Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  The air, robbed from her lungs. A gut-punch. A horse-kick. She plays through it in her head. What that must’ve been like for Chris. To learn your own father had orchestrated the worst and most humiliating moment of your life. Thinking you were broken. Thinking you could be fixed through pain and humiliation.

  “You made him do it,” she says. Voice quiet. Again Whitey growls.

  “Not really. I just marched him to the door and gave him a reason to walk through it.”

  “You forced him,” she seethes. Tears wet her cheeks. “You pointed a gun at him. Made him listen. Made him climb up there and hang himself.”

  “The gun was just to get him in the car and to the tree. Then the recording became my weapon and so I holstered my piece. I was right. It was enough. I didn’t make him do it. I just gave him a reason.”

  “That’s the same thing. I’ll get you for this.”

  “I figured that might be your response. You’re missing the big picture, Atlanta. You’re not thinking. Why am I telling you this? Why play that recording?”

  “To torture me like you tortured him.”

  He shakes his head. “Wrong. To show you. Like I showed him. I’m showing you that I can get to anybody. I can hurt the people you love. You’re a troubled girl and troubled girls make more trouble for everybody else. I can’t have that. We can’t have that. This is a warning. It may not be my last, but you’re nearly at the end of your rope just as Chris was at the end of his. Cross me and get in our way and I will hurt everyone around you. That’s how I hurt you. You want to blame anybody for Chris Coyne’s death, blame yourself. You had to go poking sleeping dogs with a sharp stick. Now the dogs are awake, Atlanta. And they’re not very happy with you.”

  She growls, cries out in grief and rage, bangs the heels of both hands against the wire.

  Then Atlanta buries her face in her hands.

  Petry says nothing, and backs the car out of the dirt lot and back onto the road, leaving the burned out building behind and heading back toward Boxelder Road.

  * * *

  Atlanta sits at Holger’s desk, waiting. Trying not to shake. Trying not to scream. Her hands hold onto the detective’s desk, fingers gone bloodless like she’s holding onto the safety bar of a rollercoaster.

  When they arrived at the station, Petry left her alone. Just walked off like it was no big thing. Another officer—a young buck with wispy non-mustache mustache took the dog away toward the basement steps. Whitey didn’t want to go but she knelt and kissed his brow and promised him they’d get someone to look at his shoulder soon. Here under the lights the wound didn’t look too bad—she hoped a few antibiotics would be good enough.

  Whitey rested his head on her shoulder and made a small sound in the back of his throat—a growl of sorts, but not aggressive, not really. She took it to be a promise, or something like one: he’s got her back.

  “Go on,” she told him, and the officer—Landis was his name—took the dog away.

  Down the hall, Petry stood by a coffee machine and gave her a look and a small, sinister nod. A reminder. I can get you wherever you are.

  Now here she is. In Holger’s office. Waiting for the woman to arrive and trying her damndest not to grab a stapler off the desk, march over to Petry, and staple his mouth and nose closed.

  In her mind’s eye she can’t help replaying Chris’ suicide. The march to the tree. The slow creeping realization afforded by that recording. The rope. The decision. Choking and kicking and emptying your bowels and then—

  Holger enters.

  “You okay?” she asks Atlanta.

  “Fine,” Atlanta says. She knows that one word doesn’t sound fine, and that the very word may be the only one in the English language that everybody says but never means—if you meant it, you’d say good, but when you don’t mean it, you say fine like it’s a joke that everybody’s in on but never admits. “Just fine.”

  “I want to talk to you about how all this… went down.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s gonna be some questions, and you might have to talk to a district attorney. Someone may want to coach you about things to say.”

  “You telling me to get a lawyer?”

  Holger shakes her head. “Not at all. It’s just that this is a big deal. Big operation like this gets busted, there’s gonna be accountability. And a man like Ellis Wayman may seem like some drunken redneck rube, but he’s going to lawyer up in a big way. And those lawyers are going to look at you…” Here her voice trails off.

  “I’m a troubled witness. Given the things that have happened.”

  “Could be.”

  “I get that. Well. Whatever y’all need.”

  “Thanks, Atlanta.”

  Holger asks. Atlanta answers. All as honestly as she can tell it. She leaves Guy and Shane out of it. Says she was looking into some missing dogs for a friend. That put her into Bird and Bodie’s orbit. Here she leaves out what they did to her and how she stole Whitey. She mostly just plays it like she was there sniffing for information and when she saw what she saw she couldn’t abide it—and so she called Holger. It’s a simplified version of the truth but it works. No real gaps to speak of long as nobody else tells Holger differently.

  When they’re done, Holger nods and says, “You’re a tough little girl.”

  “I’m not so little.”

  “No, I suppose you’re not. Girls grow up faster than ever.”

  “I guess we have to.”

  “Let’s go get your dog and get you home.”

  * * *

  They way it all happens seems like a nightmare. It’s impossible and unthinkable and yet it happens just the same.

  She and Holger walk down past the cubicles and desks of this middling police department and they head to the stairwell—metal door opens, clangs, cement steps down toward the basement.

  Holger’s making small talk, something about how there’s an ice cream place just down the road that has pink bubblegum ice cream and how she used to love that flavor when she was a girl.

  Atlanta doesn’t know why they’re talking about it or how they even got onto the subject of ice cream because all of that escapes her head when she hears the gunshot.

  The shot, loud. A quick echoing pop. Just one. From downstairs in the basement.

  Atlanta’s whole body feels like it’s falling through itself.

  Upstairs, she didn’t see Petry.

  Where had he gone?

  This is a warning. It may not be my last…

  She breaks into a run. Holger after her.

  The downstairs is all cement blocks and concrete floors. Austere. Functional. A hall with many doors. One of them open.

  Atlanta calls to her dog, starts yelling out for Whitey to come to her.

  No dog answers.

  She hauls ass to the break-room door.

  It’s there she finds him.

  On his side. Pool of blood under his head. A red hole in the ridge above his eye.

  Petry leans against the back corner of the break-room. Gun set on the counter. His hand is bleeding and he’s swaddling it in napkins. “Don’t know what happened. Dog came at me. Bit my hand—“

  But then Atlanta is screaming. The sound that comes out of her is like a banshee, a wail like a storm wind through a broken shutter—it drowns his voice out.

  She clambers up over the break-room table like a rabid animal. Claws for him. Shoves him against the counter. Thinks to grab the gun. Grab it, stick it under his chin, pull the trigger—

  Hands find her. Holger. Pulling her back. Her hip bangs into a chair. She screams. Weeps. Yells again and again how he killed her dog, he killed her dog, he killed her dog—

  Other cops come into the room. How could they not? Gun discharged inside the station? Alert. All hands on deck. Full-tilt-boogie. But Atlanta doesn’t care. She can’t get to Petry but she can get to her dog. She drops next to Whitey and feels him and holds him and kneels in his blood. She cradles his limp head to her own. The d
og made a promise to her—he had her back, and she thought he had his but soon as she turned her eyes away…

  Atlanta lays upon the dog, wetting his side with her tears.

  Whitey is dead.

  Part Four: Bait Girl

  She was there when her father died. He had an aneurysm out in his workshop. Blood balloon swelled at the base of his brain and just as he was about to hammer another nail—he was out there in the dust and the cobwebs fixing one of their dining room chairs—the balloon went pop and Daddy dropped.

  Atlanta was the one who found him. Laying on the stone floor. Bits of sawdust in his hair like the snow they never saw much of down South. And the thing she remembers about that moment is how she knew he was dead. Was like something had left him—and now what remained was just a department store mannequin of meat and bones but no soul, pale and tight and missing that essential human spark that makes us who we are.

  All that was made worse at the funeral when she got a look at the man in the box. Her father had turned into a museum display, preserved and plasticky, waxy like a McIntosh apple. Dead eyes and too much blush and his mouth forcibly arranged in a slight smile that wasn’t his smile at all. A portrait the artist got wrong.

  As she lays there across Whitey, she feels it here, too—that sense of lifelessness, that something very important to who the dog was had vacated the premises.

  A spirit, a ghost, a soul: gone.

  Hands try to pull her away but she won’t—can’t—leave him behind. She wants to curl up and lay in the blood and hold the dog tight until she starves and herself leaves behind an Atlanta-shaped mannequin. Voices call her name—Holger, maybe—but she can’t hear them and doesn’t care about what they have to say because all that’s good in this world has failed her. The police are corrupt. They can’t protect her. They can’t protect an innocent dog. She doesn’t know why Whitey bit Petry—did Petry egg the dog on? Slap him? Kick him? Or did Whitey just know to sink his teeth into the neck of a mean weasel?

  It doesn’t matter because it happened and now Whitey is dead.

  She bends down and presses her face against his face and kisses his muzzle.

  She hears it—her own heartbeat, thump, thump, thump—but then she thinks, that’s not her heartbeat, not at all, it’s not even a heartbeat. It’s a tail. Thudding dully against the floor.

  Whitey’s tail.

  Wagging. Weak. Barely there. But wagging.

  She says, “He’s alive,” certain that her own words are a lie, that this is just a false flag and one last articulation of life before Whitey wanders into the eternal fields of canine Elysium—but the tail thumps again. And his tongue snakes out over his jowls and lays there like a tired slug.

  This time she doesn’t just say it but screams it, letting the world know that her dog is alive.

  * * *

  The siren wails. The single blue light atop the old Crown Vic spins. Holger floors it.

  Atlanta sits in the back, Whitey’s head cradled in her lap. His eyes are glassy and unfocused. His breathing, fast and shallow, like he can’t get enough air. One paw twitching. The cratered hole in his skull isn’t bleeding anymore—just a few black rivulets of drying blood stark against his white fur. She feels his neck, his ribs; his pulse is there, but only barely. The tail no longer wags.

  It’s then the dog’s body seizes, stiffening in her hands. Whitey’s eyes roll back into his head and he takes one big gulp of air—holding it, holding it, no more breath, frame tight and legs sticking out like broomsticks—

  And then the eyes roll back and the dog’s breathing returns—fast, shallow, pant-pant-pant-pant.

  “Drive,” Atlanta cries from the back. She can barely see through the tears. She kicks the backseat. As if it does something, anything, at all.

  * * *

  Time dilates, then expands, then falls back in on itself until it’s meaningless mush. Atlanta sits in the waiting room of the veterinarian’s office, waiting to hear something—anything—from Doctor Chennapragada. Holger came and went. Told Atlanta that she’s sure Petry had good reason but she’d look into it and if she needed her to call Atlanta’s mother she would—but Atlanta didn’t say anything, just sat there quaking and hoping that if she sat real still time might be kind enough to fast forward itself on her behalf.

  Eventually the vet comes out. The fabric of her white coat red along the sleeves. Chennapragada is a small woman, but round, hippy—her face the shape of many lush plums strung together.

  She sits next to Atlanta and holds her hand. Tight. Atlanta feels her jaw tighten and the tears start to well up but she growls—literally growls, a sound she does not expect to make but makes it anyway—and bites them back.

  “I’m going to say something to you now you may not want to hear,” Chennapragada says.

  “No,” Atlanta says, firm. “Don’t you tell me he didn’t make it.”

  “Your dog is stable.” The words, a lift—her expectations countered. “The bullet lodged above his eye. He will have to lose that eye. There will be some… other reconstruction necessary.” The doctor pauses. “He has a very hard head, this dog.”

  Atlanta almost laughs. “Me too. I have a hard head, too.” She doesn’t understand why the vet doesn’t want her to hear any of this—it’s good news. It’s not the best news, the best news would be, your dog didn’t get shot in the head, but considering the circumstances…

  “I think you should have the dog put down,” the vet says.

  A wall slams between them. “What? You said he’s stable.”

  “But he’s going to lose an eye. And some of his skull. The brain is intact but…” She pauses, finally gets to the heart of the matter. “This is going to be very expensive.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It will be thousands of dollars.”

  “I don’t care. I got a couple grand.” The mortgage money. You need that to live. You told your mother you had it. “I can pay for some of it and, and, and you can bill for the rest.”

  “Please. There are no guarantees. The world has many dogs. It is painful, but if you were to put the animal down…”

  Atlanta narrows her eyes. “You put that dog down I’ll put you down. You fix him. You hear me? You fix him.”

  Chennapragada nods, clearly taken aback by Atlanta’s fervor. “…As you wish.”

  * * *

  Four hours later, Atlanta’s lying across the chairs in the waiting room, head extended over the back of a chair, hair touching the floor like the fronds of a dry mop. Anxiety gnaws at her like a dog chewing a pig’s ear.

  This is, once again, all her fault.

  She just keeps pushing. And pushing. And pushing—and in her head it’s because she tells herself this is the right thing to do when really it’s because you’re angry and you want everyone to pay for what was done to you. She’s making all the bad people pay for the crimes of one. One voice inside her justifies it—after all, that’s probably what drives most cops or soldiers or abuse counselors, right? Some specter haunting them from their past, a single hinge on which the whole dang door swings. But then she’s reminded of the cost: Chris dead, Whitey almost dead, their house soon gone. Is the result worth it?

  Thing is, no matter how much she recognizes her part in all of this, she keeps thinking back to Petry. And she thinks about how he needs to pay. Not a little bit. But a lot. He needs to bear all the costs. All the burden. He needs to hurt like he makes others hurt. Because now he knows he can get what he wants from her. He can keep coming back and hurting all those around her—Shane, Guy, her mother. She’s got Whitey, but Orly Erickson has Petry—Petry is a rabid dog on a long leash, and the only thing to do with a dog like that is put him down.

  That way lies madness. A road lined with the trees of bad ideas. And yet she keeps walking it.

  This is a warning. It may not be my last…

  A shadow falls over her. Atlanta, jolted from her reverie, sits up straight.

  It’s Miss Cheekbones. The
girl from behind the vet counter. She has a bottle of water and a plate of cookies—store-bought, not homemade, but Atlanta’s stomach suddenly tightens and gurgles. Hunger hits her like a wave, like until now she forgot that she ever needed food. But the hangover from earlier and the insanity of the day have scraped her clean from the inside out and now she’s staring at those cookies like a wolf staring at a baby deer fumbling through the forest.