The dog run occupied most of the back yard. Garreth pushed open the gate and walked inside. “Kennel up, guys.” When the alpha paused again at Loxton’s curses, Garreth raised his voice. “Kennel up!”
The dogs followed him in. He gave them a last hurried pat, backed out, and latched the gate tight. Then sprinted for the front door desperately wondering how to enter the house. Maybe stand at the door and shout in asking if they needed him?
To his relief, he dodged the bullet. Duncan was dragging a cursing cuffed male down the front steps, Loxton’s red face and eyes squeezed tight in pain testifying he had received the pepper spray Duncan could not use on the dogs. “You’ve blinded me you fucking bastard! I’ll sue you. I’ll have your badge for killing my dogs!”
On the porch Nat struggled with the victim, who despite a bloody nose, swelling eyes, and bruises forming on her throat, was trying to claw at Nat’s eyes. She had connected once. Three scratches crossed one of his cheeks.
“Let me go you nazi bastard! I’ll kill you!” She tried to kick him. “Tom, Tom baby! I love you! Let him go! Don’t hurt him! He hasn’t done anything wrong! It was my fault!”
Garreth leaped onto the porch and behind Nat. Did the woman still have enough vision to see him? Could he even get her attention in her hysteria?
Before he could try, she suddenly ran out of steam and sank to a sobbing heap on the steps. “My fault. I just upset him. I know better. Please don’t hurt him.”
Duncan, meanwhile, had Loxton almost to his patrol car. “You’re not blinded and you know it. We didn’t kill your fucking dogs, either!” He shoved Loxton onto the edge of the rear seat and brought a bottle of water from the trunk. “Look up and open your eyes!” And poured the water into Loxton’s eyes to wash out the pepper spray.
He had finished and was pushing Loxton the rest of the way into the back seat, when a Chevy Malibu wagon pulled up behind him.
Chief Danzig climbed out and assessed the scene. “I take it we lucked out and the dogs weren’t loose.”
“Oh yeah they were,” Duncan said, “and ready to eat us alive…until the California Kid here worked some kind of voodoo that turned them into pussycats.”
Danzig started. “You’re joking.”
A chorus of neighbor voices swore to the story.
He eyed Garreth in amazement. “No one but Loxton has ever been able to control his dogs.”
Garreth shrugged in pretended modesty. “Dogs like me.” Or he had been damn lucky.
“You’re full of surprises.” Danzig turned to Nat, who had the wife on her feet again, still sobbing, and was steering her down the sidewalk. “You about to take her to the hospital?” At Nat’s nod, he said, “Then I’m stealing your ride-along. Hop in, Mikaelian, and let’s talk.”
Not immediately, however. Danzig drove in silence, pulling finally into a parking area in Pioneer Park. Still saying nothing, he led the way down the sidewalk and over a swinging bridge to an artificial island created by a loop of the Saline River. They sat on the steps of the bandstand in the middle of the island, where Danzig lit a thin cigar from a box in his jacket pocket. The sweet smoke curled around Garreth, mixed with Danzig’s blood scent.
“Do you want a job here?”
Shades of Phil Mikaelian, cutting to the chase. And as with his father, Garreth decided to answer in kind. “I already have a job back home.”
“Which I understand you have reservations about.” Danzig took a puff. “Yet here you’ve demonstrated yourself a capable officer, so…what’s the story?”
“Didn’t Nat tell you?”
“Let me hear it from you.”
Always be straight with him, Nat had said. Okay. Leaving out only mention of vampires and his real reason for being here, Garreth told Danzig everything…from Lane’s attack to Harry’s shooting. Danzig listened without comment to the end, smoking his cigar and leaning back against a post supporting the bandstand roof.
With the cigar smoked down to its plastic mouthpiece, he ground out the butt on the steps and dropped it in his pocket. “Assuming you’re right about trust of you being forever tainted out there, which I’m not convinced is the case, what’s holding you back from taking a job where you have a clean slate? The admittedly big hit in salary? Reluctance to let go of the familiar? Trying to make family and friends understand why you’d trade a Cadillac department for a Go-cart?” He smiled wryly. “I ran into that, taking this job. From my wife, too, at first, though now she’s glad we’re here.”
“I never thought about salary,” Garreth said. “The rest, yes.” But he might as well confess the strongest reason. “At Loxton’s, when I knew Nat and Duncan were having to fight the wife as well as Loxton and thought they might need me inside, I couldn’t even think of trying to go through the back door. They didn’t need me but what if they had? Can this department risk me freezing up again at a door?”
Danzig eyed him. “Are you going to let fear cripple you and keep you from a job it seems to me you enjoy?”
If only there were a way to ensure entry into dwellings when he needed to be there. Maybe there was, he thought suddenly. What if he volunteered to conduct free home security checks for everyone in town. Use his own time to do it, even when it meant suffering daylight. It would be good public relations for the department, good for the homeowners, and good for an invitation in everywhere.
Danzig’s brows rose. “Did I just see a light go on over your head?”
Why not answer. “Thinking about going into homes gave me a public relations idea.”
Danzig listened to it, and smiled. “That sounds like a yes, you want the job.” He sobered. “After dealing with Hepner and Loxton I don’t have to tell you this job is just as hazardous as in a city, but you ought to know it can be worse. Remember the Clutter murders in Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood? Those were here in Kansas. We also had a pair of spree killers named York and Latham come through in 1959. They were tried and convicted over in Russell. We’re on the drug traffic pipeline and almost every year there’s a highway patrol trooper killed making a routine stop on 1-70. Sometimes there isn’t much backup.”
“Nat’s told me.”
Danzig stood and stretched. “I also want to tell you if you do prove psycho and present a danger to the your fellow officers, I’ll shoot you down like a mad dog. Come in Monday, then, and fill out an application and we’ll go from there.”
8
“From there” launched an intense two weeks…applying, being fingerprinted to prove he was who he claimed, sliding through a physical with a Dr. Staab tut-tutting over the usual low blood pressure and heart rate, hypnotizing a lab tech into reading normal values in the blood work, being tested for a Kansas drivers license, interviewing with the mayor and city council. No one hires on to a new department in two weeks, Garreth would have thought, but they seemed to be fast-tracking him, as if afraid of him changing his mind. They apparently considered his records from the SFPD enough of a background investigation.
Every night he continued riding along with Nat, learning the radio codes the department used, memorizing the town and people. He saw how the cruise traffic changed Fridays when the Baumen Timberwolves had home games. Sparse early — everyone went to the games — it ramped up afterward, game-goers howling and waving banners as they circled up and down Kansas. Especially when Baumen won, Nat said.
Riding along, he wangled invitations into homes when possible, and learned to recognize the voices of various sheriff departments’ personnel on the radio. Including a Trego County dispatcher named Lila, with whom their own night dispatcher Doris Schoning, though thin as Sue Ann was plump, exchanged recipes in the wee hours. After the shift he studied the Kansas Criminal Code and Vehicle Code until dawn.