“That’s the only thing holding you back from the Bigotry Bandwagon?” I asked, and Emma Jan laughed.
“It’s not our fault if the Indians couldn’t hold on to their country,” Behrman said. Instead of sounding defensive or mad, he sounded proud. “That’s how we justified throwing England out of our business during the Revolutionary War, and nobody’s running around saying we committed genocide all over the most powerful country in the world at that time. We claimed our territory and we defended it. ’Zactly the same thing.”
“Hmmmm.” George was trying to pace. Tough work in this tiny living room. “Let’s see. Let’s take a look at that. Patriots chafing under a tyrant’s rule rising up to take control of their destiny. And then there’s deciding that blacks and Jews are inferior and they should all be dropped into the deep end of the ocean. Oh, sure. Exactly the same thing. The whole thing just smacks of patriotism. Yep.”
I watched carefully, but he was under control (for now). George had a thing about skinheads and gay bashers. No one knew why.
“So, do you want your friend to hear why your alibi sucked? Or should he leave?”
“You don’t tell anyone to leave in my own house,” Behrman warned.
“Trailer.”
“What?”
“Your own trailer. We don’t tell anyone to leave in your own trailer … yeah, you’re right. Doesn’t have the right ring to it. House it is.”
Behrman glared. “Anything you say to me you can say in front of Loun.”
“Oh, goody. Mr. Behrman, the movie theater you claimed as your alibi didn’t show that matinee … they had technical difficulties. That whole theater was shut down for the rest of the day.” George shook his head, then wagged his finger in front of him like a spinster scolding a school boy. “You’ve been baaaad.”
“Maybe I told you the wrong movie. Maybe I meant—”
“That’s a terrible idea, changing your story like that. It’s making all the red flags in my brain pop.”
“Oh, that’s bad,” I said to the men. “You don’t want to pop his flags.”
Loun and Behrman exchanged glances. “Maybe I should call a lawyer.”
“Awesome, Mr. Behrman! You’ve got no idea, man. That makes our day. Yaaaaay!”
“He’s right,” I said while George literally jumped up and down, clapping his hands together and yelling “yay, yay, yaaaay!” He looked and sounded like a demented cheerleader. One that would stick a knife in your ribs if his team lost. “It does.”
“Innocent people never want to talk to a lawyer. Yaaaaay!”
Emma Jan and I looked at each other and shrugged. We knew it was true. It had happened again and again in our careers.
Loun sighed and looked greatly put-upon. “Just tell ’em, Behrman. The Good Citizens weren’t doing anything against the law. We have the right to lawful assembly.”
Oh, fudge cakes. He was about to confess, but not to the JBJ murders. He was about to tell us he’d been at a white supremacist meeting. It explained his lie while being boring and sad at the same time.
“I had a meeting with my white brothers. Morale’s been low. We needed to be reminded not just howwcome we were there that night, but howwcome The Good Citizens got started in the first place. So we got together to talk about it, brother-to-brother.”
“Sounds cozy,” Emma Jan commented.
“And there are at least twenty people who can testify to that.”
George sighed. “That’s nice.”
He was sort of right. It was nice in that we’d never seriously considered Behrman a suspect, and it was good to get that confirmed. Still, it left us with zero leads.
“You, you’re the worst kind of race traitor,” Behrman told George.
“Reeeeeeally?”
“They can’t help being lazy,” he added, pointing to Emma Jan. “But you. You’re not just a race traitor, you work for the government. There’s not a man around, I don’t care if he’s a killer or a thief, none of them’s lower than you.”
“But I want to be with you!” George wiped away an imaginary tear. “And here I thought we were gonna be best friends and spend the day giving each other blow jobs.”
Gross! And Behrman looked like he was thinking the same thing, if the revulsion-induced twitching was any indication.
“You should be ashamed,” Loun said.
“Should be, but aren’t. Shame? Me? Ha! I never feel shame. For anything. Ask them…” Pointing at me. “… if you don’t believe me. And while we’re discussing shame, you skinhead troglodytes, you mentally deficient dumbasses—”
“Hey!” Both men pointed at their heads, and Loun added, “Do we look like skinheads to you?”
“You look like assholes to me.”
“Easy,” I muttered, in a voice low enough so only George could hear. “Don’t lose it. Their time will come.”
“Goddamned right about that, Cadence.” He turned back to the skinheads-who-weren’t-skinheads. “We’ll need allll those names to check your alibi.”
“I was there,” Loun said. “I can tell you right now, Brother Behrman was there, too. You don’t need to know anybody else.”
“Gosh, thanks, that’s super-helpful, Mr. Loun, and yet I don’t feel like taking the word of someone dumb enough to make character assumptions based on skin color.”
“I’m not running down your beliefs,” Loun replied with what I was annoyed to see was touching dignity. I liked my racist fartfaces incoherent and rage-ey. “I’d like the same courtesy from you.”
“A million-zillion pardons. Names. Now.”
Loun shot Behrman a black look, and the other man shrugged and shook his head. The situation they now faced was what he’d hoped to avoid with his lie: federal agents bugging his “brothers.”
So, we’d check the names and make sure Behrman was in no position to kill our last victim and then … and then it was back to the drawing board.
We could hear muffled whining from the other end of the trailer.
“Is that your dog?” Emma Jan asked. “I wondered why she wasn’t outside.”
“She’s sick. Vet said she has to stay inside for a couple days. Shut up back there!”
More whining.
“Shee-it. Be right back.” Behrman stomped through the living room and kitchen. “Shut up, Dawg!”
Loun rolled his eyes. “I don’t know why that man even has a dog. They’re not too fond of each other.”
Golly, who’da thought?
“We can—” I began, only to be interrupted by a thump, and then a loud, agonized yelp.
“Oh, man, he stomped that poor dog again.” Loun shook his head. “Toldja. I think Behrman’s more of a cat person. Did you know Hitler tested a cyanide pill on a dog before he decided to take one himself?”
He must have seen something on my face he didn’t like at all, because he took a big step backward and added, “Are you okay? You don’t look too good.”
chapter thirty-three
doggy!
Doggy doggy who’s got the doggy?
Stomp he likes to stomp he likes to see if he likes it see if he can make a noise like the dog see if he
is a dog he IS a dog he IS
does emma jan have a muffin for me this time the dog the doggie got the muffin
oh does that hurt does that feel like somebody stomped on your foot hard enough to break a couple of bones too bad so sad oh now who’s howling
Ha! Ha ha, Behrman, ha, the doggie has her day every doggie has her day
Ha! His head hurts
like a bus
The wheels on the bus
The wheels
Doggie you come with me doggie don’t be don’t be don’t be scared
Don’t! See?
I only hurt the ones I hate.
chapter thirty-four
I stretched, glad I’d splurged on the electric blanket. Forty-nine ninety-nine at Target, and worth every penny. It kept my side of the bed nice and …
Um
.
I didn’t have an electric blanket. At the time I’d thought fifty bucks was way too much to spend, so I never got the thing. So why was I…?
I opened my eyes. Curled up next to me was Behrman’s dog, Dawg.
Oh phooey fudge cakes on a toilet!
“What are you doing here?” I asked Dawg, horrified. She was alive, right? I hadn’t actually killed a dog and then stuck it in my bed, like the horse head from The Godfather, had I? Gross. Also very, very disturbing.
Dawg yawned but stayed pressed to my side. Gah, she needed a bath. Several, in fact.
“Better question,” I muttered aloud. “What am I doing here?” The last thing I remembered was hearing the dog crying in the back of the trailer, being angry and sad that someone could stomp his dog and not be ashamed to do worse.
I groped for my cell, which had been left on the end table beside my bed, along with my car keys and two Chicken McNugget cartons, both empty except for crumbs. (I hate Chicken McNuggets.) I pulled up my texts and, yep, there were a couple of new ones.
A. kidnapped the dog. E.J. and I finished Behrman interview; alibi checks out. Does your building even take dogs?
No.
Met A., which was weird. I think she likes dogs more than me. Also, B. and L. are in the hospital recovering from concussions. A. grabbed them both by the back of their necks and drove them, headfirst, into a wall. Hard. Don’t sweat it; they’re so humiliated by being taken down by a fed they don’t want to bring charges. Does your building even take dogs?
No!
And then a text from Michaela in her typical terse style:
Get back to the office ASAP.
“Oh, great,” I groaned. Dawg wasn’t especially concerned; she just snuggled deeper into my side. “Oh, that’s just flippin’ pancake great. And what am I supposed to do with you?” Take her to the pound? Do they even have a dog pound around here? And what if they wanted to execute her right away? Would they do it immediately, or give her, say, a three-day grace period?
Why did I not know these things? Oh, right … I was raised in a hospital full of crazy people. No dogs allowed. And occasionally, no sanity.
“The day has barely started and it can’t get any—” There was a firm knock on my door. “Drat shoot darnit!” What fresh heck was this?
I got up and Dawg jumped down right behind me. She followed me to the door. I peeked through the peep hole and was relieved to see it was … “Patrick!”
He stood in my doorway, khaki shorts (idiot … he couldn’t hold off frostbite forever) and a long-sleeved navy blue T-shirt. Bare feet (madness) and thick clunky sandals.
“So it’s true,” he said, grinning as he looked past me. “You got a dog.”
“I didn’t.” He stepped inside and I shut the door. “Adrienne kidnapped her.”
He squatted and put out a hand, but she whimpered and shied away. “It’s okay,” I told her. To Patrick: “Her owner was pretty abusive and his friend didn’t much care. I don’t think she likes adult males.”
“Who’d want to abuse a cutie like you?” he asked, inching forward. She submitted, trembling, and he gently stroked her silky black ears. “Tell me Adrienne did something memorably awful to him.”
“To them.”
“Oh?”
“Concussion.”
“Excellent.”
“I can’t take her back to her owner—”
“You’re her owner now.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Does your building even allow dogs?”
“No! It doesn’t!”
“I’m standing right here, babe, you don’t have to shriek. Guess you’d better move.”
“Well, great. Sure, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll indulge Adrienne’s latest tantrum and uproot my entire life.”
“What’s the dog’s name?”
“Dawg.”
“Oh.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and paced, channeling George. “Do you believe this? I can’t believe this. She’s never kidnapped someone’s pet before. Other people, sure, and she’s occasionally rescued abused kids after beating the bananas out of their abusers, but never a pet. And now I have to deal with it! She’s so thoughtless and destructive and completely self-absorbed. Why are you here?”
Patrick had been nodding sympathetically, so I think my abrupt question took him by surprise. “Uh … Adrienne called me. She said you needed a babysitter. I thought she meant you needed a babysitter. Or that she did. But I guess she meant Dawg does.”
I stared at him. Which got me nothing but a return stare. “She … called you?”
“Yeah.”
“To watch Dawg.”
“Yeah.”
I sighed. He put a hand on my shoulder, gently turned me, then started rubbing my shoulders. The muscles were so tight I could hear him grunt as he tried to loosen them. A chiropractor could make a fortune off me.
I closed my eyes and leaned back into his touch. “It occurs to me,” I said without opening them, “that I’ve done nothing but whine since you came over. Sorry.”
He laughed, then bent and kissed the back of my neck, then laughed again when I shivered. “You’re entitled, hon. If I had to put up with a tenth of the crap you do … I can’t even imagine it.”
“I’m really, really lucky you’re here. Not just here in my apartment cleaning up another of Adrienne’s messes. Here in my life. Our lives,” I corrected myself.
“When are you going to get it through your head?” Patrick turned me around, then bent and kissed me softly on the mouth. “I’m the lucky one.”
I stretched up and kissed him back. So he kissed me back more. Naturally, I reciprocated. Before I knew it we were both shirtless. “Aw, nuts,” I managed, clutching two handfuls of his hair. “Michaela.”
“Ooooh, here comes the dirty talk.” He’d been planting kisses along the left side of my neck, and his words were muffled. “Now call me Big Jim.”
“I have to go.” I managed to extricate myself. “Agh! Sorry. My boss really wants me to get back as soon as I can.”
“Kiss me quick!”
I did. Then I put my shirt back on. “I have no dog food and no idea what you should do if she needs to go outside.”
“We’ll muddle through.” This time, when he knelt by Dawg, she sat still for it. “She’s nice, huh? I’d think most dogs jerked out of their homes and kidnapped by a nutjob—sorry, honey, but there it is—would be a little more freaked out.”
“Even my sterile, non-dog-proofed apartment is an improvement, believe me.” I guess it makes me a bad person; I wasn’t mad about Adrienne concussing those two men. Just about how Dawg would inconvenience me.
With that selfish thought, I finished getting ready for work and headed out the door.
chapter thirty-five
“Look who’s back!” Emma Jan paused. “Um … it’s Cadence or Shiro, right?”
“Cadence,” George said without looking up from his computer. “Note how she’s disheveled and out of breath after busting ass to get in here. Also note the large Frappuccino she didn’t have time to stop for but did anyway. Shiro’d never do any of that stuff.”
“Oh. Okay.” She cleared her throat. “Um, Shiro and I are supposed to go to the range after work today. That woman … that woman actually thinks she can outshoot me with a Beretta! Me! I was field stripping semiautos before I was in training bras.”
“Calm down, it’s—”
“I’m going to prove her wrong many, many times tonight. I’m bound to get at least half of my paycheck back,” she added, grumbling. “My pride, and my last twenty bucks before payday, are riding on this. It’s got to happen! Did you … I mean, is that okay?”
“You made a date with Shiro?” Could Emma Jan be Shiro’s mystery date from the other night?
Emma Jan blinked. “Not a date, exactly. A competition. Did you not hear all that ranting I just did?”
Sorry, Emma Jan, but I was the partner of George Pinkman.
Ranting was about as unusual as George snorting Splenda.
I tossed my bag on my desk and shrugged out of my Man Coat. (Yes, okay, I bought it in the men’s section at Target. It was an unattractive brown, and too big, and it also kept me warmer than any Woman Coat I’d ever bought.) “Shiro can’t just … just make appointments with my body.”
“She did, though,” George said, still not looking up.
“You stay out of this. Please.” Emma Jan was dressed in yet another suit that looked gorgeous on her (brick red, with a matching jacket and a tan blouse) that would have been a disaster on me. “Listen, if Adrienne scared you or hurt you, I’m really—”
“Oh, no! It was fine. I mean, it was weird and cool, but also fine. You just sort of … okay, your eyes sort of rolled up and then you were leaping at Behrman, and then his friend made the mistake of trying to help him, and then the dog got out—you know what? It doesn’t matter. Did Michaela tell you? They aren’t pressing charges.”
“The one piece of good news I’ve had in the last two days.” I sighed, moved my bag, and slumped into my chair. “Bet you had no idea what you were signing on for when you got your transfer, huh?”
“I like it here,” she said cheerfully. “It’s always interesting.”
Yes, that was one word for it.
“When do you think Adrienne might show up again?”
That brought George’s head up. “Proof you’re the New Girl. Nobody ever looks forward to seeing Adrienne. Except me, sometimes, and I’m…” He shrugged. He didn’t need to finish. I’m a sociopath. I feel nothing, but live for pleasure. People are objects. I am the center of the universe. And the center of the universe really hates skinheads, for reasons I will never discuss. There is no room for skinheads in my universe.
Sometimes George reminded me of that funny guy from Braveheart, the one they all thought was crazy and who claimed Ireland was “his” island. “My island. Yup.” “I’m the most wanted man on my island, except I’m not on my island, of course.” “It’s mine!” Like that.
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