Deadline

1


            DARK, MOONLESS NIGHT, in the dog days of early August.

            A funky warm drizzle kept the world quiet and wet and close.

            D. Wayne Sharf slid across Winky Butterfield’s pasture like a greased weasel headed for a chicken house. He carried two heavy nylon leashes with choke-chain collars, two nylon muzzles with Velcro straps, and a center-cut pork chop.

            The target was Butterfield’s kennel, a chain-link enclosure in the backyard, where Butterfield kept his two black Labs, one young, one older. The pork chop would be used to make friends.

            D. Wayne was wearing camo, head to foot, which was no change: he always wore camo, head to foot. So did his children.

            His ex-wife, Truly, whom he still occasionally visited, wore various pieces of camo, depending on daily fashion demands—more at Walmart, less at Target. She also had eight pairs of camo underpants, size 4XL and 5XL, which she wore on a rotating basis: two each of Mossy Oak, Realtree, Legend, and God’s Country, which prompted D. Wayne to tell her one night, as he peeled them off, “This really is God’s country, know what I’m sayin’, honeybunch?”

            His new, alternative honeybunch wore black cotton, which she called “panties,” and which didn’t do much for D. Wayne. Just something hot about camo.

            A few thousand cells in the back of his brain were sifting through all of that as D. Wayne crossed a split-rail fence into Butterfield’s yard, and one of the dogs, the young one, barked twice. There were no lights in the house, and none came on. D. Wayne paused in his approach, watching, then slipped the pork chop out of its plastic bag. He sat for a couple of minutes, giving the dogs a chance to smell the meat; while he waited, his own odor caught up with him, a combination of sweat and whiskey-blend Copenhagen. If Butterfield had the nose of a deer or a wolf, he would have been worried.

            But Butterfield didn’t, and D. Wayne started moving again. He got to the kennel, where the dogs were waiting, slobbering like hounds . . . because they were hounds. He turned on the hunter’s red, low-illumination LED lights mounted in his hat brim, ripped the pork chop in half, held the pieces three feet apart, and pushed them through the chain link. The dogs were all over the meat: and while they were choking it down, he flipped the latch on the kennel gate and duckwalked inside.

            “Here you go, boys, good boys,” he muttered. The dogs came over to lick his face and look for more pork chop, the young dog prancing around him, and he slipped the choke collars over their heads, one at a time. The young one took the muzzle okay—the muzzle was meant to prevent barking, not biting—but the older one resisted, growled, and then barked, twice, three times. A light came on in the back of the Butterfield house.

            D. Wayne said, “Uh-oh,” dropped the big dog’s muzzle, and dragged the two dogs out of the kennel toward the fence. Again, the younger one came without much resistance at first, but the older one dug in. Another light came on, this one by the Butterfield side door, and D. Wayne said, “Shit,” and he picked up the bigger dog, two arms under its belly, and yanking the other one along on the leash, cleared the fence and headed across the pasture at an awkward trot.

            The side door opened on Butterfield’s house, and D. Wayne, having forgotten about the red LEDs on his hat brim, made the mistake of looking back. Butterfield was standing under the porch light, and saw him. Butterfield shouted, “Hey! Hey!” and “Carol, somebody’s took the dogs,” and then, improbably, he went back inside the house and D. Wayne thought for seven or eight seconds that he’d caught a break. His truck was only forty yards or so away now, and he was moving as fast as he could while carrying the bigger dog, which must’ve weighed eighty pounds.

            Then Butterfield reappeared and this time he was carrying a gun. He yelled again, “Hey! Hey!” and let off a half-dozen rounds, and D. Wayne said, “My gosh,” and threw the big dog through the back door of his truck topper and then hoisted the smaller dog up by his neck and threw him inside after the bigger one.