“The mystery girl,” Charles said, “if it is a girl. Where you get that sweater, man?”
Cal saw himself on the kitchen screen getting some takeout boxes out of the fridge. Strange, seeing yourself when you’re high. Moving in slow motion, so out of it you had to think hard to remember what you were doing; no clue what was coming next. The other screens showed the hallway, the game room, and the backyard. The outside cams had night vision, everything in a green haze except the pool, the glow from the underwater lights wobbling on the patio and an ivy-covered wall, the second story of the Cape Cod just above it. The lawn separated the pool from a line of trees at the back of the property. Mr. Q was watching the tape like he was sucking in every pixel through his eyeballs. Charles was smiling, fucking with him like he did to everybody.
“What’s up, Mr. Q?” Charles said. “Y’all figure it out yet? Got all your clues and shit, ready to make the bust?”
“You ain’t gonna believe this,” Bug said. “This shit is crazy.”
“Could you be quiet, please?” Anthony said.
“Fuck you, Anthony,” Charles said.
Except for Cal in the kitchen everything was still. The brothers leaned forward, smiling, nodding. “Watch this, watch this,” Charles said.
On the backyard cam, a dog came out of the trees, its nose surfing the grass, its eyes gleaming in the green darkness. Cal shuddered under his bathrobe and felt like he had to pee.
Dodson looked at the dog like it was a twenty-foot crocodile. “Where’d he come from?” he said.
“The question of the hour,” Anthony said.
The dog crossed the lawn and into the glow of the pool lights. You could tell right away it was a pit bull. The sledgehammer head, cropped ears, powerful chest, the wide belligerent stance. Dodson pulled his feet off the floor and turned his knees sideways. “That’s a goddamn pit,” he said. “I hate them muthafuckas.”
The dog had no collar and no markings on its shiny black coat. And it was big. Really big. You could almost mistake it for a Great Dane. Cal had seen a lot of pits but never one that size.
“Watch this, watch this,” Charles said.
Suddenly, the dog’s ears shot up like someone was shouting its name—and then it started moving, uncertain at first, coming around the pool and stopping. Again, its ears shot up. Still hesitant, it crossed the patio, circled the gas barbecue, and went toward the house, its ears going up and down. It went under the portico and up to the back door.
“I hope that dog don’t have a key,” Dodson said.
“The shit gonna get crazy now,” Bug said.
Cal remembered standing at the center island, eating takeout from a restaurant called the Natural. Barbecued tempeh with steamed kale and Jessica’s Vegan Quinoa with Edamame. He hadn’t quite figured out chopsticks yet, most of the food spilling onto the countertop and getting on his bathrobe. The book said this kind of diet would draw the toxins out of his body but it didn’t say it would taste nasty or have no taste at all. He was about to get the Krispy Kremes out of the fridge when a dog came through the doggie door. At first, Cal was overjoyed, thinking Hella had escaped from Kwaylud and run all the way back from Atlanta to be with his master. But Hella was a Rottweiler and this was a pit bull. A big black muthafucka. Fear trickled into Cal’s stomach, curdling the tempeh and shriveling the edamame. He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. The dog remained by the doggie door, its eyes adjusting to the rows of recessed lights and the reflections off the stainless steel appliances and the white marble floor. It looked more like a movie monster than somebody’s pet. Massive T. rex head, Iron Man chest, fangs like ivory daggers, its blacked-out pig eyes wide apart and ruthless. And it was panting slow. Heh… heh… heh… heh. The dog went still for a moment. Then it snarled, hunched down to get its legs underneath it, and launched itself across the kitchen like it was flung from a catapult.