Bongo said, “Looks like they moved them.”
One of the men said, “Those dogs . . . don’t know those dogs, but they look like they’re starving.”
The fence had a gate, but no lock. Virgil flipped the latch and they all filed inside. Two of the dogs tried to get away from them, backing away to the far edge of the fence, tails between their legs. The third one sidled toward them, licking his muzzle nervously, head down, tail between his legs. They were dogs of no identifiable breed: mutts. All three of them were about knee-high.
“We waited too long, we moved too slow,” somebody said.
“How’d they get them out? Looks like there were a lot of dogs here, and nobody’s gone out of here in the last week, with a truck big enough for a lot of dogs.”
“Took them out one or two at a time . . . people coming and going all the time. Somebody must’ve tipped them off that we were watching,” Bongo said.
“That doesn’t sound right,” Virgil said. “They knew somebody was watching, but a whole crew of professional meth dealers goes in anyway, and has no clue?”
“I want to know where they went, the dogs,” one of the men said. “What we need to do, is figure out who had them up here, and then beat the information out of him.”
Johnson said, “We know they were here. I say we send one guy back to the trucks with the three dogs we got, and then the rest of us walk back to the end of the valley. Maybe there’s more than one place.”
They decided to do that. The three dogs they found were leashed up and taken back down the hill, while the rest of them spread out over the hillside again and began walking. An hour later, tired, hot, and mosquito-bit, they walked down the hill to the spring.
Virgil said, “I’ll tell you what, boys. The feds heard the dogs up there yesterday afternoon, so I don’t know exactly how we missed them. But I’ll be working the road down here, starting today. I’ll find out what happened. I promise you. Pisses me off.”
“We’ll ask some questions around,” one of the posse members said. “See what we can find out. Maybe they took them over the top, and out some other way. Maybe the meth raid scared them.”
“We’ll find out,” Virgil said.
—
THE PEOPLE at the trucks brought two trucks up to haul the posse back to the parked caravan. There wasn’t quite enough room for everybody, so Johnson went to get the truck, and Virgil sat on a rock at the edge of the pool and watched the water, and after a couple of moments saw a dimple of the kind made by trout. He pulled a long stem of grass out of a clump next to the rock and chewed on it for a moment, thinking about the dogs, and then a boy’s voice said, “Find them?”
Virgil turned and saw the kid they’d met the first day they’d come up the valley. He was standing on the other side of the fence, with his rifle slung across his shoulder, holding it in place with one hand. “No, no, we didn’t,” Virgil said. “Well, we found three dogs in a big pen up next to the bluff, looking pretty beat up, but not the big bunch of them we were looking for. You know where the rest of them went?”
“No, I don’t. I watched those federal agents pull off that raid last night, and I heard the dogs early this morning, but . . . if you couldn’t find them, I don’t know where they might’ve gone.”
“You’ve seen that pen up there?”
“No, my dad told me to stay away from there. Plenty of places to walk out west, and more interesting,” the kid said. “Funny thing was, I heard them this morning, and now you say, no dogs.”
“Huh,” Virgil said. “When you say you watched the feds pull off that raid . . . you were up there?”