She should run back the way she came. She should call the police. But she doesn’t. The needling panic that bothers her now has nothing to do with her own well-being. It’s her dog that matters. Hemingway. That stupid German shepherd with the black mask and bad breath and one floppy ear, the one who sheds fur like porcupine quills, the one who nudges her awake with his cold nose, the one who chews up the furniture and drinks out of the toilet and normally yelps and scrambles toward the door whenever she comes home. That one. Her only companion.
She drops her purse. She lost her knife in Powell’s, so she pulls out her pepper spray, pops the safety cap. The apartment is small, only four hundred square feet, but she can’t see all of it from here. The entryway opens into the living room, which runs into the kitchen and dinette. A short hallway leads to the bedroom and bathroom. She tries to make no noise, but that’s nearly impossible, given the old hardwood floors that groan with every step. That’s the only sound, aside from the swish and hum of traffic passing outside.
The rear entrance has an oversize doggie door that leads to a rotten patio that drops into a staircase that leads to the fenced backyard. That way Hemingway can do his business whenever he pleases. She’s gone too often to walk him with any regularity. The doggie door—she can see now—has been ripped away, and the wood around it appears chewed.
“Hemingway?” she says softly, and hears a whine come from the bathroom. When she opens the door, she finds the inside of it crosshatched with his claw marks. He rushes her and smashes his head into her groin, her stomach, her hip, desperate for contact, comfort. She tucks away the pepper spray and holds his head in both her hands. One of his teeth appears broken from where he must have attacked the doorknob. He licks her with his warm rough tongue, and she scratches him over with her fingernails until he yips and flinches. Her hand comes away bloody. He’s been cut. Or bitten. It’s difficult to tell. But he’s missing a patch of white-gray fur along his shoulder, a crater deep enough to reveal candy-slick muscle.
“Oh, my poor boy, my beautiful boy.” She talks to him the way she can’t seem to talk to anyone else, with gushing vulnerability. A few months ago, she dated a guy who claimed she never wanted to talk. “You’re a writer,” he said. “How do you have so few words?” She tried to explain. Speaking was careless and fleeting in its effect. Writing was deliberate, permanent, more meaningful. But he left her anyway. Said dating her was like dating an autistic.
Hemingway licks her cheek, and she buries her face in his fur and breathes in his skunky odor and says, “I love you, I love you, I love you, you stupid dog.”
?
Half an hour later, after she cleans the wound with water and smears it with ointment, she clips on the leash and leads Hemingway to the bus stop. She doesn’t feel safe at home. She wants to be surrounded by people. She stares at the back of her hand—where she has written BR12 with a Sharpie—and wonders briefly what it refers to, but then the bus pulls up with a shriek of brakes and a cloud of exhaust, and she forgets all about it.
At The Oregonian, she scans her ID, but the security guard—not Steve, another guy she doesn’t know so well—holds up his hand. “No dogs allowed.”
She tells him, with a straight face, that Hemingway is a service animal, and he says, “Where’s his little vest, then? Service animals are always wearing those little vests.”
“It’s dirty.”
“It’s dirty?”
“Yes. I’m having it cleaned. In the washing machine.”
“Why you need a service animal all of a sudden? I’ve never seen you with one before.”
“I’ve been diagnosed with epilepsy, if you must know,” she says, and he shakes his head and says, “All right, all right, have it your way,” and waves her through to the elevators.
It’s Saturday afternoon and the office is now mostly empty, so she sneaks Hemingway through the cubicles and under her desk without any trouble. She tells him to be a good boy and tosses him a treat from her purse, and he slurps it up and crunches it damply.
Only now does she feel safe enough to think. The person who broke into her apartment was clearly looking for something specific; it has to be the skull.
After she ran from the construction site, after she climbed into the Volvo and sped away, she could see the men in her rearview mirror. They obviously spotted her plates, figured out who she was, where she lived and worked. They could have brought charges against her for what she did—trespassing, looting—but they didn’t. Which confirms they’re up to something illegal. She doesn’t know how to puzzle together the murder and the hounds. But the slashed tires and the break-in and the late-night query as to her whereabouts all point to the fact that she’s up to her neck in some dangerously deep shit.
She pulls the camera out of her satchel and stands and peers into the next cubicle. Josh, the intern, types at a keyboard and wears a set of earbuds that connect to a smartphone. “Hey,” she says, and he doesn’t hear her, so she says, “Hey!” again, louder this time, and when he still doesn’t hear her, she throws a pencil at him.
“What?” he says, too loud, with the earbuds still in.
She motions at him to shut off whatever he’s listening to, and when he does, she says, “What are you doing?”
“Copyedits and fact-checking on your pieces and a few others. Then I’ve got to log an interview. So don’t ask me to do anything.”
“Is Brandon here?”
“I haven’t seen him for an hour or so.”
“I need help with my camera.”
“You really are pathetic, you know. My grandmother understands technology better than you, and she still has an AOL address.”
“What’s wrong with AOL?”
“Forget it.”
“Get over here.”
He sighs and saves his document and wanders over to her cubicle entrance. He’s been wearing the same pair of pleated khakis all week, and they’re stained along the pocket with ink, the knee with mustard. His cheeks are so flushed with acne that he appears permanently embarrassed. “What?”
She tells him she wants him to bring the photo up on the screen, so that they can zoom in and out, study the details.
He tells her to get up and she does and he sits down and then startles at the sight of the dog between his legs. “What the hell? Are you allowed to bring that thing in here?”
“Don’t worry. He won’t bite unless I tell him to.”
Josh gives Hemingway a tentative scratch behind the ears—“Hey, buddy”—before knocking the mouse around and lighting up the monitor screen. Their computers are all hopelessly outdated, slow to load, regularly freezing up, not that she really cares. Hers whirs and ticks and groans now, and Josh says, “You can’t leave this many windows open. You’re asking for a crash.”