Dogs

by Nancy Kress

  Three dog bites, and a fourth one in an ambulance on the way in. And one, the little Kingwell girl, had died.

  Cami had seen her when she came in, bleeding and torn up…her poor little face…why did people own vicious dogs like that? Especially people with little children? Cami had no kids, she was only twenty-one and this was her first ER duty, but she had a dog. A very gentle half-collie, Belle. Cami would never own any breed that could hurt anyone. She—

  “Move, move!” Rosita. Cami was moving as fast as she could, but Rosita never let up. Well, maybe that was okay, even if the other nurses didn’t like it. The Tyler Community ER was very well run, everybody said so. Last year they’d gotten an award for it.

  A mini-van pulled up under the portico and Cami rushed over.

  This patient was an old lady and the bite was on her leg. Blood and shredded flesh obscured the depth of the wound. She had to be in pain, but old people so often tried to not display it. Instead her wrinkled face showed enormous bewilderment. “He bit me,” she kept saying. “Dragged himself over to my chair and bit me. Older than I am practically, no trouble all these years, and he bit me.”

  “We’ll get you all fixed up, Mrs. Carby,” Mary Brown said soothingly. She was good at soothing patients, Mary was. Cami admired her.

  “But he bit me! I called 911 right away, but…why on God’s green Earth would he bite me?”

  “I can handle this, Cami,” Mary said. “You wait for the peds patient.”

  Cami hurried over to Rosita just as Dr. Olatic, Chief of Medicine, walked into the ER. Probably Dr. Baker would arrive soon. Rosita had the phone in her hand again. She addressed Dr. Olatic. “Two more dog bites coming in, one possibly fatal. Pit bull. 911 is sending them here by car now, no more ambulances are available. That makes six bad bites this morning.”

  “Six?” Dr. Olatic said. “Six?”

  “Six.”

  Dr. Olatic questioned Rosita about the patients and then said, “Where are the animal control people?”

  “Jess Langstrom called to find out if we knew what was going on, Doctor. His team is out following up and collecting dog bodies.”

  “Collecting?” Olatic said sharply. “Are the dogs dying?”

  “I don’t know. But apparently some owners have shot them after they bit, and some are shut up in houses, and— ”

  The phone rang again.

  Rosita stared at it a fraction of a second, picked it up, and listened. When she hung up, her usually sharp black eyes held an expression Cami had never expected to see there: fear. “Another two, Doctor. Both teenagers bit by the same dog. 911 told their parents to bring them here.”

  “Jesus.” For a moment nobody spoke. Then Dr. Olatic said to the wide-eyed secretary, “Call Public Health. Get Alec Ramsay on the line and tell him I said they should call the CDC.”

  » 7

  Jess and Billy had two dog bodies in the truck, Princess and a dachshund named Schopenhauer, who had also been shot. The dachshund had left its own property, which the shaken owner said it never did, and attacked a woman shoveling her driveway. The woman’s husband heard screams, rushed out with his hunting rifle, and shot the dog.

  “I don’t understand it,” the owner said. He was a very thin middle-aged man who, he said, lived alone. “Schopenhauer never leaves our property, never. And he is—was—so good with people!”

  Not this time, Jess thought grimly. He’d collected the information from the owner, and it followed what was by now a familiar pattern: unprovoked dog suddenly goes berserk for no reason and bites the nearest person, snarling like there was no tomorrow. Eight cases this morning.

  Billy, after a stretch of uncharacteristic silence, said, “What the hell do you think is going on, Jess?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe some kind of dog sickness spreading…I’m no vet. That’s Dr. Venters’ territory.”

  “Doc Venters couldn’t find his ass with both hands. I wouldn’t let him treat me for a hangnail.”

  “I don’t think dogs get hangnails,” Jess said, and Billy laughed. The laugh was one of the reasons he’d hung in there with Billy all these years. Straight from the belly, full and large and unfettered, the laugh of a man who enjoyed life.

  “Well, shoot, sure they—”

  “Jess?” came Suzanne’s voice on the dispatch. Billy grew attentive. He’d been after Suzanne since she’d been hired. And she went after Jess, who went after nobody, an endless little game of musical chairs with no movement and one chair empty.

  “Yes, Suzanne,” Jess said.

  “New call, you better take it right away.” No flirtatiousness in her voice, no teasing. “Pit bull attacked two kids. One of them might be dead. Kids and parents are on the way to Community, but the dog’s still in the house, got an older kid cornered on top of the sink.”

  “Christ,” Billy said.

  “It’s the Wright place again, 1649 North Edmond. Are you near there?”

  “Not far. Thanks, Suzanne.” She sounded scared. Jess didn’t blame her.

  All Billy said on the ride over was, “Some weird shit going down, Jess.” Jess didn’t answer.

  1649 North Edmond, unlike their previous calls, was not out in the country. A small dilapidated house surrounded by a chain-link fence, it was part of a neighborhood that had once passed for Tyler’s industrial section. At the end of the street stood a cluster of empty buildings, once a small factory and associated warehouses, long since closed. The site was endless trouble, a magnet for vandals, drifters, and teenage pot parties. The Wright house was endless trouble, too. Jess, like the county sheriff and Tyler town police, had been here before. He parked outside the fence, where a knot of neighbors had gathered. Inside the house a dog snarled and barked.

  “What’s going on, Officer?” asked a woman in a duffel coat over a nightgown.

  Good question—Jess wished he had the answer. Before he could speak, another woman said shrilly, “It’s clear what’s going on! That damn dog finally killed somebody! I filed complaint after complaint and you people never did nothing so now—”

  Jess shut her out. He and Billy went through the gate, latching it carefully behind them. They’d worked together so long they didn’t even need to talk. Billy, the better shot, went first, Jess behind him. On the porch, they looked through the windows. One gave onto the kitchen.

  A boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, stood on top of the sink with his back to the wall. The sink wasn’t designed to support his weight. Old, porcelain, free-standing, it was basically a basin and drain board on three metal legs, the whole connected to two pipes. On the floor a pit bull jumped and snarled, reaching as high as the front rim of the sink.

  Pit bulls were always the worst. Many were sweet-natured, but the breed had originally been developed for bull-baiting and dogfighting, and it still showed. Many pit bulls would attack without provocation, warning, or noise, and they would keep at it no matter how badly they hurt themselves. They bit, held, shredded, and tore, and very little would make them let go.

  The boy saw them through the window. “Help me! Help me!” he screamed at them. Evidently the dog, too, sensed they were there; he turned briefly and snapped in their direction, then returned to the boy.

  “Jesus,” Billy repeated. “That bastard got blood on his jaws already. Come on, Jess.”

  Abruptly the sink sagged to the left. The boy screamed and tried to grab at a shelf beside him. It tore loose from the wall and crashed down, sending Palmolive and sponges to the floor.

  Jess and Billy tore open the front door and sprinted to the kitchen. The boy, balanced precariously on the tilting sink, screamed nonstop and kicked at the pit bull, whose lunge just missed his ankle. At their entrance, the dog turned and leapt for Billy, who fired once and got him square in the brain. The dog dropped and the sink crashed to the floor with the boy, who screamed once more and lay still.

  “Son, you all right?” Jess said. “No, don’t move, let me see that nothing’s broken.”

  “I’m…
I’m good,” the kid said, tears in his eyes, so much bravery in his voice that Jess was moved. But then the boy snarled, “Let go of me, fucker!”

  So much for boyish self-control. Jess said, “You got it. Can you sit up…good. Now tell me what happened. We’re from Animal Control and 911 said that a dog bit two kids.”

  “He did?” The boy’s eyes grew wider, his tough-guy stance abandoned again. “Duke bit the twins? Are they all right?”

  "I don't know," Jess said. Suzanne had said one of the kids might be dead. “What’s your name, son? Do you live here?”

  “A.J. Wright. Yes. That’s my dad’s dog, he’s not supposed to be in the house, Mom says so, but Dad likes to bring Duke in and show how he can control him. Where’s my mom and dad?”

  “They took the twins to the hospital. You weren’t here?”

  “No, I was sleeping over at Bobby’s, I just came home and went in the house and…”

  “Steady now, it’s all right.” Now Jess remembered seeing the rusty bike propped inside the fence. A.J. had come home, heard the dog inside, and assumed his dad was putting the pit bull through its paces, showing off his leader-of-the-pack authority in front of his young kids. After the dog went crazy and attacked, nobody had given a thought to A.J. Their only concern had been to get the bite victims to the hospital.

  Billy had expertly wrapped the dog in a tarp—they were going to run out of those soon—and now he said cheerfully, “Okay, Jess, grab the other end of this and—oh, oh, we got company. Bit late, huh?”

  Police sirens screamed outside. Sheriff’s department, most likely Ames and Hatfield.

  “Better late than never,” Billy said, “but boy am I going to rile ol’ Paulie for this one. Here when the action’s all over. Boy oh boy.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” Jess said, and Billy grinned.

  “Guess you’re right. I can deal with Fang here alone—ain’t like the son-of-a-bitch’s going to attack anybody else. Right between the eyes. Damn, I’m good.”

  » 8

  When Tessa got home from D.C., Minette greeted her amid the mess of unpacked boxes in her new house. Tessa had moved in less than a week ago. The townhouse on Capitol Hill wasn’t even sold yet; all this had been an impulse move, borne of the intense need to get out of D.C. after she quit the FBI. Away from her anger at the Bureau, away from her memories of Salah, away from her raw grief. Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked.

  Still, the Cape Cod on Farley Street, a few blocks off Main, was comfortable and pretty, and Tyler still retained enough small-town character to seem worlds away from Washington. A bridge loan from the bank was carrying her over the transition between house deals. And real-estate prices being the insane thing they were in D.C., she would come out with enough money to live on while Salah’s will cleared probate and—more importantly—while Tessa decided what to do with the rest of her life.

  “Hey, Minette, hey, good dog. Did you miss me?”

  Minette, not a well-trained beast, jumped on Tessa. The tiny poodle reached only to her knees and weighed seven pounds, an elegant little bundle of silvery fur and huge black eyes. Tessa dropped to the floor and ran through the pantomime of attacking, retreating, growling at Minette. The dog loved it. No one else ever saw this side of Tessa—except Salah, who had been enormously amused.

  Tessa tired of the game before Minette did. The poodle followed her to the bedroom, also filled with boxes, and watched as Tessa changed into jeans and sweater. Then Tessa tackled a pile of cardboard, but her mind wasn’t on the task.

  Why were her name and Salah’s on intel chatter in Paris and North Africa? She’d been pummeling her brain during the long commute home, and had come up with nothing.

  They hadn’t even had many Arabic friends. Salah, so cosmopolitan, so at home in three languages on just as many continents, had adjusted easily to becoming an American. In fact, it sometimes seemed to Tessa that, except for his mother and sister in Tunis, Salah had shed his old life as easily as a bird shedding feathers. He had enjoyed parties with her friends. He had developed an interest in the Yankees. He was passionate about jazz. He—

  The phone rang; Caller I.D. announced Tessa’s sister, twenty miles away in Frederick. “Hey, Ellen.”

  “Hey yourself. Are you getting settled?”

  Tessa looked around at the total chaos. “Sort of.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I think you’ve got your hands full enough.” Tessa said. Ellen, although two years younger than Tessa, had three children, a husband, two cats, and an amazing collection of gerbils to care for. Nonetheless, after Salah’s death, Ellen had consigned the entire menagerie to her mother-in-law and come to stay with Tessa for two weeks, helping her pack and listening to her cry. This was all the more astonishing because Tessa and Ellen, who looked enough alike to have often been mistaken for twins, had never been close. Maybe because they’d looked too much alike. Tessa had wanted to be unique, and probably Ellen had, too.

  Over the last three months they’d kept the fragile, tragedy-born intimacy growing, nurturing it like some delicate rose. That wasn’t always easy; they had such radically different lives, perceptions, and personalities.

  “How’s the baby?” Tessa said.

  “He’s a vomit machine. Twice today already, and it’s projectile vomiting. I tell you, this is absolutely the last baby.”

  “Well, three is probably enough.” For Tessa, zero was enough.

  “Amen. How are you doing, Tessa? No, wait, I forgot—you don’t like to be asked that. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Awkward pause. Then Tessa said abruptly, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.” But Tessa heard the surprise and hesitation in Ellen’s voice. What was Ellen expecting?

  “After you and Jim got married, did he sort of…I don’t know, drift away from his old life? In favor of yours?”

  Ellen laughed. “Yes. Not all at once, mind you, but over the years I sort of turned into the social director for both of us. Except for a few golfing buddies, if I don’t arrange for us to see people, it doesn’t happen. I don’t think Jim’s in contact with any of his old friends, not since the last time we moved, anyway. I think that happens with a lot of married men.”

  Tessa hadn’t realized that. She said, “Oh,” unable to think of anything else. People aren’t really your forte, Maddox had always told her.

  Ellen said, “Look, if you want to—oh, God, he’s upchucking again! Gotta go, Tessa, bye!”

  What a life. Ellen, however, seemed fine with it. Tessa returned to the living room and dug through boxes until she found Salah’s laptop, the only kind of computer he’d liked. When she’d packed to move, she’d given away all his clothes, but not the laptop. She couldn’t. Not yet, maybe never. She set up the computer on the edge of a kitchen table ninety percent covered with plastic bags of food and a huge box containing her grandmother’s Wedgwood china, which Tessa would probably never even unpack.

  She knew Salah’s password. Was it right to use it? It felt like a violation. Although that was silly; Salah had never kept anything from her. She logged on and carefully, methodically, searched through his emails, outgoing and incoming, for any names she didn’t recognize. She discounted all the emails with the World Bank address. Those would be professional, and subject to perusal by anyone at the organization. Tessa wanted only personal missives. She began with the day of his death and worked backward.

  Most of the personal email was either to Tessa herself or to his mother and sister. Salah, faithful son that he’d been, had written his widowed mother once a week, and he and Tessa had visited Tunisia every October. Fatima had not been thrilled with Salah’s choice of bride. In fact, she’d been appalled. Conservative, still veiled when she left the house, she blamed Tessa for taking her only son away from his native country, and away from her. She had never said as much, but she treated Tessa with icy courtesy, never so much as smiling at Tessa’s attempts at friendliness in her stumbling scho
olgirl French. For Salah’s sake, Tessa had never made an issue of this. Besides, Fatima’s disdain had been made up for by his sister, Aisha.

  As much the new Tunisia as Fatima was the old, Aisha was a doctor with the World Health Organization in Geneva. Aisha was wonderful, as lighthearted and adventurous as her older brother. Aisha had especially loved the emailed pictures of Minette. Salah wrote to Aisha in French and to Fatima in Arabic. His laptop was equipped with software to handle the Arabic characters.

  Among all the emails, Tessa found only three, all in Arabic, with addresses she didn’t recognize. Two were from pennj@amserve.net, a United Kingdom ISP, dated a few days apart last August. The other was from dkd78@vvvmail.com, received two days before Salah died. If Salah had replied to either, he hadn’t saved the replies on his computer, nor entered the addresses in his address book, although he was sloppy about that, anyway. Tessa had no idea who either recipient was.

  Nor did she know if they spoke English. Querying them in French might be safer, although many younger Tunisians, especially those not rich, no longer learned French. France had, after all, pulled out of Tunisia in 1956. Still, it wasn’t as if Tessa had fluency in a dozen languages to choose from. Salah had been the one with the natural linguistic ear.

  “What language do you dream in, Salah?”

  “It depends on the dream. If it is of you, I dream in poetry.”

  Her English-French dictionary was packed somewhere unknowable. Tessa settled for a scratch job, hoping whoever was on the other end would overlook her mistakes in grammar and vocabulary.

  Je suis la femme de Salah Mahjoub, avec qui vous avez communiqué l’année dernière. Peut-être vous avez apprendé que Salah est mort, depuis décembre. S’il vous plait, voulez-vous écrire à moi cette qu’avez-vous écrit avec lui l’année dernière? C’est tres important. Merci beaucoup. Aussi, pardonnez-vous mon francais; je suis americaine.