Night Howl

by Andrew Neiderman

  After they parked at the precinct, Qwen stepped out of the car and opened the door for Maggie. The dog looked unhappy about it. The warmer than usual spring made the city air feel more like hot summer air. Qwen felt oppressed by it and by the lack of a breeze. Maggie’s tail drooped as she waited for them to move over the sidewalk and up the steps. Michaels came around the car and looked about.

  “How do you like it?”

  “Harder than hell to find good fish worms here,” Qwen said.

  Michaels laughed. “Let’s meet the captain and find out what’s going on. Maybe they’ve got the bastard, already.”

  Qwen, with Maggie at his feet, followed Michaels into the police station. Two patrolmen coming out nodded to them. When they got inside, the desk sergeant looked up quickly. He saw the insignia on Harry Michaels’s hat and badge.

  “Town of Fallsburg police department? Where the hell’s that?”

  “Upstate New York, Sullivan County. Is Captain O’Keefe in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you find the dog yet?” Qwen asked quickly. The sergeant just looked at him.

  “He means the German shepherd that went wild down here,” Michaels said.

  “I know what he means. No, not yet. Whaddya know about it?”

  “That’s why we’re here to see the captain,” Michaels said. “He’s expecting us. Tell him Harry Michaels, will ya.”

  “Charlie!” the desk sergeant yelled. A hatless patrolman, carrying a clipboard, came out of an office in the corridor to the right. “Tell the captain Harry Michaels from upstate New York is here, will ya?”

  The policeman nodded and went on down the hall. A moment later he returned to wave them in.

  “What kind of dog is that?” the desk sergeant asked when he saw Maggie trailing along behind them.

  “A country police dog,” Michaels said. Qwen laughed. They found Captain O’Keefe alone in his office, talking on the phone. He gestured for them to come in and take seats.

  “I’ve got every available man out there, sir,” he was saying. “Right now we think it’s someone’s animal and it’s back in the apartment. That’s our best bet. Yes, sir. I know. I’ll do my best, Commissioner. Thank you.” He hung up, wiped his brow with the palm of his right hand, and then sat forward.

  Qwen couldn’t help contrasting the two policemen. Although Harry Michaels was along in years, he still looked virile and rugged. Of course, his size made a difference, but Qwen believed that even if Harry Michaels were fifty pounds lighter and five inches shorter, he would have a worn, tough look about him. There was nothing slick or polished in his demeanor.

  On the other hand, this New York City police captain looked more like an agent in the FBI. He looked professional but also bureaucratic. Qwen wondered just how much real experience in the field he had. He was a slim man. In fact, he looked like someone who had recently been on a diet. The suit he wore seemed a size too big. To Qwen he looked more like an actor portraying a big city police captain.

  “As you can imagine, this thing’s heating up. The media are having a field day. A few hours ago it was bedlam out in that lobby. There are network cameramen out there on the streets, just hoping for some action. I hope none of them get mugged.” He looked at Maggie, who sat obediently at Qwen’s feet. “We’re bringing in some dogs, too. Something special about yours?”

  “Yes,” Qwen said. “She’s been trackin’ your dog.”

  “Oh?” He stood up and walked around to the front of his desk. “Might as well introduce ourselves proper. I’m Captain O’Keefe.”

  “Harry Michaels,” Harry said. “This here’s Mike Qwen.”

  “So you’re a trapper? You do that for a living?”

  “Among other things.”

  “What’ja mean, she’s been trackin’ your dog?”

  “The dog you’re after down here came from our area,” Qwen said.

  “Came from? Whaddya mean, someone down here bought him up there and brought him down here? That’s great. If we have the name, we . . .”

  “No, Captain, that’s not what Qwen means.”

  “It’s not? What do you mean then? You said he came from your area, didn’t you?”

  “I meant the dog came from our area, himself.”

  Captain O’Keefe looked at Michaels and then at Qwen. He leaned back against his desk. “Didn’t you say you came from upstate New York, around Sullivan County?”

  “Right,” Michaels said.

  “That’s about ninety-odd miles, isn’t it?” Qwen nodded. “You mean that dog walked down here?”

  Qwen looked at Michaels.

  “We don’t know how he got down here, Captain, but we’re fairly sure that’s our dog.”

  “Wait a minute. When you say ‘our dog,’ you’re talking about the military dog that killed some people?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Only it wasn’t a military dog,” Qwen said.

  “How do you know all this?” Captain O’Keefe asked.

  “I was hired to track him. Me and Maggie, that is.”

  “And you’ve tracked him to the city?”

  “In a way. Look, Captain, I don’t want to get into the whole thing right now, but believe me when I tell you this is not an ordinary animal. It’s smarter, wiser. It knows it’s being hunted. Take my word for it for the moment and let us help you. Show us where the dog did its damage and where it was last seen. We’ll do our best from there.”

  O’Keefe looked at Qwen and then at Michaels. He thought for a moment and shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said. “But when this is over, someone’s going to have a lot of explaining to do. I almost lost a good officer out there.”

  “That’s why we’ve come here, Captain,” Qwen said. “To make damn sure that explaining gets done.”

  Qwen sat with Maggie in the back of the patrol car. His dog seemed just as disgusted as he was by the things they saw as they rode along. Young children played in lots strewn with garbage. There were wrecked and deserted automobiles everywhere, most stripped of their valuable parts by unseen junk parasites. Qwen wondered how anyone could feel any sort of dignity living in such an environment.

  Although Michaels wasn’t as shocked by the decrepit neighborhoods, he anticipated Qwen’s reactions and shook his head in silent agreement. He sat up front with Patrolman Horowitz, the twenty-eight-year-old policeman Captain O’Keefe had assigned to them. His first duty was to take them to the apartment building in which the dog had killed the teenager.

  At first the young patrolman was upset with his assignment. He thought it was just his bad luck that he was available to play chauffeur to a small town policeman and a hick who looked like someone as out of place here as an Amish farmer on Forty-second Street. Who the hell came into New York with a hound dog and was surprised to learn that the subway came out of the ground?

  But as he drove them to the apartment building, he heard things that made him wonder. Perhaps these two knew what they were doing, even here. After all, dogs were being used to sniff out drugs and fires and bombs. And when he thought about it, he had nothing to brag about; the dog had eluded a big city police force up until now.

  “I was just thinking,” Qwen said as they turned down one street and started up another, “that to the dog, this might be something like being in a maze. It certainly feels that way to me.”

  “So maybe moving through the streets wouldn’t be so terrifying to him,” Michaels said.

  “Yeah, and in that case, every obstacle would become a test, and with the way he likes a challenge...”

  “You guys talk about this dog as though he’s a person,” Horowitz said. Michaels looked at him and then back at Qwen. Horowitz caught the smile between them and questioned what was going on here. Who the hell were these guys? “This is it,” he said, turning onto the block.

  Some people were still gathered in front of the building, listening to the elderly black man retell the events from beginning to end. He had been out there all day, r
elating the tale to anyone wanting to hear it. Actually, after what had happened to him, he clung to company and put off going back into his apartment for as long as he could. But as soon as the police car pulled up, everyone turned away from him. They watched Qwen and Maggie, Michaels, and Patrolman Horowitz get out.

  “What made him stop at an apartment on this block?” Michaels asked. Horowitz’s eyes widened. Could Qwen answer that?

  “Just the scent of food, I’d say. There’s nothing that resembles anything back home, nothing that would bring him to it in a search for something familiar. The apartment belongs to that old man on the stoop?” Qwen asked.

  “Huh?” Horowitz said. “Oh, yeah. His name’s Russel.”

  Qwen nodded and went to him. The crowd parted as he and Maggie approached with Michaels and Horowitz right behind.

  “Howdy.”

  The old man looked up at Qwen and at Maggie.

  “Who the hell are you? The dogcatcher?”

  “Sort of.” Qwen laughed and took out a chaw of tobacco. He bit into it and looked up the street. “Mind if I ask you some questions about what happened?”

  “Get in line.”

  “Know what you mean . . . quite a thing, quite a thing. Tell me, how the hell did he get into your apartment? Was the door open?”

  “Door open? In this neighborhood?” Everyone laughed. “Hell no, mister. I even had my chain lock on, but I heard this scratchin’ and I opened the door. Stupid, plain stupid.”

  “He just went chargin’ in?”

  “Like he owned the place. He went right to the kitchen. Knew I had my breakfast out on the table. Jumped right up on the table. I couldn’t get him out.”

  “What’dja do?”

  “I hit him with the kitchen chair, but it might as well been a fly swatter. He was a big bastard. Maybe it was a wolf.”

  “No.”

  “Escaped from some circus.” He played to his audience. Some heads nodded.

  “No, no way. Besides, a wolf’s half the size.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes, sir,” Qwen said. He looked up the stoop. “I see the front door is closed. Is it always that way?”

  “Hell, yeah. We got a spring on it makes it shut. It don’t lock, though. The lock’s broke. Still, some son-of-a-bitch let that dog in, huh?”

  “I don’t think so,” Qwen said. He looked at Michaels, who closed and opened his eyes. “Did you see him kill the boy?”

  “No, sir. I was out here. He just chased the other two out and went right by me.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Qwen turned to Horowitz. “Take us to where he attacked the policeman. Any doubts about it bein’ our dog?” he asked Michaels.

  “I’m losin’ ‘em.”

  They got back into the car and started away. The crowd watched them until they disappeared around the turn.

  “From what we got,” Horowitz said, “he entered Webster Avenue from here. He met the patrol car just at the traffic light.”

  “Pull over,” Qwen said. After he did so, Qwen looked out at where the policeman’s blood still stained the street.

  “From here he headed east. Everyone lost sight of him at the end of the block.”

  “Okay.” Qwen got out of the car. Maggie followed but remained very close to his feet. When the light turned red and the traffic stopped, Qwen walked out to the spot. Maggie sniffed about and then Qwen and his dog started east.

  “Hey!” Michaels called.

  “Just follow along in the car,” Qwen said. “Maggie’s excited. She recognizes the scent and she knows what I want.”

  “What’s he saying?” Horowitz asked.

  “Please just do what he says,” Michaels replied. The policeman shrugged and made the turn at the intersection. He drove very slowly as Qwen moved up the sidewalk. Maggie picked up her pace, seemingly oblivious to the noise and activity around her. When they came to the end of the block and saw what seemed to be an endless strip of crumbled buildings and piles of rubble, Qwen stopped.

  “Holy shit,” he said. The patrol car came up beside him and Michaels leaned out.

  “What’sa matter? The dog’s still goin’.”

  “It looks like the end of the world.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  Maggie’s bark grew louder and shriller. She went through a pile of cement blocks and worked herself around some rolls of wire.

  “We were up and down this place,” Horowitz said. “We went in all those buildings—or what’s left of them.”

  “You went through them from top to bottom?”

  “We didn’t go up no decaying stairways. In most cases, there’s nothin’ to go up to. Anyway, a dog wouldn’t do that.”

  “Maybe a dog wouldn’t, but he would,” Qwen said.

  “Huh?”

  “Better hand me out the tranquilizer gun,” Qwen said.

  “Tranquilizer?” Horowitz smirked. “We aim to kill that bastard.”

  “Not before he talks,” Qwen said.

  “Talks. What the hell is he talking about?”

  Michaels didn’t answer. He handed the rifle out to Qwen and got out of the vehicle.

  “We’ll walk from here on,” Michaels said, but when he turned around Qwen was already trotting down the street. “I mean run.” He started after him.

  “What the fuck?” Horowitz shook his head and picked up his radio mike to call in and report his location. After that, he got out of his car and followed the two men into what he had come to call the land of the dead. He saw the dog was moving quickly and barking madly. Qwen was into a run and Michaels was doing his best to keep up, but he was falling behind. Horowitz started to run himself, his heart beating with excitement.

  Did that hound dog from the boondocks really know what it was doing?

  Who the hell were these guys?

  15

  EVEN BEFORE HE heard the dog barking, he knew they were coming. Before, when he had picked up the sounds of the city policemen below and sensed their presence in the building, he had prepared himself for the inevitable battle; but he had done so with a sense of optimism. It was true that they had come in a pack, and a pack was the worst thing to fear. Animals that gathered together to hunt down and share the prey were unusual in his experience, even his race experience. If anything, it was his genetic lineage that traced itself back to such creatures. It was his ancestors who had been gregarious, who had seen the advantage in moving together in numbers. But for him, now, there was something mystical and horrifying in such an occurrence.

  When he had moved through the forest and heard sounds around him, he had looked into the darker areas and imagined such herds of marauding creatures. To come upon them was to come upon Death itself, for any animal alone had no chance of escaping them or defeating them. Nothing was truer than the knowledge that the strong survived and the weak perished; and he knew without ever having personally experienced it that even an animal half his size was stronger when it was in a pack.

  But he had been so successful in eluding and defeating men, even those in the uniforms, that he viewed them now almost the way he would have viewed a colony of rabbits. They were animals; even when they were in large numbers, they were no match for him. Now he was suffering from the belief that man was that way, too. When he had heard them below, he hadn’t felt that all-encompassing, deadly fear that could move with electrifying intensity throughout his entire body and could leave him disheartened and weak.

  Suddenly it was different, though, because he sensed something familiar in these oncoming pursuers. They had been behind him before. This knowledge came from an instinctive awareness, honed through centuries of species development. It was a marvel of nature, the result of thousands of years of adaptation, the evolution of those wild elements within him that were now given at birth. It was why baby birds flew, why newborn horses stood almost instantly after birth, and why squirrels knew to hoard. Scientists had come to describe it as the sixth sense; they struggled to dissect it, to understand it. Maybe it
was electrical; maybe it came like radio and television waves, or maybe it was extrasensory perception. Whatever it was, it was there.

  He raised his snoot in the air and sniffed, as though to confirm it. What could have followed him so far and located him so quickly? Whatever it was, he hadn’t yet defeated it. All he had done was postpone the face-off. He growled in anticipation and stood up. The sound of the dog barking outside grew louder and closer. He stepped out to the middle of the room and tuned in his hearing to any activity below.

  Qwen paused as he approached the gaping hole in the side of the building. Maggie had stopped before it, not crossing through to enter the partially wrecked structure. The moments of silence between her barks had grown shorter and shorter until she delivered almost one continuous yap, high-pitched and excited. It excited Qwen; he knew what that meant. She would do it only a few feet from a fox or a coon. A well-trained hound dog didn’t go farther without command at this point. Maggie had done her job well—she had brought her master to the kill.

  “Hold on!” Michaels yelled. He was a good twenty-five yards behind. The short, quick run had brought home his weight problem, his age, and his fatigue. He had to slow down to a quick walk. Even that seemed too strenuous. How embarrassing it would be for him to keel over in the South Bronx, he thought. Jenny didn’t know he was down here doing this. If he didn’t die from it, she’d kill him. He cursed under his breath as the younger city patrolman caught up with him and passed him.

  “What the hell does this mean?” Horowitz asked when he reached Qwen.

  “He’s definitely in there,” Qwen said, his gaze set firmly on the opening in the wall.

  “I’d better go back and radio the station, first. Everybody’s at least a half dozen or so blocks to the south and west of this. We checked this place out.”

  “If he wanted to do it, he could hide right below your feet and watch you walk by,” Qwen said. Horowitz swallowed hard and turned to Michaels as he approached. “What kind of dog is this? A circus dog?”