Instinct (14 page)

“Hello?” he called. Next door, he heard the dog bark a response. “Hello? Is your phone working?”

He heard no response and saw no life inside the messy living room. Whoever lived here was the kind of person who felt comfortable leaving plates of half-eaten food on the end table. They felt fine walking away from a scatter of newspapers on the couch next to a pair of tube socks. Tim saw the phone sitting on the side table. It was cordless. There would be no power for the base station.
 

The dog began barking again.
 

Tim exhaled. The festival or parade idea didn’t seem very likely. When everyone headed off to a big gathering, they didn’t often abandon their houses with the doors wide open. This was starting to feel like a place that Tim shouldn’t stay. He couldn’t just leave that dog in a locked house though. He would try one more thing.

Tim glanced around as he rushed between the houses. The back yard was fenced. Tim let himself in through the gate. He climbed the back porch and cupped his hands to the glass of the storm door. He knocked. When he heard no response, he tried the latch. The storm door opened, but the back door was locked. Through the glass he saw a yellow kitchen with dark, looming cabinetry. The appliances were old but clean. At least this wasn’t the house of another slob, like the neighbor. Past a china cabinet, he saw into the hall. Bright red streaks caught his eye. Something was scrawled on the wall. At first he thought it was a child’s handwriting. The letters were impossible to read. But they were too tall. No child could reach that high to make that symbol that looked like a lopsided smiley-face.
 

On the floor, just poking around the corner, Tim saw the edge of a shoe. He leaned to side and saw that the shoe was connected to an ankle. Tim pushed away from the house and ran to the gate.

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Around the front of the house, he didn’t slow as he leaped up onto the porch. He hit the door with his shoulder and regretted his momentum. The chain gave way much easier than he expected and Tim spilled into the house. The dog barked. He was big. Not super tall, like one of those comical Great Danes, standing on stilts for legs, but the dog was barrel-chested and solid. His ears were folded back and he barked again.
 

Tim saw the body.

The woman was laying in the hall. One hand was resting near her head, as if she’d pressed the back of her hand to her forehead before she’d fainted. Her other hand was in her stomach. Tim recoiled and then looked at the dog.
 

The dog couldn’t have done the damage he saw. If the dog had done that, his mouth and chest would have been covered in blood. This dog’s long, auburn hair looked clean and brushed. Tim glanced back at the woman, keeping his eyes to the periphery of the gore. He didn’t even see any paw prints in the blood.

Tim exhaled slowly and forced himself to look.

He saw the knife. It was red up to the hilt and leaning against the wall.
 

He saw the ropes of intestines. They spilled from the woman’s abdomen. Her left hand was reaching inside her ruined stomach, like she was looking for something in there. Her face was ageless in its agony. Based on her short hair, the pleats in her jeans, and her pink walking shoes, Tim guessed that the woman was at least forty, but the terror on her face made her look like a frightened child.
 

When he couldn’t stand to look at the gore for another second, Tim turned his eyes to the wall. Someone had used the woman’s blood to paint a mural of symbols there. They were nonsense characters of a foreign alphabet. Each was a different size. They extended down the hall towards the yellow kitchen that Tim had seen from the back porch. Based on the bloody footprints on the floor, Tim was ready to identify the artist. The woman must have made the mural herself. There were no other prints leading away from the scene.

Tim backed towards the door.

Out on the porch, Tim glanced at the house number. He whispered, “4508 Spencer. 4508 Spencer. 4508 Spencer.”

The dog pushed his way through the door and looked at Tim.

“You’re on your own, dog,” he said. I’m going to go find help.

Tim broke into a run when he got to the sidewalk. There were no pesky strollers today. Maybe the stroller people had all spilled their guts in their hallways, like the pleated-jeans woman. The thought made Tim’s stomach flip.
 

He looked down as the dog pulled alongside him. Tim ran faster, hoping to leave the dog behind, but the dog accelerated too. At the end of the block, Tim turned towards his own building. He ran down the middle of the street and veered around the double-parked car. It was still running.
 

At the front door of his apartment, Tim used his lobby key and squeezed through a narrow gap, to keep the dog outside. The dog barked once and then sat down. Tim waved through the glass and turned towards the stairs.

He forgot about his prohibition on using the railing as he climbed. He found his apartment as he’d left it. It was stuffy, and smelled of roasting bird. Aside from that, everything was normal in there. The digital clock next to the window was dark, but that was the only signal that anything was out of the ordinary. Tim went to the keyring for his car keys and saw the potatoes on the cutting board. They were already turning brown. He could deal with them later. He had a suicide to report, and he had yet to find a single living person to report it to.

Tim locked his apartment behind him and ran down the stairs.
 

He had his wallet, his keys, and his jacket. He couldn’t think of anything else he absolutely needed. It occurred to him for the first time that he had never checked the pulse of the woman on the floor. He’d just assumed that she was dead. How could someone live with an injury like that, or with all that blood spilled on the walls and floor? He couldn’t even imagine how she’d stayed upright long enough to scrawl the symbols. She had sliced right through all that muscle—what had kept her standing?

Tim shook his head to clear the image as he pushed through the back door for the second time that day. He jogged to the parking area and hit the button on his keyring to unlock his doors. The lights of his Volkswagen flashed and Tim slipped inside. Everything was perfect inside the tight little car. He kept it neat as a pin inside.

Tim started to back up and then stabbed the brakes. The dog was back there. He backed up slowly and the dog graciously moved to the side to let him turn into the aisle. Tim rolled forward and realized he wasn’t going to make it far. There was a long, blue sedan blocking the end of the row. He turned in his seat. Behind the dog, at the other end of the lot, a concrete wall held back a grassy hill. He was boxed in.
 

Tim pulled the brake and left the car running as he got out.

The sedan’s door was open. There were no keys in the ignition and it was in park. Tim cocked his head and tried to understand. Somehow the driver had backed up out of their spot, blocked the row, and then decided to shut off the car and leave? It didn’t make sense.

He sighed as he looked up at the sky.
 

The dog appeared at his side.

“Plan B,” Tim said.

He took the time to pull his car back into its spot. He didn’t want to be the next person blocking the aisle when the sedan was finally moved or towed. He locked it up and flipped his keys over to his bike lock. The bikes were parked in a room next to the building’s utility room. The door was always open, that’s why Tim kept his bike locked to the rack. The room was dark. Tim propped open the door with a rock and found his bike. It took him several minutes to puzzle out the lock in the dark. He rolled the bike outside on its back tire and carried the front. He assembled it out in the light and kicked the rock away.

“Stay here,” he said to the dog. “Or go home. I don’t want you to get caught up in my spokes or something.”

The dog didn’t obey. As Tim jumped the curb to get out to Chatham Street, the dog was right there, bounding down the pavement. He was headed for the hospital when he saw the answer he didn’t know he was looking for. The police station was an enormous building made of gray stone. It sat on the corner, with a parking garage around the other side and a church next door. Tim rolled to a stop in front of the steps. There was nothing to lock his bike to except a “No Parking” sign. He didn’t bother to remove the front wheel. He just looped the lock around the frame and called it good.

“No dogs allowed, sorry,” he said. The dog was panting from the run. With his mouth open like that, he looked like he was smiling. Tim shook his head and climbed the steps. There were eleven stone steps leading up to the arched doors. The building almost looked like a church. It had a lot in common with the building next door.

The big blue and white letters reading, “POLICE,” over the door were unambiguous. Tim pushed open the door.
 

The lobby had a mellow glow from the high windows that ran down the side wall. Tim stood, listening, while the door closed slowly on its pneumatic hinge behind him. The door creaked and Tim spun to see the door opening again. He saw the dog’s face press through gap, forcing the door open with his shoulder.
 

“You’re going to be in trouble,” he whispered.

Tim advanced to the front desk. It ran the length of the lobby and had one of those flip-up portions of counter to let an officer come around. It didn’t look like this lobby did much business. Tim figured they must lead the criminals in through another door, or maybe they had a handicap entrance around the side where most people came in. There was a tall chair behind the center of the desk. That would be where an officer should sit, to answer questions like the ones Tim had. This would be the officer in charge of keeping the peace and settling jangled nerves, like the ones Tim had.

The place was empty except for Tim and the dog. There wasn’t even a pile of woman guts to welcome him to the station.
 

The dog whined. Tim turned to look at him. The whine turned into a growl. Tim followed the dog’s eyes to the windows that ran along the ceiling. The ones on the left showed a taller building across the street—it was a bank, if Tim remembered correctly—but the ones on the right showed nothing but blue sky.
 

“What are you…?” Tim started to ask. He stopped his question when the shadow passed over the window. The dog stopped growling at the same time. The next sound Tim heard was the scrabble of the dog’s toenails as it tried to run on the tile floor. The dog finally got traction and took off like a shot for the gap in the counter where the folded-down door separated the lobby from the official police area. The dog disappeared around the counter.

Tim’s eyes returned to the window when the shadow passed again. He saw nothing but blue, but something had blocked the light. He saw one of the dog’s eyes appear around the corner of the counter, and saw the way the dog’s ear was cocked.
 

Tim stopped trying to figure out the dog’s motivation and decided to follow his lead. Tim ran for the gap in the counter. Behind him, he heard the door creak once more as something pushed its way inside the police station lobby.

CHAPTER 10: NEW HAMPSHIRE

W
ITH
THE
GARAGE
DOOR
open, the headlights of the van lit up the interior. The bright lights seemed to insist on immediate action. Everyone was impatient to act.

“No,” Pete said. “I’m not going anywhere with him. He was armed and hunting us. He can rot here.”

“He never even shot at us,” Lisa said. “You’re sentencing him to death because he was carrying guns? We had a gun in the old van.”

“He said he was going to kill Robby,” Pete said.
 

“He said if we came closer, he would kill Robby. He might have just been frightened,” Lisa said.

“Are you serious?” Romie asked. “You’re defending this guy? Robby—did he intend to kill you?”

Robby nodded. “Yes. He has wanted to kill me for a long time.”

“Case closed,” Romie said. “We’ll leave him here.” She turned towards their new van.

“I think we should bring him with us,” Robby said.
 

“You too?” Romie asked. “You’re both crazy. Just because life is scarce, doesn’t mean that it’s all worth defending. This guy is crazy and wanted to attack us. We have enough things in our lives that are trying to kill us. The last thing we need is one more threat that we’re dragging along with us. Not to mention, he’s seriously injured.” Romie moved to within striking distance of Lyle as she talked. She looked like she might be in the mood to injure him some more.

“He might know something that we don’t,” Robby said. “He might have seen something or experienced something that can inform us.”

“And he’s incapacitated,” Lisa said. “He’s no threat to us now.”