Dog Eats Dog

by Iain Levison

  Kohl knocked on the door. They could hear a television blasting. Denise reached under her suit jacket and unsnapped her holster.

  “WHO DAT?” The voice from inside was male, gruff, and aggressive.

  She and Kohl looked at each other. “Just knock again,” she said.

  “WHAT CHOO WANT?” The TV was still blaring and he could barely be heard above it.

  There was a few seconds of silence. Finally Denise called out, “Mr Davenport? We’d like to talk to you for a few moments.”

  More silence. Then they heard a chain being put on the door and the lock being worked. The door opened a few inches and a huge black man wearing a stained white T-shirt and boxers peered out at Denise. He looked enraged.

  “There ain’t no Mr Davenport,” he spat at her. “There’s a Miss Davenport, but she gone. What you want?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” Denise said, aware that if this man produced a gun and began to shoot through the narrow opening, there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She adopted her most non-threatening, maternal voice. “We’d like to ask you a few questions. Can we come in?”

  He stared at her. His eyes were bleary and red, Denise noticed, and she got a whiff of alcohol on his breath. A strong whiff. Her eyes teared up and she tried not to gag as she took another step back from the door.

  “Who you? You ain’t friends of Angelique.” He gave Denise a long, slow, appraisal, most of it concentrated on her legs, and his expression softened. She smiled at him. Ooh, yeah, baby, just what I’m looking for, a fat shitfaced bully in his stained underwear. For the first time since they had left New York, she was glad Kohl was here. That feeling ended abruptly.

  “FBI,” said Kohl firmly, flashing his badge. Denise winced as the man’s expression turned hard again.

  “FBI? What you fuckers want with me?”

  “We don’t want anything with you, sir, we want . . .”

  SLAM.

  Denise looked at the closed door and sighed, then turned to Kohl. “That was smart,” she said.

  “We have to tell him who we are if he asks.”

  Denise sighed and rubbed her forehead. “We could have told him after we got inside, you rocket scientist.”

  Kohl said nothing. Denise was about to turn to go when they heard the TV shut off, then the chain on the door being slid back. The door opened wide, and the man stood in front of them now with a complete change of demeanor, head hanging, shoulders sagging.

  “Bitch left me,” he said. “She split. I don’t know where she went.” He looked rueful. “She ain’t comin’ back.”

  “She left yesterday?” Denise asked, trying to sound sympathetic.

  “Yeah. Why the FBI want to know about this?”

  “Well, she bought a plane ticket to Kingston, Jamaica, and paid for it with bills stolen in a bank robbery on Friday. Would you know anything about that?”

  “What? Huh? No, I don’t know nothin’ about dat. What the fuck, you think I robbed a fuckin’ bank? Is that what this shit is about?”

  “Have you ever seen this man before?” Denise opened the file and showed him Dixon’s picture. The man looked at it for a second and shook his head.

  “How do you know she’s not coming back?” asked Denise.

  “She left a note on the fridge.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “It’s on the fridge,” he said.

  “Could you get it for me?”

  “What? The fridge?”

  “The note,” said Denise patiently.

  “It’s on the fridge,” he said again. “Come in.” He pointed at Denise. “Just you. You can look at the note, and then you gotta leave.”

  Kohl and Denise looked at each other, and she gave him a nod indicating it was OK. The man opened the door all the way and Denise went into the kitchen while the man went over to the couch and slumped down again. Next to him was a bottle of bourbon, half empty, sitting on a busted coffee table amid the aftermath of what had obviously been a temper tantrum. She looked around the kitchen. Two potted plants were broken on the floor, and on the refrigerator, written in lipstick, were the words “CHARLES GOODBYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE. GET A JOB!”

  Denise looked around the kitchen as she heard the over-loud TV roar back to life. On the kitchen table was an opened letter addressed to Angelique Davenport, RN, with a return address logo of Tiburn College. Denise looked inside the envelope and saw a pay stub from which the check had been removed. She carefully eased the stub out of the envelope and looked at it. Fourteen bucks an hour? She thought nurses made more than that. Also scattered across the table were several buds of marijuana and a few rolling papers. Without thinking, she grabbed two or three of them, a couple of the papers, and the pay stub, and put them all in her jacket pocket.

  “Thanks for your time,” she called to Charles as she went out, waving to him.

  He grunted.

  She closed the door behind her and she and Agent Kohl walked back to the car.

  “Find anything?” Kohl asked.

  “She was a nurse at the local college,” Denise said. She handed Kohl the pay stub, careful not to let the marijuana buds spill out of her pocket.

  “A nurse? How do you think she knew Dixon?”

  “I don’t think she did. Remember the police report? Dixon had been shot. They found blood in every car he stole after the robbery. His first priority after he got here was to find a nurse so she could clean out the wound. Obviously Dixon paid her well enough to get out of a rough living situation.”

  “So he knows somebody here or he wouldn’t have come here.”

  Denise nodded. “And that somebody probably works at the college. So tomorrow, we spend the day interviewing people on the campus. Sound like a plan?”

  Kohl nodded.

  “Let’s go get a couple of rooms at the motel.”

  They drove to the edge of town, where they had noticed a small motel when they had come in off the Interstate. Denise handled the booking of the rooms to make sure there were two of them.

  “Here’s your key,” she said. “We’re next-door neighbors.” She waved at the parking lot and the truck stop across a field beyond. “I got us rooms with a view.”

  “Do you want to get some dinner?” Kohl asked hopefully. Since the interview with Angelique Davenport’s ex, he had become friendlier, and had several times mentioned that it was getting near time to “relax”. Denise had said nothing.

  “Nah, I’m not hungry,” Denise lied. She quickly decided she would rather spend her evening sitting on her bed eating vending machine potato chips out of a bag than spend anymore time with Kohl, who looked disappointed at her response. Perhaps, as Yancey had suggested, Kohl had set his sights on a nice romantic evening, sharing their souls over a bottle or two of wine in Tiburn’s most romantic restaurant. Gaaak.

  “You take the car. I’m gonna stay in.”

  “OK,” he shrugged. “What time tomorrow?”

  “Let’s meet here at nine.”

  “Don’t you think an earlier start would be good? Say, eight?” He was getting professional again now that his hopes of a wild evening had been rebuffed.

  “If you want to go down to the college before anything is open and hang around for an hour, knock yourself out,” said Denise, opening her motel room door.

  “OK,” said Kohl, looking sheepish, almost smiling. He was trying to charm her. Oh shit. What was wrong with men? The bitchier you were the more they took it as a challenge. Look, being bitchy means I don’t like you, it doesn’t mean I want you to try harder.

  “G’night,” she said sweetly, slamming the door. Ugh, she mumbled under her breath. She tossed the motel room key on the dresser and took her coat off as she heard the rumbling of a storm beginning outside. She took off her jacket and hung it on the lone wire hanger in the rickety closet and kicked her shoes off next to the bed. Then she peered carefully between the dusty curtains out into the parking lot, where she could see Agent Kohl getting his bags out of the t
runk, looking dejected.

  Denise got the marijuana buds out of her coat pocket and looked at them, then took a whiff. The dank, musty odor returned her to the halls of her high school in Upton, Minnesota. With the memory came the feelings of hope and excitement for her future, and the almost volcanic energy she had back then. She would get out of bed at five o’clock for her track team meetings on mornings so cold that the farmers she would see on her way to the track would be breaking ice off the well covers, and she had been excited about where she was going. She had drawn her energy from the thrill of the competition, the delight in being part of a team, and the friends she had made. She had been one of the slowest runners on the team, not a natural athlete, as her coach had kindly put it. But he had kept her on the team because of her attitude, which was always so positive and friendly. Well, she thought, as she broke the buds up into the rolling paper, those days are over.

  She didn’t know what she could have done differently. Be a housewife? She could have married any number of guys over the years, but her career had always come first, and the men had not been comfortable with that and moved on. Denise had been determined early on that she was not going to wind up like her mother, talking about all the dreams which had gone unfulfilled so she could be a good wife and mother. In high school and college, she had decided that her career, not motherhood, was going to make the world a better place. She struggled through a challenging scholarship program at the University of Minnesota, then another scholarship degree at Stanford, keeping her sights set on the goal of becoming an FBI profiler.

  She was, it turned out, not a natural academic either. Her good grades in both programs were the result of endless hours in the library and frequent tutoring, and she realized early in her higher education that her small-town schooling was not putting her on a par with the more affluent kids competing for the same scholarships. But once again it was her attitude, her extracurricular activities and her perpetual smile, which had won over the judges and boards. And, of course, her sincerity as she described her bright future: busting child molesters and serial killers and using her training, her gifts (she was a natural at evaluating people) and her belief in the system to make the world a better place.

  The day she had joined the FBI had been one of the proudest days of her life. Her mother had thrown her a party, and Denise had flown back from California to spend it with her family. It was the last time she had seen her parents together. Shortly after, her father had passed away from a massive heart attack, the result of forty years of road construction and after-work drinking – but not before he had been able to brag to all his friends that his daughter was an FBI agent. Her mother had also died soon after from a stroke, thankfully before Denise’s disillusionment had begun. She, too, had passed away while bragging to the nurses about the career of her only child.

  She was eight years from retirement now and the world was the same shithole she had been too naive to notice it had always been. She had busted people, sure, but very little training or personality analysis had been required. Mostly she just waited for them to start spending their stolen money, or for jealous neighbors to squeal on them. Bank robbers were not the same as child molesters. Almost none of them were clever, and over half were drug addicts. A majority of bank robberies were committed by desperate people who had stolen small amounts of money from the fantastically wealthy and well-insured, and who rarely had the sense not to brag about it to potential informants. If they weren’t caught on camera, they were usually caught at an auto show or a high-end clothing store, flashing their new-found wealth while trying to buy things no one from their neighborhood would ever legally own.

  So instead of seeing herself as a guardian of the people, Denise had come to see herself more as a government-employed night watchman whose sole duty was to prevent the FDIC, another branch of government, from having to make payouts. She had become a businesswoman whose responsibilities to the public were entirely financial. And when she did have actual face to face contact with the people she apprehended, usually at their trials, she felt more sympathy than pride.

  Denise had at first suspected, then slowly begun to realize, that her gender was more of a career detriment than her charm, personality, and positive attitude were attributes. Gradually, those positive characteristics had begun to slip away, until the FBI had wound up with the person it deserved, a sullen and uninterested cynic who smoked pot stolen from suspects in hotel rooms charged to the government. Denise finished rolling the joint and admired it. She had retained that skill, at least. She went into the bathroom and opened the window, which provided a view of the dumpster, leaned her head out and looked around. It was clear. She kneeled on the toilet and, careful to keep the smoke from blowing into the bathroom, lit her first joint in eighteen years.

  The feeling hit her quickly. She smoked the joint down to a nub, and as she flicked it out into the dumpster, she was grinning, her eyes shut, enjoying the wind and noise of the rainstorm which had just begun.

  “It’s gonna storm,” said Dixon.

  They were both drunk now, and night was falling, and the first raindrops were making a staccato drumming on the kitchen window. Dixon loved the rain, partly because there was so little of it where he had grown up. When he had heard it thrumming against the prison windows at night it was the only thing that made him feel free. He got up to open the window and had to steady himself, unaware of how much he had wrecked himself on two bottles of wine. His tolerance had dwindled away to nothing.

  “Let’s go onto the back porch,” said Elias. He, too, had some minor problems with his balance. He opened the back door and was surprised by the strength of the wind, the type of weather which caused havoc in towns that weren’t used to it. Tiburn had a long history of storms like this and everything was fastened down. It had been years since the power or cable had gone out.

  Elias stepped out onto the porch, holding a fresh bottle of wine in one hand and his glass in the other, and slumped down into one of the padded deck chairs. Exhaustion was overtaking him. It had been a long day, a long week. Where the wine had made him tired, it had made Dixon excited, and he didn’t think Dixon would understand if he said he wanted to go to bed. He dreaded the type of evening he would often spend with Ann and her friends, his eyelids growing as heavy as bricks while they chattered, animated, about a certain professor’s moustache or the pointlessness of including some book or other in a reading syllabus. All Elias would be thinking about would be polite ways to excuse himself, wondering why he always lacked the energy of those around him. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he hated everything about his life.

  Dixon stumbled out onto the porch. He was holding his big silver pistol. Oh, Christ, what now? Elias was suddenly irritable, not in the mood to be threatened by this expletive-spewing madman, and the wine was giving him a sense of familiarity with Dixon, making him brave. “Is it time to threaten me again?”

  Dixon wordlessly handed him the gun. Elias looked down at it, noticed the slide was pulled all the way back and the bullets had been removed.

  “A deal’s a deal,” Dixon said. “I’m gonna go for a walk,” he said.

  “In this weather?” Elias tried to hide his relief, both at the prospect of some privacy and at this new development. He had the gun. He instantly found himself wondering whether or not Dixon had another one, a smaller one, tucked into his sock. Didn’t all the TV bad guys do that, tuck small guns into their socks? He looked down at Dixon’s ankles, which didn’t seem to be concealing anything.

  “I love this weather,” said Dixon, as he stumbled down the stairs and wandered off through the backyard.

  Well, that was easy. This maniac was a less intrusive guest than Ann’s friends. Perhaps Elias would invite him over one day when Ann came back. If she came back. That would be a fun evening, Dixon running around screaming “fuck” at everyone while they walked around with their wineglasses held high, pinkies extended, discussing the stunning revelations of Salinger’s mistress or th
e latest issue of LitReview Quarterly. Elias suddenly remembered the letter on the table. He’d read it tomorrow. He was momentarily glad Dixon was here, had distracted him all evening. He wouldn’t want to have gotten that letter alone, in a quiet, empty house. He filled his wine glass, finishing the bottle, and watched Dixon disappear into the night.

  Dixon had complemented the wine with three Percocets, and was feeling no pain as he stumbled off into the darkness. He bumped into a fence and felt no pain, probably would have felt no pain if a jackhammer had been applied to his foot. Tonight would be a pain-free evening. He had no idea where he was going, didn’t care; as long as nobody came with him he’d have an OK time.

  He crossed a road and wandered down into the thicket of trees he had walked through the night he had first approached Elias’s place. The rain began to come down in sheets, and he let it soak him, marveled at its power to overwhelm him, to be the focus of his thoughts, when he had so much on his mind.

  He slumped under a tree and pulled a bottle of wine from under his shirt, Elias’s last one. The guy wouldn’t mind – he’d looked about toasted back there on the porch. Dixon could tell the guy didn’t drink much. He was the type of guy who would get drunk with someone if he thought it would get him ahead in the world, like with an administrator at his college, or a senior professor, but mostly he’d rather just use it to get young girls hammered and see what would happen. There had to be a reason for doing things with this guy. Dixon imagined Elias felt the time they had spent drinking together had been largely wasted.

  Not so with him. He had been without alcohol for so long that this evening was almost special. Now that he was alone, under a tree, with no one bothering him, it was definitely special. He pulled out the wine tool he had taken from the counter and used the blade to cut away the paper, as he had seen Elias do, then worked the metal into the cork. It took a minute or two of struggle, and he accidentally jabbed the blade into his finger and released a slow trickle of blood, but the Percocets made the wound feel warm and friendly. When the cork popped free, spilling wine onto the soaked sweater, Dixon chuckled. He leaned back under the tree, swigged heavily from the bottle of 1999 Gridleiu Merlot, and, while a powerful storm drenched him further, tried to imagine his farm in Edmonton, Alberta.