Dog Biscuits

by Geonn Cannon

  #

  Joseph Levesque lived in a boxy condo in Whittier Heights, a non-descript residence notable mainly for its ugly red-orange paint job. They decided to start from the middle out rather than taking the list alphabetically. It made as much sense as any other angle, since they had nothing to go on for any of the names. Ari parked at the corner with her tablet propped against the steering wheel. Dale had already found enough information about Levesque for a short bio. Ari propped her phone up on the dashboard and put it on speaker.

  “Levesque is a center coming in from the Quebec League. That’s junior hockey.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Nineteen.”

  Ari whistled. “That’s worse than the NBA. At least those kids usually go to college first.”

  “Sure, but these kids are living their dreams. And Levesque’s been dreaming about this since he was a kid. Mite, Squirt, Peewee, Bantam, Midget…”

  Ari frowned at the phone. “Why are you saying these words?”

  “They’re amateur ice hockey leagues. It means Levesque’s been playing since he was… let’s see… six years old. His whole life, basically.”

  Ari did the math in his head. “That’s only thirteen years. Thirteen years ago, I was… shit, I was older than he is now. We’re old, Dale.”

  “You’ll always be older than me, puppy.”

  Ari sighed. “Okay, so he’s Canadian?”

  “French Canadian. He lived in Quebec until he was fifteen, so we’ll have to dig around up there if we want to find out what he was up to before coming here.”

  “In the meantime, we can find out if he’s living clean in the States.”

  “I don’t know what to expect,” Dale said. “On the one hand, these are all pretty young kids from what I’ve seen. There’s one guy who is twenty-eight. Oh, here are some guys in their thirties. They must be the old guard. Anyway, the young bucks haven’t had much chance to get in trouble.”

  Ari said, “Yeah, these squeaky-clean teenagers and kids in their twenties. Real pillars of society. Especially the athletes.”

  Dale laughed. “Okay, you have a point, I guess.”

  Halfway down the block, the garage door of Levesque’s house began to rise. “Hold on, he’s leaving. I may have to follow him.”

  “High-speed chase through the streets of Seattle.”

  “More likely a low crawl through the side streets of Ballard while a kid who can’t even drink yet goes about his errands.”

  Levesque was a slender young black man in a skintight shirt and skinny jeans. He wheeled a motorcycle out onto the driveway and disappeared back into the garage. When he returned, he was carrying a bucket with a bag of cleaning supplies over his shoulder.

  “Oh, geez, it’s worse than I thought,” Ari said. “I have to watch a guy wash his bike.”

  “Is he at least shirtless?”

  “Doesn’t look like he’s going that way.”

  Dale clucked her tongue. “Be brave.”

  Ari grinned. “See what you can find on the other guys. I’ll call you back later.”

  “Love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Ari disconnected the call and moved the phone to the charger. She took a baseball cap off the passenger seat and pulled it low over her eyes. If anyone questioned what she was doing, she could say that she’d gotten tired while driving and chose to pull over instead of continuing on. As Levesque began washing his bike, Ari feared she might not have to feign exhaustion if things didn’t pick up soon.

  #

  Nicole Vasquez worked at a coffee shop near the Space Needle. According to the Facebook status Dale found, her shift ended at five-thirty. Ari was waiting outside at a quarter past. While she watched Joseph Levesque wash his motorcycle, Dale had been doing a deep dive on another player. Brett Potter was a lifelong Seattleite, a twenty-two-year-old former honor student currently enrolled at U-Dub. Dale didn’t find any record of a scholarship, but his social media was awash with pictures of him in various hockey uniforms.

  His Facebook also revealed he’d recently broken up with his girlfriend of three years. Six minutes after her shift ended, Nicole came outside with a bag dangling from one arm and a phone clutched in her other hand. Ari got out of her car and moved on an intercept course, smiling when Nicole realized this stranger was approaching her.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Hi. My name is Ariadne Willow. I’m a private investigator.”

  Both eyebrows flicked upward at that. “Really?” She put the phone back to her ear. “Aspen, I have to go. There’s a private investigator who wants to talk to me. Seriously.” She hung up and then held the phone out in front of her. “Can I take your picture?”

  “Uh.” The flash blinked. “Sure. I guess.”

  “What’s up? What did I do?”

  Ari said, “Nothing that I know of. I’ve been hired to perform background checks for a certain company’s future employees. Do you know a Brett Potter?”

  Nicole laughed and crossed her arms over her chest. “Brett’s actually going to get a job? I’ll believe that when I see it. What even is he qualified for?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t reveal that. They’re just interested in getting a character reference.”

  “Okay.” She looked toward the street, her lips pursed in thought. “Brett’s actually an okay guy. He’s nice, he’s sweet, he means well. But he’s got a one-track mind and that track doesn’t have anything to do with being responsible. For anything. You think he’s gonna hold down a nine-to-five job? Good luck. The only thing he gives a damn about is hockey.”

  Ari tried to look surprised. “He’s an athlete?”

  “Whoever hired you didn’t tell you that? Because Brett sure as shit brought it up in his job interview. Hell, he probably wore a jersey to the office. Long story short, Brett’s not a bad dude. If I could have counted on him a bit more, we’d probably still be dating. But you’re never going to get his brain off the ice. I’ll guarantee you that.”

  “Okay. Thank you, that’s very helpful. Thank you for your time.”

  Nicole hesitated. “This is really for a job, right? You’re not just saying that?”

  “No, someone definitely wants to hire him. Why?”

  “It’s just easier to believe he’s in trouble than he might actually make something of himself. He spends every waking hour in skates. Or playing video games based on hockey. Can you imagine being so completely obsessed with something?”

  Ari shook her head. “It’s surprising. But I promise you, Brett’s not in trouble.”

  “Good. Cool. Thanks.”

  “Sure. Have a nice afternoon.”

  Ari walked back to her car and opened her tablet to fill in what she’d learned about Brett. So far she’d been bored by one potential player doing chores and heard that another might end up being the most dedicated player in the NHL. She told herself to appreciate the dullness while it lasted, because sooner or later she was going to find the black sheep on the roster.

  #

  On Sunday, Ari watched Oscar Lindeman drive two women she assumed were his mother and grandmother to church. He didn’t go in with them, but he sat in the car and read a book for two hours until they came back out. Ari watched him the entire time from a parking lot across the street just to make sure he wasn’t using the occasion to meet with any drug dealers or crime lords. While she surveilled him, she read Dale’s latest update. She’d found a few players with police records. That perked Ari’s interest until she discovered it was all teenage misdemeanor crap; graffiti, loitering, skateboarding. Lindeman and his family headed for lunch at a nearby restaurant. Ari took the chance he wouldn’t get up to any mischief and went off to check out the next name on her list.

  Sunday night she put a hold on the team’s investigation so she could work her surveillance gig. Her case took her to the moorage at a marina on Lake Union where several boats had been vandalized over the past few weeks. The vandals only struck on Sunday, so
there was no point in staking it out the rest of the week.

  She parked at the end of the lot, where pavement gave way to a thin strip of grass and then water that looked black as ink. The Space Needle was beautifully shining to the southwest, like a small UFO hovering between her and the lights of downtown. The day had been hot so she rolled down the window to let the cooler night breezes push out the stale warmer air out of the car. She was parked so she could see the entrance as well as most of the berths and settled in for a long night of waiting. A laptop screen would have given off far too much light, so she’d asked Dale to print off a few bios of Totems players. She used a small flashlight that could be easily concealed and spent the long night reading about what had to be the most squeaky-clean group of athletes she’d ever come across.

  Some of the players had parking tickets, speeding tickets, minor offenses that all law-abiding citizens acquired in the course of owning a car. A few other players had been caught with a DUI or two, but there were no rehabs or secret families waiting to be uncovered. The moorage also remained unmolested, without a sign of anybody trespassing or marking the boats. At one point she got out of the car to stretch her legs and to make sure no one was casing the marina before striking. Just south of the marina, a row of houseboats stretched out onto the lake, and she counted time by when the residents turned out their lights to go to bed.

  At dawn she walked along the docks just to make sure no one had somehow managed to vandalize the boats without being seen, but everything looked to be in order. She left a report for the owner, dragged herself home, and crawled into bed just as Dale was getting out of the shower.

  They cuddled as Ari reported what she’d uncovered, one on the verge of unconsciousness while the other was struggling to wake up.

  “Isn’t it good that none of them are monsters, though?” Dale asked. “It means the Totems are going to be a team Seattle can proudly support.”

  “I guess in the grand scheme, yes. But if I go back to Cecily empty-handed, I’m afraid it’s going to look like I just didn’t dig deep enough.” She closed her eyes. “Lack of results implies lack of effort.”

  “Or maybe it proves lack of evidence,” Dale whispered. “We’re just getting started. You’re scratching the surface. If there’s something to find… puppy? Ariadne? Are you asleep?”

  “Mm.”

  Dale leaned in and kissed Ari’s lips. “Go to sleep, puppy. You’ll get ‘em next week.”

  Ari’s features were already slack with sleep, so Dale eased her way out of bed and tiptoed out of the room.

  Chapter Four

  Aaron Rigby was a promising candidate for shenanigans. He was one of the team elders at thirty-one. Already twice divorced, Dale discovered his credit card was frequently used at bars in the wee hours of the morning. It took time to track down his most recent ex-wife, a hotel receptionist, but Ari was finally able to sit down with her on Wednesday morning. It turned out he would wait in the hotel bar until she finished her shift, buying coffees to keep himself awake so he could drive her home at the end of her shift. Not just a good guy, a contender for Husband of the Year Award.

  She was beginning to get seriously disillusioned with the case. She spoke to ex-girlfriends, former bosses, neighbors, and friends. Dale tracked down old team rosters and Ari interviewed old teammates.

  “Great guy,” one said, unable or unwilling to elaborate. “Gladstone’s just, I don’t know, Gladstone. He’s a good guy. We’d grab a beer sometimes.”

  Another looked confused by the concept. “Faults? I don’t know. He can be a little moody. Who isn’t sometimes, though.”

  One girlfriend had asked, a little too enthusiastically, “He’s not dead, is he?”

  The closest she came to a lead was Chuck Weaver’s former high school coach who cut him from the team over drugs. He was caught with some marijuana and the school had a zero tolerance policy.

  By Friday night she’d done a pretty thorough job looking into seven of the prospective players and hadn’t found anything that would make a sports website salivate for an exclusive. Ari typed up background information on each one that would’ve put Wikipedia to shame, then leaned back and stared at the screen. She rocked her chair back and forth as she looked at the results of the past few days, frustrated at how little there was.

  Dale knocked on the open door. “Hey, puppy. How’s it going?”

  Ari slumped forward.

  “Yeah. I kind of got that impression.” She came into the office and opened the bureau where Ari kept a spare change of clothes. A dry-cleaner bag she didn’t remember putting there was hanging among the T-shirts, and Dale took it out. “This is your red blouse. Those black slacks you like are in there, too. You’re going to change into them, and I’m going to change into that green dress, and we’re going out to dinner at McCormick’s.”

  “McCormick’s?” Ari sat up straighter. “You need a reservation to get… you got a reservation.”

  Dale shrugged. “When you got this case, I knew it would be a lot of chasing your tail, reading files, and not a lot of interesting or exciting developments. I figured you would need a date night to take your mind off of it.”

  Ari stood up and leaned across the desk. She cupped Dale’s face and kissed her. “You are objectively the best girlfriend in the world.”

  “I know. Hurry up and change. We should get there early.”

  Ari eagerly saved her work and shut down her computer. Her mood instantly lifted just at the thought of spending a romantic evening with her partner. She changed and escorted Dale out the door, leaving the case for the next day.

  The restaurant was on Columbia and Fourth. It was cheaper to park a few blocks away and walk the difference, so they linked arms and strolled downhill toward the restaurant. They passed someone selling flowers and Ari bought a rose for Dale, who tucked it behind her ear after confirming there weren’t any uncut thorns.

  When they arrived, the hostess looked at Ari’s collar before leading them to a table. Ari was used to the sideways glances. The collar was a simple strip of leather with a gold clasp. There weren’t studs or elaborate chrome fasteners that would indicate a BDSM connection. It was their version of a promise ring, a testament to her commitment to their relationship. Dale had a bracelet of Ari’s hair woven together with a lock of fur from the wolf, and Ari looked at it as they took a seat. Dale caught her looking and twisted her wrist in acknowledgement.

  The rule was no talk about hockey or the players during dinner. The Totems had taken full command of Ari’s mind for the past week and she needed something to cleanse her mental palate. They talked about Ari’s mother and Dale’s father. Dale mentioned she’d gotten a few emails from Milo and the British pack. She watched Ari throughout their conversation and the meal, noticing how the tension seemed to evaporate from her in ever-increasing increments until she was sitting up straight and actually smiling.

  Ari took Dale’s hand as they left the restaurant. “That was exactly what the doctor ordered.” She kissed Dale’s cheek. “Thank you, sweetie.”

  Dale smiled. “Anything to help you relax. I’m just glad it worked.”

  They turned left out of the restaurant and, as they walked, Dale noticed several things that she didn’t fully connect until much later. A truck slowed down as it passed them, but there was an intersection coming up. It was apparently there, under the currently red light, where the truck pulled a highly illegal U-turn, sped up crossing the wrong way across four lanes of traffic. The engine rose to a low growl as it closed the distance. Traffic was light, but a chorus of horns and shrieking tires still erupted to life in response.

  None of these things registered to Dale consciously in the moment, but her subconscious put them together. The flash of lights was enough to trigger something primal in the back of her mind, a survival instinct that told her they were in danger. It was just enough of a warning for her to turn around in time to see the truck bearing down on them. Its headlights were off as it clambered up on
to the curb. A line of trees prevented the truck from fully climbing onto the sidewalk, a fact that may have saved their lives.

  “Puppy!” Dale wrapped her arms around Ari’s waist and hurled them both closer to the buildings. Ari instinctively put her arms around Dale and turned them as they fell so that she would land on the ground and cushion Dale’s landing. They cleared its path with inches to spare. Dale’s foot twisted off the pavement and swung up to be tapped by the bumper as it passed. They hit the sidewalk hard, knocking the wind from both of them. Traffic was frozen, and a group of pedestrians were forming a circle around where Ari and Dale had fallen. A few people were advancing on the truck with their phones extended to take pictures of the driver, even though the windshield was obviously tinted.

  “Maniac!” someone shouted. Another person rushed forward to see if Ari and Dale were okay.

  The truck reversed as quickly as it had accelerated, tires spinning on the sidewalk before finding purchase. Someone was talking to 911 on their cell phone, and now people were coming out of the restaurant to see what had just happened.

  Ari touched Dale’s face and shoulders. Her eyes were wide with panic, the irises shrunken by the surge of adrenaline. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Dale could almost feel the wolf trembling under Ari’s skin. Her ankle was throbbing with an injury she couldn’t yet feel the pain from. “Go. Go!”

  Ari got up and started running after the truck. Dale stood as well, crying out when she put weight on her left foot. The truck reached the intersection, spun around, and drove in the right direction down the steep hill of Columbia.

  “Wait, 911 is on the way,” someone told her.

  “We need to get the license plate!” Dale shouted without slowing. Her foot was definitely messed up, but she limped on. Ari had a huge lead on her and ran into the dark open mouth of the parking garage across from McCormick’s. Dale followed her, already well aware of what Ari’s plan was. She ran into the garage as well and stooped to pick up Ari’s shoes. Next she found her slacks with the panties still tangled inside of them, then the jacket and blouse lying right by the Columbia Street exit. The shoulder of the jacket was ripped, but it had spared the blouse from the same fate. Ari would be happy to see one of her favorite blouses was unmarred.