“Mind sending your pictures in while I look up your old flame, or is that too much to ask? I don’t know how long this will take. It took me two days to get clearance on the Amblers. Do you want the whole thing—pictures, documentation?”
“No. Just a resume. And a phone number.”
She cut out, still not saying goodbye. If phones still had receivers, Ramirez would be a great one for hanging up on people. I highwired the vidcam footage and the eisenstadts in to the paper and then fed the eisenstadt cartridge into the developer. I was more than a little curious about what kind of pictures it would take, in spite of the fact that it was trying to do me out of a job.
At least it used high-res film and not some damn two hundred thousand-pixel TV substitute. I didn’t believe it could compose, and I doubted if the eisenstadt would be able to do foreground-background either, but it might, under certain circumstances, get a picture I couldn’t.
The doorbell rang. I answered the door. A lanky young man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggies was standing on the front step, and there was another man in a Society uniform out in the driveway.
“Mr. McCombe?” he said, extending a hand. “Jim Hunter. Humane Society.”
I don’t know what I’d expected—that they wouldn’t bother to trace the call? That they’d let somebody get away with leaving a dead animal on the road?
“I just wanted to stop by and thank you on behalf of the Society for phoning in that report on the jackal. Can I come in?”
He smiled, an open, friendly, smug smile, as if he expected me to be stupid enough to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and slam the screen door on his hand.
“Just doing my duty,” I said, smiling back at him.
“Well, we really appreciate responsible citizens like you. It makes our job a whole lot easier.” He pulled a folded readout from his shirt pocket. “I just need to double-check a couple of things. You’re a reporter for Sun-co, is that right?”
“Photo-journalist,” I said.
“And the Hitori you were driving belongs to the paper?”
I nodded.
“It has a phone. Why didn’t you use it to make the call?
The uniform was bending over the Hitori.
“I didn’t realize it had a phone. The paper just bought the Hitoris. This is only the second time I’ve had one out.”
Since they knew the paper had had phones put in, they also knew what I’d just told them. I wondered where they’d gotten the info. Public phones were supposed to be tap-free, and if they’d read the license number off one of the cameras, they wouldn’t know who’d had the car unless they’d talked to Ramirez, and if they’d talked to her, she wouldn’t have been talking blithely about the last thing she needed being trouble with the Society.
“You didn’t know the car had a phone,” he said, “so you drove to—” He consulted the readout, somehow giving the impression he was taking notes. I’d have bet there was a taper in the pocket of that shirt. “—The 7-Eleven at McDowell and Fortieth Street, and made the call from there. Why didn’t you give the Society rep your name and address?”
“I was in a hurry,” I said. “I had two assignments to cover before noon, the second out in Scottsdale.”
“Which is why you didn’t render assistance to the animal either. Because you were in a hurry.”
You bastard, I thought. “No,” I said. “I didn’t render assistance because there wasn’t any assistance to be rendered. The—it was dead.”
“And how did you know that, Mr. McCombe?”
“There was blood coming out of its mouth,” I said.
I had thought that that was a good sign, that he wasn’t bleeding anywhere else. The blood had come out of Aberfan’s mouth when he tried to lift his head, just a little trickle, sinking into the hard-packed snow. It had stopped before we even got him into the car. “It’s all right, boy,” I told him. “We’ll be there in a minute.”
Katie started the jeep, killed it, started it again, backed it up to where she could turn around.
Aberfan lay limply across my lap, his tail against the rar shift. “Just lie still, boy,” I said. I patted his neck, was wet, and I raised my hand and looked the palm, afraid it was blood. It was only water from the melted snow. I dried his neck and the top of his head with the sleeve of my sweater.
“How far is it?” Katie said. She was clutching the steering wheel with both hands and sitting stiffly forward in the seat. The windshield wipers flipped back and forth, trying to keep up with the snow.
“About five miles,” I said, and she stepped on the gas pedal and then let up on it again as we began to skid. “On the right side of the highway.”
Aberfan raised his head off my lap and looked at me. His gums were gray, and he was panting, but I couldn’t see any more blood. He tried to lick my hand. “You’ll make it, Aberfan,” I said. “You made it before, remember?”
“But you didn’t get out of the car and go check, to make sure it was dead?” Hunter said.
“No.”
“And you don’t have any idea who hit the jackal?” he said, and made it sound like the accusation it was.
“No.”
He glanced back at the uniform, who had moved around the car to the other side. “Whew,” Hunter said, shaking his Hawaiian collar, “it’s like an oven out here. Mind if I come in?” which meant the uniform needed more privacy. Well, then, by all means, give him more privacy. The sooner he sprayed print-fix on the bumper and tires and peeled off the incriminating traces of jackal blood that weren’t there and stuck them in the evidence bags he was carrying in the pockets of that uniform, the sooner they’d leave. I opened the screen door wider.
“Oh, this is great,” Hunter said, still trying to generate a breeze with his collar. “These old adobe houses stay so cool.” He glanced around the room at the developer and the enlarger, the couch, the dry-mounted photographs on the wall. “You don’t have any idea who might nave hit the jackal?”
“I figure it was a tanker,” I said. “What else would be on Van Buren that time of morning?”
I was almost sure it had been a car or a small truck. A tanker would have left the jackal a spot on the pavement. But a tanker would get a license suspension and two weeks of having to run water into Santa Fe instead of Phoenix, and probably not that. Rumor at the paper had it the Society was in the water board’s pocket. If it was a car, on the other hand, the Society would take away the car and stick its driver with a prison sentence. “They’re all trying to beat the cameras,” I said. “The tanker probably didn’t even know it’d hit it.”
“What?” he said.
“I said, it had to be a tanker. There isn’t anything else on Van Buren during rush hour.”
I expected him to say, “Except for you,” but he didn’t. He wasn’t even listening. “Is this your dog?” he said.
He was looking at the photograph of Perdita. “No,” I said. “That was my grandmother’s dog.”
“What is it?”
A nasty little beast. And when it died of the newnarvo, my grandmother had cried like a baby. “A chihuahua.” He looked around at the other walls. “Did you take all these pictures of dogs?” His whole manner had changed, taking on a politeness that made me realize just how insolent he had intended to be before. The one on the road wasn’t the only jackal around.
“Some of them,” I said. He was looking at the photograph next to it. “I didn’t take that one.”
“I know what this one is,” he said, pointing at it. “It’s a boxer, right?”
“An English bulldog,” I said.
“Oh, right. Weren’t those the ones that were exterminated? For being vicious?”
“No,” I said.
He moved on to the picture over the developer, like a tourist in a museum. “I bet you didn’t take this one either,” he said, pointing at the high shoes, the old-fashioned hat on the stout old woman holding the dogs in her arms.