“What is this, what happened here, what’s going on?” the host demanded. “I can’t make heads or tails out of what your raving lunatic over there is telling me.”
By “raving lunatic,” he meant Sammy.
“He’s not our raving lunatic,” Harry said.
“Yes he is,” Connie reminded Harry, “and you better go talk to him. I’ll handle this.”
She was half afraid that Harry — as painfully aware of their time limit as she was — might pull his revolver on the host and threaten to blow his teeth out the back of his head if he didn’t shut up and get inside. As much as she approved of Harry taking a more aggressive approach to certain problems, there was a proper time and place for aggression, and this was not it.
Harry went off to talk with Sammy.
Connie put one arm around the host’s shoulders and escorted him up the walkway to the front door of his restaurant, speaking in a soft but authoritative voice, informing him that she and Detective Lyon were in the middle of important and urgent police business, and sincerely assuring him that she would return to explain everything, even what might seem to him inexplicable, “just as soon as the ongoing situation is resolved.”
Considering that it was traditionally Harry’s job to calm and placate people, her job to upset them, she had a lot of success with the restaurateur. She had no intention of ever returning to explain anything whatsoever to him, and she had no idea how he thought she could explain people vanishing into thin air. But he calmed down, and she persuaded him to go inside his restaurant with the bodyguard-waiter who was standing in the doorway.
She checked the shrubbery but confirmed what she already knew: the dog was not hiding there any more. He was gone.
She joined Harry and Sammy on the sidewalk in time to hear the hobo say, “How should I know where he lives? He’s an alien, he’s a long way from his planet, he must have a spaceship hidden around here somewhere.”
More patiently than Connie expected, Harry said, “Forget that stuff, he’s no alien. He—”
A dog barked, startling them.
Connie spun around and saw the flop-eared mutt. He was uphill, just turning the corner at the south end of the block. Following him were a woman and a boy of about five.
As soon as the dog saw that he had gotten their attention, he snatched hold of one cuff of the boy’s jeans, and with his teeth impatiently pulled him along. After a couple of steps he let go, ran toward Connie, stopped halfway between his people and hers, barked at her, barked at the woman and boy, barked at Connie again, then just sat there looking left and right and left again, as if to say, Well, haven’t I done enough?
The woman and the boy appeared to be curious but frightened. The mother was attractive in a way, and the child was cute, neatly and cleanly dressed, but they both had the wary and haunted look of people who knew the streets too well.
Connie approached them slowly, with a smile. When she passed the dog, he got off his butt and padded along at her side, panting and grinning.
There was a quality of mystery and awe about the moment, and Connie knew that whatever connection they were about to make was going to mean life or death to her and Harry, maybe to all of them.
She had no idea what she was going to say to them until she was close enough to speak: “Have you had… also had… a strange experience lately?”
The woman blinked at her in surprise. “Strange experience? Oh, yes. Oh my, yes.”
PART THREE
A Scary Little Cottage in the Woods
Faraway in China,
the people sometimes say,
life is often bitter
and all too seldom gay.
Bitter as dragon tears,
great cascades of sorrow
flood down all the years,
drowning our tomorrows.
Faraway in China,
the people also say,
life is sometimes joyous
if all too often gray.
Although life is seasoned
with bitter dragon tears,
seasoning is just a spice
within our brew of years.
Bad times are only rice,
tears are one more flavor,
that gives us sustenance,
something we can savor.
SIX
1
Now they know.
He is a good dog, good dog, good.
They are all together now. The woman and the boy, the stinky man, the not-so-stinky man, and the woman without a boy. All of them smelling of the touch of the thing-that-will-kill-you, which is why he knew they had to be together.
They know it, too. They know why they are together. They stand in front of the people food place, talking to each other, talking fast, all excited, sometimes all talking at once, while the women and the boy and the not-so-stinky man are always sure to keep the stinky man up-wind from them.
They keep stooping down to pet him and scratch behind his ears and tell him he’s a good dog, good, and they say other nice things about him that he can’t really understand. This is the best. It is so good to be petted and scratched and liked by people who will, he is pretty sure, not set his fur on fire, and by people who do not have any cat smell on them, none.
Once, long after the little girl who called him Prince, there were some people who took him into their place and fed him and were nice to him, called him Max, but they had a cat. Big cat. Mean. The cat was called Fluffy. Max was nice to Fluffy. Max never once chased Fluffy. In those days Max never chased cats. Well, hardly ever. Some cats, he liked. But Fluffy did not like Max and did not want Max in the people place, so sometimes Fluffy stole Max’s food, and other times Fluffy peed in Max’s water bowl. During the day when the nice people were gone from their place to some other place, Max and Fluffy were left alone, and Fluffy would screech, all crazy and spitting, and scare Max and chase him around the place. Or jump off high things onto Max. Big cat. Screeching. Spitting. Crazy. So Max understood that it was Fluffy’s place, not Max’s and Fluffy’s place, just Fluffy’s, so he went away from the nice people and was just Fella again.
Ever since, he worries that when he finds nice people who want to take him into their place and feed him forever, they will have cat smell on them, and when he goes to their place with them and walks in the door with them, there will be Fluffy. Big. Mean. Crazy.
So now it is nice that none of these people has any cat smell, because if one of them wants to be a family with him, he will be safe, and he won’t have to worry about pee in his water bowl.
After a while, they are so excited talking to each other that they aren’t petting him so much and saying how good he is, so he gets bored. Yawns. Lies down. Might sleep. He is tired. Busy day, being a good dog.
But then he sees the people in the food place, looking out the windows of the food place. Interesting. At the windows, looking out. Looking at him.
Maybe they think he is cute.
Maybe they want to give him food.
Why wouldn’t they want to give him food?
So he gets up and pads to the food place. Head high. Prance a little. Wag the tail. They like that.