not the scars so much, but lots of other stuff hurts.”

  “I thought bullets made a small hole where they go in and a big one where they come out.”

  “Sometimes they do. Sometimes not.”

  “How long did it take you to get better?”

  “I spent two years learning to walk and talk again.”

  “But you’re okay now?”

  “Not really, but I can fake it well enough that most people can’t tell.” You laugh softly. She doesn’t.

  “Is that enough?” The question is full of both sadness and curiosity.

  You shake your head. “No, but I’m still working on it.”

  You try to read her face. She’s been focused on you, but just for a moment you can see that she’s thinking about something else, too. You want to ask what it is, but you don’t want to pry. If she wants to tell you, she will.

  “Do you ever just want to give up?” she asks. There’s more than curiosity in her voice now, and you can see the weight she’s carrying, how much she needs to let go of it.

  “Every day.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “My dad needs me.” It’s not the answer she’s hoping for. She tries to hide her disappointment but you can still see it. You want to tell her something else, something that will help her, but you’ve got nothing.

  “Thanks, Ben,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “Letting me in.”

  Peter was still waiting outside the bathroom when Ben finally felt composed enough to come out.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m having kind of a bad day, Dad.”

  “Hurting?”

  Ben nodded. He was hurting, but not really in the way his father thought. There was a headache, but most of the pain wasn’t physical. Seeing the callout at the Marriott had rattled him badly. It was as if the walls of every carefully constructed and managed compartment in his psyche had been shredded, and everything he’d been so carefully containing had spilled out and was roiling in an uncontrollable turbulence. He didn’t feel like he could even get a hold on anything, let alone begin the arduous task of getting everything he’d been so carefully containing—life before, the trauma, the recovery, his dad, Grace, the mess of his life—back under control and compartmentalized again. But he needed to keep his father from seeing any of it. There was no way he’d be able to maintain even a semblance of control if his father started spiraling, too.

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “My head is really bad.”

  “Oh, no. Did you get some medicine?”

  “I did, yes.” Three lorazepam and two Advil. The PTSD/TBI full house. Hopefully, he’d feel them start to kick in soon. He would have taken four of the antianxiety pills instead of three, but even though they’d surely provide relief, he probably wouldn’t be able to stay awake.

  “You should lie down.”

  Peter was right. He should. “I will. I just need to get you something to eat first.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m not hungry. You rest.”

  “I’m going to fix you something just in case.”

  Peter followed Ben into the kitchen. Ben poured him a cup of coffee and Boost and turned to put it on the counter. He stopped when he saw the cup he’d left before going to the Marriott. The paper towel was still on top of it. That was when he realized it had been less than an hour since he left.

  Peter opened the refrigerator and found a Hershey’s bar. He held it up so Ben could see. “I’m okay. I have food.”

  “You sure you don’t want some yogurt or some more oatmeal?”

  “No, this is good.”

  Ben acquiesced and went into his bedroom. He took off his shoes, lay down on top of his bedspread, and stared at the ceiling. The antianxiety meds were starting to kick in.

  Before he had a chance to think about anything, though, Peter knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open. In his hands he held his favorite blanket, the one his wife had crocheted twenty years ago. He spread it over Ben, leaned over, kissed him on the forehead, and said, “Rest.”

  Not long after Peter closed the door softly behind him, Ben rolled over on his side, clutched his mother’s blanket to his chest, and began to weep.

  SIXTEEN

  It turned out that even three lorazepam were enough to put him to sleep. He woke an hour and a half later, angry that he hadn’t been able to keep himself awake. The mild headache he’d had earlier had developed into the full-blown ice-pick-through-the-forehead pain he used to feel when the cluster headaches were at their worst, during the early days of his rehabilitation. He went into the bathroom and swallowed two more Advil.

  The first thing he did when he came out was to check his burner for word from Rob. Then his regular phone for a text or voicemail from Jennifer or Becerra. There wasn’t anything from anyone.

  Was it possible that the death at the Marriott had nothing to do with Rob? Yes, but Ben didn’t think it was remotely likely. That would be way too much of a coincidence. Especially considering that when he was there, someone had entered Rob’s room prepared for violence. He wondered if it might have been the stranger who’d been killed. Maybe he died on the floor and they had only just discovered the body. That didn’t seem to fit, though. If the guy wasn’t able to get away, Rob would have found him. And even if Rob hadn’t come back to the room, housekeeping would have gone in to clean. The only way Ben could figure that it could have been the stranger was if someone had found him, left him there, and then hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door. That was a possibility, but it didn’t seem likely.

  Ben was afraid to think about what he believed was the most probable situation. That when he’d been in Rob’s room, the stranger had in fact come to kill Rob, and that either he or someone else had come back and completed the job.

  It was the mobile-command unit that concerned Ben more than anything else. A hotel room makes for a very contained and controllable crime scene. The trailers were usually only brought in for large or complex scenes that would require a significant amount of time and manpower to fully process. Or for multiple murders. Or if the victim was of great importance or someone whose death would be particularly interesting to the press.

  Like an out-of-town detective working a case in Long Beach.

  What if Rob really was dead?

  Ben thought about calling Jennifer and telling her everything he’d found out since the last time they talked. She’d be angry with him. But if there was a murder in Room 406, they would be certain to place him at the scene. If by some miracle he had managed to get out of the room without leaving any physical evidence of his presence, they were sure to see him on the hotel’s security recordings. They would definitely
have him in the lobby and the elevators, and probably even going into and out of the room.

  He should call her and try to get out in front of it. That was surely the wisest course of action.

  There was just one thing he needed to do first.

  Amy was probably at work, so he thought about a text message, but decided the urgency of the situation warranted an actual call. He tapped his thumb on her name in the contacts on his phone and waited to connect. After the third ring, he got her outgoing voicemail message. He paused long enough for a single deep breath, then said, “Hello, Amy. This—this is Ben Shepard. Quick question: Did Grace ever mention anyone named Ky . . . Kyle? His name came up in the investigation and I need to get a hold of him as soon as I can. Thanks.” On top of the stutter, he caught himself slurring the last few s sounds, but hoped she wouldn’t notice.

  Headache. Slurred speech. Ben knew he should be keeping track of the symptoms. But he didn’t want to deal with the notebook now. There was too much going on, too much to figure out before he went to Jennifer. Or before someone knocked on the front door.

  Ben spent twenty minutes in the shower with his head under the hot water. By the time he got out, the heat and the extra Advil had cut the pain in his head by about half. While he was in there, he figured out how he might be able to find out what happened at the hotel. It would be a bad idea to contact anyone at the department. Just one more thing that could possibly connect him to the crime scene. But he was certain that the media would already be paying attention. There was a columnist at the Press-Telegram he used to know pretty well when he was still working. Ben had bumped into him at CVS a few weeks earlier and they’d agreed they should get together for lunch sometime soon. Of course, Ben had never followed through, but it was a good excuse to reach out.

  He went back into the office and sat down in front of the computer. A phone call would have been more expedient, but he didn’t think he could maintain a tone that sounded casual enough. And he was pretty sure he’d never sent a text message to him before and that might seem odd. It would have to be an email.

  Hey Tim,

  Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to you. I’d love to get that lunch we talked about a few weeks ago if you’re still up for it. What’s your schedule like? I’m pretty wide open so let me know what works for you.

  BTW, I just drove past the airport Marriott. A big crime scene there. From the looks of it, somebody got killed. Any idea what happened?

  Best,

  Ben Shepard

  He hit “Send,” hoping it wouldn’t take too long for an answer. Newspaper guys had to be punctual with email replies, right?

  The response to the phone call came first. Ben saw the name on the screen and answered right away. “Amy,” he said. “Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.”

  “I’m on my break at work.”

  “I won’t keep you, then. Did Grace ever mention someone named Kyle?”

  “Yeah, one time. It didn’t seem like anything, though. I’d completely forgotten about it until your message.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “We were at her place. Watching Netflix. I think it was Master of None? She paused it because she had to go to the bathroom. While she was in there, her phone rang. I looked at it and took it over to the door in case she wanted to answer, you know? So I knock on the door and tell her someone named Kyle is calling and do you want to take it? She says to let it go to voicemail. When she comes out I ask her who Kyle is. ‘Just a guy I know,’ she says. ‘From where,’ I ask. She laughs and says, ‘San Pedro.’ She knew it wasn’t what I meant. Before I could push her for more, she unpaused the show and that was pretty much it.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone else about that?”

  She thought for a moment. “No one.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I’d forgotten all about it until you asked.”

  “Did she ever mention him again?”

  “No. I thought about asking her after we were done with the show, but I forgot and that was pretty much it.”

  “And no last name?”

  “It just said Kyle on the phone, and she never said it.”

  “Thanks, Amy,” Ben said. “That’s a big help.”

  “It is? Good. Have you found anything else out?”

  “A few things.” He filled his voice with as much feigned optimism as he could. “I’m getting closer.”

  “You’ll tell me, right? When you find her?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Ben wished he could get a look at her phone records. He wondered if Becerra had tracked Kyle down. Probably not. In all likelihood, he’d already moved on to his next case. Ben wouldn’t blame him if he had. He knew the job. You worked a case as long as you had leads to pursue, and when they dried up, you put it aside and worked something else until you got another break. And if another break never came along, well, there was no shortage of new cases.

  He’d need more to find Kyle than knowing he was from San Pedro, if he even really was. Who could know what Grace might have meant when she said that? Maybe she met him there, or maybe he worked there, or grew up there. Maybe. He needed more to go on, and he didn’t know where to find it. What really mattered, though, was that Ben was confident that he was the only one who knew about Kyle and the San Pedro connection.

  Ben wasn’t sure what else to do at that point, so he sat with Peter in the living room and watched a movie he’d never heard of, with Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton playing an old married couple who had to move out of the New York apartment they’d shared for decades. It wasn’t a great movie, but the actors were appealing, and the fear it instilled in him of ever having to move out of the house was enough distraction to push everything he’d been thinking to the side for a little while.

  By dinnertime, the LBPD still hadn’t knocked on the front door, so Ben was allowing himself a sliver of hope that he’d been wrong about what he had seen at the hotel that morning. His headache was gone and his anxiety had normalized. He couldn’t deny the fact that he was experiencing some disconcerting symptoms. All the stress of the last several days was taking a toll. It was possible, he thought, that he was making too much of what he had witnessed. The Marriott was a big hotel. They had hundreds of rooms, conferences, meetings, all kinds of events. Thousands of people must go in and out every day. To think that the police response he had seen there this morning was connected to him might very well be grandiose thinking, even paranoia.

  Ben was feeling better, carefully recompartmentalizing everything, just as Emma had taught him to do in their sessions. The thing she always came back to with him was the idea of managing his thoughts and feelings the same way he used to manage a case. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t personalize. Don’t rush to action. Be careful with your instincts—trust them, but only act on them after significant analysis. Step back. Strive for objectivity. Consider other perspectives. And breathe. Always breathe.

  He felt a kind of calmness he wouldn’t have believed possible only a few hours ago. Then he sat down at the desk in the office and checked his email.

  Ben,

  Happy to get lunch. Maybe Monday or Tuesday next week? Just tell me where.

  As for the hotel, you were right. There was a homicide. A cop from San Bernardino. Don’t have much more, but there are rumors he used to work for LBPD. No ID yet. Hope he wasn’t someone you knew.

  Tim

  When Ben read the email, the piercing pain behind his eyes exploded and the room began to spin. He rolled the chair back away from the desk and leaned forward, putting his head between his knees. For a few seconds it worked and the spinning slowed. It seemed safe to sit up again. But as soon as he began to move, something in his stomach let go and he vomited on his feet.

  SEVENTEEN

  The rain came again in the middle of the night. Ben was awake in bed. He had nodded off two or three times, but the sleep never took hold, and after half an hour or so, he found himself each
time staring at the ceiling again. He got up before dawn and sat at the table in the dining room, watching through the patio door as the darkness gradually lifted and the rain continued to fall.

  The coffee maker had just started dripping and he was filling the kettle to boil water for Peter’s oatmeal when he heard them.

  Nobody knocks on a door like a cop.

  Whoever it was, though, either wasn’t very sharp or hadn’t done their homework. You knock on a door at seven thirty in the morning when you want to catch someone to question them before they go to work. It’s a courtesy so you don’t have to interrupt them at their job. But if you know you’re going to arrest them, you go earlier, before the sun comes up, so you get them while they’re still sleeping. Anybody who knew him or who had been watching should have known he’d be at home most of the day with his father, and rousting him early for an interview wouldn’t be a courtesy at all, just an annoyance that would complicate the situation and make him less forthcoming and willing to talk. It didn’t make any sense. Was somebody trying to rattle him?

  It wasn’t Long Beach at the door—they would have known better—so he was glad he’d already put on his shoes.

  Ben grabbed his phone, activated the voice-recorder app, and slipped it in the pocket of his T-shirt. With his left foot planted firmly behind the door, he put his hand on the knob and opened it six inches, bracing it with his shoulder. Whoever was on the other side might still be able to get in, but they’d have to be willing to knock him over to do it.

  “Yeah?” Ben said.

  “Mr. Shepard?” The cop on the other side was tall, with dark hair and a good suit to go along with a deputy-sheriff’s badge. There was a younger, blonder cop in a cheaper suit behind him. “I’m Matthew Lopez, from the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department. We need to ask you a few questions.” He didn’t introduce the other man. You always introduce your partner if you want a comfortable witness. You don’t if you want to play alpha-dog intimidation games.

  “About what?”

  “We’re following up on a case Rob Kessler was working on.” Lopez smiled amiably, but Ben could see something darker behind his eyes. “Could we come inside? It’s coming down pretty hard out here.”