An Oath of Dogs

by Wendy N. Wagner

  “So Songheuser’s property won’t be taxed.”

  “Yeah.” His finger stabbed the back page. “And look who sponsored the thing.”

  “Joe Holder! I should have known. He’s the head of operations. If anyone’s looking out for Songheuser’s bottom line around here, it’s him.”

  “Joe knows everything about the mill and about this town. He goes to every city council meeting, and he’s been here for six years. If there’s anyone who knows anything about what Duncan was digging into — about what he was doing before he died — it’s Joe.” Peter began pacing excitedly. “Can you spy on him?” he asked. “Set up a camera in his office or something?”

  “Well, he’s my boss, so I’ve got a good excuse to get in there. I could probably find a way into his house and snoop around there, too.”

  He was already nodding. “Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Standish, we have to get to the bottom of this. Whatever Songheuser’s up to — the secret road, the maps Duncan was hiding, this new property tax — I think it’s all connected.”

  “Me too,” Standish said, and felt a cold rage kindle in her chest. “And we’re going to prove it.”

  THE OFFICE’S front door was blocked off by debris and operations staff, so Peter hurried down the side courtyard, pleased by his meeting with Standish. They were finally making headway on Duncan’s case. If Joe Holder knew anything, they’d get it sorted out.

  As for Peter, he was going to make things right with Sheriff Vargas. He just needed to grab Belinda’s purse out of his office. They’d have GreenOne behind bars in no time.

  He rounded the corner to the motor pool, noticing the sheriff’s deputy in tense conversation with the security guard standing in front of the guard shack. The last time he’d seen Paul Wu, he’d been skulking around the edges of Joe Holder’s circle of toadies and looking embarrassed about it. Peter hoped the bug up Wu’s ass had crawled out.

  The deputy turned to face him. “Peter Bajowski.”

  “Paul. You helping with the bombing investigation?”

  “Dr Bajowski, I’m going to have to ask you to step away from the utility vehicle.”

  Peter took a step backward. “What?”

  “Not a step closer to the building! And get your hands up!”

  Wu’s service revolver was pointed at Peter’s chest. Not an air bolt gun, but a genuine firearm. Peter raised his hands slowly.

  “I’m not the one you should be arresting, Paul. I’ve got information—”

  “Get away from the entrance!”

  Paul seized his wrist and twisted it up behind his back. His shoulder gave a scream of protest, the joint creaking under the strain. Paul’s knee pushed into the back of Peter’s leg, driving him to the ground. He gave Peter’s back a sharp nudge so he fell into the fragile greenery of the flower bed beside the office’s door. The deputy’s weight flattened Peter’s back as the deputy wrenched Peter’s free hand behind him. The tiny silhouettes of pseudo-club moss stood outlined in Peter’s vision.

  “Peter Bajowski, you are under arrest for the bombing of the Canaan Lake sawmill. Whatever you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” Paul’s voice rolled over Peter’s head in monotone waves.

  “I wasn’t even here!”

  “We found the transmitters in your office, courtesy of an anonymous tip.” Paul jerked Peter to his feet. “I’m taking you in.”

  The government says we should be grateful to corporations like Songheuser, who have built what infrastructure exists on Huginn. But in truth, the corporations are like interstellar parasites, stripping the world to send the profits back to Earth. They invest the bare minimum in their employees and this world, and they refuse to clean up the devastation they leave in their wake.

  This is colonialism in its most naked, greediest form.

  — Olive Whitley, A NEW COMMON SENSE (pamphlet)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  STANDISH SLAMMED the door of her UTV. Just moments ago she’d been happily cutting the connection on Joe Holder’s cable box, looking forward to finally figuring out what Duncan had been up to. Then she’d checked her hand unit and seen the news. How could Vargas arrest Peter, of all people, for bombing the mill?

  She squeezed past a line of UTVs with the logos of at least three different law enforcement offices emblazoned on their sides and caught up with a woman carrying a box of breakfast pastries up the police department’s stairs. Standish trudged up behind her, her back and legs protesting about her all-nighter. She’d pictured herself bursting into the station and demanding to see Peter, but now she wasn’t sure she had the energy to do much bursting.

  The pastry bearer opened the door, spilling out a cacophony.

  The Canaan Lake sheriff’s department was not built with the intention of holding more than six or seven people, and there had to be at least twice as many crowded in there right now. Hattie would have hated all the chaos if she hadn’t stayed in the UTV: Joe Holder was shouting at the sheriff; Victoria Wallace sat in a desk chair, watching him with her lips set tight. Several members of the volunteer fire department huddled around the coffee pot, looking hungrily at the box of pastries in the hands of the young woman Standish had followed up the stairs. The girl smiled winsomely as she leaned down to place the pastries beside the coffee pot, and a small cross painted in many colors swung out of her shirt.

  Standish’s gaze followed the pendulum swing of it. A Believer cross, like those covering the cemetery and sticking out of flowerbeds around town. People might not share the Believers’ religion, but their beliefs still ran through Canaan Lake, as strong a thread as Songheuser’s paychecks.

  “All right, all right,” Sheriff Vargas said, her voice cutting through Joe’s without losing its calm authority. She squeezed between a young man and woman in brown uniforms, probably help from another nearby town, and stopped in front of Standish with a pleasant smile. “How can I help you, Ms Standish? I hear you were a big help out there last night.”

  “Uh… thanks.” Every eye in the room had fixed itself on her. Her new popularity was going to be short-lived. “I’m here to see Peter, if that’s OK.”

  “Sorry. No one in or out today. But get yourself a pastry, Standish. You look like you’re about to fall down.”

  “No thanks. I just came to check on Peter.”

  “I insist.” Vargas steered Standish toward the corner table with the coffee pot and the box of donuts. “I’ve got my doubts about this arrest but for right now I think Peter might be safer in here than outside,” she confided in a low voice. “The security footage from the mill and the office building just finished downloading. It ought to reveal who planted those explosives and how a set of transmitters wound up in Peter’s office.”

  Standish frowned. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Sheriff Vargas poured two cups of coffee, her eyes flicking around the room as she did so. “I worked a long time to get here. Private security, mostly. I know a lot about swimming with sharks.” She passed Standish a cup. “That doesn’t mean I like them.”

  Standish sipped her coffee, wondering just what the hell the sheriff meant.

  “You hear about the property tax the city council proposed?”

  “Yeah.” Standish reached for a bear claw.

  “Thirty percent of the funds it will raise are for new roads and infrastructure. Fifty-five percent is earmarked for law enforcement. Songheuser might be happy they can move more lumber, but not nearly as happy as I’ll be with a budget that doesn’t come out of their pocket.”

  “Feeling a little under their thumb?” Standish murmured.

  A volunteer squeezed by to grab a donut. Vargas took a drink of her coffee and raised an eyebrow. Things began to come together in Standish’s head — Vargas’s treatment of Duncan’s disappearance, the phony declaration that he’d committed suicide, Standish’s own suspicions about Duncan’s investigations into the company’s doings in Sector 13. Songheuser might own the sheriff’s department right now, but that
didn’t mean Vargas liked it.

  “Thank you for the donut,” Standish said in a conversational tone. “How can I help Peter?” she added in a whisper.

  The sheriff moved away from the table and around the corner. The coziness of the office’s main room disappeared in this corridor; a draft came from the grate of the freight elevator, and the overhead light flickered. She stopped in front of a doorway giving off the piney scent of disinfectant. “Here’s the bathroom,” the sheriff said loudly.

  “Peter told me about Belinda when I booked him,” Vargas continued, softer. “If she’s part of this GreenOne business and she lied to me about Peter’s alibi, then there will be a lot of pressure to reopen the Duncan Chambers case. Plenty of people have it out for Peter, and they want to see him in jail — for any crime.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is finding the murder weapon. Without it, all I’ve got is a cockamamie suicide note that won’t hold up to any real forensic testing and a lovesick ex-boyfriend with plenty of motive. I have a hunch that air bolt gun is still in the woods someplace. Maybe you can take a metal detector and spend a few hours out there. You probably won’t find it, but you’d have a better chance than I did with a group of Songheuser-approved volunteer deputies.”

  Standish caught Vargas’s forearm. She could feel hard bands of muscle beneath the stiff fabric of her uniform. “Are you really saying Songheuser covered up Duncan’s murder?” If so, she was the second person with Huginn government connections to hint at it. Damn, Standish needed to get hold of Dewey!

  “I’m saying I don’t believe Peter Bajowski had any part in it. He’s an honest man, honest to a fault. And he’s too soft-hearted to even eat a cheeseburger.”

  Standish gave a dry laugh. “That’s true.” She glanced over her shoulder. Sheriff Vargas would have to return to her desk soon. The chaos had gotten louder in there. “Do you really believe that property tax is going to change things here in Canaan Lake?”

  “Oh, if it passes, things are definitely going to be different.” Vargas smiled, revealing large, white teeth. “You ever see a dancing bear, Standish?” The smile grew. “Do you know what happens when it gets off its chain?”

  It wasn’t a smile, Standish realized. It was the bear inside Vargas preparing to rip into her captors’ flesh.

  “Oh hell, now what?”

  Joe Holder’s booming voice brought them all to the front windows. At the end of the block, horses and wagons filled Main Street.

  “Looks like you’ve got yourself a Fleshie problem, Sheriff,” he added.

  “It looks like every Believer in town’s down there. What are they up to?”

  “I see my father’s buggy,” the pastry woman said. “It looks like he’s turning onto this street. Maybe he’s headed to the post office.”

  Sheriff Vargas opened the door and they all followed. Standish eyed the gathering mass of Believers. She needed to get past them if she was going to get back to her place to grab her outdoor gear.

  “They are headed for the post office,” Sheriff Vargas said. “But they’re just standing in front, waiting for something.”

  “What’s in the post office?” Standish asked. She hadn’t had a reason to go inside.

  “They handle permits and registrations as well as the mail,” the sheriff said. She pulled the brim of her hat lower and headed toward the gathering. Standish stayed close. They joined the Believers standing in front of the plain shoebox of the post office. There had to be fifty or more neo-Mennonites lining School Street, with the majority knotted around the post office.

  “What’s going on, Mr Eames?” the sheriff asked the nearest farmer.

  He barely glanced at her. “Believer business.”

  “If you’re blocking the street, it’s my business. Now what’s the matter?”

  A group of Believers on foot turned the corner from Main Street, and the mass of Believers went silent. In their black wool homespun, they could have been a flock of ravens waiting at a deathbed.

  Standish studied the walkers. The Believers around them seemed to pull away from the group, unwilling to even brush their sleeves. She recognized a few faces: Vonda and Orrin Morris, Mei Lin Vogel.

  The crowd shifted, and she saw a figure standing alone in front of the post office. Matthias watched the group come toward him and did not step aside as they neared. The group paused.

  “Don’t do it,” Matthias said. “You know it’s not our way.”

  A man stepped past Vonda Morris, a short man with light brown hair. “We’ll do what we need to do to protect ourselves, Matthias. That’s our way now.”

  Standish took an unwilling step forward. “Shane?”

  The sheriff frowned at her. “Yeah, that’s Shane Vogel. And it looks like he’s in charge.”

  Shane pushed past Matthias, and a dozen or so Believers followed him inside. Matthias watched them go, his face twisted in misery.

  “They’re registering to vote,” Vargas said, her voice astonished. “They’re registering to goddamn vote!”

  Matthias jammed his hands in his pockets and walked away. In a moment, he was gone. Standish turned away. She climbed into her UTV and sat in silence for a moment, stroking Hattie’s head and thinking hard. The Believers — or at least some of them — had turned on Matthias and all their old ways.

  And Shane Vogel was not only alive, but well enough to walk.

  That, out of all of it, made the least sense.

  Standish’s hand unit flashed a message alert at her. She felt a second’s disappointment when it wasn’t Dewey, and then surprise: Olive Whitley? She steered with her elbow as she tapped the alert.

  Please come. Home alone.

  Standish felt a surge of frustration. Peter needed her — she had to get to Sector 13 while there was still daylight. But she couldn’t turn her back on Olive after what had happened to the kid’s mother. She started up the UTV and crept between the buggies down to Main Street.

  She turned into the Whitley’s driveway and wondered if she ought to put Hattie on her lead. The front door of the house burst open before she made up her mind.

  “Miss Kate!” Olive charged out of the house and threw open the UTV door. Her wiry arms squeezed tightly around Standish’s neck.

  “Hi, Olive.” Standish gave the girl a hesitant pat.

  The girl buried her face in Standish’s shoulder, her whole body quaking. “You saved my mom.”

  “I was just helping the firefighters.”

  “Can you come in? Please?” She took a step backward, dragging Standish out of the rig. “Please?”

  There was no denying that kind of sweet neediness. Standish followed her inside, Hattie at her side.

  “So you’re all alone in here?” Standish felt glad she hadn’t ignored the kid’s message. There was one light turned on in the place, a bare LED bulb over the kitchen sink which only managed to illuminate a heap of dirty dishes. Clothes and blankets had been strewn across the main room as if a bomb had gone off.

  One had, of course. Standish felt sick and pried her hand out of Olive’s too-tight grip.

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  “Breakfast?”

  Standish picked up a pink sweater, the kind of garment a man would grab and then reconsider when packing his wife’s suitcase for the hospital, and folded it into a square. “Did you even get dinner?”

  “Dad was making spaghetti when the mill called,” Olive said, her voice very small. “I forgot about it.”

  Standish put the pink sweater on the couch and made her way into the kitchen, searching for a light switch. With more light, she could see a pot filled with a black and brown mess that might have once been noodles. She opened a cupboard and was glad to find cereal. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

  She poured cereal and real cow’s milk, and put the girl down in front of it at the table. If there were words for these times, Standish didn’t know them.

  Olive stirred her cerea
l, watching the circles she made in the bowl. “Dad called from the hospital. He sounded like a robot. He says Mom has a perforated bowel, three cracked ribs, and a ruptured spleen. She has to have a long surgery and she’ll be in the hospital for a couple of days.”

  “I was there when the EMTs looked her over. She inhaled a lot of smoke, too. The surgery will be easy, but it’s hard to fix lungs when they get full of shit.”

  “It’s going to cost a lot of money.”

  “Well, it happened at work, so Songheuser’s insurance will cover it.”

  “Yeah, but Mom won’t be able to work for a long time after that.” Olive took a bite of cereal and swallowed it without chewing. “Mom’s job covers a lot of our bills, like the UTV loans and the credit card.”

  Standish opened her mouth and closed it. It wasn’t like she had a spare couple of grand to help out. Standish wanted to find Belinda and her crop of GreenOne freaks and punch their faces in.

  She picked up the pot of scorched noodles and scraped at the mess, using plenty of muscle.

  “I think I can take care of it,” Olive said. “Chameli gave me a lot of money for the blue butterflies, and I know where I can get more.”

  “Yeah?” Standish dumped the black stuff into the garbage and began scrubbing like she could scrub away the whole night, the whole explosion at the mill.

  “I found them in the woods behind Jeff Eames’s farm,” Olive explained. “I think they live in the hills. I’m going back tomorrow to look for them.”

  “Well, that’d be a nice way to help your family. As long as you’re careful out there and you make sure Mr Eames doesn’t mind you being on his property.”

  Olive drained the milk from her bowl. “It ain’t his anymore. Songheuser owns it, and I don’t think they care much about butterflies.”