Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  “Hungry?” Cheekbones asks, but by the time she adds the question mark to that one word Atlanta’s already got a cookie shoved in her mouth. “Oh. Okay.” Cheekbones sits while Atlanta eats. She’s three cookies deep by the time they form a wad of masticated dough in her throat, so she quickly uncaps the water and chugs it.

  “Thank you,” Atlanta gasps, wiping her mouth. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Betsy.”

  “Hi, Betsy. Sorry for… camping out here. I just don’t want to go home.”

  “It’s no big thing. It’s a slow day.” Earlier a woman with a twitchy dust-mop—a Shit Zoo is the only way that Atlanta can spell the breed’s name in her head—came in, but Betsy turned her away, said the vet would be in surgery all day. Beyond that, in the place was dead. (So to speak.) “Your dog is pretty amazing.”

  Another gulp of water and mouthful of cookie. Atlanta nods. “Yeah. He is.” She sighs. “Dogs aren’t supposed to survive a shot to the head, right?”

  “No, not really. It happens more than you’d think, I guess, but it’s still a one in a million.” Betsy shakes her head. “We had a cat with an arrow through its head come in last year. Some kids were shooting animals at the park—ducks, geese, squirrels. They saw the cat and, well.”

  “The cat live?”

  “Yeah, but not well. The cat was kinda… weird after that.”

  “Oh.” Her skin goes clammy. “Will Whitey be… weird?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  Atlanta stares off at a point that doesn’t exist here in this room. “No, it’s cool.”

  It’s a thousand miles from cool.

  “Your dog’s breed is rare,” Betsy says. “I was doing some reading. You know those dogs used to hunt mountain lions?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah. They chase their prey and just keep throwing themselves against the animal again and again until the prey falls down—and then the rest of the Dogo’s pack joins in, both dog and man. Hunting mountain lions like that? Lord. That tells me your guy back there is one tough cookie.” She looks at the now-empty plate. “Um, no pun intended. I’m just saying, if any dog’s gonna make it through this, it’s yours.”

  “I hope so.” Atlanta forces a game smile. “Thanks.”

  Betsy pats Atlanta’s shoulder. “If you need another water, just say the word.”

  * * *

  It’s another three hours when Chennapragada appears, and says five words.

  You can see him now.

  Atlanta does not hesitate.

  Walking into the back is a slow-motion walk. She wants to hurry but Chennapragada moves slow with a trundling hip-sway—Atlanta wants to shove her out of the way but wouldn’t know where to go once she did.

  The vet takes her to the final door. It swings open, no doorknob. The smell back here is strongly antiseptic, a medicinal sub-layer and beneath all that, the smell of musk and fear and animal piss.

  There, in the center of the room, on a shiny metal table, is Whitey.

  He looks dead.

  “He’s not dead,” Chennapragada says, obviously aware of how it looks. “He’s under anesthetic.”

  The eye below the hole—now hidden behind a square bandage—is a tight pucker, the fur around it shaved down, the stitches suturing the eyelid edges closed.

  His face seems to sag on that side. Like he’s got a palsy.

  But his chest rises and falls. Slowly. Steadily.

  “Here,” Chennapragada says. “Souvenir. If you want it.”

  She rattles a metal tray—a 9mm bullet rolls around in there. It smells strongly of rubbing alcohol. The lead has mushroomed, like a muffin that blew up and out of its tin.

  “He’s going to be okay?” Atlanta asks.

  “He should be, yes. I’ll give you antibiotics and some pain pills.”

  “I can take him home today?”

  “He should stay here for a couple nights. So I can monitor him. But you’re free to visit with him.” The doctor eyes her up and offers a small, wry smile. “You can go over to him. He won’t bite.”

  Atlanta didn’t even realize it but she’d been hanging back. Afraid to touch him like he was a pile of dust and if she got too close he’d blow away on the wind of her breath. She hurries over, wraps her arms around him gently. He’s warm. The rise and fall of his breathing gives comfort.

  Then: a stink fills the air.

  Atlanta’s nose crinkles. “Something’s wrong. That smell…”

  “Gas,” the vet says with a chuckle. “He farted.”

  “Oh.”

  Chennapragada shrugs. “Welcome, Miss Burns, to the joys of dog ownership.”

  Whitey remains asleep but his tail thumps against the metal table: clong clong clong. Happy in gassy oblivion.

  * * *

  Home again, home again.

  By the time she makes it home—on foot—evening’s creeping in. Not yet dark but will be soon, the paint of twilight already spilling slow across the sky. A few early fireflies light up their butts across the driveway and above the corn. Should be peaceful. She should feel settled. She doesn’t. She feels on edge. Like she’s stepping on the ragged tail of an Adderall high, but she hasn’t had Adderall in months. Itchy. Twitchy. Angry.

  Inside, an answering machine message from her mother. Things didn’t work out with Cousin Harley. Coming home soon. Couple more days then she’ll be back. Hope everything is good there, whatever, blah blah blah.

  Yeah, Mama, things are peachy-keen here. One big dollop of ice cream on a giant shit sandwich.

  Mama coming home soon. Whitey, too.

  Atlanta’s alone.

  She should feel scared but she doesn’t.

  She calls Shane, and then she calls Guy.

  It’s time to do something.

  * * *

  After she tells them both the whole story, they both sit and look shell-shocked. She expects that from Shane—that’s one of his default looks. You tell him there’s pudding pops in the freezer or that it’s the day that the new comic books come out and he tends to get that deer-in-the-headlights-of-an-oncoming-Peterbilt look. Guy, though, he’s sharp, snappy, ready for all that crazy stupid shit life throws at folks—and he’s got the same look, like maybe he just saw something you’re never supposed to see, like a lion eating a baby.

  “Oh my god,” is all Shane can say.

  “I can’t believe that dog’s still alive,” Guy says. “Yo, that’s messed up. And you put away the Mountain Man? Damn. Damn. That’s some shit right there.”

  “The cop killed Chris,” Shane says, staring at the floor. It’s like he wanted to know but now that he does…

  “I want payback,” Atlanta says. “And I want it now.”

  “Girl,” Guy says, “you gotta leave this one alone. Let the bird fly free.”

  Shane shakes his head and finally looks up. “No, she’s right. He needs to pay. We let him keep going and he’ll mess with all of us. What do you think’s gonna happen when he finds out Whitey is alive? He’ll find a way to finish the job. Maybe he’ll just kill him. Or maybe he’ll have the dog put to sleep. That’s the law, right? Dog bite means euthanization.”

  “The dude’s a cop,” Guy says, incredulous. “You saw what happened—he was able to shoot that dog inside the damn police station. He’s untouchable. And did I mention he’s a cop?”

  “I’m the bait dog,” Atlanta says suddenly.

  They both look at her like, whuh?

  “I’m the cat on the cat-pole. The coon in the cage. Petry knows he’s already got a piece of me. He’s got blood in his nose. I dangle in front of him a little more he’ll come for me. He’ll come to make me hurt. Maybe he’ll hit me. Or try to do to me what my Mama’s boyfriend did. Or maybe he’ll just kill me. But I can make him come here. And when he does, I’m gonna kill him.”

  “Whoa. That’s fuckin’ crazy,” Guy says.

  Shane nods. “Yeah, actually, that is crazy.”

  Her jaw sets,
her mouth a hard line. “It’s the only way.”

  Shane frowns. “There might be another way. Guy, can you drive us somewhere?”

  * * *

  Night comes. They drive.

  “So, you okay?” Guy asks, looking over at Atlanta in the passenger seat. “Maybe you need time to cool down.”

  “Don’t have time,” she says, gnawing a fingernail to the quick. She gets it to a hangnail and uses her teeth to wrench it free from its mooring. Blood wells and the wound stings. “This has to happen fast. He can’t know it’s coming.”

  “Yeah, but are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Chew, chew. The taste of licking an iron skillet in her mouth.

  “Is your nose broken?”

  She touches it. She’d forgotten about it, actually—the pain receding like low tide, but now that she’s thinking about it again her nose feels like a radio powered on, full volume, dialing up a loud frequency of pain. “No. Don’t think so.”

  “This can’t go like this forever. At some point you gotta be a normal girl.”

  “If you say so.”

  Guy looks over at her, obviously worried. “I’m serious.”

  “This part has to happen first. This man shot my dog and killed my friend—and I don’t buy that line of bull that Chris killed himself, that’s not what this was, not for one dang second. I let that slide and soon he’ll come for you. Or Shane. Or my mother. I’m tired of people taking power that’s not theirs to take. Evil keeps on keepin’ on. At some point you gotta stand in the headlights and take your shot.”

  And that’s the end of that conversation. Guy nods. Says nothing else. Just drives.

  She eventually points ahead: “Turn here.”

  The night sky is a kind of green-dark, like the algae waters of the pond that is now the murky mud-bogged home to Orly Erickson’s heirloom ring. A pond they just passed, the waters merging with the sky: one big algal smear. As they get close, Atlanta tells him to cut the lights. He does, and slows the Scion so it’s quiet. And so they don’t go driving into a tree.

  Up ahead—moonlight on windows, like ribbons of light caught in pools of oil.

  The gun club. Where Orly Erickson and his cronies meet and talk about powder loads and the NRA and, oh, right, white power Heil Hitler let’s hurt anybody who doesn’t look or act like we do.

  From behind Atlanta, a blue glow rises, fills the car. She looks back, sees Shane sitting there, nose practically pressed against the screen of a laptop. Well, he calls it a “netbook,” but to her it’s a to-may-to to-mah-to thing.

  “You can do this?” she asks.

  “I dunno. It depends.”

  “Depends are what old people wear to hold in their pee,” she says. “I thought you said you could do this.”

  “I can. If there’s even anything here.”

  Way Shane put it was this:

  Petry played for her a recording, but it wasn’t played on a handheld digital recorder. It was an MP3 player. Which means that conversation between Orly and Bill Coyne was contained within a digital file—like, duh, an MP3.

  Good bet that Orly does his business—er, more to the point, his really nasty business—out of the gun club since doing it at his house or his company would put him at risk. That, then, must be where the recordings come from.

  And that might be where the recordings live. Recorded there. And stored there.

  Easy-peasy, George-and-Weezy.

  “So you’re gonna hack a computer in there,” she says.

  “Huh?” Shane looks up. “Oh. No. Just the network.” His computer boops. “There. Wireless network. And…” He taps on the keyboard. “Like I figured, not very well protected. No WPA or WEP, just a straight username and password. I looked at the gun club’s website and it’s pretty much a big old piece of crap—like, Geocities-era terrible,” he says, continuing with words that Atlanta only barely comprehends. “I figured they didn’t exactly have a robust network and I was right. Still. We need to figure out the password. Maybe they use the default…” More typing. “Admin, no. Administrator, no. 1234, no, password, no, comcast, no. Damnit.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  He gives her a durrr look. “I don’t know the password.”

  They start going through possible passwords. Mitchell, since it’s his son. TNC Biologics, since it’s his company. Gun club. Gunclub. Wife’s name takes a bit of Googling: Mary. No, not that, either. Shane frowns. “I wish he had a Facebook profile. Could find out his birthday, maybe.”

  “I don’t think Orly’s the type to be on Facebook.” She almost laughs. “Is there a racist white asshole version of Facebook? Hitlerbook or something?”

  That’s when it hits her.

  She says, “Wait. These racist pricks are pretty much shoved up Hitler’s ass every hour of every day. They’re Nazi fetishists, it’s got to be tied to that.” And so they start firing off Nazi-themed stuff—everything from Hitler to Himmler, Adolf to Eva, Panzer to Jew-Biter. Wehrmacht. Warshed. Blitzkrieg. The names of concentration camps. The names of high-ranking officers. Shane’s pretty good with this stuff, because he studies and knows his history—but then Atlanta snaps her fingers.

  “It’s not old Nazi stuff. It’s new Nazi stuff. I saw a license plate at Bill Coyne’s and in the gun club on the wall behind Orly’s desk. 14WORDS, it said. It’s a Neo-Nazi thing, counting the words in one of their mottos—something about securing the world and future for white children. Try that. All one word.”

  Shane’s eyes light up brighter than his netbook monitor. “Bingo was his name-o.”

  Atlanta starts biting another nail—this time, her thumb. Guy looks impatient. “So what now? You like, take over their computers and shit? Hack the files?”

  “I’m not really a hacker,” Shane mumbles, staring into the screen like a sorcerer peering into his cauldron. “And I’m not gonna be able to hack the computer—if I were better than this I could maybe put out a packet sniffer and see what comes and goes, but we don’t have time for that anyway. I don’t need to hack the computer, though. I just need access to the printer. And…” Tap, tap, click, click. “I do. Via the IP address. Adding it now.”

  “You said you needed a message from me. You got it ready?”

  He nods. “All ready. Is it go time?”

  “It’s go time.”

  He stabs a key.

  “Your message is printing, milady.”

  * * *

  The wait is the worst part.

  Will someone come? Tonight? Tomorrow? No way to know. Nobody was at the gun club and so the message on the printer should go undiscovered until morning.

  Just the same, they’ve no way to know when the axe will fall.

  Or if it will. She starts to worry—maybe he won’t take the bait. Maybe he’s too smart a monster to go for the low-hanging fruit.

  So, they wait. Or, she and Shane do, at least. Guy leaves her with some Adderall and heads back home. He wants to stay, he says, he really does, but he’s already had enough trouble, and these are cops and…

  Atlanta tells him it’s okay. She needs his car gone from the driveway anyhow.

  When he’s gone, she takes the Adderall.

  Doesn’t kick in right away but when it does everything seems crystal and bright—she finds a sense of hyper-alertness, easy and electric. All the world under a magnifying glass. Her mind wiped free of fatigue. She tells Shane to sleep and he lays down on the couch. One leg draped over. The house is humid. He’s got a sheen of sweat on his brow.

  “Do you think he’ll come?”

  She nods. “I figure. We all set up?”

  “Yeah. Won’t take much to get it all going. You sure this’ll work?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just remember, whatever happens—stay out of the way. Hide in the coat closet and don’t come out. I don’t need you in the crossfire in all of this. Just say in there and stick to the plan.”

  He pauses. Draws a deep breath. �
�What do you think he’ll do?”

  “I’ve been nesting on that. First I figured he’ll come after one of you. But then I got to thinking, he knows I’m vulnerable. Mother’s gone. Dog is at the vet—far as he knows, maybe dead. Day after I shut down a major dog fighting ring I might have some folks who want to come at me, make me pay, so he could pretty easily make it look like something it’s not. Plus, we dangled the bait. So, he’ll come. He’ll come. He’ll try to kill me.”