The Pet

by Charles L. Grant

"Oh, my god ... Tar," Tracey whispered, a cry caught in the name. "Oh, god, Don, you weren't lying."

  "And I'm not crazy either."

  The fog.

  Greenfire.

  "I wished him dead," Don told her without looking away from the horse.

  "I wished Tar dead."

  Tracey's eyes closed. "Don, tell it to go away."

  "It helps me," he said. "It hears me and it helps me."

  "Don?"

  He smiled, open-mouthed and suddenly. "Damn, Tracey, do you have any idea what this means?"

  The horse backed off, into the fog that streamed from its nostrils as it breathed and moved, until its outline was a shadowed blur and its eyes were slanted green.

  Then it vanished when an explosion of sirens erupted behind them. They whirled, whirled back and the fog was snaking off into the trees, the pool raising wavelets that slapped against the apron, and they spun about a second time when they heard footsteps racing toward them.

  It was Luis Quintero, revolver drawn and followed by three other men.

  When he saw the two standing next to the water, he slowed and holstered his weapon, but didn't stop until he reached them and grabbed Tracey's arms.

  "Are you all right?" he demanded. Then he looked hard at Don. "You. Are you all right?"

  "Dad!"

  "You told me you would come here. When ..." He looked at Don and gestured to one of the men. "Take my daughter home at once."

  "Dad, what's going on?"

  "Don, please come with me." The voice was rough and solicitous, and Don looked over his shoulder at the empty dark path. "Please, Donald, we have to hurry."

  "What?" he asked.

  More sirens, and the thunder, and the first spatter of rain.

  "No more until we get you home."

  He balked, suddenly panicked. "Home? Mom? Is it Mom? My father?"

  "Until we get you there," Quintero repeated. "Be patient. I will help you."

  Chapter Nineteen

  A patrol car was parked askew at the boulevard exit, and Don started for it at Quintero's gentle urging. Tracey was already gone, looking through the rear window of a departing cruiser, one palm pressed against the glass, her face obscured in glaring fragments by the streetlights sweeping over it. Then, as a patrolman opened the door and gestured him in, he looked up the avenue and saw two other police cars angled across the mouth of his street, lights spinning while three officers put up a sawhorse barricade.

  "Mr. Quintero, what's going on?"

  "Don, please," Quintero said.

  Don gaped, then looked in the opposite direction and saw the cars, the lights, a handful of people walking hurriedly toward his block. With a cry no one heard he yanked his arm free and started to run, heedless of the traffic as he bolted across to the islands, crashed through the shrubs and out the other side. A bus swerved barely in time to avoid him. Quintero shouted several yards behind.

  At the mouth of the street he vaulted the barricade and ran a dozen feet before slowing and taking to the right hand pavement, walking stiff-legged, his arms flapping at his sides.

  In the yards his neighbors were standing alone and in small groups, porch lights brightly white behind them and masking their faces; in the street was a fire engine angled in toward his driveway, and at the curb were two cruisers whose radios filled the air with abrupt bursts of static, whose lights bounced off the dead branches, flared off the windows, while an ambulance van backed onto the lawn.

  He walked on, half-stumbled, until a policeman grabbed his arm and tried to turn him around. He protested and was released when Quintero barked an order; he breathed through his mouth as he stepped off the curb and stared at his house-at the ragged hole of the bay window, at the lamps on in every room with shadows on the walls, in the garage, at the roof bleached by spotlights on the sides of the cruisers.

  "What?" he gasped to Quintero when the man reached his side and laid a hand on his shoulder. "What?"

  A siren. Firemen standing around the engine, smoking while they waited for the word to go home. Flashlights. Voices in raised-whisper instructions.

  "What, Mr. Quintero?" he said, turning to Tracey's father with anguish in his eyes.

  "It is all still very confused," the man said, trying to watch Don and the house at the same time. "Someone—Mr. Delfield, you know him, I think—saw smoke coming out of the house a little while ago. He called us, he called the fire department."

  White-jacketed men backed out the front door, stretcher in hand, on the stretcher a green plastic bag tied shut at the top.

  "Oh, my god!" Don sobbed, and took a step to run.

  "No!" Quintero snapped. "Not your mother, Don."

  It was the voice, not the hand, that stopped him again; it was the voice, not the hand that told him who it was.

  In his house. That bastard had been with his mother, in his house.

  "H-how?"

  Quintero scratched his thick mustache nervously. "I don't know. Sergeant Verona is inside. I was for a while, and I saw no fire, nothing charred. Just ..." He gestured toward the body being loaded into the van. As it pulled away and another took its place, he said, "Do you know about Tar?"

  Don nodded as his hope to believe this wasn't real failed.

  "Like that."

  The window was smashed inward, and as he watched, a section of frame wobbled and broke free and tumbled to the ground.

  A man in a tuxedo started up the front walk, and paused when he saw Don by the curb. He waved and hurried over, and Don felt his stomach begin to lurch. It was Dr. Naugle, and he was talking before he even reached them.

  "... called me and I came right over. Donald, are you all right? Were you-" He looked to Quintero, who shook his head. Then he put a hand to Don's face and felt the cold, the sweat, felt the chest begin to heave.

  "Bring him over here," he told the policeman, and for the moment Don didn't argue-he let them walk him to the curb, where he was forced to sit down, forced to look over his shoulder at the wreckage of the house, at the station wagon still in the drive. "I'll be right back, Don. Stay right here. Can you hear me, Don? You stay right here."

  Don thought he nodded; he wasn't sure.

  "Mom?"

  "She is not hurt," Quintero assured him. "I promise you, she is not hurt."

  "Then where ..."

  "In her bedroom. The door ..." He looked around, searching for someone to tell him to stop, to tell him this boy had no right to know how his mother was found behind a barricaded door that had been almost bashed in.

  "Dad," Don said suddenly, straightening and looking around.

  "He's not here."

  He stood and tried to pick out his father's face in the crowd growing on the lawns opposite the house. The voices were clearer now, subdued and excited, a post-game show to keep their spirits high. "Where's my father?" he demanded. "Why isn't he here?"

  "Don," Quintero said, seeing the look on his face. "Don, do you know what happened here? Do you know who did this?"

  "No!" he said, angry he should be asked, afraid he would be blamed. "No, I was with Tracey since the game ended."

  A voice stopped him. He spun to his right and saw Norman skirting the fire engine, nearly tripping over a length of thick hose being wound into place. He ran, and they collided, and his father hugged him tightly, asking over his shoulder what was going on?

  "Where were you?" Don asked into the man's neck. "God, Dad, where were you?"

  Norman thumped his back a couple of times and turned him away, keeping one hand around his shoulder. "I was at the Starlite with the goddamn mayor. Your mother was supposed to… Sergeant Quintero, what's going on? Will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?"

  The ambulance attendants reappeared at the door, Dr. Naugle beside them.

  Joyce was on the stretcher, only her face visible above the sheet; Norman brushed the police aside as he ran for his wife.

  Don started after him, then turned to Quintero. "You said she was all right," he
accused through a spray of spittle.

  "She is not hurt," the man repeated.

  "Then why ...?"

  The stretcher was wheeled to the ambulance's back doors, and Norman watched helplessly as they lifted her in. Then he said a word to Naugle and returned to his son.

  "She was sitting on the floor," Quintero said, and said it a second time when Norman drew near. "Her eyes were open, but she was in shock. That is all I know, Mr. Boyd," he said loudly when Norman started to question. "But there is still the matter of the other man. I—"

  "Why didn't you go with her?" Don asked his father. "Dad, why didn't you go with her?"

  Norman's eyes were red-rimmed and puffed, the neck of his sweater sagging where he'd pulled on it. He looked back at Naugle standing by the van, then stiffened and Don saw Sergeant Verona making his way down the walk from the porch. The detective took his hat off when he saw the Boyds waiting, and turned it slowly in his hands.

  "Who did it?" Norman demanded, one step short of grabbing the cop's lapels. "Who the fuck did this to my house, to my wife? Was it Falcone? Did he—"

  "I don't know, Norm. I came as soon as I got word. Your wife obviously isn't up to talking just yet, and the coroner there can only tell me Falcone was-'' He stopped and looked at Don. "The place is a mess. It's like a football team had practice in there with clubs and bats, for god's sake." He motioned to Quintero and they moved off, heads together.

  "Dad?"

  "She's in shock, like he said," Norman answered absently as he watched the two men conferring. "She'll be all right. She's just in shock. Jesus Christ, will you look at that house? They'd better the hell leave someone around to watch it or we'll get stolen blind."

  Don moved off the verge into the lawn and stared in the window. The mantel was clear, one lamp's shade was cockeyed, and he thought he could make out smears and stains on the back wall. A look to the policemen, the firemen climbing back onto their engine, their breath steaming, their coats rippling as the wind dropped under the trees to push down the road. His father came beside him and touched his arm.

  "Jesus," Norman said, staring at the house. "Jesus, it looks like somebody dropped a bomb on it."

  Don couldn't think because there was too much to think, and he didn't protest when he was pulled across to the van, helped into the van.

  Naugle was perched beside his mother; Norman came in behind and drew the doors shut.

  He didn't hear the siren wind up to a wailing; he didn't see the barricades parting to let the ambulance through. He could only watch Joyce strapped under the sheet, all her hair pulled over one shoulder, an IV snaking from its stand to her hidden arm. Her eyes were closed, her complexion sallow, and every so often Dr. Naugle would pat a handkerchief to her forehead and touch a finger to her neck to check on her pulse.

  "Jesus," Norman whispered. "Jesus, what a mess."

  The waiting room was small and filled with sculpted plastic chairs, a single plastic couch, a low table stacked with magazines worn and some tattered as if they'd been read. Don stood at the window overlooking the main entrance, one foot tapping arhythmically on the checkered tiled floor. Every few seconds he wiped a hand under his nose or buried it in his hair; every few seconds he would turn to the swinging doors and stare down the hallway toward his mother's room.

  The building was quiet. The passage of a nurse or doctor was soundless, and even when one stopped to speak to another, he could see their lips moving and couldn't hear a whisper.

  He wanted to leave.

  He didn't want to know what Joyce would say when she regained consciousness and saw where she was; he didn't want her talking about a horse or Falcone, didn't want her judged crazy when she insisted on the truth.

  And she would be. He knew it, and all of it would be his fault just because he had tried to get things running his way.

  And the most terrible part wasn't the dying. That's what frightened him, it wasn't the dying. Something had gone wrong, and he had somehow lost control. If, he thought with the heels of his hands to his eyes, he had even had control in the first place.

  His arms lowered slowly.

  He stared blindly out the window.

  "Who did it?" Norman asked quietly behind him.

  Don jumped and spun around, leaning back defensively against the sill.

  His father was jacketless now, more grey in the hair falling over his brow. "What?"

  Norman glanced at the window, at the floor, and leaned a bit closer.

  "I'll bet it was some of your friends, wasn't it?"

  "Friends? Dad, what are you talking about? What friends?"

  Norman's fist bunched at his sides. "What the hell did you do to Pratt this time, huh? What did you say to him now?"

  "Nothing! I don't understand. I don't know what you mean."

  Norman grunted with the effort to open his hands, and dropped onto the couch. "Neither do I, son," he said wearily. "Jesus, neither do I. This is ..." A forearm wiped hard over his face, a hand plucked at his shirtfront. "Your mother is going to be all right. She's ... like Naugle said, she's in shock."

  Don peered through the door panes. "Did she say anything?"

  Norman shook his head. "About who did it? No. Verona's in there now, hoping she'll come around soon. But she isn't going to. Naugle says it's going to take a while."

  "Verona? The police?"

  Norman leaned forward and picked up a magazine, flipped the pages and dropped it. "Yep. Why not?" He laughed bitterly. "I have drinks with the mayor and we're talking ... well, we're talking, and the next thing I know your mother is in here and Verona is calling me from the school because Hedley—"

  Don fumbled to a chair. "Mr. Hedley?"

  "When it rains, it pours, and don't you ever forget it," he said in disgust. "D'Amato found him in the auditorium after the game. His body was on the stage, hidden in the wings." Then he slammed his palms to the table, looked up and glared. "This is crazy! What other town gets rid of one madman and immediately replaces him with another?" He looked around the room helplessly. "It's nuts. It doesn't make any sense. Jesus Christ, you try to protect your family, your future, and what help do you get, huh? You don't get any, that's what. You get shit is what you get."

  Don pushed out of the chair.

  Norman looked up at him, eyes dark with rage. "If I find out Pratt had anything to do with this, I'll kill him, you hear me?"

  "Brian doesn't kill people," Don said, almost shouting. "How can you—"

  "It could have been an accident."

  "What?"

  "Sure. The prick could have ... well, it could have been something that went wrong, you know."

  "Dad—"

  Norman wasn't listening. "Damned Falcone. Can you believe it, right in my own house? It's crazy." He nodded, agreeing with himself. "It's goddamn crazy!"

  Don moved to the door and pushed it open.

  "Where are you going!"

  "Air," he said. "I need some air."

  "Your mother's in there. Don't you care that your mother's in there? We have to be here when she wakes up."

  "All I need is a little air," he said, and let the door swing shut behind him, let his feet take him across the corridor to the elevator.

  He pressed the button. He watched the doors slide open in balky stages. He stepped in just as Sergeant Verona left his mother's room. The detective raised a finger for him to wait a minute, but Don let the doors close and sagged against the rear wall.

  He gave the doors a slightly skewed grin.

  In a way it was kind of funny. His father was right in blaming him for what happened, but for all the wrong reasons. But that he was blaming him in the first place wasn't funny at all.

  The cage thumped to a halt, the doors opened, and he blinked at the lower floor's glare as he followed a short hall into the main lobby. A man ran a polisher over the floors, the machine humming softly; a young woman at the reception desk was reading a book and smoking. Neither of them looked at him as he crossed the gleaming flo
or, and he could see no police or security guards on duty either at the reception desk or at the revolving doors as he pushed through to the outside.

  Cold; it was cold, and he leaned his head back to drink the night air.

  "There you are!"

  He started and half-turned to retreat inside when, suddenly, Tracey was there and her arms were around him.

  "I told Mother to go to hell," she said, half-laughing, half-crying.

  "She said I had to stay home and I told her to go to hell. God, am I gonna get killed when I get back."

  Hesitantly his arms went around her; gratefully he lowered his face to rest against her hair. He didn't care if anyone was watching, but he would have killed the first person who tried to break them up.

  Another hug and she said, "C'mon, I want to talk to you." She took his arm and guided him along the arc of the circular drive leading on and off the hospital grounds. To the right was the visitors' parking lot, empty and barely lighted by three-foot pillars at the corners, and they crossed it without speaking, Don only once looking up at the building to see if he could pick out his mother's room.

  At the far, darkest side they found a concrete bench under a half-dozen skeletal cherry trees and sat down, staring across the empty blacktop to the brick posts that marked the hospital's entrance. Across the street there were houses as black as the near-leafless trees that marked the edge of the sidewalk. No cars passed. No horns sounded. It was a hospital zone, and no celebrations were wanted.

  "How's your mother?" she asked then, covering his hand with one of hers.

  Haltingly, pausing frequently to clear his throat and stretch his neck to shake loose the obstructions he found there, he explained what the police had told him and what his father had said about Mr. Hedley. Then he told her what he knew had really happened, what they wouldn't believe even if his mother had seen it and could talk.

  "But I didn't do it!" he added heatedly, his insistence almost begging.

  "Trace, you know me, I wouldn't wish my own mother ..." He remembered.

  Suddenly, like a sharp elbow in the stomach, he remembered.

  "Don?"

  "My father wanted to know if it was one of my friends."