Cadaver Dog Page 5

  “All I’m saying is that the US government doesn’t torture its prisoners, until Abu Ghraib happens and then the truth is out. The NSA doesn’t keep track of your phone calls, until some contractor comes out and tells the papers that that’s exactly what they do. And the US wouldn’t develop a monster like this giant crimson wasp, until somebody calls them on it and they are forced to admit it.”

  Angie shook her head and turned off the dial. Did it really matter how they came to me? Maybe to NPR, and maybe to people like Dr. Saracen, but to her? All that mattered was finding them.

  Like the Santa Claus of dogs, she cradled a dozen toys in her arms. She propped open Murder’s kennel with her one hand, then dumped the pile of toys into Murder’s pen.

  “You find one you like, you let me know, buddy,” she told the disconsolate dog, who still had yet to touch his food.

  Angie tried everything. She ordered a new rubber stork with goofy eyeballs online, but when she presented it to Murder, he just kind of looked at it like it was day-old sushi. So she commanded him to sit, opened his mouth and shoved the stork in his mouth like it was a pill. Murder sat there not knowing what to do.

  Angie took him outside. The familiar box lay in the middle of the field. But when Angie commanded Murder to “Find buzz” her dog dropped the stork, turned tail, and ran back to the pen.

  Again and again she tried. Neither stuffed flamingos from Colorado City toy stores nor stuffed giraffes, which were at least yellow, worked with Murder.

  “Well, damnit, what is going to work?” she yelled in frustration. “You are the most stubborn cuss I have ever worked with!”

  Murder just stared at her helplessly.

  “I know!” Then, “Shut up!”

  Finally, she called in help. When Dr. Saracen picked up the phone, Angie said, “I can’t get Murder to work anymore, Henry. I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried Kongs, I’ve tried treats, I’ve tried rubber chickens, I’ve even tried a stuffed flamingo from Colorado City. Nothing works!”

  “I don’t understand, Ms. Graves.”

  “Murder was doing great, and then the first time I really tested him on a night hunt, double-blind, and I go and screw things up. I’ve been up and down that trail a hundred times and I haven’t found anything. Not even in the creek. You set me sailing down this little river. You have to bail me out.”

  “Okay,” he said credulously. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need a chicken, a stuffed chicken. Not a real animal with taxidermy done to it, but a toy, like a kid’s plaything. It needs to be bright yellow with a white breast and like neon red beak. I have tried Amazon, I have tried Wal-Mart, I just can’t find it, and Murder won’t work without the chicken. Do you understand now, Henry?”

  “You need a chicken.”

  “I need a chicken.”

  “And I’m going to ignore for now all that stuff about murder and trust you. I don’t want you to worry. I will get my people on it.”

  “Thank you.” Angie ended her call and took a deep breath. She wished there was some chocolate in the house.

  With a doleful dog and her father’s words echoing inside her, Angie immersed herself in finishing many of her other dogs. She flew Hank and Cash out to New York City. She traveled with them so that she could demonstrate the techniques needed to work the bomb-sniffing dogs. She flew back to Colorado in time to turn around and fly back to New York City with the forensics dog. Then she spent a week working with the arson dog before driving him home to North Dakota and “Scuba” the golden retriever back to his parents in Colorado City.

  She also finally went and got her blood drawn for Hepatitis C and AIDS testing. She hadn’t felt any symptoms so she was ignoring them, but the hospital had called three times to remind her to get her blood drawn.

  She spent a few days working on the gun dog. Bama retrieved well, clearly loved bringing back birds, and did not drop the bird from her mouth. She showed hardly any dropoff from the last time Angie had worked with her steadily. Bama, like many retrievers, did have a love for running pell-mell and forgetting to retrieve, so Angie set up some scenarios of increasing difficulty that had the dog running through brush. The dog quickly focused on her game. After a few days of full scenarios bird hunting with her dad, Bama was ready to certify. Angie returned her to the owners and made arrangements to meet them and Bama at a gun dog certification.

  The evening after returning Bama, she went into the barn. Despite the heat, the inside of the barn felt cold. She had no dogs in except her own. On these rare occasions, she often let her dogs come inside the house with her. Waylon, Darcy, and Lizzy came eagerly and paraded around her. She let them in the house, and they fanned out in full-on scrounge mode, searching for particles of pizza that had fallen into tiny crevices unseen except by a dog’s nose.

  Angie kept the door open and looked across the lawn to the barn. Murder still hadn’t come. She started walking out, when she noticed the black and blue shadow emerging from the open barn door. Murder, moped as he walked, head down, with little energy and a small tail wag.

  Angie kneeled down in front of Murder and hugged him. She could still feel the scars in his hide, and she felt that pull that made her wish she could find out about his past. What kind of life did this dog have before she met him? What boulders did he strike in the river of life before some eddy dropped him into her own currents?

  Murder licked Angie’s ear.

  Two days later the Shovelhead surfed a wave of dirt up her driveway. Henry Jameson Saracen, PhD, looked like a member of an outlaw biker gang with his faded black leather, boots, and jeans. As he cut the engine, Angie walked up, Waylon and two other Labradors following beside her.

  “For a man who likes the straight-forwardness of bugs, you have a duality to you, Henry.”

  “I’ve always enjoyed looking into the dark shadows where few others dare. I think as a person training a dog to hunt zombies, you would understand.”

  “I understand turning a need into a line of work.”

  “Well said. Now, I’m not here to banter about our respective idiosyncrasies, I wanted to stop by and give you something.”

  “Please be a chicken. Please be a chicken.”

  Dr. Saracen waved his finger at her. “Now, I want you to understand that I had two interns set aside their studies into Africanized bee brain morphology to spend the rest of their week searching for toy chickens.”

  “I ran out of options,” Angie said.

  “No, you were right. I set you on this path, and it wouldn’t be fair to not assist.” He opened one of the satchels. It was filled to the brim with stuffed toy chickens, all with shiny red beaks, bright yellow bodies, and white bellies.

  “Lucky for you one of my interns has an uncle who is a stuffed animal aficionado. The less we know about his eccentricities, I think, the better.”

  “Murder,” Angie called toward the back of the house.

  The black and blue dog with part of one ear missing loped around the corner.

  “What a strange beast,” Dr. Saracen commented. “And you call him Murder?”

  “I found him in the road, half-dead. I usually don’t take in strays, but something about him just caught my eye. He was found−”

  “Under a flock of ravens, hence the name,” Dr. Saracen finished for her. He watched the dog come up to them. Murder didn’t quite look like a Labrador, but didn’t quite look like any other kind of dog either.

  At the sight of the chickens, Murder sprinted, tail wagging, to the bike. Angie saw the inevitable happening and tried to hold one of the chickens away from the Shovelhead. Murder ignored her and plowed through them both, jamming his paws onto the bike. The bike fought stiffly against the dog, but as his head plunged into the bag of chickens, Murder’s weight pushed the bike off balance. Dr. Saracen tried helplessly to keep it upright. A happy Murder sifted through the chickens, grabbed one from the very bottom, and yanked it out of the pouch. While Angie apologized and Dr. Saracen pulled his bike u
pright, Murder trotted away, his feet barely touching the ground with his shoulders high and his head arched.

  “Well, I think this calls for a drink,” Dr. Saracen said once he got his bike back up. “What do you have?”

  Angie grabbed two beers from her refrigerator. She had two older rockers on her porch, hand-me-downs from her parents. Dr. Saracen was already sitting in one when she brought him a bottle. He had pushed the rockers almost against the outer wall to keep them in the shade and out of the summer sunlight. He was rubbing Waylon behind the ears and watching Murder pull the stuffing out of the toy chicken. He stopped rubbing Waylon to take the bottle that Angie offered.

  He swallowed some of the drink and savored its coolness. “You never know how hot it is in the summer until you drive a cycle outside. You have beautiful property up here. It must be wonderful to have a home up in the pines away from it all.”

  “Fifty two acres. I border a national park on two sides, and my father on the other. He gave me these fifty two when I told him I wanted to train bomb dogs.”

  “The world needs people like you to do its dirty work, Ms. Graves.”

  “Call me Angie. You make me sound like an assassin.”

  “I don’t mean that at all. I mean−”

  “I know what you mean, Henry.” Angie drank from her bottle. Like Dr. Saracen, she appreciated the beer’s coolness as a kind of stop-gap between her and the encroaching heat. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s about these wasps. I’ve been trying to learn more about them, but it seems there is still a lot that nobody knows, certainly me included. How did they get to be so big? I remember seeing bugs that big in pictures of dinosaurs.”

  “You think maybe a crack opened in the ground near the Yellowstone caldera and these wasps, saved from extinction so many eons ago, have ventured forth to tear apart mankind?” Dr. Saracen asked.

  “Well, when you say it like that,” Angie said.

  “Don’t be shy. People have had weirder ideas. And large wasps are not uncommon. The Asian Giant Hornet can grow to be bigger than your index finger, and they have killed hundreds of people in Asia. But the best DNA tests show the crimson wasps to be descendants of emerald wasps, not Asian Giant Hornets. Why they are the size of your hand and why they prey on humans? We’re still working on that one. Now can I ask you a question?”

  “Go for it.”

  “How ready is your dog?”

  “That’s not an easy question to answer. When training a dog to find something you have to train an alert. It has to be something that will always mean ‘I found it.’ That takes time to develop. Murder, though, it’s weird. It is like he came with this chicken recall thing already trained in him. I’d like to think that maybe his previous owners had him taught to be a retrieving dog or something, but then why would they give him up? It makes no sense to me.”

  “Did you put up posters?”

  Angie half-smiled.

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said he was half-dead, Henry.”

  “I was coming back from Denver about two months ago. Denver had gone really badly, and I just wanted to get home. I’d been giving a presentation up there to a search group, and their projector wasn’t working, and there were problems with the room they had reserved. The presentation did fine, but I was tired. It is a long road to Denver. I just wanted to get home and crawl under the covers.”

  “I was driving out of Jack Calf, on the last stretch to home, when I saw what looked like a cloud of black birds. It was too early for them to be roosting. I couldn’t help but think of something my mother used to tell me about the ominous portents of ravens sitting and waiting to judge. I kept driving.”

  “Soon enough, though, I turned a bend through the pines and I see them all hopping on the ground and jumping from branch to branch. There was something on the road that they were picking at.”

  Dr. Saracen leaned forward in his chair. “My God, Angie.”

  “Whatever it was, it was all fur and bones. The honest truth: I didn’t know if it was a dog or a coyote or a bear cub. It was mammalian and seemed to have rib bones poking through the skin. I did what any driver would do. I aimed my truck for the next lane and avoided busting my tires on its carcass.

  “But something was bugging me about the whole thing. To see that many crows worked up over an animal on the road that wasn’t an elk or a deer or something, it just seemed kind of funny. Kind of strange. Do you believe in omens?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Neither am I. But if there are omens, and if people really can communicate with animals. Not just read their behavior but communicate concepts and ideas.”

  “You think they were talking to you.”

  “I can’t explain it, and if you were just about anyone else, I wouldn’t be saying this, but something was talking to me that day.”

  “What did it say?”

  Angie’s lips parted thinly, and she looked out into the distance, like she was somewhere else. “I checked my rearview mirror, and that’s when I saw the dead dog raise his head up off the asphalt. There was that head and the light and the crows jumping around him. I hit the brakes hard. I checked my rearview a second time to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. I wasn’t. His head was up and he was begging me to save his life. I’ve saved dogs before, took in strays, dropped them off at no-kill shelters. So I’ve seen some animals in some pretty effed-up shape. I’ve never seen one as far gone as he was.

  “I drove back and honked my horn. The crows cawed at me as they took flight. There were wings everywhere as they flew away. A tornado of crows. But then it was just me and the dead dog. I scooped him up. It was like holding a stocking full of sand in my arms. You could place your fingers between his ribs. I placed him on the floor of the truck beside me. He looked up at me thankfully. His eyes moved in his sockets independent of the rest of his body.

  “Usually when I pick up a dog, I take it straight to the vet. This was different though. I’ve been around death a lot, and this dog smelled of death. I didn’t know if he would survive the drive home. I couldn’t let him die in a vet’s office. I didn’t know a damn thing about this dog, but it had earned the right to go out on a quiet bed without a bunch of dogs barking at him.

  “I grabbed some old dog food from the glove compartment. I always have some around. I didn’t expect him to eat, but if he wanted to, it’d be there for him. He kind of nuzzled it a bit, but that was it. I drove home, pulled out an old throw-away pillow, and set up some water and food. When I went back to get him out of the pickup, half the food was gone, but he showed no improvement.

  “I set him up in my laundry room where he’d be closed off from me and the rest of the world. Where he could die in peace. I figured in the grand scheme of things, a laundry room was better than a highway as far as places to die. Then I checked on my other dogs and went to bed.”

  “The dead dog scared me awake me in the middle of the night to be let out. I had no idea how he got out of my laundry room. His water was gone, and his food bowl was empty. He still had very low energy, barely enough to wag his tail. But he went outside and peed, and then came back inside. I restocked his bowls and went to bed.”

  “The next morning, the dead dog was still alive, so I took him to the vet to be checked out. They did some assessments, gave him a drip, and then all we could do was wait. They needed a name to put on his cage. ‘Shadow’ was suggested because of his coloration. Also ‘One-Ear’ because by then his injuries had been assessed. But only one name seemed appropriate.”

  “Wow,” Dr. Saracen said. He patted Murder’s head. Murder wagged his tail.

  Angie took him by the haunches and turned him around. Murder glanced at her curiously. She pointed to scar tissue that was not so obvious until she pointed it out. “I don’t know where the scars on his muzzle came from, but these are all from the crows. So you see, I didn’t advertise this dog. There was no chip, and I didn�
�t expect one. He had been someone’s pet at one time. I don’t know what happened to not make him a pet anymore, but he had been out there in the wilderness for a long time.”

  “You did everything you could.”

  Angie took another swig and changed the subject. “We’ve been working for two, maybe three months. He needs more blind work. And he needs to work in rain and snow.”

  “So what you’re saying is−”

  “Murder’s a very special, very talented dog. He tracked down two zombies the first time I really took him into the field. But he has food distraction issues and God knows what else. He is a rescued mixed-breed dog, not a breed dog, which comes with certain assurances of personality and performance. If this was cadaver dog work, I wouldn’t certify him yet.”

  “Good. Because this isn’t cadaver dog work, and there are no certifications for finding crimson wasps.”

  “Where is all this coming from?”

  “Where it always comes from. Above. Word got out about what you are doing here. Animal Control wants your help. Everything they have done in the past has been about responding to calls. ‘There’s a zombie in my yard.’ That sort of thing. You and Murder would be on the front lines of preventative care, so to speak.”

  “He isn’t ready.”

  “He isn’t or you aren’t?”

  “Jesus, Henry. First you bring me gifts, then you insult me. What the hell?”

  Dr. Saracen leaned forward in his rocking chair.

  “Animal Control wants to see a demonstration of Murder at work in three weeks, or they are going to stick with a robot solution.”

  “Robots? Really? They have no heart for the work, Henry. They don’t wake up wanting to find a zombie like Murder does. Didn’t you say they aren’t prioritized for this line of work? They just clear an area.”

  “Animal Control isn’t giving us a choice in the matter. And it isn’t about a change in robot priorities. The director simply does not understand pursuing this endeavor (i.e., tracking a wasp to its burrow) unless we can first prove that Murder can track a wasp.”