Someday, my vivid thriller-writer’s imagination told me, the person on the other side of that knock would be a serial killer, coming to attack me. My logical mind told me that serial killers didn’t knock, but my vivid imagination would counter with the fact that thieves often did, just to see if someone was home.
Fortunately, the person waiting on my stoop wasn’t a serial killer or a thief.
It was Ike.
He was a big man with long, graying hair that showed his hippie roots. He slouched on a good day, but this evening, he was nearly bent in half.
He gave me a sheepish half-smile. “I don’t suppose I can ask you a question.”
“Sure,” I said. “Come on in.”
I stepped back and he walked in, careful to stay on the throw rug I put over the hardwood at the start of every rainy season. Even though we had been neighbors for more than fifteen years, we hardly went inside each other’s homes. I couldn’t remember the last time he had been in mine.
He looked at his mud-covered shoes as he said, “My daughter sent me over here. Seems Wicked is missing.”
His voice had the right combination of sincerity and loss, but he wasn’t meeting my gaze.
“Wicked stopped barking about eleven this morning,” I said.
Ike looked up, frowning at me much the way his elderly dog had when I stood in their driveway.
I told Ike the entire story, such as it was, leaving out, of course, the Goddess’s odd attack and her murping sounds, as well as my desire to see Wicked blood seeping into the muddy tire prints.
“A truck?” Ike repeated.
“I thought maybe it was you,” I said. “You know, that whole incident with the cat.”
He winced. “No one lets me forget that. I didn’t mean to hit the damn thing.”
“No one ever does,” I said, then realized I wasn’t being neighborly. “You want a beer?”
“I want an entire keg,” he said tiredly. Then he smiled at me. “But a bottle will do.”
I got him a Rogue Brewery Pale Ale from the fridge, then kicked out one of the dining room chairs. “Sit for a minute.”
“I’ll track all over,” he said.
“Who cares?” I said, catching myself before I added, I have a housekeeper who worries about such things. I had a lot more money than my neighbors — hell, these days, I had more money than the entire town — but I didn’t try to call attention to that.
Although it was hard not to notice in my maple and cherry kitchen, with the matching formal dining table, the brand new appliances, and every cooking gadget known to man lining the kitchen counters. Not that they saw those.
What they usually saw was my one and only toy. My late-model Jag, which I replaced each and every year.
He sat down and took a sip from the long-neck bottle.
“That goddamn dog,” he said. “If my karma determined that I had to run over only one animal with my truck, why did it have to be Roxy’s kitten? Why the hell couldn’t it have been Wicked?”
“If the neighborhood had known you were looking for volunteers...” I said, letting my words trail off.
He looked up at me, startled. Then he realized I was joking. He leaned against the table, resting his elbow against the tablecloth my housekeeper insisted on changing every Tuesday
“There were times I might’ve looked,” he said. “The Bastard” — that was his nickname for his daughter’s soon-to-be ex — “trained the little creep, or didn’t train it, as the case may be. Wicked loves my daughter and that baby, and will guard them with his little doggy life, but other than that, he isn’t a dog at all. He’s a goddamn menace. He doesn’t shut up, he pees all over everything, he tears up the furniture.”
“He’s still a puppy,” I said, not exactly sure why I was making excuses for a dog I hated.
“A puppy?” Ike said, sitting upright. “Are you kidding? Wicked is three years old. I’ve been trying to train him all month. It’s not working.”
Obviously, I nearly said, but didn’t. No sense in causing my neighbor more pain.
“I haven’t heard Wicked since that truck,” I said. “You’d think if he got injured or snuck into the woods, we’d hear him.”
“You’d think the entire town would hear him,” Ike said. “I’m hoping the little bastard ran off.”
The little bastard, trained by the Bastard. I had never put Ike’s language together before. He hated Wicked not just because he was an uncontrollable dog, but also because the dog represented an uncontrollable soon-to-be-ex son-in-law.
“If Wicked did run off,” I said, “he did so chasing that truck. Silently.”
“That dog isn’t quiet about anything,” Ike said. Then he paused for a moment before adding, “You thought I was driving that truck?”
I nodded.
His frown grew deeper. “Not many trucks sound like mine. Did you see it?”
“Nope,” I said, taking another sip of my ale. “I heard it. It sounded big and heavy, like yours does when it comes up the driveway. But you usually don’t peel out. In fact, the only time I ever heard you peel away down the driveway was—”
“The cat incident,” he said tiredly. “I know.”
He started to take a sip from his beer, and stopped.
“The Bastard,” he said.
“Hmmm?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the soon-to-be-ex or the little dog.
“The Bastard,” Ike said to me, slowly, like he was having a realization. “He used to peel.”
I sipped. Thought. Remembered.
He did peel. It was one of the noises I had gotten used to. Roxy had started dating the Bastard in high school. It became one of those neighborhood dramas, something everyone in Crest Hill subdivision talked about, since the Bastard came from a family of do-nothings on the wrong side of town.
In a town of seven thousand, the wrong side is pretty low-key. We don’t have murderers, thieves, or knife-wielding maniacs. Our do-nothings are well named. They’re freeloaders who try to live on county money without doing any work. If they do get a job, from an unsuspecting out-of-towner, they lose that job within the month.
The Bastard’s family was pretty notorious. Entire generations lived in a small trailer on an expensive lot near the ocean. They wouldn’t move, no matter how much developers offered them, and they wouldn’t work, either. Mostly, they sat outside — rain or shine — and drank, throwing their empties into an ever growing pile in a part of the yard that had once housed a driveway.
The Bastard had that bad-boy charm. At least, that was what fifteen-year-old Roxy had thought. She had been a straight-A student, and remained so, graduating at the top of her class, earning several partial scholarships — enough so that the Maizes could send her to the school of her choice in California.
The Bastard followed. By this point, he had dropped out of high school, lost three jobs, and had his first DUI. Yet for her, the charm remained.
For Ike, who complained about him every moment he got, the Bastard was a gigantic version of Wicked, peeing all over the neighborhood, then barking and yipping when anyone else got in his mangy little way.
When the Bastard followed Roxy to California, I stopped thinking about him.
“I thought he was still in California,” I said. That was what Stella had told me one morning when we met at the mailboxes, both of us picking up our rain-soaked copies of the Oregonian.
“He went to live with his mother in Vegas,” Ike said.
“Oh, jeez.” I didn’t even have to ask how that was working out. When you took do-nothings and gave them the opportunity to get rich quick for very little effort, they spent every dime they hadn’t earned on penny slots and the upcoming big win.