Adam was already in the car when she got there, stuffing the silver-foil packets of food into his backpack. She slid in beside him and shut the door. “Got a good deal, huh?” she offered, turning the key in the ignition and ignoring her seatbelt, which she could do with impunity because she’d long since disabled the dinger or nanny buzzer or whatever you wanted to call it.
“Let’s just say I have a connection.” He gave her a smirk, tearing at the packaging that housed the cook kit (more hard plastic) and casually dropping it out the window. By the time they were rolling out of the lot, he’d slipped the shining aluminum kit into the pack, along with the knife, which he didn’t even glance at, and he was lifting the canteen to his lips again and again offering it to her.
“No,” she said, “not now. Not till we get Kutya.” She smiled. “Then we can celebrate.”
“Party,” he said, and his voice had gone mechanical, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, as if he weren’t even there. “Party on.”
Was he drunk, was that it?
“I’m a party animal,” he said in the same detached voice. “A real, a super, party animal.”
“Yeah,” she said, swinging out onto the highway, “yeah, me too. But you’re going to be all right for this, aren’t you? What we discussed?”
Nothing.
“Listen, Adam—”
“Colter.”
“Colter. I need five minutes, that’s all. And then, if you want, we can go back to my place—in Willits, at the top of the canyon?—and party all we want. I’ve got wine. I can make us omelets. You like omelets?”
No response. He was rigid again, staring through the windshield as if it was the transparent lid of a coffin.
“Okay,” she said, “okay, fine. Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
She got lucky, because when they came through the door at Animal Control, it wasn’t the girl behind the counter but a middle-aged man with dyed hair and a severe comb-over, and he was busy explaining adoption procedures to a couple his own age who sported identical his-and-hers paunches. Adam was grinning, for what reason she couldn’t fathom, except that he was drunk, he must have been drunk, but he’d roused himself when they pulled into the lot and now he edged right in, saying, “Sir? Sir, could I ask you a question?”
The couple turned to stare at him. The man behind the counter, who’d been in the midst of enumerating the virtues of a dog named Dolly, lifted his head to give him an annoyed look. “Just a minute,” he said.
“But”—and here Adam, soft-voiced to the point where you could barely hear him, calibrated his tone till it was a kind of rising whine—“I have a question, just a simple question.”
The man just blinked at him.
And her? She was making like she didn’t know him, as if they’d come in separately, two strangers interested in dogs. And cats. She went over to the brochures and made a show of selecting one of each, a pet lover who only wanted to be informed about the rules and regulations, about safety and health and the special needs of kittens and puppies.
“About spaying?” Adam said. “You do spaying here, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the man behind the counter said, “yes, of course. But if you could just wait a second until I’m done with these people, who were here before you—”
The woman gave Adam an indignant look, then turned back to the conversation. “Dolly’s housetrained, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” the man lied, because how would he know? “They all are.”
And then Adam, inserting himself between husband and wife at the counter so that each had to take a step back, let his voice go a notch higher. “How old do they have to be before you spay them?”
The Animal Control man blinked again, but he was there to inform people and the response was all but automatic. “Six months or so.”
“You use a scalpel, right? Betadine, make it nice and clean. Do you do it yourself—I mean, personally?”