Deadline(156)
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JENNIFER HOUSER, of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, bought a J/27 sailboat and hired a very attractive instructor to teach her how to sail. His instruction was comprehensive, and she’s still sailing. “And now I know why they call it the cockpit,” she told a similarly aged lady from New York. She also began taking piano lessons, and has that photo of her mother in a silver frame on top of the baby grand. Her Spanish, which had been quite good already, got even better, and she was often mistaken for a native. BCA follow-up investigators came to believe that she’d been murdered by Kerns and dropped in the river, though Virgil insisted that she was on the run.
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AFTER DELIVERING D. Wayne Sharf to the county jail, Virgil took the yellow dog to the Buchanan County Humane Society. He had a little trouble getting the dog out of the truck, because the dog was large and didn’t want to get out. Virgil thought that the dog might even recognize the look of the Humane Society building, even though it had never been there, according to the young lady behind the counter.
“I’ve been here for four years,” she said, “and I would have remembered him. Nope, never been here.”
Virgil gave her a little history on the dog, who kept crowding closer and closer to his knee, and looking up at him with stricken eyes, and then the girl said, “Look, you gotta do what you gotta do, but that dog is your soul mate. You can tell by the way he’s already bonded to you. If you leave him with us, there’s probably a thirty percent chance he’ll eventually be put down.”
“Aw, man, I thought you guys place them all—”
“Impossible. We’ve always got a lot more dogs than we have people to adopt them, and he’s a big dog, and he’s probably four or five years old,” she said. “People usually want a younger dog.”
Back outside, Virgil said to the dog, “Get in the fuckin’ truck.”
The dog jumped into the truck, settled into the passenger seat, and hung its tongue out.
“I’m calling you That Fuckin’ Fido,” Virgil said, as he got in the driver’s seat.
The dog didn’t say anything, but he might have nodded, figuring he could change his name later, when they’d gotten the hell away from the Humane Society.
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VIRGIL WAS SCHEDULED to go home that night, but Johnson Johnson asked him to stop by Shanker’s for a Diet Coke, and when Virgil walked in, he found a hundred dog lovers crowded into the place, and they all sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” in his honor, backed by the band Dog Butt Plus Muddy, and Johnson hugged him three or four times, and Winky Butterfield gave him a gilded trophy with a dog on top of it and a blank plate under the dog.
“We didn’t have time to get it engraved with your name, but Johnson’s going to get it done, and he’ll send it to you,” Butterfield said. Virgil was intensely embarrassed, but agreed to have a beer or two, and eat some of the wedding-style cake, and a couple of attractive dog lovers asked him to dance, and he did, and then he danced some more, and when Johnson finally poured him into bed, back at the cabin, it was one o’clock in the morning.
“Don’t worry about a thing. I told Frankie what happened, and I did NOT mention your groupies,” Johnson said. “Lucky for you that you talked me out of being an alcoholic, or we’d both be drunk in a ditch somewhere.”
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VIRGIL LEFT TOWN the next morning with a yellow dog and a hangover, and Virgil found that the dog was an attentive listener who panted in all the right spots. He stopped at a bookstore in Rochester and bought a book on how to care for dogs, and how much to feed them, and then stopped at a store and bought a dog food bowl, a sack of kibble, and two pounds of ground round, and fed the dog, and walked it around until it pooped, got back in the truck and said to the dog, “I really can’t have a dog.”