Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund

by Blaize Clement

  After a while I got the prickly, uneasy feeling that happens when somebody is staring, as if eyes were boring into the back of my head. I looked behind me, but all I saw was a screen of palmetto fronds, potato vines, and trailing banyan branches. No-see-ums were beginning to snip at my flesh and get into places no living creature should get into without specific permission. If I ever gave permission to go there, it wouldn’t be to an invisible biting insect. Not that anybody was asking.

  I looked at my watch. It would soon be time to start on my afternoon pet rounds, and the drive home would take me about forty minutes. I shouldn’t have come here. I should have stayed home and taken a nap. What had I expected to see, anyway?

  A sound reached me, the mechanical whine of the front gate swinging open, then the sound of a car engine. A shiny red car came to a jerking stop in front of the garage. I squinted through the leaves at it. I knew that car. It was the classic red Honda I’d seen in Birdlegs Stephenson’s garage. I knew the man getting out of it too. It was Leo Brossi, still with his nose taped and wearing dark glasses to hide his swollen eye.

  One of the garage doors lumbered up, and Denton Ferrelli strolled out to meet Brossi. They stood close together and spoke in low tones for a couple of minutes, then Brossi laughed and stepped back.

  He said, “Where you going to kill him?”

  Denton said, “I thought I’d take him out to the country where nobody can see.”

  “That’s good. You can throw him in the river for the alligators.”

  “You want to come watch?”

  “Sure. I haven’t seen a dog killed in a long time.”

  Denton went back inside the garage and came out with Reggie on a leash. My mouth went dry. Now I knew why Reggie hadn’t barked. He wore a muzzle buckled around his mouth to keep him quiet. He looked listless too, as if he were drugged or exhausted.

  Brossi said, “I don’t want that dog in my car. He might shit or throw up or something.”

  Denton looked down at him with a pouting frown, but went back inside the garage and prodded Reggie into the backseat of a black Land Rover. Denton backed the car out of the garage, and Leo Brossi got in the passenger side. Denton swung the car back and then moved forward toward the front gate. As they drove off, I could see them laughing.

  I ran for the Bronco, pulling out my cell phone as I went. I started the motor while I punched in Guidry’s number. Something seemed different, and I looked at the phone screen.

  “Fuck!”

  There was no light on the screen, no nagging little logo of a lone battery trying to get my attention. My phone was dead.

  I threw the phone on the passenger seat and waited until I was sure Denton had turned onto Gulf of Mexico Drive before I tore out after him. This wasn’t about catching the killer of Conrad and Stevie Ferrelli anymore. This was about preventing Reggie’s murder.

  At Gulf of Mexico Drive, I looked south and saw Denton’s car half a mile ahead. I stayed well back, passing cars that got in my line of vision, but not getting close enough for him to recognize me. At St. Armand’s circle, I slowed at every crosswalk to let wilted pedestrians creep across the street, then turned onto John Ringling Boulevard and picked up speed. Denton had had to slow down too, though, so I hadn’t lost him. We raced over the new causeway to the mainland, where Denton hung a right along the curve of the bay.

  Keeping my eyes on Denton and traffic, I tried the cell phone again, as if it might have resurrected itself. It was still dead. I had the feeling that it was glad I was being punished for not charging it, like its nasty little electric innards were saying, See what you made me do?

  I sped up to get through a yellow light before it turned red, and got closer to Denton to make sure I hadn’t lost him. That was him, all right. That was Leo Brossi in the passenger seat and that was Reggie standing muzzled and forlorn in the backseat. We were going south on Tamiami Trail. At Clark Road, which leads to Interstate 75 or the Myakka River, Denton turned.

  I got a sick taste in my mouth. Birdlegs had said Gabe Marks lived in the country near the Myakka River. Now Brossi’s crude jibe about throwing Reggie to the alligators seemed even more cruel, because he probably meant it literally. The Myakka River is full of brooding alligators waiting for new flesh to eat.

  After a few miles, Denton crossed 75 and continued southeast. Toward the Myakka. Perhaps toward Gabe Marks’s place.

  I slowed the Bronco and pulled to the shoulder. This was insane. I should turn around now. I should go home and make my afternoon rounds. I should go home and plug in my dead cell phone and recharge its battery. I should wait for Guidry to bring a transmitter for me to wear when I accosted Denton Ferrelli.

  But Denton had Reggie with him, and he planned to kill him. Reggie wasn’t a fellow human being, but he was a fellow being, and he was a damn sight more deserving of respect than a lot of humans.

  While Denton’s car got smaller and smaller in the distance, I sat and debated with myself. Then I took my foot off the brake and drove straight ahead. In the end, it all boiled down to one thing—if I didn’t try to save Reggie, I would never be able to live with myself.

  Out of the city, Clark Road becomes State Highway 72. There was enough traffic to keep me from feeling conspicuous, but I stayed three or four cars behind Denton. After about ten miles of orange groves and vegetable and plant farms, he left the highway, turning right on a side road. To let him get farther ahead, I stopped on the highway shoulder for a couple of minutes before I turned. The new road was a paved farm-to-market that cut between densely wooded pinelands interspersed with occasional cattle farms. The pines had once been farmed for turpentine, but when the turpentine market bottomed out, trees were cut to make way for cows.

  Denton’s Land Rover was a black dot ahead of me. I imagined him laughing with Leo Brossi as they planned Reggie’s murder. The black dot turned left and disappeared, and I stomped on the gas. When I reached the turn, he was already half a mile away. If he had been observant, he might wonder at a car taking the same route. On the other hand, he was headed directly toward the Myakka River and the popular Myakka River State Park. The park comprises almost thirty thousand acres of prairie grasses and wildflowers that have been obliterated in the rest of Florida, so it’s a state treasure. The Myakka flows through twelve miles of the park on its way to Charlotte Harbor. Outside the park, a few farmers and ranchers cling to a way of life that in just one generation has become an anachronism.

  Denton turned right, bouncing down a sandy road and whipping a high cloud of white dust. I pulled to the side of the road and watched the dust. After about half a mile, the dust cloud stopped, and the black dot that was Denton’s Land Rover emerged, going slowly toward a group of frame buildings set far back on the left side of the road. He had reached his destination.

  I moved forward, turning at a snail’s pace to keep from exciting the dust. Wide ditches lay on each side of the narrow road. On the right was a wilderness of pine, oak, palmetto, and palm above a morass of saw palmetto, wax myrtle, gallberry, fetterbush, and staggerbush teeming with deer and wild hogs. Ospreys perched in the trees, and a red-shouldered hawk watched my passage from the top of a runner oak. On the left, a barbed-wire fence enclosed thick yellow cordgrass, tall as a man. The grass hid the house where Denton and Leo Brossi had taken Reggie. I prayed it hid me too.

  27

  Well back from the driveway leading to the house, I pulled to the side of the road and got out of the Bronco. I managed to bound across the ditch without getting bitten by any critters hiding in its vines and grasses, and balanced on the ditch’s edge while I pushed down the lowest string of barbed wire. Gingerly, I stretched my leg over it, whispering ouches and shits when sharp barbs punctured my flesh. At least I managed to crawl through without snagging my shirt or my hair on the top wire.

  I crouched low and began swimming through the cordgrass, parting it with outstretched arms, praying I didn’t step on a snake. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes rose like steam, and a fin
e mist of pollen covered me from the grass heads. I felt a sneeze coming on and pinched my nose. The sneeze imploded inside my head, causing lightning flashes across my cortex.

  Something sticky brushed my bare shoulder. I instinctively slapped it away and then gave an involuntary shriek when I saw it was a furry tarantula. The thing scurried away into the grass, while I rubbed my skin and remembered all the stories I’d heard as a child about how a tarantula’s bite will cause your flesh to rot away and leave a big cavity down to your bones. I couldn’t see a bite mark, but for all I knew a tarantula’s bite might be invisible. Shuddering, I moved on, wanting to get to the end of this teeming field.

  I could hear men’s voices now, and a heavy laugh floated over the grass. I couldn’t see anything except the pale grass stems, but I didn’t dare stand up. All I could do was press on, hoping my movement through the sea of grass wasn’t an obvious trail the men were watching. With luck, I would come out behind one of the sheds. If I weren’t lucky, death might be waiting for me on the other side of this ocean of grass. Oddly enough, it wasn’t death that I feared, but turning coward and running away without saving Reggie.

  After what seemed an eternity, I got close enough to the end of the field of cordgrass to see a dilapidated shed directly in front of me, one of a number of similar buildings scattered behind and to the side of a battered old house. A wall of stacked lumber stood at the end of the driveway, with logs piled higher than my head. Gabe either sold wood to people nostalgic for fires roaring inside while snow fell outside, or he just kept trim by felling trees and chopping logs. Several snakeskins hung with their top ends nailed to logs in the stack, and a long alligator hide was stretched on a plywood board raised on sawhorses.

  The front yard was littered with abandoned furniture, parts of cars that had been there so long that grass grew on them, and rusted pieces of farm equipment. On the far side of the sandy driveway, the weathered frame house had a sagging front porch and a pile of garbage beside the porch steps. Not a compost heap, just a pile of garbage. Eggshells and egg cartons, plastic milk bottles and bread wrappers and greasy KFC boxes, all rotting and stinking in the glaring heat and probably being aerated by roaches the size of small mice. The garbage pile made Gabe seem even more dangerous. He really was as dumb and primitive as he looked, and a violent nature in a stupid man makes a lethal combination.

  Gabe himself was apparently having some kind of standoff with Denton and Leo. They were below him next to the car, while Gabe stood on the porch with his hammy arms folded over his chest and his chin defiantly tilted to show he didn’t defer to any man. Anybody looking at the three men would immediately have known they came from different worlds. Denton was dressed like a lawyer, dark trousers, white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled partway up his arms. Leo looked like the pimp he had been. A foot shorter than Denton, his pinkish beige pants were too tight and too shiny, and an expensive palm-printed silk shirt still managed to look cheap on him. Gabe wore a dark mesh muscle shirt that emphasized his defined chest, and stained jeans that hugged thighs thick as tree trunks. He stood with legs spread, feet firmly planted in knee-high leather boots. I didn’t have to be any closer to know he smelled like the garbage heap below him.

  Denton was speaking in a measured monotone, as if he wanted something and was being careful not to rile Gabe in the asking. He pointed toward his Land Rover, where Reggie was standing in the backseat looking out the side window. Then he raised his hands in a gesture of being at his wit’s end, as if he didn’t know what he would do if Gabe didn’t do whatever he was asking.

  Gabe gave him a scornful look, dumb rube showing contempt for the helplessness of the city slicker, and unfolded his arms.

  “This is the last time! I’m not doing it again!”

  He came down the steps, walking with the swaggering strut peculiar to men of small minds and large egos, and Denton permitted himself a quick smile of victory. He had manipulated Gabe, and it didn’t look as if it were the first time.

  Denton opened the car door and Reggie backed away, whining and uncertain. Denton reached in and grabbed Reggie’s leash and jerked him out, while Gabe turned and walked toward the small shed in front of me. I heard the door open, and I imagined sharp hoes and scythes and all kinds of toxic and poisonous farm supplies that would be harmful to a dog. Reggie must have had the same idea, because he struggled and fought, but Denton had him on a choke chain that finally brought him across the driveway to the shed.

  Denton said, “Get in there, dammit!”

  A moment later the door slammed shut, and I heard a wooden latch drop into place.

  At least Reggie was alive. Still muzzled, he was stuck in a good dog’s dilemma. Denton had been a guest in Reggie’s home, which put him in the category of humans to whom he was supposed to show submission. But Reggie was a smart dog, and I had the feeling that Denton had pushed him beyond his limit.

  Leo Brossi’s voice carried well enough for me to hear him ask Gabe a question that made my heart clatter.

  “How long will it take you to load the darts?”

  Gabe said something that was lost, and the three men went inside the house.

  As soon as the front door closed behind them, I hunkered over and began moving through the tall grass toward the shed. All the windows on this side of the house had opaque window shades pulled halfway down. To see me, a person would have to raise a shade or stoop to look under it. They could also see me if they were sitting in a chair where they would be at the level of the lower part of the window, but I didn’t want to think about that.

  I also didn’t want to think about how Gabe was loading a dart gun with a deadly poison that would paralyze Reggie within seconds. He would die a horrible death, fully conscious and unable to move.

  Getting as close to the edge of the screening cordgrass as I could, I told myself Go! and ran like hell around the shed to the door. As I’d expected, it had a simple wooden latch high above my head. I stood on tiptoe and stretched my arm as high as it would go. As I did, I spoke low to Reggie.

  “Hey, Reggie, it’s me. I’m getting you out. Don’t jump when I open the door, okay?”

  Inside the shed, Reggie must have recognized my scent because he began to whine eagerly and scratch at the door. My fingertips touched the latch and I jumped to push the wooden bar up from its crude resting place. It went up and then flopped back down. I grunted and jumped at it again, this time sending it farther up before it slid back into its slot. I heaved myself upward and knocked the bar to the very top, where it hung poised at the very edge. Good. It hadn’t settled back. Another good jump and I could knock it the rest of the way out.

  I stretched my arm up and gathered myself to jump. A large hand suddenly closed on mine, and an arm hard as steel wrapped around my ribs and jerked me backward. A man’s triumphant laugh drowned out the sound of my own terror.

  Denton Ferrelli said, “Hello, dog-sitter. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  The truth hit me all in one gulp. I had been tricked. Denton had known all along that I was following him. The talk about killing Reggie had been a ruse to get me to follow him to this remote place. Nobody would know to look for me here, and nobody would hear me scream. They would kill me here and dump my body in the woods and nobody would ever find it. Animals would eat my flesh and scatter my bones while search parties combed Siesta Key.

  I wasn’t so different from Gabe after all. Like Gabe, I had thought I was being smart and brave when I was really just being stupid and arrogant.

  Denton Ferrelli swung me around while I kicked and flailed and screamed, all my noise and struggle as useless as the squeaks and air-peddling of a mouse about to be dropped in a snake’s mouth. My gun was in my shorts pocket, but the armlock Denton had on me made it impossible to reach. While I hung from his forearm, he carried me toward Leo and Gabe, who stood at the bottom of the porch steps. Leo’s malicious grin gave his sharp-boned face the look of a demented skeleton. A demented skeleton with a piece of tape st
retched over the ridge of its nose.

  Gabe was stern and self-righteous as a televangelist. He had put on a straw cowboy hat with the sides curled up like a rodeo rider, and he held a twenty-caliber dart gun pointed down at his side. The hilt of another gun stuck out from a thick leather holster draped around his hips, and a square metal container that I assumed held loaded darts was stuck in his waistband. I felt a little spurt of appreciation for his professionalism. He had backup ready, the same as a law-enforcement officer would.

  Behind us, Reggie was scratching and jumping at the shed’s door.

  I said, “Just so you know, my Bronco has a tracking device on it. If I’m not home soon, people will come looking for me.”

  Denton laughed again. “You’re such a transparent liar. You’re a cute little dog-sitter too. Too bad you couldn’t mind your own fucking business.”

  Panting and twisting, I said, “You’re cute too, Denton. I love the little ironic twists you give to murder. The kitten with broken legs for Conrad was a real stroke of genius.”

  He chuckled, and his voice went high as if he were speaking lines on a stage. “Hey, Conrad, come see what I’ve found. It’s beautiful, man, some kind of rare bird I never saw before. Come look, it’s back here in the woods.”

  In his normal voice, he said, “Stupid freak believed every word. Thought I wanted to share the joy I felt with my little brother. Gabe was in the trees waiting. He shot him while he leaned over looking at the damned cat.”

  Gabe said, “Are you gonna keep holding her?”

  Denton’s grip loosened a bit, and his voice came out sharp. “Don’t be a fool! Of course I’m not.”

  “Then let her go so I can hit her running.”