by Rene Fomby
I’m having none of that. “Yeah, like I said. Strays. Stuck out on the streets with no idea where our next meal is going to come from. Sounds like a real peachy keen idea.”
“Well, when you put it like that—”
“And you know how that all ends up for us dogs in the end. Scooped up by the animal cops and thrown into prison like Killer. Until the grim reaper swings by on Monday morning and—” I make a sign like a knife cutting my throat.
“No, no, it’s not like that in Chicago anymore! The city has adopted a no-kill policy—”
“Right. Bella told me all about that. No-kill. But they really should call it some-kill, shouldn’t they? Because they still get to kill as many as one out of five dogs—”
Muttsy’s ears are now pulled straight back, because he knows I’m right about what is really going down out there. “Uh, well, maybe in some of the prisons… but you and your girlfriend, there are rescue groups for your breeds, so you wouldn’t have to worry—”
“So only the less desirable dogs get offed, like my pit bull friend Killer? Yeah, I get it.” This conversation is going nowhere fast. Leaving me with the distinct feeling that I need to be somewhere else even faster. Somewhere where I can find some answers, instead of listening to this overpaid waste of good kibble—
Muttsy stands up abruptly and pushes a card across the desk. “Look, I’m sorry I can’t make things happen any faster, but here’s my personal number. Stay in touch. As soon as we know something—”
“You’ll give me a call. Got it.” Not the first time I’ve heard that one. “Okay, well I guess we’re done here. I’ve got to get back to HQ and help out with the election. So you can still have a job tomorrow morning, such as it is.” I flick my tail at him and hop off the chair. But before I leave, one last little thing is nagging at me.
“You said PETSEC prefers to call stray dogs ‘fenceless.’ Do they also have a name for the dogs that do have good homes?”
That seems to throw him for a second. “Uh—I suppose maybe you might call them defenceless…”
Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. Stuck inside a nice, safe home, with two solid meals a day, lots of humans to wait on you and dish out endless full body massages… and free healthcare to boot! Being defenceless doesn’t sound like all that bad an idea right about now. So I guess I just gotta find Bella and me a good fence to hide behind. And I’m rapidly running out of time to do it.
Miracle Mile, 11:30 a.m.
W
ith absolutely no idea what Bella and I are going to do about our current situation, I figure at least I could drown my sorrows by staying busy helping out with the election. I’m only about a block from Tony’s office when I bump into Tommy on the street. Literally. One moment I’m dodging some idiot kid racing down the sidewalk on an electric scooter, and the next I slam right into him and go sprawling.
“Ooof! Watch it you stupid—” When Tommy finally rolls his eyes in my direction and sees me lying there, trying to sort out up from down, he immediately jumps up and starts to apologize. “Hey, sorry, Moose. I—”
“No, you’re right, Tommy. I had my eye on that knucklehead with the scooter, and I should have been paying closer attention to where I was going.”
“Yeah, same here. The fool almost ran me over, too. He came from out of nowhere with that thing.” Tommy stretches out a paw to help me up. “So where are you headed off to in such a hurry this morning?”
I point down the street in the general direction of Tony’s office, ground zero for all the election activity today. “Just checking in to see if I can help out in some way. I wanted to sit in on the election returns later on today, so running home and then turning right back around didn’t make much sense.”
“Well, if you’d like you could hang out with me. I’ve been sent on a mission to check out a few reports of voting irregularities at some of the polling places. Feel like taking a little stroll?”
“Sounds like a great idea, Double-O. Lead on!”
As we saunter down the street I fill Tommy in on my problems at home, and the possibility that Bella and I might wind up homeless as early as tomorrow morning.
Tommy rests a reassuring paw on my shoulder. “Hey, buddy, don’t sweat it. If you and the girl wind up on the street, maybe you can come work for me for a while. I don’t think we have any openings right now, but things do pop up from time to time. And I’ll warn you, it doesn’t pay all that much, but it’ll keep a roof over your head and kibble in your bowl until something better comes along. I can certainly use a resourceful dog like you on the team.”
That is absolutely the best news I’ve heard in days! But then I remember the part about “no openings right now.” Not so best news after all. “Uh, thanks for the offer, Tommy. That’d be swell. If something bad does happen at home, you’ll be the first person I’ll call for sure.”
“Don’t mention it, Moose.” Tommy stops suddenly and gives me the evil eye. “And by the way, I mean that. Don’t mention it. Ever. Otherwise I’ll have every freeloader from here to Wisconsin sniffing around my office looking for handouts like it was free cheeseburger night at the Sonic.”
“No. Right. My lips are sealed.” I make the zipper motion on my muzzle to let him know I’m serious.
We have just crossed the bridge over the river, my steps a bit lighter now, when all of a sudden I hear a little whoosh, and something whizzes past my right ear and imbeds itself deep in the trunk of a tree in front of me. Whatever it is, it’s pretty tiny, really, with tiny little feathers to match, almost like some kind of dart.
“It’s a poison dart!” Tommy yells, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me quickly into the safety of a nearby crowd of humans. “The Russians! They’re onto us!”
I check back over my shoulder, and sure enough, several Wolfhounds are hot on our trail and closing fast. One stops and puts a long tube of some sort up to his lips, and a second later a human right beside me screams out and collapses onto the street.
“This way!” Tommy shouts, already racing headlong down a steep set of steps leading toward the river.
I’m right behind him, but as we near the bottom, I’m starting to worry that Tommy may have led us into a trap. A dead end, quite literally in this case. But then he veers left and leaps on board a small boat that is just pulling away from the pier. I redouble my speed and barely make it on board myself.
“We’re safe!” I holler at Tommy over the din of the boat’s engines. Behind us I can see that the Russians have made it to the pier as well, and I’m just starting to feel good about our chances of making a great escape when without any warning one of the dogs jumps on board another boat and butts its human owner over the opposite side and into the water. Within seconds the other Wolfhounds have joined him on board, and I head the distinctive sound of the boat’s engines coming to life. They’re after us again!
And that isn’t our only concern right now. From the front of the boat I hear a loud shout and another human starts running toward us, waving his arms wildly.
“Moose! Follow me!” Tommy darts toward a small hatch near the rear of the boat, disappearing into it in a flash. I’m right behind him again, leaving the human still shouting at us from up above.
Wherever it is we landed, it is really dark down here, but things start to get a little clearer as my eyes finally adjust to the light. Glancing around, it appears to be some type of room for mechanical equipment, and by the sound of the huge machine chugging away beside me, I can guess that we’ve located the boat’s engine.
Tommy has zeroed in on a spyhole at the very back of the boat and is staring intently through it, trying to make out what’s happened to the Russians.
“They’re right behind us, Moose. And they’re gaining on us! A few more minutes and they’ll be right beside us. We’ve got to figure out some way to make this tug go faster.”
He pulls away from the spyhole and examines the engine with an appraising eye.
“Aha! Just what I need!” he yells, reaching for a funny-looking lever that’s attached to a long metal wire stretching off into the distance toward the front. “It’s the throttle. Here, Moose, give me a hand.”
Tommy snatches a wrench off the floor and is using it to push hard on the lever thing, motioning for me to help out with it. With a tremendous effort we manage to shove the lever forward all the way to the stops, and the boat’s little engine screams beside us in protest as our ride instantly leaps forward, the nose of our boat rising ever so slightly into the air. Tommy jams the wrench in place, then jumps back to the spyhole.
“Perfect! We’re opening up a lead on them. Now let’s just hope the driver up there can keep us from crashing into something.”
I was so excited about making our escape that I hadn’t even thought about that possibility. If we hit something dead-on going at this speed, it’ll be all over for us, for sure. We might be done in even before the Russians get to us!
I poke my head up through the hatch to check out what’s happening up top. Maybe if we could see the wreck approaching, we could jump off the boat just in time to save our necks. In the front of the boat, the driver is trying to pull back on the throttle with one hand while steering the boat with the other, but it doesn’t take him long to figure out he needs to keep both hands planted firmly on the wheel.
Beside us, other boats whizz past in a blur like they’re stuck in reverse, and several times we shoot between two or three boats so close I can actually see the paint peeling off the sides of their bows. Off on the shore, people are pointing at us and shouting as we race past. My ears are flopping crazily in the wind, but somehow that doesn’t feel quite the same as it does when I stick my head out the window of Helen’s car.
I look back again, hoping against hope that the Russians have decided to give up the chase, and I’m shocked to see they are now bearing down on us again, and closing the distance between us in no time! They seem to have lucked out by stealing a much faster boat, and it’s now only a matter of minutes before they’ll be onto us!
I duck back down inside the hatch. “Tommy!” I shout, pointing in the direction of the Wolfhounds’ boat.
“Yeah, I know,” is his simple answer. “But we’re already going every bit as fast as this thing can take us. We’ve got to think of some way to stop them, and fast!”
As Tommy was talking, we must have hit a wave or something, because the boat flew a foot or so into the air, then crashed down hard on the water, sending me flying against the side of the engine. By sheer instinct I throw out a paw to brace myself, and wind up grabbing something just before impact that gives ever so slightly. Before giving way completely.
Immediately the engine coughs and sputters, then dies entirely. We’re now stuck dead in the water with no power, with the Russians racing our way at full throttle! And if we don’t think of something pretty quick, in just a few minutes we’ll be every bit as dead as this engine!
“What did you do, Moose?” Tommy yells, but almost immediately the answer is crystal clear—my collision with the engine had torn loose a fuel line, and gasoline is now flooding the compartment. I start to gag from the fumes, but Tommy quickly leaps on the hose that is thrashing round the tiny room like an angry snake, spraying gasoline everywhere. He grabs the snake by its head, then spins around and shoves it through the spy hole. The hose is bucking in his hands like a wild animal, and it’s everything he can do right now to hold it in place.
“Moose, see if you can find a red box of some kind It should be in here somewhere—”
Instantly I see it! There, on the shelf! I grab the box and toss it to Tommy.
“No, no, not a first aid kit. The flare gun, Moose! Quickly!”
I root around the gasoline-soaked shelves searching for another red box even as I hear the sound of another boat engine, slowing down, right on our rear. Then I see it.
“This what you’re looking for?” I ask, sliding the box across the floor toward Tommy. If in fact there is a gun of some sort locked inside that box, no way I’m going to be throwing it through the air!
“Perfect!” Still holding the hose in place with one paw, Tommy flips the latch on the front of the box and pulls out a pistol with a really fat barrel. He grabs something else out of the box and loads it into the gun, then pokes the barrel out through the spyhole and pulls the trigger.
Chicago River, 11:57 a.m.
I
don’t know what I was expecting from that tiny little gun, but the blast it set off was like Tommy had just fired a massive cannon out the back of the boat. Something like a ginormous hand slammed into the back of the boat, sending us flying, then a fierce red light instantly flooded our little engine room, followed immediately by a furnace-like blast of hot air.
The back of our boat is now leaking dangerously, filling the tiny engine compartment with water. Tommy scrambles up the hatchway, motioning furiously for me to follow. And motions are pretty much the only way to communicate at the moment—the explosion had left my ears ringing like church bells on Sunday. Which for some reason had my mouth watering like it was time for Sunday dinner.
When we get back on top, I glance back at the Russian boat, expecting them to be jumping on board our ship at any moment, armed to the teeth with knives and swords, ready to slash our throats. But strangely, their boat is now nowhere to be seen, just a ton of random debris floating around in the water behind us, and a half-dozen Wolfhounds dog-paddling desperately to stay afloat.
The driver of our boat seems to be trying everything in his power to turn the boat around to help rescue the Russians, but with his engine completely kaput and his boat rapidly taking on water, he finally abandons the idea and instead grabs a rope and tosses it to another boat that has pulled up alongside, hollering to them that he needs to be towed right away to the wharfs that are stationed way off to our right. With the tow line secure and the two boats puttering slowly toward shore, he takes off for the back of the boat and jumps down into the engine room, trying desperately to save his own boat from drowning in the flood of river water that is seeping through cracks caused by the explosion. He tosses us an angry, accusatory look as he races past, but I think he’s way too concerned about his boat at the moment to pay us much mind.
Nevertheless, we’re not in any position to deal with him ourselves at the moment, so as soon as the boat sidles up next to the wharf we waste no time leaping to freedom and disappearing into the huge crowd that has gathered to watch the boat chase and explosion on the river. I’m sure it’s a sight none of them have ever seen before, even in their wildest imaginations. And I can assure you it’s something I don’t want to experience ever again. As Fat Tony reminded us once, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a dog or a cat. You only live once.
Fat Tony’s Office, 5:30 p.m.
W
ith the Crimson Canines and their loathsome boss now locked up safe and sound in the newly rebuilt Southside Prison, we can finally take a break to check on the election returns. And I’m unpleasantly shocked to see that Tony is running pretty far behind Boss Dawg in the early polls. And even more shocked to see that he doesn’t seem bothered by that fact in the slightest.
“Do you know something I don’t, Tony?” I ask him when we finally get a moment to talk quietly face-to-face.
“Well, that goes without speaking, Moose,” he answers with a grin. “But then, ‘something’ is a pretty broad topic. Do you have anything specific in mind?”
It takes me a second to catch the insult. Tony is clearly getting back to his cocky old ways. At least as far as I’m concerned. You would think he’d show me some gratitude—and now I’m not all that sure I care whether he is losing or not. Except when I remember the alternative…
“What I meant, Tony, is that the returns have you trailing Dawg by quite a large margin. Do you expect that’s gonna change at some point? Maybe the late returns will swing the numbers around for you somehow? Maybe a surge out in the
western suburbs?”
Tony laughs, an easy laugh that manages to jiggle most of what’s left of his belly fat. “No, no, Moose, thanks to our Russian friends, the numbers will probably just get worse as we get further into the night. Q’ute tells me they hacked all of the polling machines, making sure Boss Dawg got almost all of the votes. But of course, none of that matters at this point.”
“Why’s that? Don’t you want to win the election?” I’m now completely confused by his attitude, which is just the opposite of what I would have expected from him. Especially after everything we had just been through over the previous two days, trying to save the election. Tommy and me, especially.
Tony is still grinning mischievously like that Cheesy Cat from the Alice stories, even as a shout goes up from somewhere out in the crowd and new numbers are updated on the whiteboard behind him. Even further behind! “Of course I want to win it, Moose. That’s never been in doubt. I want to win it not just for me, but for all the doors it will open for all the other cats, all over the world. But—why don’t we let Tommy explain it to you?”
I hadn’t noticed Tommy slipping up behind me, a giant smile plastered on his own flat face.
“Moose! Come grab a drink! It’s time to celebrate!”
“But—but Tommy, what is there to celebrate? We’re losing to the Dawg by a landslide!”
Tommy shoots a sharp look in Tony’s direction. “What, you haven’t told him?”
Tony shakes his head. “No, why don’t you do the honors?”
My eyes keep flicking back and forth between them like I’m watching a Chinese ping pong match. What in the world is going on that I’m just not getting?
Tommy swishes his long black tail and stretches out a paw to place lazily on my shoulder. “Okay, Moose, it goes like this. Have you ever had a chance to study PETSEC’s Constitution? Particularly the section on how presidents get elected?”