by Mark Wheaton
But Becca.
She’d been through so much. He’d found a couple of houses in Queens, but that wasn’t far enough away. He considered upstate and New Jersey with that killer commute, but that wasn’t going to make it. That’s when he remembered a cousin who drove trucks out in Colorado Springs. He called him up and was told that not only was housing cheap because of the real estate crash, but that he could get him a job.
“The money’s not great until you own your rig,” the cousin had said. “But once that happens, you’re rolling in it.”
It meant a lot of time on the road while Becca was at home, probably looked after by his cousin’s wife, but they’d work that out. For some reason, Ken just never figured Trey into the picture. He could see the conversation in his mind. He’d bring up Colorado, talk about the schools and the opportunity, Trey would start grinning, then start shaking his head. All Trey would be thinking about was how the move would screw up his plans.
What plans? Ken thought, staring at the ceiling.
But now Ken wondered if it was too late. Becca had started with this dog-stuff a few weeks back, saying there was some kind of monster in the building. If she was five, that’d be one thing, but this wasn’t an over-active imagination. So he’d treated it like a joke at first.
Mr. Preston had been a fall-down drunk. When he went to his cupboard, pulled a bottle of drain cleaner out instead of his Rémy Martin, poured it down his throat, and was dead minutes if not seconds later, no one was that surprised.
But Becca had said from the start that it was suspicious. She’d said that she’d seen Mr. Preston with a strange dog all of a sudden. He’d seemed out of it, like he barely recognized people he’d known for years. Then he was being carted out under a blanket of blue velvet with a funeral home logo in cursive flapping against the gurney.
As quickly as it had appeared, the dog was suddenly gone.
So when Becca told her oldest brother that she thought the animal had something to do with it, Ken assumed this was some kind of juvenile reaction to death. He told her that if this Devil Dog scared her, she should let it know that her brother was a much worse monster than anything it had ever seen and would kill it if it came around. He’d growled when he said it and made a face, hoping she’d feel better.
Instead, she just looked at him like he was nuts.
But now, she’d not only picked up what was apparently a murder weapon from the hall and brought it into the apartment, she’d also absconded with a police dog. He knew he’d have to start dealing with that in the morning but wasn’t even sure where to begin. If he told the police what happened, suddenly Becca would be involved in all this. If they decided to start looking, might they start saying that he was trying to cover up for Trey? Then, he’d be roped into it.
It was at that moment that the door to his bedroom eased open and the police dog in question nosed its way in. It sniffed around for a second as Ken watched before hopping up on the bed next to him.
“Just make yourself at home,” Ken cried, though he was intimidated enough not to shove the shepherd away.
He reached out to pet the animal, only to have his hand land on the harness. He felt something that didn’t exactly feel like leash material and withdrew his hand.
“What is that, boy?” He turned on a lamp and eyed the thing before flopping back down on his pillow. “Aw, shit—really? You’re wearing a fucking camera? Jesus Christ.”
• • •
“Executions, every last one of them,” Garza announced, joining his partner in the 22nd Precinct’s empty briefing room. It was the one place where they thought they might escape the chaos erupting in every police station in the five boroughs but still have access to the latest on the case.
Detective Leonhardt pinched his sinuses. His head had been all right, but each piece of worse news increased the violence between his eyes. First it was that there were multiple officers wounded up on the sixth floor of Building 7. Then “mortally” became a prefix and every badge in a four-block radius began racing up the stairs, Leonhardt included. After that, it was a reporter the detective passed on the sidewalk who mentioned this would be the single greatest gun-related loss of life to New York law enforcement since Attica.
But executions?
While sure, when he’d gone up to see the carnage, it had looked like something out of an old yakuza movie. But the idea that each of the dead officers had been shot unawares in the back of the head, likely in the one spot not covered by body armor, was almost too much to take.
Detective Garza waited for Leonhardt to react, but should’ve known it would be all internal for his partner. He was a man who could make himself a magnet for blame, taking even imagined censure upon his back like a flagellant.
“Was it the same gun?”
“Yeah. Something firing .357 caliber cartridges, possibly a Ruger SP 101.”
“And they didn’t find the gun?”
Garza shook his head.
“So,” sighed Leonhardt, “somebody got away.”
“I don’t know. There were supposed to be eight in the room, five are dead, the other three wounded. We got Chiedozie, the big bad. No one’s talking about a number nine.”
“If you’ve accounted for the weapons in 638 and the weapons of the Spec Ops guys, that leaves the old lady.”
“Are you kidding me? She stepped out of her apartment at the wrong time and got shot in the eye.”
“She walked halfway down the hall!” Leonhardt protested. “You think she couldn’t tell what was going on?”
“It was dark. She might’ve been disoriented, she might’ve gotten pushed. You don’t know what her bad luck was.”
“No, but it is suspicious. I’d almost say someone knew we were coming and might’ve been waiting in her place to get behind everybody. How else do you account for somebody getting the drop on that many tactical officers?”
“I can’t,” Garza admitted. “All shot from behind, base of the skull while standing, pitch darkness. No one gets that lucky.”
“They get anything off the dog handler’s monitor?”
“No, the recorder was attached to the camera itself, not the monitor.”
“Then where’s the camera?” Leonhardt asked.
“You hadn’t heard? Dog’s missing, too. They actually didn’t notice right away. They think he panicked at the gunfire and bolted.”
“An enforcement dog? That’s the first thing they train out of them.”
Garza shrugged. “Yeah, but that sound you’re hearing is everyone from City Hall to 1 Police Place covering their asses.”
Leonhardt sat for a moment longer, but then got to his feet, reaching for his coat. “You up for a drive?”
“Sure, what are we doing?”
“Missing dog, missing gun, missing camera. Take your pick.”
• • •
Trey had only been asleep a couple of hours when Ken shook him awake.
“What the hell, man?” Trey protested.
“That laptop,” Ken hissed. “Where’s the laptop?”
Ken refused to call the computer Trey had in his squat of a bedroom “his” laptop. Ken imagined the device, which just showed up one day about three months back, was anybody’s but Trey’s.
“Why?”
Ken held up the camera. “This was on the dog.”
Instantly intrigued, Trey rolled out of bed and began searching through piles of clothes. A minute later and the laptop was open, a USB cord running from it to the camera. Ken had figured it might require some kind of special rig only available to law enforcement or government types, but Trey indicated that the camera itself wasn’t anything special.
“You can buy something like this on the corner for nothing,” Trey said. “Cheap piece of shit, really.”
“I’m impressed, tough guy. Can we see what’s on it?”
A window popped up on the laptop screen asking if the user wanted to download the footage or simply view it. Trey hit “View” and a sec
ond window appeared and the footage began to roll.
“All right, Bones. Search!” came the disembodied voice of Sergeant del Vecchio.
Ken and Trey watched as the camera angled up the steps to the sixth floor. After a few fruitless sniff-arounds, Chiedozie appeared, coming out of his apartment. The camera lurched forward, galloping straight for the Nigerian slumlord. The man’s face filled with terror as his unseen assailant tore into him.
Then the footage got interesting.
After the gangster was subdued, there was a flurry of activity from within apartment 638. Several armed men rushed at the camera and numerous shots were fired, but way over the dog’s head, the shooters not yet realizing their leader’s assailant wasn’t human. The camera dove straight into these new attackers and began tearing them apart.
“Holy fuck, that dog!” Trey exclaimed. “He’s a monster!”
“Quiet,” Ken demanded.
At this point, the audio was all shouts, screams, and gunfire. The heavy footsteps of the tactical squad could be heard racing up the hallway. Bones wheeled around as the captain yelled out for the occupants of 638 to drop their weapons. By way of reply, they unleashed a torrent of machine-gun fire at the newcomers. For his part, the shepherd continued on, tearing into the bad guys even as Sergeant del Vecchio’s voice could be heard calling him off in his ear buds.
But then the single gun shots began.
At first, the tactical officers looked as if they couldn’t tell where the shots were coming from. The gunmen in the apartment took advantage of the distraction and pushed forward, shooting with near-suicidal disregard for their own safety.
As if finally hearing his handler’s commands, Bones bolted through the crush of tactical officers firing from alongside the doorway. As he entered the hall, the camera immediately revealed the executions taking place in the darkness as the diminutive Mrs. Fowler quickly shot several officers from behind at point-blank range. It was a startling sight, an old woman methodically lining up shots aimed directly at the base of the officers’ skulls. She had a very serious, very determined look on her face as she pulled the trigger.
“Oh, my God!” Trey laughed. “Ms. Fowler going Scarface!”
“Shut up, Trey,” Ken said, albeit toothlessly. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Mrs. Fowler’s rampage lasted only seconds before the bullet caught her in the eye. She had no real reaction, as if the round had torn straight through her brain, closing her account before she knew what hit her.
As she sank to the ground, a new pair of eyes appeared behind Mrs. Fowler. Ken could just see the outline of an immense black dog, low to the ground, watching from down the hall.
“See, I told you,” Becca said.
Trey and Ken turned and saw their little sister watching from the doorway with Bones.
“How do you know that’s not Mrs. Fowler’s dog?” Ken asked.
“Mrs. Fowler doesn’t have a dog,” Becca replied. “And if she did, you really think it would be some kind of monster like that one?”
“She’s got you there, Ken,” Trey said. “That thing would eat her alive.”
On the screen, the dog stared back at Bones until the camera turned away. The shepherd had found Sergeant del Vecchio and was sniffing around her corpse. He nuzzled the dead woman’s face though half of it had been blown away when the bullet had exited, taking her nose and right cheekbone with it. As the camera bobbed up and down, however, the eyes of the other dog remained fixed, as if staring directly into the lens. For a moment, Ken wondered if it wasn’t a statue or some kind of taxidermy animal that Mrs. Fowler kept for one reason or another, so still did it stand.
But then it moved just a little, as if registering a sound on the stairwell. A second later, however, its gaze had returned to Bones.
“What is that?” Trey whispered, hypnotized by its gaze.
“I don’t know,” said Ken. “But since when do you have two dogs in the same place and neither one so much as gives the other a how-do-you-do?”
Ken looked back at Bones, wishing more than anything that the shepherd could give him the answer to that question.
They watched the rest of the footage, the dog making its way over to their apartment door and Becca letting him in. The shepherd didn’t turn around once to see the other animal.
Trey popped the cord out of the camera and shook his head. “Now that we know all this, what the hell do we do about it?”
Another question Ken wanted the answer to.
• • •
Over on the eighth floor of Building 3, Vernon Lester ached all over. A mechanic, he’d never been too careful with his back or knees or elbows for the first thirty years on the job. But in the last five, it had all caught up with him. He couldn’t find a comfortable position to sleep in anymore and used alcohol and pills to knock himself out more and more. Helen warned him away from this, but everybody at the bus yard had the same problem and even told him which doctor would give him the most substantial hydrocodone prescription.
Now, Vernon was often in haze throughout the day, time flying by as it never had before, which he didn’t really mind at first. He’d take the pills during the week and drop off during weekends or holidays. This led to such a violent reaction—he’d go from moody to furious anger to straight-up pitch-dark depression in the course of a handful of hours—that he decided to take a few pills on the weekend, too. When even they didn’t do the trick, he supplemented with alcohol.
Only, he’d woken up that morning to find that not only had he forgotten to refill his prescription, he’d also exhausted his supply of booze. He figured he’d be able to shower, dress, eat breakfast, and get down to the bodega on the corner for a couple of tall boys before it did too much mental damage. In the short term, however, the pain the pills were actually designed to suppress raged through his muscles. There were short sharp shocks just below the surface on the top of his feet and through his hands. But in his lower back, it was a dull throb that had him bent over and grabbing the sides of the shower stall to keep steady.
He knew at least one thing that would make him feel better, but he also knew Helen would see right through him it if he tried to get her to join him in the shower. She’d make a crack about not wanting to get her hair wet, then go back to doing whatever she found to occupy her mornings now that the bank had cut her hours to almost nothing.
“Hey, Vernon!” came Helen’s voice from the hall. “You’ll never believe what was sitting on our doorstep just now.”
Got me there, woman, Vernon thought.
Vernon figured she had him there.
Helen entered the bathroom and, through the frosted glass, he saw that she was walking what he took for a massive black dog of an indeterminate breed.
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” laughed Helen. “But he sure was hungry. Found him nosing through the trash bag I’d put out there earlier. I gave him a piece of chicken, and he just started smiling from ear to ear.”
Vernon opened the shower door a little and saw the dog. He couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe a mastiff of some kind, but with the upper body musculature of a Brahma bull. Vernon figured, if the thing put its mind to it, it could knock him straight to the ground.
“You planning on keeping it?” Vernon asked.
“Oh, no,” Helen replied. “I’m sure it belongs to somebody in the building. Just reminds me of my dad’s dog from when we were kids. He babied that animal.”
Vernon nodded and eyed the dog a moment longer. It looked back at Vernon the way a hungry man might regard a turkey dinner just out of reach.
V
Leonhardt and Garza climbed the stairs of Building 7 in silence. For Leonhardt, each step sent a shiver up his spine, particularly as they neared the floor of the shooting. When he’d gone up only a few hours before with the other emergency responders, there’d been a task at hand. He could allow himself to get caught up in the situation. Now, it was revisiting a scene f
rom which all traces of the crime had been removed, relying on Leonhardt’s memory to fill everything in.
That corner? That’s where he’d seen the captain slumped over, his half-open mouth drooling blood through shattered teeth.
That doorway? Where one of the Nigerians was sitting with his throat ripped to hell, though whether it was from gunfire or the missing police dog had yet to be determined.
The ceiling? Where Leonhardt had ducked under a congealing pile of hot brains blasted out through an officer’s forehead, sticky stalactites of blood, brains, and spinal fluid only just beginning to form.
All of this had been scrubbed away by whatever trauma scene cleaners were on retainer to the buildings once the location was released by law enforcement. Leonhardt was never less than amazed at the work of these outfits, which could turn even the most heinous of abattoirs into a livable space within hours of a bloodletting. Just another thing New York did well.
All that said, the one thing they never managed to fully disguise was the smell. Chemical cleaners mixed with blood, shit, sweat, and flesh had such a peculiar odor that even a ventilated space, which the sixth floor of Building 7 clearly was not, would reek for days after.
The two detectives broke the seal on Mrs. Fowler’s apartment and let themselves in. Flipping on a light, the pair were hit with a new but no less familiar scent.
“Yeah, an old lady lived here, huh?” Garza snarked, glancing from the cherry-finish console television to the curio shelves lined with blown-glass animal figurines.
The wallpaper was red, gold, and decades out of fashion. The carpet in the living room was thick and brown with threads of more gold woven in. The carpet stopped at the kitchen where peeling yellow-brown linoleum with a fleur-de-lis design took over. Like the rest of the apartment, the kitchen and breakfast nook looked like something re-created from a Sears catalog circa 1973. Nothing was out of place.
