The music stopped, as if a plug had been pulled. I heard staccato footsteps on a staircase.
“What’s your name?” I asked the Goth.
“Spike.”
“You don’t know if you have a dog, Spike?”
“It ain’t my house, man.”
A moment later, a woman elbowed her male friend aside to face me. She stood no more than five feet tall and weighed, I was guessing, no more than ninety pounds. She had a pixie haircut (dyed black), a painful-looking sore on her lip, and bile-green eye shadow. Like her beau, she was outfitted for the end-time in a leather vest, with no shirt underneath, and black jeans rolled above her bare ankles. She also happened to have a new tattoo on her forearm. It was poorly drawn and still scabbed, but it was unmistakably the silhouette of a howling wolf.
“Didn’t you see the sign!” she said in the overloud voice people use who are hard of hearing. Her eardrums must have still been stunned from all that metal. “No trespassing!”
“That doesn’t apply to law enforcement,” I said. “I also saw the ‘Beware of Dog’ sign. What kind of dog is it?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“A dog killed a deer down the road from here.”
One side of her mouth—the side with the sore—twitched. “I don’t have a dog no more. That sign is old. Who told you I have a dog?”
“You’re Carrie Michaud, aren’t you?”
“So what?” Everything about this hostile, manic, hollow-eyed person shouted narcotics.
“Look, Carrie, I know you own a dog. There are dog tracks and urine stains all over your yard. There’s a big pile of dog shit next to that snowbank. You need to stop lying to me. Now, why don’t you go get your dog?”
“So you can give me a ticket? Ha! No way!”
I was tired of playing coy about my suspicions. “It’s a wolf dog, isn’t it?”
Before I could say another word, she slammed the door in my face.
Wolf dogs are the hybrid offspring of wolves and domestic dogs, bred, mostly, for people who want the thrill of saying that they own the baddest animal on the block. They rank above pit bulls in that regard. They also happen to be illegal to possess in the state of Maine.
I backed slowly away from the front door and looked at the windows. Sure enough, one of the blinds was lifted, and I saw the Goth’s tubercular face peering out.
I made sure to be loud. “Open the door, please.”
Carrie Michaud appeared in the next window. “Fuck you!”
So much for negotiation.
I retreated back to my truck and turned the key in the ignition. Once hot air was finally blowing through the vents, and my face was feeling less like a death mask, I picked up my phone and dialed a friend.
“Kathy? It’s Mike.”
“Grasshopper! Long time, no speak.”
Kathy Frost had been my field training officer and sergeant when I joined the Warden Service. For years she had headed all of the Warden Service’s K-9 teams, until she was forced to take early retirement due to injuries she’d sustained from a gunshot. She still helped us out during search-and-rescue operations, directing the efforts of dog teams to cover the most ground in the fastest amount of time. No one I’d ever met knew more about dogs than Kathy.
“How’s retirement?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of buying a metal detector. What does that tell you?”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Listen. What can you tell me about wolf dogs?”
“They’re illegal to possess without a permit.”
“I’m wondering how I can identify one.”
“You can’t,” she said. “Not by sight. I mean, you can look for certain features—long legs, slanted eyes, small ears—but you still might be looking at an animal that’s one part Siberian husky, one part Malinois. Breeders have gotten good at making fakes, since people will pay top dollar for an honest-to-Jesus timber wolf.”
“What’s top dollar?”
“Two grand for a high-content animal. Generally speaking, the more wolf DNA it has, the more expensive it is. Why do you want to know?”
“I’ve got a situation with some tweakers. I think they’re keeping a wolf dog, and I am going to have to confiscate it. I was hoping there was a way I could tell if it was the real thing or not.”
“The only way to know for certain is to do a lab test.”
“I know it’s been chasing deer,” I said. “It killed a yearling this morning.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. But it gives you cause to take it to a shelter. They can test it for you.”
“What happens if the results come back positive—that it’s a high-content wolf dog?”
“Usually, the department would try to find someone to adopt it. But if yours killed a deer, it’ll probably be put down.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“Are you going to try wrangling the animal yourself?”