“It’s nothing. Bruised ribs. But my head hurts like a sonofabitch.”
Kev sniffed Deck’s face and hair. “Bang head, I bet,” he said.
“I don’t remember whacking it on anything.”
“Not a banged head,” said Kev. “Bang head. I get it all the time.”
“What the hell’s bang head?”
“A nitroglycerin headache,” Boomer explained. “Means the device was dynamite. Nitroglycerin—the explosive in dynamite?—makes blood vessels dilate. You can get a headache just from handling the stuff, absorbing it through the skin. The fumes are the worst, though—they go up your nose, into the capillaries, and straight to your brain.” He frowned at the house. “Guess that means I’ve got a vise-clamp headache with my name on it waiting for me in there, too, huh?” He looked back at Decker. “God, I’m glad you got out okay. Sounds like a close one.”
“Closer than I liked.”
From inside the bomb-squad truck came a series of short, sharp barks. Kevin’s head snapped around. “Izzy. Quiet,” he commanded. The barks were replaced by high-pitched whines. “Izzy.” Izzy, named after a character on Miami Vice, was Boomer’s dog, a big German shepherd whose job—whose passion; whose very reason for living—was sniffing out explosives. Until recently, the bomb squad had relied mainly on a robot, which sounded great but worked like crap, always getting stuck or running out of battery power, requiring somebody to go in and retrieve it. The robot was so unreliable, in fact, that Decker’s SWAT team—the ones generally tapped to go fetch the malfunctioning machine—had acquired a nickname that was all too accurate: the “Robot Rescue Team.” Decker generally hated seeing the robot get hauled out and sent in; today, though, he would welcome it.
“You starting with R2D2?” he said hopefully.
“Nah. If there’s already debris, the robot would get snagged for sure. Faster and better to go right in with Izzy.”
“How’s his nose today?”
“Awesome. As always.”
Decker gave Kev’s shoulder a squeeze. “Y’all be careful in there.”
Kev nodded reflexively, but he didn’t answer, and Decker noticed that his brother looked distracted, as if he were listening to something other than the words of brotherly love and caution. “Is it true? The guy’s still sitting in there?” Decker nodded. “Head blown off? No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Good,” snapped Boomer, with a vehemence that surprised Decker. “I just wish he’d died slower. Sick son of a bitch.”
“Hey, now,” Decker said. “Don’t make it personal. Forget about me; forget about him. Just do your job. What’s that thing you’re always saying, about how the dog knows when you’re off kilter?”
“What, ‘The dog is only as good as the handler’?”
“No, the other thing you’re always saying.”
“Oh, you mean ‘Shit flows down the leash’?”
Deck nodded. “Yeah. That. You stay focused in there, so Izzy can, too.”
SHIT FLOWS DOWN THE leash. The words were stuck in Decker’s mind now, replaying like a broken record. Like a premonition. Or maybe, he preferred to think, like a mantra, a message he was sending to Kev via brother-bond ESP.
He pictured the dog sniffing its way around the walls of the foyer and toward the blasted den; pictured Kev casting furtive glances over his shoulder at the headless, handless corpse slumped in the La-Z-Boy. Shit flows down the leash, bro, he messaged. Keep your head in the game.