If he got to me and there was no choice, well, then there was no choice.
But what if it wasn’t Butch?
A lot of this stuff was passing through my mind in the few seconds it took the dog to race down the tunnel. I had learned how to handle a dog in a death struggle in the Corps. In boot they’d given us a chance against a few extremely well-trained German shepherds; an eight-man squad, and we’d all lost badly.
Hypothetically, the trick was to feed the dog your passive forearm, then wrap your other around its neck and push, effectively breaking the dog’s neck. The instructor said that it usually worked, unless the dog was large and powerful, in which case his jaws could break the proffered arm, making it doubly difficult to concentrate on step two. He also said that if the dog was trained properly it would leap for the arm but then at the last instant go underneath and clamp its jaws around your throat.
A recruit had asked what you did at that point, and the instructor said he’d heard that if you stick a finger in the attacking dog’s anus, the animal would break off the attack. Intrasquad consensus was that you’d have just as good a chance if you stuck the digit up your own asshole.
I set my feet and kept the butt of the .45 ready to bring down on the dog’s head.
I could see him plainly now, but it was impossible to tell which one it was. He looked like he meant business though. I braced my legs for the impact and then suddenly remembered the only other weapon I had at hand—my voice.
Just as he was shortening his stride to time a leap, I yelled. “Butch, bad dog! Down!”
It was as if someone had cut off the fuel, and he landed at my feet a little clumsily. His head was between his paws as he looked up at me with the glow of the flashlight in his eyes. He wagged his tail in supplication, just a bit, and then was motionless.
“Good boy.” His head rose. “C’mere.” He stood and turned, sitting his behind on my boots. “Good boy, good boy.” I ruffled his ears, stroking the silky hair at the back of his neck, and remembered the biscuits that Larry had given me at the drive-through. I pulled one out and gave it to him. That left me with another biscuit for Sundance, an item likely to be as helpful as an accordion on an elk hunt.
With the experiences of the last few months, I had to remember to carry an entire assortment of animal treats with me. “Good boy, good boy.”
I started down the tunnel again, this time with a wagging companion. I didn’t think I could get him to stay, so I let him tag along, figuring that I could close the door at the end of the tunnel to keep him from joining Sundance if Gina put him on me.
When I got to the end, I could see that the snow had crept in the doorway and held the door open a few inches. I looked down at my companion, still wagging. “This is as far as you go, buddy.”
I buttoned my sheepskin coat, flipped up the collar, and pulled down my hat. I wedged the door back far enough to get a leg through and just hoped that Gina wasn’t waiting on the other side with the .32 pistol. It was dark, and the darting snowflakes stung.
I dropped my face down into my coat and tried not to think about how my skin already stung, my foot already hurt, and about the bite wound on my left cheek. Butch had tried to follow after me, but I brushed him back with my boot and shoved the cellar door closed. I again figured if he got together with Sundance and Gina, he was more likely to run with the pack.
I turned into the night and wondered where my pack was.
Visibility was no more than twenty feet. I looked around for prints, but the gusts had filled anything that was out here. The wind was coming straight out of the North Pole, and there were no stars or moon.
I looked toward the ridge in hopes of seeing something that might indicate that she’d gone that way, but there was nothing but drifts, running like shallow sea waves toward the southeast. I looked toward the gated walkway that led to the quarry, but there was nothing there either.
She had to be after the tow trucks. They were solid and had four-wheel drive and weren’t blocked in by my three-quarter-ton. Had to be.
I postholed my way toward the junkyard below, aware that if I went in the wrong direction, I could take a seventy-five-foot header. The wind had scoured the edge of the cliff, and the pathway became more evident as I got to the gate, which was swinging freely in the wind. I could see boot prints now and figured I should move as quickly as I could, since there was no way Gina would stay out in this weather any longer than absolutely needed. If she was going for the tow trucks, she’d be going for them fast.
It was easier going downhill, and the wind wasn’t as bad inside the quarry. The snow had been accumulating with a vengeance and was about two feet deep in the junkyard itself, but at least the visibility had improved to the point where I could now see about thirty feet, which was the length of one of those behemoths they made back in the forties and fifties.
It was easy to feel small and alone in the muffled quiet of the snow amid all that dead hardware.
It was hard enough for me with my long legs to move quickly in the deep drifts, and I wondered about the desperation that must have forced Gina to try. I thought I saw something ahead and stopped by a ’66 Belvedere with a Buick stacked on top of it and a Ford sedan on top of that. It was only when the ricochet of a .32 slug caromed off the quarter panel of the Plymouth that I became really sure.
I jumped back to the rear of the coupe with all the agility of a circus bear and peered around the taillight. “Gina, it’s the sheriff. There isn’t anywhere to go. I’ve got people on the way and they’re going to block off the gate, so you better just give it up now!” I hoped the part about the people was true.
My answer was another round from the .32, which disappeared somewhere behind me, and the barking of the dog.
I figured I’d flank her and continue down the next row and try and cut her off before she got to the trucks. I high-stepped to my right and hoped she and the dog hadn’t had the same idea as I made my way along the other side of the car tower. I tried to remember how many rows there were before the main thoroughfare that held the office and the straight shot to the gate and was thinking three before I hit the turn of the century in motor vehicle manufacture and crossed the road.
I hurried through the seventies and the eighties, and was just making it to the nineties when I thought I saw something ahead again.
It was smaller than me and, more important, it wasn’t standing upright.
I stood there breathing heavily, most of my energy drained from slogging through the snow, and waited. That primordial stem at the back of my brain shot a jolt through me, the same jolt that it’d sent through my ancestors’ brains for a couple hundred thousand years, the jolt that told you something was coming for you and you were too far from the safety of the trees.
He knew where I was but was waiting to see if I knew where he was.
The hackles rose between his shoulders, and the sound that resounded there had nothing to do with civilization. He walked on his paws with the shape of his own savagery: suspicious, hostile, and deadly, with yellow eyes as still as a snake’s.
“Easy.”
He didn’t hesitate for an instant, and it was almost as if my speaking to him had weakened my position on the food chain. My voice went out into the distance like a match dropped in the snow.
I could easily see the great, gapping jaws now and the saliva dripping from his lips. He lumbered in the snow on the first few steps but that almost instantly changed into a gallop. He launched like a torpedo, and I had that sickening feeling that there wasn’t going to be any way to circumvent this. The dog’s mouth was like a tunnel full of teeth, and he was fast. I had dissuaded Butch but knew the results were going to be different this time.