Decker couldn’t stand it. Ducking under the crime-scene tape Fireplug had stretched across the front sidewalk, he climbed the stairs and positioned himself in the open front door. The interior still reeked of explosives, though the smoke had dissipated. Boomer and Izzy had made it halfway across the foyer by now, working their way along the front wall of the house, when suddenly the dog’s head snapped up and he stood on his hind legs, his front paws on the wall, his nose homing in on something. Decker leaned in and saw a dark smear on the wall. Blood, Decker thought, touching his shoulder. My blood. Did the dog know the blood was Decker’s? Could he smell the kinship with Kevin? Hell, yeah, he thought. Blood brothers. Brother’s blood. Thicker than water. For sure he knows it’s mine. “Leave it,” he heard Kev say, saw Kev give the leash a twitch. “Keep working.” The dog resumed snuffling, following the baseboard around the room, to the doorway of the den. “Good boy,” Kev praised. “Good work.”
The dog disappeared through the doorway, into the den, and Kev followed, a leash-length behind. The den would be a bigger challenge for them to check and clear, Decker knew. For one thing, it was a bigger, more complex room, with chairs and tables and lamps and other mangled furniture, plus the smells and soot from the SWAT team’s flash grenade and the dead guy’s dynamite. Then there was the stink of the dead guy himself—seared flesh and vaporized hair and leaked-out shit and piss—not to mention the creepy presence of the guy, too. Despite the lack of eyes, or even a head, for crissakes, Decker somehow imagined the dead guy watching, tracking Boomer and Izzy as they made their way along the wall. “Check,” Decker heard his brother say in a low voice every few seconds, and even at a distance—even through the residual ringing in his ears—Decker could hear the strain in his brother’s voice. C’mon, Kev, he messaged. Focus.
Suddenly he heard the dog yelp with pain and fear—fear, from a creature trained to hurl himself without hesitation at a 250-pound thug. A split-second later, he heard Boomer shout, “No!” Decker braced for a blast, but there was none; only shrieks from both the dog and the man.
Ignoring protocol, Decker raced into the house and across the foyer, skidding around the corner and into the den. There he saw a surreal nightmare unfolding. Kev and Izzy were on the far side of the room, near some kind of splintered cage of wood and wire. Rearing up on his hind legs like a horse, the dog was thrashing wildly, whipping his head back and forth, struggling to shake something off his snout. A snake, realized Decker. A huge fucking snake! The triangle of the reptile’s head was like some awful reflection of the dog’s own angular head; the long, thick body disappeared beneath the edge of the broken cage. “No!” Deck heard Kevin scream again over the dog’s howls. “Izzy!” As Decker lunged across the room to help, he saw Boomer drop to his knees, hands scrabbling up the back of the snake, tugging at the neck, then—desperate to free the terrified dog—grabbing hold of the jaws themselves. He had just managed to pry the reptile loose when the dog—finally free to fight back—bit blindly, the powerful jaws closing on Boomer’s right hand. Now it was Boomer howling, first as the bones of his right hand snapped, then as the fangs of the snake sought and found his left wrist, piercing the pale skin and then the ropy blue vein. The vein that carried blood up Kev’s arm and into his lungs.
As Decker reached his brother’s side, he saw the knotty glands at the base of the snake’s head pulsing—once, twice, three times. “Kevin!” shouted Decker. “No!” Now it was Decker grabbing the snake’s jaws, prying ferociously, ripping tendons and ligaments with the force of his fear and fury. Gripping the reptile’s head with both hands, he smashed it to the floor, again and again and again, reducing it to a bloody, bony pulp.
On the floor beside him, the dog began to convulse, blood foaming from his mouth and nose, and Decker saw his brother lift the dog and clasp it to his chest, sobbing. “Izzy,” Kev gasped. “I’m sorry. Oh, God, Izzy, I’m so, so sorry.”
Then—as if stricken with guilt at his failure to repay the dog’s devotion with diligence and vigilance and safekeeping; as if the two were joined by bonds even stronger than family—Decker’s brother began to froth blood as well. Decker watched, paralyzed and helpless, as his younger brother toppled forward onto the twitching body of the dog.
Death crawls up the leash.
CHAPTER 42
Brockton