Dog Eats Dog

by Iain Levison

  Dixon was looking at him, and Elias felt he was being evaluated, and that Dixon was reading his mind. Dixon was understanding that there was no way Elias was going to give him the gun back. Dixon was completely aware Elias was just blowing smoke and trying to get away from him. Dixon was about to do something explosive.

  But Dixon just nodded thoughtfully. “OK,” he said. “You’re going to go get me the gun . . . today?”

  “Yes,” said Elias, careful not to move a muscle unless the movement portrayed the picture of honesty he was trying to project.

  Dixon shrugged. “All right then,” he said. “I need a carton of cigarettes and a six pack of my beers, too. And my hundred-and-twenty cash.” He slammed the door behind him when he went back in.

  Elias exhaled, and felt himself starting to sweat. He felt like the whole day had been ruined. No post-sex euphoria anymore.

  He needed Dixon gone.

  11

  Elias pulled out of the driveway, sure that Dixon was crouched low by the window and watching him leave. The guy had just let him go, and he really seemed to believe Elias was coming back. Give you your gun back . . . Are you out of your fucking mind? Yeah, I’m going to get you your shopping list: beer, cigarettes, a newspaper, and something you can murder me with before you leave, you psychopath.

  He drove off, carefully suppressing the impulse to slam his foot on the gas and squeal out of there. The whole time he had been dressing in his bedroom his heart had been pounding, listening for the creak of Dixon’s foot on the stairs. Dixon must know he was going to opt out of their arrangement. He was coming up the stairs, with the pipe wrench. He was going to throw open the door and his face would be maniacal and he would scream, “Trying to fuck me, eh?”

  Bam.

  He had wanted to pull on a T-shirt because, alone, in his room, his hands had been shaking so badly he couldn’t button anything. But he had told Dixon he was going into the office, and even Dixon would think a professor going into work in a T-shirt with holes in it was funny. Even on a Sunday. Elias was always immaculately dressed when he went to work, Dixon must have noticed that. Then he had pulled his dress pants off the chair and noticed the foot-wide bloodstain, which had been concealed from Denise’s view by the way they had been carelessly thrown onto the chair the night before. Lucky.

  The buttoning process had taken so long that he had needed to steady his breathing, and when the shirt was finally on, he still had to deal with his shoes. In his haste, he had pulled on white socks. He couldn’t wear white socks with black loafers, and he didn’t want to take his socks off, because his hands were shaking again. So he pulled some sneakers out of the closet. Dress pants and sneakers. Would Dixon notice that this just wasn’t something he did?

  Hell, it was Sunday. And he needed to get out of the house.

  When he had come galloping down the stairs, his instinct had been to keep up his speed when he came to the ground and flee the house. But through the open kitchen door he had noticed Dixon sitting on his metal deck chair, smoking. The guy had been outside, not seeming to care where Elias was. Maybe he hadn’t been suspicious after all. Maybe I’ve really fooled him, Elias had thought. Nonetheless, he hadn’t waited to double-check his briefcase. He had quickly grabbed it, and was just turning to leave when Dixon had stood up with a growl, and came into the kitchen.

  Elias had tried not to act like he was about to run, had just kept moving smoothly towards the door.

  “Get me a Sunday paper,” Dixon had called after him jauntily. “I really should be keeping up with the world.”

  Now, out of the house at last, he began to plan his next move. He needed to calm down. Find a coffee shop somewhere in which he could organize his thoughts. But as he felt himself decompressing, his mind began to wander back to the sex of the night before. Elias had felt so much pleasure in having her so close to solving her crime, it had actually made the sex better. He had been fantasizing at the moment of orgasm, wondering if screaming out some kind of muffled clue would be his ultimate inside joke. “Basement!” His mind had become cloudy with pleasure and he had gotten lost in the moment, but afterwards, he must have been grinning, because Denise had commented on it.

  “You sure look happy after sex,” she had said. For her part, she had seemed vague and distant. Most likely having those deep after-sex thoughts that Elias would rather not hear. He had fallen asleep quickly.

  He drove slowly past the town square, and was pleased to see that Willard’s Coffee Shop was open. He parked, got a twenty-ounce cappuccino, found a seat at a table on the deck. And he sat there, sipping cappuccino, thinking about going to the police department, which was fifty feet away.

  Denise pulled out onto the highway, glad to be rid of Kohl on the drive back, to be able to pick her own radio station and not worry about making conversation. She could stop for coffee or a burger wherever she wanted. Lately she wondered if she enjoyed being alone far too much.

  Goodbye to Tiburn, she thought as she accelerated up the on-ramp and joined the sparse traffic on I-93 South. It was a pretty place, but she was never going back there. It had left her with a feeling that was not quite right. Something had happened to her the minute she had arrived there, a complete loss of self, which one usually associated with places like Bangkok or Las Vegas. A new Denise had emerged, a pot-smoking, promiscuous Denise, who needed to go back in her cage now that she was on the way back to New York City.

  She had no feelings of guilt. She was far too lapsed a Catholic for that. What she had was a vague sense that something bad had happened to her spiritually, a mild, nagging feeling of indefinable violation, as if her apartment had been broken into but everything left untouched. She tried to overcome the feeling by focusing on the mundane matters of her return home. Dry cleaning. How late were the dry cleaners open on Sunday? Till five? She looked at the dash panel clock. 9:02. She had eight hours to return the rental car on Tenth Avenue and get to Wang’s Dry Cleaners, or she wasn’t going to have anything to wear tomorrow. Maybe she should just call out. Nope, couldn’t do that, Carver would expect a report before lunch.

  The feeling didn’t go away.

  Her cellphone, which she had laid out on the passenger seat, rang once, and she answered without taking her eyes off the road to see who it was. Calls on a Sunday morning were usually friendly in nature and never required a professional greeting, so she just said, “Hello?”

  “Is this . . . Denise?”

  “Yes.” She recognized Elias’s voice immediately. Oh, shit. Should have just let it ring. Be businesslike, end the conversation quickly. Pretend you don’t know who it is. “Who’s this?”

  There was a silence, and she thought something might not be right with Elias. But then, she had always had that feeling with him.

  “Elias White,” Elias said. “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” said Denise. “I’m about to stop for coffee. I’m on the highway.” She had just passed a sign that said “Next exit eighteen miles”.

  “You never said goodbye,” Elias said, and she didn’t think he sounded hurt, just curious. Would this be a good time to just hang up and pretend her cellphone had died? Maybe she should start making hissing noises like she was entering a dead area, then shut the phone off. No, he’d just call back later, when other people were around.

  “You were dead asleep,” Denise said.

  “Yeah,” said Elias, and there was a silence again, leaving Denise wondering if he just wanted to chat. If that was the case, she had to end it now. He hadn’t seemed the type to get emotional over a one-night stand. Denise had figured Elias as being an old hand at them, which was why she had chosen him.

  “Well,” said Denise, with as much finality as she could muster. “Thanks for everything. I had a nice time.”

  “Listen,” Elias said quickly, as if he had sensed her desire to end the conversation, and was trying to keep it going. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Uh huh.”

  There was a se
cond or two of silence. He had slowed down again now he knew she was listening. “I wanted to ask you about the bank robber. How’s the investigation going?”

  “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation,” she said. Had he really called for that? Denise now had the sense that maybe he was upset she had just left, was looking for some kind of connection. She thought there had been an understanding of meaninglessness.

  “Oh.”

  “Well, OK then.” She actually tapped the brake pedal as if she was moving onto an exit ramp, hoping that Elias might notice the noise of deceleration and believe her story of pulling off to get coffee. As she crested a hill, she took in the view of the New Hampshire mountains, forests lining both sides of the road, and she realized she couldn’t see a car in either direction. Nothing but empty highway, mountains and trees. A view she could be enjoying if she could only hang up. “I’m going to get some coffee. Thanks again.”

  “I’m across the street from the police station,” said Elias.

  That was weird. Why was he telling her that? “What are you doing at the police station?”

  “I’m not at the police station. I’m across the street. At a coffee shop.”

  “Yeah,” said Denise. “Coffee sounds about right. I’m pulling up to a rest stop myself.” She pulled the car over onto the shoulder and came to a complete stop, and hoped he heard the unmistakable sound as she yanked up the parking brake. It might be time to break out the hissing sounds. “Okey doke,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Uh huh. Bye,” Elias said, and she almost thought she heard dejection in his voice, but she slammed the cellphone shut before she could get a chance to analyze it. She tossed the phone back on the seat as if it were red hot, relieved to have it out of her hands. It bounced off the passenger seat, rebounded off the glove compartment, and landed on the floor mat.

  The vague sense of violation had gotten worse. It must have something to do with Elias. Maybe it was some deep-seated Catholic guilt about the one-night stand. She’d had them before, in New York, and not felt this way. Maybe she was just getting too old for them. She put the cellphone back on the seat, then opened the glove box to look at her rental contract, hoping to distract herself by focusing on details again. Where was the car rental return? Tenth Avenue and what?

  She looked over the document, trying to find the address, and there was too much small print. Irritated, she shoved the papers back into the glove box and slammed it shut, and as she pulled back onto the deserted road, she was overwhelmed by the feeling that she needed to take a shower. She felt filthy. She had showered barely an hour ago at the Tiburn motel.

  She gunned the car up to highway speed and realized she couldn’t wait to get back to New York City, to the life she had been so anxious to get a break from only two days before. She wanted that easy anonymity, that feeling that any story of hers could be topped by the next person rounding the corner. But it wasn’t really so much the city she needed. She just needed to get as far away as possible from Tiburn, and never go back.

  Elias put his cellphone back on the table and looked at it, his hands over his mouth as if trying to stop secrets from coming out. He had almost told Denise everything.

  For half an hour he had sat there, staring into his cappuccino froth, readying himself for the walk over to the police station. How would he phrase it? “There’s a bank robber hiding in my house.” And he’d wait for the response. Would they frantically reach for phones with urgent looks on their faces the minute he began to speak? Or would they stare at him blankly? Then, during the course of the half hour, Elias had noticed that no one had come or gone from the police building, and the lobby, which he could see through the glass door, was dark.

  The police building shared space with the municipal building, and it was closed on Sundays. The police station was closed. That was great. Elias was thinking about handing the local cops what was probably the biggest case in their history, but it would have to wait until Monday.

  It gave him a few extra minutes to think. He imagined them surrounding his house, calling to Dixon through megaphones. They would probably call a SWAT team down from Concord, line the street with dark blue vans which would spill out men in black body armor, sniper rifles and baseball caps. Melissa and her family would be out in the street, looking bemused, along with Mr Cuthbertson, who would probably be wearing gloves and holding pruning shears as the helmeted men with M-16s ordered them to go back into their houses.

  Dixon, of course, would not come out, and they would fire tear gas into the house. Tear gas. Elias hadn’t thought of that. That stuff would get into his carpet, his couch pillows, his bedspread. And the actual canister would be fired through a glass window. Who was going to pay for the damage? The bank whose money Elias was going to help them recover? Doubtful. And what if shooting started? Did he really want M-16 bullets going through Dixon’s head and into the new Sony DVD player, splattering brain matter across his Nakamichi speakers?

  And that was the best case scenario. Elias couldn’t be sure Dixon would opt to go out in a blaze of glory. Maybe he’d come right out, give himself up, let himself be cuffed right in front of Mr Cuthbertson, Melissa, and her odd family. And as they dragged him away, he’d give Elias the eye as he was shoved into the back of a van by six helmeted men with rifles, a look that said, that’s it, I’m telling them everything.

  Then it would be evening, and he would be sitting on his metal porch chair, the street quiet now, except for colleagues and neighbors calling and asking if he was OK. And then, after the furor had died down, maybe three days later, he would be sitting at his desk in his office and Alice would knock gently and say, with that disturbed expression of hers, that the police were here. Something about Elias’s teenage neighbor . . .

  So maybe going to the police wasn’t such a great idea. Then he thought about Dixon in his basement, with the gun. What was worse, getting a visit from the cops, or being found by them after his body had started to smell up the neighborhood?

  That was when he had thought about Denise and started fantasizing about her fixing everything.

  He could call her. He could tell her she had just spent the night in a house with the felon she was looking for. She might actually be able to solve this problem. Maybe he could arrange it so that Denise would go downstairs with her gun drawn and just shoot Dixon five or six times before the guy had a chance to open his mouth. He could tell her about what a monster Dixon was, how Dixon had terrified Elias into some kind of shock.

  But then, when he had actually called her and heard her voice, it suddenly seemed insane to tell her. He had pulled it off, made a complete fool out of her, and now he was going to call her and confess? Her voice was so cold and distant, so anxious to be rid of him, that he had stalled, enjoying her ignorance. He wanted her to know how badly he had fooled her – only not badly enough to go on trial for statutory rape of a minor.

  And so he had put the cellphone down, covered his mouth, breathed deeply and taken another sip of his cappuccino. Through the picture window of the coffee shop, he could see a phone book sitting on the counter of the cash register. He went inside and asked to borrow it, then took it back to the table and flipped back through the yellow pages.

  Gift shops, graphic design, guest houses. Guns and gunsmiths.

  Putting the phone book in his lap, he carefully tore the page out, shifting in his chair to cover the noise of the paper ripping. He folded the page under the table and put it in his pocket, then returned the book to the register.

  Dixon leaned back in the deck chair, shut his eyes, felt the sun in his face, and listened to the sound of peace in Elias’s backyard. Today was Sunday. He would stay with this fuck-up one more day and then be on his way. Monday was always a bad day to travel, too much business. Tuesdays were better. You could get lost in the anonymity of the working week. Good day to take the train.

  The bushes parted and Dixon’s heart jumped, and before he could move and dart back into the hous
e, he found himself looking at a pretty teenage girl holding a kitten. The same girl who had been looking for her bra on Elias’s living room floor just a week before.

  “Hi,” she said, petting the kitten, not seeming surprised to see Dixon. She was looking around, behind him, into the house, and Dixon figured right away she was trying to get a handle on the situation. Dixon had heard her surprise the FBI lady earlier in the morning, and now she had returned for more information, using the kitten as an innocent prop.

  Holding the bewildered kitten in an outstretched hand, she put one leg over the fence, shifted the kitten from one hand to the other, then put the other leg over, to come uninvited into Elias’s yard.

  “This is Tyke,” she said, holding the kitten out for Dixon’s examination. Wordlessly, and while still trying to figure how to handle this, Dixon instinctively reached for the kitten, and she handed it to him. It mewed as the girl deposited it into his huge hand.

  “I’m Melissa,” she said. “Who’re you?”

  He was stumped. How to answer that? Should have thought of a fake name. “Phil . . . Johnson,” finally came out, rough, gravelly, unsure. Just what he didn’t want. But the girl was barely listening, seemed more concerned with stealing glances back into the kitchen, as if wondering where Elias was.

  “Elias had to go to work today,” Dixon offered.

  “Mm hmm,” she said, as if she didn’t care. “Are you a friend of his?”

  “Yeah.” Dixon gently petted the kitten, which was moving nervously around in his hand, looking up at him, trembling. He knew his answers weren’t satisfying the girl’s curiosity, and the last thing he wanted was for her to leave while wanting to know more. He needed to make up a good story. “Me and my girlfriend are staying with him for the weekend,” he said.

  “Ah, so that was your girlfriend . . . that lady I saw this morning?”

  “Yeah. You saw her?” Dixon was almost tempted to ask what she looked like. “She had to leave early, go back to Jersey. She’s gotta work tomorrow.”