“Relax. She’s a lot smarter than we are. In nine months when she graduates the academy, she’ll be too busy passing us by on the way to making chief of detectives.”
“That’s a relief. So she’s just there to solve all our cases for us then, and ensure we don’t get axed for falling down on the job. I guess that’s a better reason for hating her than just feeling jealous.”
“Come on,” Santini said, putting the book down. “Something tells me the ASPCA isn’t going to cut it this time. We might need to call in the National Guard.”
“You’re a crack shot and I’m a redneck. What more back up do we need?”
“Point taken.” Reaching for the doorknob, Santini said, “The shotgun in the car?”
“Strapped to my back. This is Oakland. You should know better than to reach for a napkin in a deli without one.” He closed the door behind them as they stepped into the sun, which Mort figured served as Santini’s reminder to buy a dollar store pair of shades, the cheap bastard.
Santini felt up his back. Evidently, he thought he was kidding about the shotgun. “You ever think of writing a how-to manual for rednecks?”
“Nah, you’re born with this stuff, or not at all. It’s not something you can teach.” Stepping off the stoop, he said, “You really think Hartman trained those dogs to eat Moonie brains?”
“Sounds like the kind of off-color humor he’d indulge in.”
“For a man of such pretensions, I suppose.” Mort wasn’t a hundred percent convinced. But then he was an even bigger dog lover than Santini was. He lived with a couple French Poodles that were yet one more invitation to get into fights every time he walked them in public and whistled jauntily.
***
Thor sat up at the damnable sounds of mechanical monsters invading his province. Yelping in protest before he could control the reflex.
The neighbor’s house was being refurbished, top to bottom. Just his luck, the only neighbors to complain had the best ears this side of the moon.
He barked impotently in protest, angry at himself for not being able to override his doggie urges.
The trucks rolled in along every side of Hartman’s estate, eager to make use of any easement that gave them greater access to the neighbor’s property.
With no letup in sight, the dogs set about tuning out the madness as best they could, with paws over ears, heads tucked behind natural sound dampeners; islands of shrubbery, decorative stones.
***
Thor awoke with the bright sun in his eyes, which he experienced as an unusual situation. He and the pack had become increasingly nocturnal in their activities. He quickly grasped the situation.
They were surrounded by those utility trucks with the giant baskets that held humans high in the air so they could work on electrical wiring feeding the homes. There were two of these crane trucks to each side of the property, each one filled with sharpshooters, their rifles bearing down on them from high above.
If they made it over the fence, the sharpshooters would continue to have a clear line of sight on them for some distance. A rim of fire blazed behind them, cutting off access to the house’s many egress points. Whoever thought this up, had done a thorough job, and had the dope on them.
Thor barked to alert the others, signaling psychically as well. “They have us surrounded. Get over the fences. And keep out of sight of the rifles. Stick to the trees and bushes. Get to the closest manhole. We’ll use the sewer drains.”
Six of them were already down. The sharpshooters were merciless, unhesitating, and dead on with their bullets. Though he could tell four of the Bullmastiffs were only playing dead. Too wounded to flee, they were waiting for closer inspection of their bodies to exact revenge.
The bastards had raised the stakes of jumping the fences as well. The entire perimeter was surrounded by forty-five-degree angle saw-cut metal beams that would impale them the second they jumped the fence. They had made use of the construction noise on the home being remodeled next door for cover. The more Thor thought about it, the construction itself could have started a few days previous as a set up for this scene. He was starting to like his unmet opponent; he thought more like Thor than Hartman did.
Brutus flung himself onto the canine-like metal beams, skewering himself, to give Thor a path to freedom.
Thor leaped over the fence, landed sideways on Brutus, so he could grab his collar with his teeth, and fling him off the skewers, using his own momentum and bodyweight.
That worked, but Brutus was badly hurt. He limped behind, taking a few more shots for his efforts, while complicating the line of sight to Thor by tackling the truck holding the sharp shooter beading down on Thor. The reverberating bucket holding the marksman caused his aim to stray, giving Thor time to free the manhole cover.
He used one of his long claws, which, like the rest of him, had overshot the mark in response to Hartman’s vita-nutrient solutions—on the lift-hole. The manhole-cover cleared, Thor stepped into the shadows of an overhanging tree branch and waited for Brutus to limp to the hole in the asphalt, and uneasily squeeze his massive size through.
Thor watched the cops, baited by the wounded animals, get too close. The dogs clamped down on the police men kicking them or leaning to inspect at the neck, and ran to the fence. They flung the cops onto the metal skewers to clear a path for themselves.
Three of them made it over before being cut down. Another three made it to the manhole, limping and bloody.
Thor studied the leader shouting orders to turn the searchlights to where they could do some good, committing his name—Santini—and his odor to memory.
Thor was the last one through the manhole, so far, unharmed. “Get me a diagram of those sewer lines!” Thor heard Santini shout overhead.
Thor took one look at the sorry state of his pack and held out little hope of them lasting much longer without medical attention. Brutus had cracked a rib just falling badly down the manhole. Thor decided their best hope was to scatter to the wind, impinge on some pet lover to take them in, conceal their identities from the cops. Ironically, an even better chance would be afforded them in Oakland than in Berkeley, where illegal dog fights were commonplace. They’d be put to fighting other dogs. They’d live in squalor and underfoot of brutality. But with the bullets taken out of them, they could bide their time. And Thor would maintain his psychic connection with the others to help them through the ordeal.
They did as ordered.
Thor decided he’d linger a while longer, see what intel he could glean. Then he’d make his way to Santini’s, digest his ambivalent feelings about him along the way, which no doubt would determine the outcome of staring one another down.
***
Mort surveyed the field of dead dogs as he trudged through Hartman’s yard. “These were some high-functioning mutts, but I’ve seen Dobermans do some things…”
“I wouldn’t have thought even a massacre would soften you any,” Santini said, picking up on the tone of remorse and second-thoughts.
Santini gazed up in the direction of Mort’s glance. Cat-Man-Do, covered from head to toe in fur currently standing on end, hissed at the three riflemen that had him surrounded. He sneezed from nerves and panic and ejected his whiskers at them, which had all the charm of porcupine needles. The riflemen grabbed their faces, screaming, and dropped their rifles. Cat-Man-Do was able to aim those things well enough that those riflemen would never fire another rifle again.
Cat-Man-Do bolted down the street, still hissing.
Santini and Mort gave chase, but first they had to slip out the damn gate. All the other cops were inside the perimeter, hadn’t seen a damn thing, and were otherwise preoccupied with the aftermath of the shootout—not the least of which included putting out the fires to keep from burning down the damn house. Even shouting “Get that guy!” wouldn’t do much, as Cat-Man-Do was already out of sight, and Santini and Mort were the closest ones to the gate. That meant it was down to them. Santini with his arthritic hip, Mort wit
h his shuffle.
Cat-Man-Do glanced back at them, evaluated the distance he was putting on the two detectives, and threw them a parting smile. That’s when he saw it. About the same time as Santini. The Bullmastiff tackling him and pinning him to the ground.
By the time Santini and Mort made it to Cat-Man-Do, he was screaming, “Get this animal off me!”
“God forgive me.” Mort made the sign of the cross over himself, as he examined the whiskery genetic freak—convinced he’d just participated in a bloody massacre against God’s innocent creatures for no good reason.
Santini reached into Cat-Man-Do’s brown bag of groceries and pulled out canisters of cow’s brains, held them up for Mort to see.
“I’m sorry I ate those people’s brains,” Cat-Man-Do said, “but the ones at the foodmart are so tasteless.”
Mort pulled his gun and aimed it at Cat-Man-Do’s head, determined to make amends to the Almighty right there for the wrong-minded slaughter of the Bullmastiffs, who they were now both convinced had nothing to do with the curious Moonie murders.
If this guy was complaining of the dog on his chest, he wasn’t going to think much of the electric chair, Santini thought, assuming he survived Mort.
Santini rubbed the dog’s neck, pulled at the skin affectionately with his hand. He kneeled down to see his nametag. Thor. “That’s a good dog.” He stood again and directed his next remark at Santini. “I think I found my dog, Mort.”
“Hell, yeah. Finally a cockamamie idea I can sign off on. Might help allay some of my guilt for jumping the gun on the rest.”
“You mean my guilt, don’t you? It was my crazy idea.”
“I didn’t have to go along with it like it was written in the gospels.” Mort resituated his hat on his head as if his raised blood pressure was making the fit uncomfortable.
Watching Mort cuff Cat-Man-Do, Santini couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy. With a mug like that, he had to have his own hard-luck story to tell. He was a man on the outs. Scientist? Artist? Whoever he was, he was too colorful to fit with the mainstream. It drove home for Santini just how all of Berkeley’s colorful characters were on the outs, just like Mort and him. He’d never felt much in common with the peacock-types before. But he might have been wrong about them.
“Ease up, Mort,” Santini cued, seeing him wrenching the guy’s hand out of its socket.
***
Thor was very pleased everything was going to plan. Their neighbor had been unfairly sacrificed, but there was the bigger picture to consider. Which is why Thor had begun slipping left-over cocktails from Hartman’s lab to him the previous month. Thor’s thought-projection had done the rest. He visualized the guy eating cow’s brains and so he did. He visualized him growing hair like a cat, and so he did. How exactly Thor’s thoughts affected the man’s underlying genetics remained a mystery to Thor, and a frightening prospect. He’d have to attend his mind dutifully from here on out to make sure he didn’t unwittingly trigger changes in others.
Because the purple pill triggered a personality change, anyone digging into Cat-Man-Do’s past would find plenty of evidence of a psychotic break. Maybe that would get him shrink time versus jail time. As to all that cat hair, the condition could hit someone late in life. He knew this because Mort had recently downloaded the intel to his PDA off Wikipedia, and the thought had stuck in his head.
Thor figured he’d be found out, eventually. All the same, he was glad Plan A had worked out, so he didn’t have to resort to Plan B—killing off anyone on to them. Especially now that Santini was growing on him. Hartman had never returned. Thor needed a new master, and this one might even suit him better than Hartman. They even saw the world the same, in black and white. Thor’s psychic link to Santini was even stronger than it was to Hartman, which suggested a serendipitous union, and an already strong heart connection. He wasn’t sure how well he could play the role of dog at this juncture, but would cross one bridge at a time.
***
Santini was taking in the environmental exhibit at the Oakland Museum, courtesy of Gretchen’s determination to shift his outlook on Oakland away from the drug and savage-death capital of the world to something more honest. He gawked at the frogs featured in the display touting California as one of the world’s top ten biological “hot spots.” That wasn’t news to him. What was news was they weren’t referring to homemade drugs.
Thor was busy fixating on a Henry Moore sculpture. He stared at it from one angle for a while, barked, then took up another angle. The dog did seem strangely high functioning. On a bluff, they’d snuck him in as a seeing-eye dog, but once through the door, he was well-enough behaved that Gertrude seldom had to flash the blind man’s cane to silence the openly outraged. After that, Santini and Gretchen had left him to wander the museum on his own. He seemed to sense when they needed alone time.
Gretchen was gifted at occupying space alongside him without having to fill it with babble. They spent a lot of time together in serenity, not saying a word, feeling the fullness of one another’s presence. In this way, he emptied himself into her the way he imagined people with big lawns emptied themselves into their oceans of grass, the poor man’s beachfront.
The next time Santini looked around for Thor he was standing by the giant M sculpture in the garden, painted bright Valencia orange. Apparently taking offense, he jumped up on a large man and relieved him of his shades, donned them, and returned to the sculpture to stare at it some more. The museum goer, relaxing after his initial heart attack, laughed and pointed. Thor was drawing a throng. Finally he gave up on the sculpture, returned the man’s shades by using his paw to pull them free of his face, and setting it on the ground. He fled the publicity high-functioning brings to a dog, evidently feeling the same way about being in the public eye that Santini did.
Santini smiled. He knew the M was shocking orange, loud enough to sear the retinas, because he’d read about it in the museum catalogue. Could the dog actually be frustrated with his inability to see in color, realizing he was being robbed of the truth of the artist’s intentions? The virtual-reality shades he’d ripped off the blind man was cutting edge technology which disturbed brainwave patterns in such a way as to confuse sounds with colors, an actual medical condition. This meant the colors were synthesized in the brain, getting around any limitations of the retina. This, too, he had only recently read about in an article in a magazine he subscribed to, in order to better help him cope with his astigmatism and color-blindness as new technologies came along. The dog would have to be psychic to know the shades could get around his black and white vision. Surely it must be some party trick Hartman had taught him owing to his sick sense of humor. Santini chuckled and put his mind on more deserving subject matter: Gretchen.
After telling Gretchen about the massacre of Hartman’s dogs, they spent the rest of the day at the biological hotspot exhibit—throwing out the Hartman-case memories adorning their minds like so much unwanted memorabilia, and redecorating with more pleasant ones. Hours later, they were both happy the ripples left in Hartman’s wake were finally subsiding.
An indoor butterfly garden exhibit capped their visit to the museum, with every known living butterfly type represented and gaily fluttering about.
Gretchen was tickled pink, literally, by all those butterfly legs landing on her at once. “Aren’t they marvelous?” she said, holding up her hand, covered with the insects.
“Even in black and white,” Santini confessed.
Seeing her fill with joy allowed Santini to feel the same for the first time in his life. Bittersweet tears drained from his eyes, for which he was happy; Gretchen was prevented from seeing by the butterflies pulling focus.
***
That night, Gretchen dragged him to La Dolce Vita, showing at the Roxy. The ratty, casual furniture, the sofas and arm chairs, collected from however many Ashby flea markets over the years, suited them fine. Thor curled up beside them on the couch looking intently at the movie the entire time. His head nev
er once dipped from the screen.
***
“Come one. Come all. Catch the Carnival of Characters, Causes, and Crusades.” Santini chuckled, set down the flyer advertising the attractions of Berkeley’s street scene. He returned it to the stacks of takeaways by the exit for the Rialto.
Gretchen picked up the flyer he’d set down. “We should go.”
Thor yapped approvingly.
“Looks like you have me outnumbered.” Feeling that straitjacket of emotions he kept around him chafing him, Santini said, “OK.” He embraced her.
***
Santini and Gretchen were finally back in his townhouse, after taking in the “Carnival of Characters, Crusades, and Causes” Berkeley had to offer.
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