Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  It’s then that Atlanta starts to put together a plan.

  Or, at least, the first step of one.

  * * *

  The vet’s office smells like animal. All kinds of animal, given that this is a farm vet. Horse musk and dog shit and cat piss and rabbit fear. A big poofy Persian cat that looks like Wilford Brimley stalks the counter. Back and forth, back and forth, occasionally pausing to survey his leonine domain. Then back to pacing. His domain isn’t much to look at. The waiting room has gray tile, some cracked. The walls are white popcorn. Ceiling, too. Everything cast in a swimmy fluorescent glow, lights occasionally buzzing and snapping like a bug-zapper.

  The woman behind the counter is a dainty thing with knucklebones where her cheekbones should be; they bulge out like sharp corners. She says, for the second time, “I’m sorry, but the doctor’s with a patient.”

  Atlanta frowns. “By doctor, you mean the vet. And by patient, you mean like, an iguana.”

  “Veterinarians are doctors.”

  “Okay.” She really didn’t know that. “When will Doctor—“ Atlanta leans left to get a look at the name on the door. “Ch… Chenna… Pro… Pra?”

  “Chennapragada.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “She’s Indian.”

  Atlanta says, “Like, an Indian—“ She taps a dot on her forehead, tap tap tap. “But not an Indian.” She opens her mouth round and pats the flat of her hand against it like a whooping Cherokee war cry but without the sound.

  Miss Cheekbones scowls. “She’s from India, yes.”

  “Okay.” Atlanta pauses. “Hey, was that racist?”

  “What you just did?”

  “Yeah, what I just did.”

  “It was. A little.”

  “Sorry. It’s just something my Momma does sometimes and she doesn’t know any better and so neither do I but I am trying to do better.” As to explain further: “I’m from the South.”

  “It’s… it’s fine.”

  “Not that you don’t have racists up here.” Miss Cheekbones says nothing. “I mean, you’re thick with them, honestly. Like termites in a rotten house.” Atlanta drums her fingers. “So, the doc? Free soon?”

  The woman flits her gaze toward a boxy old CRT computer monitor. “Not until 2:30.”

  “That’s like, two hours from now.”

  “That’s her schedule. If you’d have called…”

  “No, I’ll… I’ll wait.”

  Atlanta goes and sits back down. Flips through some magazines. Allure—ugh, girls too skinny, skinny like those harsh knobby cheekbones. Field and Stream—really? There’s a magazine about fishing? Seems like there’s magazines for everything. Jogging. Walking. Knitting. She spies a Food Network magazine, thinks maybe to steal it and give it to her mother—either to teach the woman how to cook or instead to roll it up into a tube and swat the woman’s fool nose any time she reaches for a kitchen implement.

  Like the cat, Atlanta gets up and paces the waiting room. Across the far wall is a corkboard and she goes over, starts perusing. John Deere tractor for sale. Free kittens, which Atlanta figures is about as redundant as it gets because who in their right mind would pay for a kitten (probably the same weirdos who read fishing magazines). Dog missing. Then another dog missing. A third. And fourth.

  One’s a cairn terrier (“Pepper”). Another a Dachshund (“Oscar”). Third is a… Vizsla puppy, whatever that is (no name given). Third a Lab puppy (“Lucky”).

  Three of the flyers have addresses.

  And all three are up in Gallows Hill.

  Atlanta’s heart leaps the same time her gut sinks.

  She goes to the counter, reaches over—ignoring the protestations of Little Miss Cheekbones—and snatches a pen which she then uses to write the phone numbers on the inside of her arm.

  “Here,” Atlanta says, tossing the pen back to the counter lady. “I don’t think I need to meet with the vet doctor anymore. Sorry again for being rude.”

  * * *

  Pepper: the man is icy like a frosted-over windshield, tells Atlanta over the phone that the dog was a show dog, a regional winner and a state winner once he’ll have her know, and he’ll pay whatever it takes to get the terrier back, and then he says his “partner” is the dog’s trainer and Atlanta thinks, oh, okay, he’s gay—which adds up because he seems buttoned tight and has a clipped and lispy voice but then she hears a woman’s voice in the background calling for the man and he ends the conversation with a sudden goodbye, cutting it short as if with a pair of scissors, snip, snip, click.

  Oscar: the woman is destroyed, gibbering and blubbering and it’s clear suddenly this dog, this Dachshund, is not merely her dog but actually her “son,” to the point where through the tears she even refers to him as “her little fur-baby,” which sounds weird and somehow porny to Atlanta’s ears and for a moment that thought lets her escape the woman’s grief—grief which is as deep and profound as quarry water, as hungry and wet as a sucking chest wound, and when the woman has that glimmer of hope because she thinks Atlanta knows something, all Atlanta can do is panic and hang up on her.

  The Vizsla: The Viszla is, in fact, a dog, a red Hungarian retriever who the man says he was breeding to be a hunting dog, but everyone around here wanted pointers or spaniels and didn’t know what the hell a Vizsla was and so nobody bit and now the man doesn’t know what to do, and Atlanta almost almost reminds him that it doesn’t much matter now because the dog is gone, though he doesn’t seem to care about the dog so much as he’s pissed about the “lost investment,” and when she gets off the phone she thinks, ugh, people.

  Lucky: It’s a little girl that answers, maybe 9, maybe 10 years old, and she tells Atlanta that her mother is outside pulling weeds and her father’s not home and so Atlanta takes a chance, asks about Lucky, and then the girl tells a story that pries open Atlanta’s breastbone and punches her right in the heart—the girl woke up at night when someone (mother or father the girl doesn’t remember) let Lucky out to go to the bathroom and it’s only five minutes later when the girl wakes up again (she fell back asleep) and heard Lucky yelping and—in the girl’s words, “screaming”—and then after that she heard people laughing and the screech of tires and she even said that outside the house they found burned rubber tire tracks on the street and curb, and does Atlanta have Lucky? and Atlanta tells her no and it punches her heart again to tell the girl no, and the girl doesn’t cry but she says the saddest, quietest little “oh” that Atlanta’s ever heard.

  Four phone calls over the course of an hour and Atlanta feels tense, her guts pulled taut like a clothesline. And she feels sad, too—the sorrow serving as the heavy wet clothes hanging from the line and pulling it down, down, down toward the ground.

  But, at least she learned something.

  All four of the people on the phone told her when the dogs were taken.

  They were taken at night.

  And they were taken within a couple miles of one another up on Gallows Hill.

  Atlanta starts looking through her closet for dark clothing.

  * * *

  Gallows Hill at night. Floodlights and sidewalks wet from spitting sprinklers. Everything clean and walkable. A small playground every mile. The cars in driveways are a mixture of BMWs and Subarus, Mercedes and Hondas, a Lexus here, a Porsche there. Atlanta wonders what it must be like. To buy gourmet food and to have foreign housekeepers and to know what it means to pump the really expensive gas. Then she wonders what it’s like on the other end of the spectrum: to have no car to drive, no house to clean, no money for any food at all.

  She’s trying to figure out where she falls in this spectrum and whether or not she feels envious that she doesn’t have all this or guilty because she’s still a white girl in America, when she sees Shane riding up on his dingy rust-gobbled ten-speed. Panting.

  “The hill,” he says, gasping. Leaning up against the light pole. That’s the other thing—all the homes and developments in Gallows Hill
are lit by bright white streetlights. Where she’s at down in the valley—or, worse, on the other side on Grainger Hill with the trailer parks and dirty Amish—everything’s dead and dark and when you hear a sound in the woods you don’t know if it’s a skunk or a rabbit. Or someone come to hurt you. Sometimes she hears screaming in the woods, a sound like a woman getting killed, but everyone assures her it’s just a fox’s cry.

  “You okay?” she asks Shane.

  “Yeah.” But it comes out as a breathy gyeaaaauuhh. He looks like he might throw up.

  “You can throw up if you have to.”

  “I’m not…” Cough, cough. “Not going to throw up. So what’s…” Hawwwwwk, ptoo. “What’s up?”

  She’d called him, left a message with his mother. Told him to meet her up on Gallows Hill around 9:30. She’s not sure if she’s surprised he came. It’s been a while. “I’m… doing something for someone.”

  “Could you be a little more vague?”

  “I’m trying to solve a murder.” Soon as the words are out of her mouth she knows she shouldn’t have said it like that because his eyes light up and he thinks she’s talking about Chris. “Not Chris. A dog.”

  The fire in his eyes dims, vanquished by her swift admission. “A dog murder. Is that a thing?”

  “I dunno. I guess. Remember Chomp-Chomp?”

  Now the fire’s truly gone as Shane’s brow darkens—his eyes smoldering black briquettes. Of course he remembers Chomp-Chomp. Steven was one of the three bullies that used to torment Shane.

  “Him?”

  “He helped us before.”

  “I know, but…” Shane shakes his head. “Fine. Whatever. Go on.”

  “His cousin, Jenny, her dog was… tortured. Which I guess was bad enough to kill it.” Behind her eyes flash images from the folder. Her breath catches in her chest like on a blustery winter day even though the air is warm and sticky. “So she hired me to do this. And I thought maybe you might could help.”

  “Me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re still not looking into Chris’ murder.”

  “Well, no. I… I don’t know. This pays. I need money, our house—“

  “So it’s all about money. That why you helped Chris the first time? Because he paid?”

  She sucks air between her teeth. “Now, c’mon. Don’t be that way. It’s not like that. This girl… this dog…”

  “They killed Chris and you don’t want to do anything about it.”

  “Don’t you dare say that. I did something already and it was the wrong thing.” Her nostrils flare. Feels her pulse in her wrist, her neck, the back of her legs. “Now I’m doing something different. Maybe trying to help someone instead of hurt ‘em.”

  “You don’t even care that he’s dead.”

  Pow. A hand—her hand, a hand she seems to barely control—slaps Shane hard across the cheek with a stinging smack. He recoils, touching the struck cheek with the gingerness one might use to touch a wounded bird. Eyes wide, he looks around like this is some kind of joke, like someone’s going to be here to help him. The panic on his face kills her. Because she made that panic happen. She gave it life.

  “Shane—“

  He fumbles with his bike, almost trips over it. She says his name again, reaching out and putting her hand on his tire to help him—but he pulls the bike away.

  “I’ll handle this on my own,” he says. Way his voice shakes, she thinks he might cry.

  “Please, Shane, I’m sorry as hell that I did that—“

  But he’s gone. Already his pudgy legs spinning, the bike bumping as it jumps off of the sidewalk. She hears him for a little while even after she can’t see him. Spokes whispering. Bike chains like bee wings.

  She kicks the curb with her foot. Pain shoots up through her calf.

  “Shit!” she hisses. “Shit.”

  * * *

  Past midnight in Gallows Hill. Atlanta—alone and feeling it—hides behind a well-manicured boxwood shrub ringing a tennis and basketball court. Her legs are cramped and her back feels like it’s on fire but she makes no effort to move, in part because she’s afraid that once she does she won’t want to hunker back down again, and in part because she thinks she just plain deserves the pain.

  The neighborhood is still. What’s not still is Atlanta’s mind. Filled with thoughts locking antlers like bucks, clashing and crashing in some competition over who gets to be the worst, the meanest, the baddest motherfucking thought in the forest. Guilt over Chris. Shame over Shane. Anger at her mother. A sudden spike of rage at the richie-riches who live here, who have too much. Flashes of white fur and red blood. Punctuated by the imagined sound of the Labrador puppy screaming in the night as someone steals it away.

  That’s when she realizes she’s doing this wrong. Waiting here in the middle of nowhere hoping… what? Hoping that some pesky dog thieves and canine tormentors will come winging by on a lark?

  She needs to go find a dog. A dog left outside acting as an irresistible lure.

  Dog thieves will go after dogs. Seems obvious, now. So obvious in fact a new mean-bad-thought comes slinking into her head like an alleycat—You’re fucking stupid, Atlanta Burns, stupid as a fence post but not nearly as useful.

  She emerges from her hiding spot, knees popping and back muscles burning brighter as they stretch.

  It’s then that Atlanta goes on the hunt. Wandering the streets of Gallows Hill for the next hour. Aimless and restless. And worse, unable to find a single dog. Maybe the folks here know that someone’s been taking dogs. Maybe they’re keeping them in. And, of course, these are rich people. Their dogs are well-fed and kept inside. These aren’t barn dogs. These aren’t dogs on chains made to sleep under the double-wide. These are… show dogs and Hungarian hunting dogs and the beloved well-fed puppies of little well-fed girls.

  She’s in her third development—from Fox Run to Palomino Farms to Clover Knoll—when she gives up. Decides, fuck it, not finding anything, best to go home. And then she gives up all the way, at least mentally—she realizes that she’s not cut out for this. Atlanta has no idea what she’s doing. She’s never going to find Sailor’s torturers. She’ll never be able to give Jenny Whitsett once ounce of solace.

  It’s then that she hears a distant barking. Not frightened. No panic there . Just a dog barking in the night. Maybe barking to be let back in after a dump. Maybe barking at a cat or a rat or an imagined interloper.

  Atlanta takes a deep breath and figures, I’ll just check this out, and then I’ll go home.

  It pays off.

  * * *

  Takes her a while to zero in on the pooch, but zero in she does—and out front of a real tacky Garage Mahal with jagged rooflines and a salmon stone walkway she sees a fat-bellied beagle with his butt planted on a lush, trim lawn. Barking at nothing. The moon, maybe.

  She’s across the street and about three houses down when headlights come from the other direction. The one headlight blinks, winking like a lecherous old man. An engine growls.

  Atlanta ducks behind a blue mailbox and crouches there, darting a hand into her messenger bag.

  Impossible to tell make or model, but the coming vehicle is a white pickup pitted with rust and dented everywhere, giving it the texture of crinkled aluminum foil. The truck screeches to a halt in front of the beagle house, and the beagle goes from just barking to doing this… other thing. Something between howling and wailing, some mad banshee yowl that’s probably meant to indicate alarm but sounds more like the dog fell in a well and can’t get out. Someone hops out of the back of the truck.

  And runs toward the dog with a bag.

  Atlanta feels the hoofbeats of horses in her heart—her skin prickles and everything seems suddenly hyper-real, like she just went from looking through a pair of greasy eyeglasses to using a pair of brand new binoculars.

  This is it.

  She pulls the weapon from her bag, and bolts across the street, ducking low as she darts in front of the headlights, h
er long shadow stretched and bloated on the street for a hair’s breadth of a moment.

  Voices. Someone from inside the truck whoops. Male voice. “Get that dog you fat clown!”

  Another voice. Also from inside the truck: “Who the fuck is that?” Someone yells: “Hey! Hey!”