Kendall didn’t see an exit strategy that could accomplish everyone’s goals, and this left him profoundly frightened. How the hell had things gotten this far? He glanced at the NYPD tactical van as if that vehicle might be able to provide some answers.
After a few seconds, the side door of the van slid open. A diminutive silver-haired woman stepped out to surprised cheers from the crowd. Kendall met her.
“May I see that paper?” she asked.
“Of course, Madam Mayor,” Kendall said as he handed it to her. The mayor reviewed the document silently. McGreary joined them.
“I see the governor has left us no choice,” the mayor said.
“That’s the way I see it, ma’am,” McGreary said.
“Very well. But this is still my shelter,” she said. “I will advise them to open the doors.”
Kendall and three of his men began clearing a path for the mayor through the crowd. Kendall could feel the heat coming off some of the impromptu protestors. Somewhere along the way this had become bigger than some stray dogs in a shelter… bigger even than this virus of unknown origin, and certainly bigger than the politics of the convention. The street outside the shelter had become a microcosm for the city’s current emotional state—one of fear, distrust, powerlessness, and cynicism.
As the mayor, Kendall, and McGreary approached the barricades, some of the Guards stationed near the shelter began to push forward, clearing the path from the other direction. Although the crowd was unruly, it obeyed the line of brusque soldiers with automatic rifles.
All except one.
Andy.
Kendall didn’t know how or when Andy had gotten there, but he couldn’t miss the look of anguish and pain in his young face. In that instant Kendall knew this was someone beyond caring about soldiers’ orders and automatic rifles. He also knew that this was how innocent people got killed.
The Guards moved or pushed the crowd to the sidewalk in front of the church or onto the opposite side of the street. Andy stood alone in front of the barricade before the shelter.
A soldier walked over to deal with him.
“Oh, holy shit,” Kendall spit. He sprinted toward the shelter, leaving the mayor and McGreary openmouthed and staring at his back.
The soldier was Owens.
21
Andy was disappointed that the others had given in so easily. Disappointed, but not surprised. Everyone has a threshold. It all comes back to context and alternative. Clearly they had much more in their lives to protect and so the cost of their dissonance was that much higher. In contrast, whatever Andy cared about now was in that shelter.
“You need to move down the steps.” Andy recognized the prick talking to him. It was that soldier, Owens, from the perimeter.
Andy was too angry to speak in any way that wasn’t primal… in any manner that would make sense. He just shook his head.
“Now don’t make this a YouTube moment, kid,” Owens said. “Just move along like all the other idiots.”
Andy felt his reserve breaking. “Screw you.”
“What’d you say, freak?” Owens’s tone was all challenge as he grabbed Andy’s arm.
That was the line. “DON’T-TOUCH-ME!” Andy brought his fist up in a powerful uppercut under Owens’s chin.
Kendall caught Andy’s fist a millisecond before it connected.
“Get off me,” Andy protested. He struggled against Kendall, but the cop was too powerful. “You can’t let them take the dogs.”
“Stop it, Andy,” Kendall commanded. “You’re gonna get yourself killed.”
“I don’t care,” Andy shot back.
“But I do,” Kendall answered.
The mayor reached them. “And so do I,” she said.
“They’re going to kill my dogs.” Andy tried to push Kendall away.
“Listen to me,” Kendall whispered in his ear. “Those dogs have only one shot out of here alive and you’re looking at her. Let her do this.”
“I’m not going to abandon them,” Andy snapped.
“No one said you had to, son,” the mayor said. “You can still make your voice heard and I hope you will. Just do it from over there where you’ll be safe. Don’t give them a reason.”
“But I—”
Kendall cut him off. “All martyrs are dead, Andy. These dogs need you alive. There’s no one else.”
Something in Kendall’s voice reached Andy. He studied the Guards surrounding them and knew Kendall was telling the truth. Andy moved down the stairs and away from the shelter entrance with the rest of the crowd.
Owens followed. “Hey, kid!” Andy spun to face him, bristling.
“Get back here now, Owens!” McGreary yelled.
Owens appeared torn between compliance and violence.
“Aww, listen, his master’s voice,” Andy taunted.
“Another time, OK? I’ll be waiting,” Owens said, and turned away.
Andy lost interest in Owens and focused on the mayor. She stood alone behind the barricades in front of the shelter door with the governor’s order in her hands. She eyed the crowd that filled the street and raised her hands for silence.
“What does the paper say?” Andy called out. The question was echoed by others standing near him.
“It says,” the mayor began in a surprisingly loud voice, “that by order of the governor, we must turn over the dogs in this city shelter.”
Instantly shouts, expletives, and general dissent ran through the crowd as cameras flashed.
The mayor waited for the crowd to quiet. “Yes, it reeks of politics, and yes, the governor will have to answer to you come November. But for now we must comply with his directive.”
“My dogs are in there!” a woman yelled in a panicked voice.
“Ours too,” a man shouted. “We brought him here to be safe! We were told he’d be safe!”
There were more shouts.
“I know how you feel,” the mayor said, looking directly at the line of video cameras. “Decisions being made for you with little or no explanation and without so much as an ounce of compassion about how we live in this city.” The mayor’s voice cracked with emotion. “But the reality is that this is now the best way to resolve this situation without loss of life and I ask for your continued patience and cooperation. We will get to the bottom of this very soon. Until that time, I ask you to trust me. I promise I will not betray that trust.”
The mayor turned from the crowd and knocked on the shelter door. She waited but got no answer. “This is the mayor of the City of New York. Please open the door,” she shouted.
Again no answer.
“If you open this door, I promise that no harm will come to you.”
Andy and the rest of the crowd waited in silent anticipation.
22
Kendall and McGreary joined the mayor at the shelter door. Kendall had a bad feeling as he watched the door swing open. The lights were on, but the reception room was empty.
“Hello?” the mayor called out. No response, only a disconcerting stillness underneath the hum of the fluorescent lights. “You know these people,” she told Kendall. “Go in and find out what’s going on. They need to understand that I can only protect them if they cooperate.”
“Whoa. Hold up,” McGreary said. “This is my jurisdiction now. I make those decisions.”
The mayor spun on him. “Do you want to resolve this without a fight or not? If you want to show me what big balls you have, I’ll borrow a microscope. But I promise I will make this such an embarrassment for your superiors that you will be confined to base for the rest of your life.” The mayor finished the sentence with a nod toward the television cameras.
“What about if just the two of us go in?” Kendall offered, pointing to McGreary.
“Fine. But you will not go in with your guns drawn,” the mayor ordered. “They’re only armed with dog bones and bags of kibble.”
“Agreed,” McGreary said. “But one attempt to resist and all bets are off.” McGreary
held the door open for Kendall and they stepped inside.
Kendall thought the quiet was disorienting at first. Then it was frightening. He had stopped in the shelter almost every workday for years now and he knew it as a place of near-constant activity and noise. But now the shelter seemed lifeless.
“Hello? It’s Kendall,” he called out, really just to hear something in the stillness. The absence of response—not a bark or a growl, not to mention a human voice—the wrongness of the silence, made him shudder.
McGreary looked to him for an explanation, but Kendall couldn’t offer one. They moved quickly to the upper floor and entered the room that had served as the isolation room. Empty.
“Is there a basement?” McGreary asked.
Kendall nodded and led the way to the door that opened onto the stairwell. The door was closed, but unlocked. Kendall pulled it open. “Hello,” he called down the stairs to the lights below. “It’s me, Kendall of the NYPD. You’re gonna need to come out of there now.”
No answer.
Kendall took the stairs slowly with McGreary right behind. He knew the basement was empty long before they reached the bottom floor. The cages Kendall had helped move down here were gone. Large plastic bags filled to overflowing with soiled newspapers, disposable kennel pads, empty bags of dog food, and red barrels marked for “Sharps Disposal” had taken their place. The room smelled of disinfectant and, underneath that, urine and feces.
McGreary turned on Kendall. “If you know something about this bullshit, you’d better tell me now before someone gets hurt.”
“I don’t know crap.”
“And if you did, you’d tell me?”
“Look, Lieutenant, the last thing I want is for one of your Jeep jockeys to get surprised by someone hiding behind a corner, OK?”
McGreary’s radio phone squeaked. “All OK in there, sir?”
He grabbed the phone. “There’s no one here.”
“Excuse me, sir?” The radio crackled.
“You heard me. No one home.”
“Sorry, sir. That’s really not possible. We saw them go in. We’ve been monitoring the rear exit from the start. No one came out.”
“Then I—” McGreary loped across the room to a large set of metal shelves. “Stand by,” he said.
A square rust mark on the floor appeared to match the footprint of the shelving unit, but the mark was four feet from where the shelves now stood. McGreary gave the unit a tug and managed to move it five inches—enough to see the door behind it. McGreary pulled the unit the rest of the way, uncovering the entire doorframe. A rope tied to the back of the shelving unit ran under the door. “What’s this?” he asked.
Kendall shrugged.
McGreary yanked on the rope and it came free from under the door. “Looks like they went through and then pulled these shelves behind them.” He tried the door handle. Unlocked. His hand dropped to his gun.
“Stay cool,” Kendall warned.
McGreary opened the door, revealing the inner door. Someone had taped a handwritten note to that second door: “You are looking at the property of the Catholic Church. Do not even think about entering. Signed, GOD.”
Kendall barely suppressed a smile.
McGreary noticed. “You think this is funny?”
“Well, actually—”
McGreary gripped his phone so hard that his knuckles turned white. “They’re in the church.”
“Repeat that, sir?” the phone squawked.
“There’s a damn connecting door in the basement. They’re all in the church.”
After a confused pause, the voice on the phone asked, “What are your orders?”
“Damned if I know,” McGreary said. “Heading out to you now.”
23
While Sid, Greg, and Luke worked tirelessly in the church basement to set up crates and ensure that the dogs were clean and comfortable, Gabriel and Eliot became the de facto guardians of the church sanctuary. This was where they had placed the nine dogs from the shelter isolation room. These dogs, recovering but still weak from their battle with illness, lay silently in their crates under the tortured stained glass eye of Isaac and the wooden image of Christ on his cross.
Greg had earlier moved their IV lines from one front paw to the other to keep the lines from occluding, but he hadn’t had time for the usual niceties of cleaning and wrapping the old IV port sites. Gabriel had offered to do that for the dogs and this was what occupied him now.
He took a bottle of sterile saline solution, a box of cotton swabs, and a roll of paper towels from the supply box they had brought over from the shelter, and sat cross-legged before the first crate.
Nick lay curled up on his side, completely exhausted, but he thumped his tail when he saw the priest. Gabriel unlatched the crate and Nick immediately stretched out his long frame and yawned. Gabriel rested his hand lightly on Nick’s head and he thumped his tail even harder.
“Now, let’s see that paw.” Gabriel reached for Nick’s foreleg and gently pulled it forward.
Working as carefully as he could, Gabriel cleaned the affected area with saline and a cotton swab. Nick was forgiving but Gabriel could see by the way the dog winced that the site of the old port was sore. “I have an idea,” he said. “It works for my knees.”
Gabriel rose and grabbed the nearest substitute washbasin he could find—the large ciborium on the altar. He filled it with warm water from the bathroom behind the dais and brought the bowl to Nick. Gabriel delicately placed the dog’s wounded paw into the warm water. Nick dropped his head in Gabriel’s lap, closed his eyes, and sighed.
As Gabriel stroked Nick’s head, a deep sense of peace came over the priest. It had been so long absent that at first Gabriel couldn’t identify the feeling. Then he noticed the worn wooden image of the crucified Jesus looking down on them and understood. He desperately wanted to say something to that figure—that sometimes, maybe only twice in a lifetime, it is all laid out before you; discrete pieces of a life that have no business even being in the same area code meet and join to create something so much more powerful than their parts; worlds open and the divine spirit becomes not only real, but tangible and measurable; that in this moment Gabriel loved his God at least as much as he had ever loved another human being; that without the love he now felt there could be nothing else. And he knew—with a degree of moral certainty that came only from years of hopeless searching in all the wrong places—that he was loved as deeply right back.
Gabriel wiped his eyes and moved on to the spent dog in the next crate.
He was cleaning the paw of the last dog in the sanctuary when Sid found him. Gabriel sensed Sid’s presence but addressed him without turning around. “I have a very aggressive form of Alzheimer’s,” the priest said. “Within six months on the outside, I will lose most of my ability to speak. I will not be able to recognize you or anyone else. I will shit and pee myself and need to be cleaned by someone else. I will not be able to read the word of God or the Sunday comics. I will again become a baby, except in the body of a man. Then I will become only an empty vessel in human form. After that I will lose the ability to swallow. I signed the paperwork to decline a feeding tube.”
Sid placed his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “How long have you known?”
Gabriel rose. “A month. This may sound ironic, but I don’t believe in miracles. Or, even if they do exist, that I’m worthy of one. I’ve prayed every day since I found out that God would take me into His house before another sunrise. But I guess sometimes God’s greatest gift to us is an unanswered prayer. Everything follows something that came before, doesn’t it? If He had taken me, these creatures would not have found sanctuary, even if it is perhaps just for a day. Eliot would have been dead on some cold metal table, and you, my friend”—Gabriel turned to face Sid—“would have been denied the opportunity to pull my head out of my ass.”
“Is there nothing I can do for you?”
“Oh, on the contrary. I intend to extract a promise from yo
u.”
“Of course.”
“But you don’t even know what it is. You’re supposed to make this hard. I had it all planned out.”
“You are a good man. You would not impose an unreasonable burden.”
“I want you to take Eliot and Molly when the time comes.”
“It would be my honor.”
Gabriel sighed as the weight lifted from his chest. “There is one other thing.” Gabriel struggled for words, but they would not come. The request was too large, the language required to frame it too alien to a Roman Catholic priest.
Sid appeared to think for a moment and then nodded. “Make sure she is happy, Gabe.”
Sid’s blessing made Gabriel’s knees weak. He desperately wanted to switch subjects before he became a blubbering mess. “So,” he said, “did you hear the one about the priest, the locksmith, and the sick dogs all locked in a church?”
“What sick dogs?” Sid asked, pointing.
Gabriel followed the direction of Sid’s finger.
Each dog that Gabriel had cleansed and bathed—each of the nine that had been sick and in isolation at the shelter—now stood alert and renewed, waiting for freedom.
24
By the time McGreary and Kendall stepped back onto the street, CNN had already sent a “Breaking News” e-mail blast that the dogs were now being given “sanctuary” inside Riverside Church. The video cameras jockeyed over new positions for the best live images of the top human interest story of the day.
McGreary returned to his troops while Kendall spoke to the mayor. “I’m going to assume you didn’t know about any of this,” the mayor warned Kendall.
“Of course not,” he said, but there was a smirk in his voice. “The Guard doesn’t have jurisdiction over the church, does it?”
“No. The order was specific as to location. Plus the church is neither city nor state property.”
“Clever. What do you think they’ll do now?” Kendall asked.
“I guess they could ask God, but in the meantime I’m sure the governor is calling the head of the diocese. I just hope Tom and Dr. Lewis get me some news I can share before that happens.”
Just Life Page 29