Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  “We gotta figure out where Bodie and Bird are at. They’ll show us who needs to pay, right? I mean, unless it’s them.”

  “Sounds right.”

  “How will you make them pay?”

  “Jenny didn’t say what to do.”

  “So it’s up to you.”

  Atlanta shrugs.

  “Whaddya gonna do to them?”

  She clears her throat. “I don’t really know yet. Right now I just want to find ‘em. I didn’t see them in the phonebook at home. The Cooch said they were home-schooled so it’s not like they’re in school records or anything. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen ‘em.”

  “So we’re up the creek.”

  “Well, hold on, now, because here’s our resident expert—“ Coming in through the front door is Chomp-Chomp, messy hair in his face and big-teeth-and-tiny-gums preceding him like he’s some kind of mouthy horse. He sits down—well, flops down, really—and offers an awkward wave.

  “Hey,” he says.

  Shane tightens. His head shrinks into his shoulders like a softball pressed into some mud.

  She tells him, “It’s all right. This is more Ch… Steven’s area of expertise.”

  “You can call me Chomp-Chomp,” he says. “Or Chompers. It’s okay.”

  Atlanta kinda wants to, but she feels like being polite is the way to go. “Nah, we can call you Steven. Or Steve. Or Stevie?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  That’s not how a name works, she thinks, but Shane’s still bristling, so they got other things to worry about.

  “Chris was our third,” Shane says, his voice small and stiff.

  She leans in, whispers to Shane as if Steven isn’t sitting there. “He’s not a replacement, dum-dum, he’s just… he’s just here to help and I need help so can we continue. Please?”

  “Fine. You may continue.”

  “Good.” Back to Chompers, then. “Steven. You know someone named Haycock? Bodie and Bird are brothers, I guess. They were—or are—victims of The Cooch’s cooch, so she says.”

  He nods. “Yeah. Bodie’s the older one but not even by a year. They live up on Grainger Hill past the trailer parks. But I called Adam Rains—he’s the drummer for Hyperdoor—and asked and he said they’re not around this summer. Adam said they went and are staying with their… uncle or something up on his farm in Little Ash.”

  Little Ash is just one town over. On the other side of Grainger Hill. Atlanta’s been through there—not much to look at. Not even a town, really, so much as a couple farms and hills and a few Amish and Mennonites here and there. “Uncle’s farm,” she says. “Wonder if that’s the Farm. One Tressa was talking about.”

  “Could be,” Shane says. “That where the dog fights are?”

  “Maybe. I dunno.”

  “Then we need to figure out where the Farm is.”

  “Shit. If that’s where they hold the fights, we won’t have access. It’s not like a town softball game or something.”

  Shane shrugs. “Why not ask your friend, Guy?”

  “Why? ‘Cause he’s Mexican?”

  “No,” Shane says with a scowl. “Because he’s into some…” For this, Shane lowers his voice, talks out of the side of his mouth. “Shady. Business.” Dang, just because she told him one time that she bought some prescription drugs from Guy he thinks the guy is like fucking Scarface or something. Still. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to ask.

  “I’ll ask. I need to see him anyway.” Get some money upfront from Jenny, get a hook-up. She’s about to tell them they need to settle up when someone else comes into the greasy spoon.

  The cop.

  The cop.

  Orly’s buddy. From the gun club.

  Not a big man. But he carries with him a sizable darkness. He’s in uniform. Catches sight of Atlanta and the others sitting there, and his thin lips turn to a small smile. His single dark brow like a line drawn from permanent marker twists like a snake trying to find a comfortable way to lay and he starts walking over.

  Atlanta’s blood and bowels go to ice water. The sugar tang in her mouth tastes suddenly bitter.

  Shane sees him, too. He stares down suddenly at his coffee.

  Steven doesn’t get it. He mostly just looks up, confused.

  “Everybody good here?” the cop asks.

  Nobody answers. Steven finally says, “Yup.” Oblivious.

  Atlanta stands. Moves fast.

  She takes her iced tea glass and smashes it over the cop’s head. Sweet tea goes everywhere. The cop cries out. Jagged glass rends forehead flesh—blood and ice hit the cracked linoleum of the greasy spoon and—

  The little mini-movie inside her head stops playing and the cop nods as he remains standing there, her iced tea glass still sweating in front of her. The cop smiles again. Watches her the way a black cat watches a spring robin underneath a bird feeder. “Hope so,” he says, then heads to the counter.

  Shane lets out a breath.

  Atlanta can’t take it. She has to get up and leave. Tosses her last dollar on the table and bolts.

  * * *

  Guillermo Lopez is nowhere to be found. Jay-Z raps over the grass and the crooked post-and-rail fence surrounding his doublewide trailer, the thumping beat causing the windows in the trailer to vibrate and hum—bvvt bvvt bvvt bvvt. She orbits the trailer a few times. Puffs out her cheeks and lets out a breath.

  Should’ve called first.

  Maybe he’s inside. She goes for the door—it’s open, not locked—and pops her head inside. Same as it’s always been: he’s her pillhead hookup out in the boonies and yet, despite all that, loves his country décor. Amish hexes and cornflower blue curtains and on the breakfast nook table a little porcelain cow creamer.

  “Guy?” she asks. Nothing. Just the muted bass of the music. Doom. Doom. Doom. The little cow creamer trembles with each deep beat.

  She pulls her head back out—then hears something above her.

  A shadow out of the sun—a hand appears, in it the silhouette of a blocky pistol—Atlanta gasps, staggers backward, almost loses her shit and goes bristles over broom-handle—

  It’s Guy. He’s up on the roof of the trailer. Eyes hidden behind wrap-around mirrored shades.

  “Yo! Atlanta.” He waves at her with the gun, like it’s no big thing. “Ladder’s on the far side. Come on up, girl.”

  She has to check herself, make sure she didn’t accidentally pee. Shaking her head, she goes around the long side of the trailer and, by the little window that must overlook the kitchen sink she sees a steel ladder leading up.

  On the roof, Guy’s got a boombox. He shuffle-dances over, turns it down. Atlanta spies a beach chair and smells coconut suntan lotion. Weirder still, she sees a small stack of paperbacks sitting next to the chair. Authors she’s never heard of (not that she likes to read much). Meg Gardiner. Patricia Cornwell. Margaret Atwood.

  “What?” he asks, obviously catching the look on her face. “I fuckin’ like to read, you know?”

  “Look like chick books.”

  “And you’re a chick, so what’s the problem?”

  She laughs. “Well, you’ve got beans-and-franks, or so I assume.”

  “Hey,” he says, suddenly all serious. “Reading books by female authors does not limit my masculinity. Plus, bitches write the best characters, man. It’s like they get people, you know?”

  “I’m just saying, this goes against my image of you as a displaced drug-peddling thug. Though, that pistol you keep waving around is starting to move the needle back the other way.” She cocks an eyebrow. “What is that, anyway? Looks like a .45. M1911?”

  Guy sits on the edge of his beach chair. Kicks over an old plastic roof tar bucket and flips it over so she can have a seat. “This? Nah. It’s a fucking Daisy. Pellet gun. I just keep it up here in case I want to try to shoot squirrels or groundhogs or some shit.” His voice suddenly gets all faux-tough. “Or if some nosy bee-yotch comes poking her better-dead-than-red head in my damn trailer.”r />
  “Shut up.”

  “I’m just messin’ with you. So whassup? Been a while, girly. Heard you got into some shit.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Word gets around when you tangle with the town Nazis.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  Guy’s face suddenly falls. “Oh, shit, you know, I didn’t say to you—I didn’t say sorry. And, uhh, what’s the word? Condolences. For your friend. The gay kid.”

  “Chris.”

  “Yeah. Him. That sucks.”

  “It’s pretty much the definition of suck.”

  “He killed himself?”

  “Yes.” She pauses. “No. I don’t know.”

  “So, ahh, whatchoo need? You need pills, I don’t have anything right now that’s up your alley. I got a little weed if you want it, and between you and me I got some sugarcubes if you like acid—did you know that the penalty for selling LSD is like, ten times worse than if you were selling heroin and shit? That’s what I hear. That’s fucked up. Anyway, you don’t seem like the trip-out kinda girl.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t want to feel my brain melt, no. I was hoping you had some Adderall.”

  “My hookup at Geisinger’s gotten all paranoid. I think he’s using what he takes and it’s making him a little fucking loco, you know? I need to find a better connect there. Sorry, Burns.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “Sup.”

  “I need to know about dog fighting.”

  Guy leans back. Opens his mouth, waggles his tongue back and forth over his teeth. “Who told you that?”

  “Who told me what?”

  “That I could help you with that.”

  “Nobody. Well—Shane had an idea—“

  “Who’s Shane?”

  “What? He’s my—you know, what the hell just happened here? One second we were talking and now you’ve gone all squirrelly on me. I just asked—“

  Guy stands up. Puffs his chest out and tucks the gun under his armpit. “Who the fuck is Shane?”

  She stands up to meet him chin to chin. “He’s a friend who thought you might know people who know people.”

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “The fights.”

  “The dog fights?”

  “Yeah. I don’t do that anymore.”

  “You used to be involved in that shit?”

  “Isn’t that why you’re asking?”

  She gives him a hard shove. He staggers backward. Guy’s ankle clips an exposed duct and suddenly his arms spin like a pinwheel in a hard wind and next thing Atlanta knows he’s tumbling over the edge of the trailer. Yelling as he falls.

  Then: thump.

  Oh, shit.

  * * *

  She stands over him but doesn’t help him up. Atlanta can see that his limbs aren’t twisted up or anything and that his biggest problem is trying to get air back into his flattened lungs after all the oxygen was punched out of them when he hit the grass. When he fell, he narrowly missed hitting a small rusted picnic grill. Good for him.

  He flails about with a hand, trying to get her to help him up.

  “No,” she says. And swats the hand away.

  She’s patient. She waits for him to finally gasp air back into his chest and sit up. Butt in the grass, he looks up at her with pathetic hang-dog eyes. “You pushed me off my damn roof.”

  “That was an accident.”

  “You didn’t mean to shove me?”

  “I meant to shove you, just not off the roof.”

  He laughs but it’s not a happy sound. “You’re lucky I’m not dead.”

  “I’d say that makes you the lucky one.”

  “Yeah. Good point. Listen, I don’t do the dog thing anymore. That’s something I did as a kid. And even then it wasn’t that I wanted to do it was…” He rubs his eyes, groans. “Life is better now, is all I’m saying.”

  “But you know people.”

  “I didn’t fight dogs around here.”

  She says it again. “But you know people.”

  “Of course I know people. Dog fights are like… they’re like the oases you see on nature shows where all the animals come from hundreds of miles around to hang out at this one watering hole. At the fights you find, like, drugs and gangs and guns. Hookers. All kinds of shit.”

  Atlanta’s suddenly not sure she can trust him. Guy’s part of that. He’s not her people—he’s one of the beasts at the watering hole. Once she thought of him as a friend, now she’s a bit wifty on that point.

  Still. What choice does she have?

  “I’m looking for some people. Used a friend’s terrier as a bait dog.”

  “Ooof.” He shakes his head. That means he gets it. He knows what that terrier went through.

  “And I need to get some payback for her.” And for that poor dang dog.

  “I dunno, Atlanta. That’s tough, but…”

  She folds her arms in front of her chest. “You’re gonna help me.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because next time I’ll do worse than just push you off a roof.” She grabs at her crotch, then says: “Remember the thing with my mother’s boyfriend.” She turns her hand into a gun, lets the thumb-hammer fall. “Boom.”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, his deep tan going suddenly pale. “Awright. Help me up. Let’s go inside. I need some ice.”

  * * *

  He doesn’t have any ice so he holds a tall-boy of beer against the back of his neck. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he says. Guy cranes his neck left, then right. Vertebrae snap, crackle, pop. “Ow.”

  “I’m just looking for two particular dickheads. Bodie and Bird Haycock.”

  “They’re the ones that stole the dog.”

  “Yup. They’re staying somewhere called ‘the Farm.’”

  Guy winces. “Course they are. That’s where they hold the fights. It’s a fucking compound, yo. You’re gonna need an in if you want to get within a mile of that place.”

  “You’re my in.”

  “I’m not your in.”

  “But you said… it’s like a watering hole for shitheads or whatever. And you used to…” She doesn’t bother finishing the sentence.

  “I’m nobody around here and I like it that way. Got it? I sell my little pills and do my little thing and ain’t nobody thinks I’m more than just a stone in the tread of a sneaker. You want to head to the Farm, you’ll need somebody to vouch for you and I’m not that guy.” He sets the beer down, cracks it with a psssshhh. Catches foam with his lip and slurps it up. “Besides. You don’t wanna go up there. That’s nasty-ass business. You want just those two, fine, wait till those rats poke their head outta their hole—they’ll go buy smokes or beers or go try to get some trim somewhere, and when they do, you get ‘em then. Don’t go up to the Farm.”

  “I want to,” she says, and it’s true though she doesn’t know why. It’s like walking into a dark cave knowing there’s something real mean sleeping down in the deep, but you keep walking anyway because you have to see it with your own eyes. “I’m going to the Farm one way or another, so it might as well be with your help.”

  “Please.” Way he says it, it sounds like he’s begging, really begging. “Don’t drag me into this.”

  “Consider yourself drug. Drugged. Dragged. Whatever.”

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t you want to do something good?”

  He just shakes his head. “Nothing good’s gonna come out of this, Atlanta Burns. Nothing.” He tells her he’ll put together some names, figure out a way in, that he’ll call her when he knows. Then he slams back the rest of the beer and doesn’t bother offering her one.