“What do you mean?”
“Okay, let’s say you do have a big dog. Well, you could mate it to a regular-size dog and you might get big pups and you might not. The surest way is to go out and find another big dog. Now it’s no guarantee but you’re more likely to get big pups that way and if you’re lucky one of them will grow up to be bigger than its parents. Then you take that dog, breed it to another big dog, get an even bigger pup, and then it’s wash, rinse, and repeat, each generation getting bigger and bigger until you’ve got the giant on your video. It’s like my brother, Barry. He wasn’t too bright to begin with and he goes and marries a woman who’s thirty-four years old and flunked her GED twice. Then they have a son that’s dumber than a box of hair, he gets married and has kids that play hide-and-seek in the rosebushes. Can I see that kitchen shot again?” Harry held the tablet this way and that. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. “This dog has been crossbred. Somewhere in his pedigree, a pit bull parent was bred to something else. Happens all the time. People breed pits to Dobermans, Rottweilers, Catahoula Leopard dogs, all kinds of things. Now it’s hard to make out here but your dog has some dewlap, wrinkling on the forehead, the legs are a little long and the tail’s got a curve in it. Could be Great Dane or mastiff but I’m thinking Presa Canario, which would explain a lot of things.”
“Presa what?” Dodson said.
“Presa Canario. It’s originally from the Spanish Canary Islands. Big strong dog, weighs over a hundred pounds. Ranchers bred them to kill predators and for dogfighting. They call it a pit bull on steroids. It’s got an unpredictable temperament and it’s human aggressive. Mix that together with a pit’s fearlessness and determination and train it to attack on sight and I don’t know what you’ve got.” Harry closed the cage and wiped his hands on his shirt. “And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “Whoever the fella is that bred this dog is one crazy son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jiffy Lube
May 2005
Hunting down Marcus’s killer gave Isaiah focus; something to occupy his mind besides his grief. A reason to get up in the morning. He called the East Long Beach police station and spoke to Detective Purcell who was in charge of the investigation. Isaiah told the detective he was calling on behalf of his mother. She was too upset to talk and wanted to know if there was any progress tracking down the driver.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much to tell her,” Purcell said. “In a hit-and-run people tend to look at the victim first and only see the vehicle as it’s leaving the scene.”
“Nobody saw anything?” Isaiah said. He could hear Purcell thinking Why didn’t you?
“There was a witness at the bus stop,” Purcell said. “He stated the vehicle was a late-model Honda Accord, silver, the up model. He couldn’t describe the driver, everything happened too fast.” Purcell said there were stories about the accident on the local news and an article had appeared in the newspaper but nobody called the hotline.
“Anything else you can tell my mom?” Isaiah said.
“It’s an ongoing investigation and we’re doing everything we can,” Purcell said. “If there are any developments we’ll contact you.”
For the first time since the accident, Isaiah went back to the intersection of Anaheim and Baldwin. Not much traffic this time of day. A woman filling up at the Shell station. An old man sweeping the sidewalk in front of a liquor store. A homeless kid with two dogs walking by. Normal, like Marcus was never here. Like Marcus had never died. Isaiah tried not to look at the patch of asphalt where his brother lost his life but couldn’t help it. He saw Marcus lying there, a bag of broken bones and smashed arteries, the luminous smile snuffed out forever. Isaiah felt a surge of heat coming from his insides, pushing sweat out of his pores, his face burning up. Light-headed and nauseous, he sat down on the bus bench. Somebody asked him if he was all right and he waved them away.