by Lyle Howard
Julie interrupted his trend of thought. “Not only that; I can shoot an even bigger hole in your theory.”
Lance turned to face her. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“The banker, Winslow. He never returned any pets to Animal Control. As a matter of fact, he never owned an animal!”
Lance tapped his hand on his knee. “You’re absolutely right. That sure throws a monkey wrench into some deep-rooted conspiracy.”
“So what do you do next?”
Lance stood up. “Next? Next I go back to my office and work on any one of twenty other cases the county has me investigating. I’ll probably know more when Toby gets back the results of the tests he requested.”
Lance helped Julie to her feet. “What time will you come over?”
Lance looked down at his watch. “It’s almost two. Figure I should be at the house somewhere between six and seven. How’s that?”
Julie took his hand and together they walked toward the elevator. “That’ll be perfect!”
TWELVE
The late afternoon sun was just starting to dip below the crest of trees that bordered 15140 Eaglebrook Drive. The intense sunlight as it filtered through the fissures between the black olive leaves caused an annoying sparkling effect that made him pull down the visor to block the harsh glare. He had been parked across the street for nearly forty-five minutes, and there were no signs of life.
He flipped open the cigar box he kept on the floor of the beat-up old van and removed the folded slip of note paper. He studied the address he had written earlier in the day, and then squinted through the window to read the numbers on the mailbox. It was a match. He would give Cutter another half-hour to show, otherwise he would have to come back after his shift was over. He had missed too much work as it was already.
The battered brown van was camouflaged in the ever expanding shadows, fashioned by the huge oak trees that slouched lazily over the residential street, but it wasn’t hidden enough, it seemed.
As he slumped lower into the driver’s seat, he reached out of the window and adjusted the side view mirror to get a better view of the house next door. Every few minutes, like clockwork, an old man would step out onto his front porch and scrutinize the van. The last thing he needed was some meddlesome neighbor complicating matters. He would have moved the van when he first spied the old man snooping on him, but there was nowhere else he could park that would give him such a good view of Cutter’s house.
The sound of another car approaching from behind made the hair on his neck prickle with anticipation and caused him to slide up in his seat a bit. A pale blue station wagon slowed down as it moved past the van. Without hesitation, he reached down beside his seat and unlocked the lever which allowed the back of his seat to recline. Slowly, he leaned backward until anyone peering in through the driver’s window would think that the van was unoccupied.
The station wagon slowed to a dead stop at the entrance to the driveway and then turned in. From out of the car’s passenger window, a young boy … no more than thirteen … leaned out and hurled a newspaper at the front door. The afternoon edition had arrived. He watched in frustration as the station wagon backed out of the driveway and moved on to another house, three doors away.
He glanced down at his watch again. Five more minutes were all he could wait. He left the seat tilted backward, basking in the simple pleasure of relaxation that he was so rarely able to savor. Even as the sweat seeped out of his pores like liquid through a colander, he felt oddly at home being confined in the poorly ventilated old van. It reminded him of … back then.
He had been only four years old when his old man crammed him into the crawlspace for the first time. The crawlspace was nothing more than an eighteen-inch gap between the ceiling of their house and the wooden trusses that supported the roof. These hellish quarters were only accessible through a small door in the ceiling of his parents’ closet. It was a dark musty place, in which the builders had spread yellow foam insulation to keep the five-year-old house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It wasn’t so bad in January or February, but in the intense heat of July or August, even the roaches wouldn’t venture into the insufferable crawlspace he was always being banished to.
His father wasn’t an alcoholic, nor was he some religious zealot that believed his son was the devil incarnate. He was just one mean old son of a bitch, a few sandwiches shy of a picnic, with a hair-trigger temper that kept the young boy and his mother terrorized with fear. The old man’s psychological collapse had begun long before the medical community had made the correlation between fits of unpredictable rage and the dangers of chemical imbalances in the brain. One minute he could be the king of the world, spreading good cheer and ruffling the boy’s hair, and the next second he would be chasing after the dog with a tire iron because it spilled water from its drinking bowl.
His mother, on the other hand, was an angel. As far as the boy was concerned, she could do no wrong. She never opposed the inhumane disciplinary actions for fear of her own safety, but she always brought him a paper cup filled with water whenever he pounded on the bedroom ceiling. She would lift open the trapdoor slowly so that the boy’s eyes could adjust easily to the stark stream of light. “Only a few more hours,” she would tell him cheerfully, as she passed the cup to him. That deed alone would qualify her for sainthood, as far as he was concerned.
The lengths of punishment that the old man dished out varied. He could be imprisoned for as little as an hour for not wiping his face at dinner with his napkin, or entombed in the crawlspace for as long as three days for leaving one of his toys sitting out. It was during one of these longer stints that his leg was broken.
He had just turned seven and he was getting a little too big for the crawlspace. Out in the garage, a place where his father had recently made off-limits, the boy could hear the old man hammering and sawing away while whistling a variety of Broadway show tunes. His father was a librarian and had a reputation for not being well coordinated when it came to using his hands, so it struck the boy as odd that the old man would try to build something on his own. When he would ask his mother what his father was building, she would quickly change the subject, or scurry out of the room to avoid the young boy’s questions.
It was late on a July evening when the boy’s curiosity could no longer be appeased. He threw the covers off himself and tiptoed out of his bedroom. His parents door was closed, so he knew that half of the battle was already won. Silently, cautiously, he pressed his ear against their door to listen for anything that sounded like movement. There was none.
Stepping down the stairs as though he was walking on glass, he would occasionally freeze, as if suddenly paralyzed every time one of the risers would creak under his slight weight. Assured that he hadn’t been heard, he pressed on toward the garage.
Inside of his parents’ bedroom, his father had heard something. It was like he possessed some eerie built-in radar that could sense the slightest disturbances in the air currents around him. In the midst of the darkness that enveloped the room, he sat bolt upright and reached over to feel for his wife. She was still there, deep in sleep. It couldn’t be the beagle. Unlike his son, it had learned the hard way, and long ago, not to disturb the old man’s slumber.
It had to be the boy, but he knew not to get out of his bed until they told him it was permissible to get up. The boy couldn’t be thirsty, because they always let him have a paper cup full of water to put on his nightstand. The old man’s fury began to brew like a teapot on a high burner. The boy better not be going to the bathroom! He knew the rules … the sound of flushing was forbidden as long as either of his parents were still sleeping. The muscles in the old man’s face began to twitch as the anger began to fester in his confused mind. If the boy thinks that he can fool me by leaving the toilet unflushed, he fumed to himself, then he’s got a real surprise in store for him, yes indeed!
The dog watched the boy as he crossed through the living room. The beagle would tip his f
loppy ears to one side and then back again, looking at the youngster in utter disbelief. Dogs may or may not be the most intelligent of animals, but they sure know when something is terribly wrong. The dog sniffed at the air and whimpered softly. The boy stopped and put his finger to his mouth to quiet his pet. “Shhh…”
The beagle set his chin down on the floor and let his mournful eyes roam back and forth between the boy and the stairway from which he had just descended. The boy deliberately pressed on through the darkened kitchen to that revered door that would open onto the enemy’s forbidden stronghold.
Upstairs, the old man turned the bedroom doorknob the same methodical way a safecracker would spin the dial to open a vault. To the unaided ear, there was no sound, but downstairs in the living room, the beagle’s left ear flinched at the noise.
The boy stared down at the hook latch that hung open on the garage door. It wasn’t fastened, because it didn’t need to be. No one living in this house would have the impudence to cross this threshold after being warned not to.
The youngster judiciously stretched his fingers for the doorknob as though the round, aluminum handle was a lump of white-hot charcoal. He didn’t realize it, but his pulse was racing faster and he was sweating more than if he had just spent three days confined in the crawlspace.
The poor beagle was unsure of what course of action to take. Through whatever primitive sense of reasoning it possessed, the dog seemed to be contemplating its alternatives. It could lie passively on the rug, pretending to sleep through the confrontation that was coming as sure as the next sunrise, or he could warn the boy of the advancing danger, and most certainly suffer the old man’s wrath himself. As the father gingerly came down the staircase, the beagle quickly made its choice. The dog closed its eyes and tucked its head under a paw.
The boy opened the door in slow motion, as if daring the creaking hinges to give him away. Once it was opened just far enough for him to shimmy through, he stepped into the unlit room that lay just over the threshold. He knew where the light switch was, but he dared not risk flipping it on. Although he could not see his hands in front of his face, he raised his arms like a sleepwalker, groping for anything that might block his path.
The old man crossed through the living room, never giving a second glance to the beagle asleep on the rug in the corner. He had more pressing things on his mind.
The boy felt his way past a table that he never remembered being there before. He paused to run his hands across the table’s surface, stopping once on what he could feel was a claw hammer, and then a few nails and screws of various shapes and sizes scattered about. He continued forward, probing the immediate area around him with both his hands and his bare feet. He inched forward with one foot at a time, like a mountain climber, testing the stability of a rock’s foundation.
After the old man had passed, the beagle lifted his head and watched him enter the kitchen. The father’s movement was unrelenting and his demeanor, premeditated. Instinctively, the beagle bared his fangs and growled quietly to himself in a muted show of bravery.
The boy touched something … and it was big! He let his hands slide across the vertical facade like a blind person reading Braille. He reached upward to feel how tall the strange object was, but his outstretched hands never reached any sort of apex. He already had surmised that the structure was square in shape and built from planks of wood. As he glided his fingers upward from the ground, he could feel an occasional crosstie or wooden support beam nailed to the planks every two feet or so. The wood beneath his fingers was gnarled and rough as he made his way around the sides.
The old man reached the garage door at the same moment that his son came upon the access handle. The old man threw open the door and flicked on the lights, bathing the garage in damning white brilliance. The boy froze like a deer caught in a car’s headlights. His father’s face was crimson, and there was no doubt in the boy’s mind that, this time, the old man was out for blood.
“How dare you come out here!” the old man snarled. The boy was speechless as he turned his head to look at the windowless wooden cell his father had built for just this sort of insubordination.
The old man inched closer, his fists knotted until his fingernails almost drew blood in his palms. “I’m talking to you, boy!” he frothed.
The youngster shrank backward until his spine was pressed up against the custom-made dungeon. He tried to speak, to apologize, but his mouth had gone as dry as dust. His father grabbed him by his pajama top and slammed him unmercifully against the unforgiving hardwood. “You just never learn, do you, boy?” the old man screamed, spittle flying onto the boy’s face.
Grabbing the lapels of the young man’s nightshirt with one mighty hand, he lifted the boy off of the ground and carried him around to the door. “You’re so curious, boy? Let’s see how you’ll like these surroundings for the next week or so!”
With his free hand, the old man unbolted the door and was just about to toss the boy inside when, from seemingly out of nowhere, the beagle scurried across the garage floor and sank his teeth into the father’s ankle. The old man let out a bloodcurdling scream, but the dog refused to unlock his jaws. The old man hurled his son into the box while, at the same time, attempted to kick the beagle loose.
The boy tumbled inside the wooden cell with one leg still dangling over the threshold. When the father tried to slam the heavy door shut, a crosstie at the base of the door snapped the youngster’s fragile tibia bone like it was a toothpick. Repeatedly, the old man labored to close the door, shattering the boy’s leg over and over again.
When the pain in his own leg became too unbearable, the old man gave up on closing the door and turned his full attention to the tenacious beagle. He dragged himself, the dog still firmly attached, across the garage to the tool table. The dog’s fangs tore and gored the old man’s ankle, sending chunks of red flesh spraying in every direction whenever the dog would shake its head. The father wailed at the sheer agony that shot up his leg and sped to his brain like wildfire.
Finally making his way to the table, he grabbed the business end of the claw hammer and began taking swipes at the beagle who managed to avoid every blow while remaining fused to the old man’s leg. The dog chewed deeper until the old man was sure that the mutt had reached bone.
Swinging like a man possessed, he remembered what his little league coach had taught him: “Keep swinging that bat and soon or later, you’ll connect.” Well, he was right; it wasn’t long before the old man crushed one out of the park.
Across the garage, the boy had pulled himself into the box. His leg dragged behind him like an unwanted stepchild. He used all of his strength to pull himself into a corner before the searing pain began to obscure his consciousness. Through the hazy mist that clouded his mind, he thought he heard his dog yelp … once.
The claw hammer protruded from the beagle’s head like some bizarre hood ornament. The dog’s jaws were still firmly entrenched in the old man’s leg, even though the last breath of life had long since passed over the heroic beagle’s lips. Blood ran down the old man’s ankle and onto the concrete floor in a steady stream. Reaching down, the old man tried to pry the dog’s mouth open, but it was locked tighter than a bank on Sunday. Changing his focus to the tool table, the old man grabbed a slotted screwdriver and inserted it between the beagle’s jaw and his ankle. With a gruesome cracking noise, the dog’s mastoid process split open like a nutshell. The sensation of relief was immediate.
The boy curled up into the corner and fought valiantly not to pass out. He looked up in horror when he saw the door to the cell fly open. His father was standing, or possibly staggering there, and was holding up the lifeless beagle by his lower jaw the way a fisherman would display a prize-winning bass. “This could happen to you, boy!” the old man screamed.
With that warning firmly embedded in the boy’s mind, the old man tossed the dead animal’s carcass inside and slammed the door shut, locking it from the outside. The odor
of the rotting beagle would be a stench that he would never be able to cleanse from his soul.
The following morning, by some morbid twist of fate, both his mother and father were killed in a fiery head-on collision on the far side of town. When his first meal was delayed, the boy just figured that his parents had gone out and were just running late. Banging on the side of box did no good. As the hours crept by, his anxiety grew and the pounding grew louder and louder until the sides of his hands began to bleed. Everlasting days in the stifling darkness turned into endless nights without water or nourishment. While his young mind struggled to maintain its fragile grip on sanity, his starved body withered in the darkness like a neglected flower.
It would be another seven days before the police would find him, cringing in the corner of the box, his eyes sunken in their gray sockets, stripping the meat clean from the dead dog’s bones. But until then, all he could do was beat his bloody fists against the walls …
BANG … BANG … BANG …“Hey, Buddy’.” The muffled words startled him back to the present, only to find the nosey old neighbor banging on the van’s passenger-side window. The old man had his face pressed against the glass and was motioning with his hand for him to roll down the window.
“Hey, pal, what are you doing here?” He shook off the persistent nightmare and obliged the old man by partially rolling down the window.
“I’m on my break.”
“Break?” Harry Kaplan asked incredulously. “You’ve been here for over an hour! Let me see some identification.”
He pulled out his wallet and showed his credentials from Animal Control.
“The pound?”
“We got a report of a rabid dog in the neighborhood,” he said, thinking quick. “They sent me here to check it out.”
Kaplan strained to peer into the back of the nearly empty van. There was no doubt that this guy worked for the pound, he thought. The van stunk to high heaven from animal odors and there was a pet carrier on the floor. “Well, you can’t be doing much good just sitting around here.”
