Before I might breathe any of the fumes issuing from the dog’s mouth and spend the next couple of hours sleeping the stuff off with my sharp-toothed fellow druggies, I scrambled to my feet and turned in a circle, expecting a fourth attacker. Apparently the security detail consisted of just three.
Although I was breathing loud enough to silence the two owls in the neighborhood, I could hear the second dog still sneezing, and I went after the poor pup. He was sitting with his head hung, his front legs splayed wide for balance. He raised his head to look at me, and between sneezes and jaw-cracking yawns, he made a miserable little sound that, to my ear, seemed to be in part accusatory. I told him that it hadn’t been me who wanted to tear out someone’s throat, that I understood he had once been a good dog, as all dogs are good, that he had the misfortune to fall in with a crowd of bad people who had taught him to behave in ways that would have disappointed his mother, that I sympathized with him, I really did, but nevertheless, I would have to squirt him directly on the snout. He collapsed when the stuff touched him. I was happy to be alive and unbitten, but I didn’t feel particularly good about myself.
I moved a few steps away and studied the house and the surrounding territory. No one inside could have been aware of my encounter with the pack, but if anyone had been outside, he might have heard something. Guard dogs bark to warn off intruders, but attack dogs give no warning and are trained to conduct the entire assault with a minimum of noise. The discretion shown by these three Dobermans worked to my advantage, because judging by the continued stillness of the night, no one knew that I was here.
Evidently, the dogs had been given the opportunity to sniff all of those people on arrival, and therefore knew not to target any of them. Or maybe you could turn off their aggression with a memorable command word—like frankfurter.
A snarl caused me to jump so far off the ground that if I’d had a flaming sword, I could have passed it under my feet with ease, like they do in those athletic Cossack dances. I figured that I had at least three shots in the canister, maybe five, but as it turned out, I didn’t need them. The snarl that I had heard was in fact a snore. Then came another. A moment later, all three dogs were vigorously sawing wood in counterpoint.
I was concerned that if anyone came out of the house to any of the vehicles in the parking area, they might hear this doggy symphony and might investigate. I grabbed the nearest Doberman by his four feet, two in each hand, and dragged him about twelve yards farther toward the stable and to the very edge of the tree line. In the short grass damp with evening dew, because of his tight smooth coat, he could be pulled almost as easily as a sled on ice. By the time that I had moved all of them, however, I was sweating and short of breath, and utterly disenchanted with dog-dragging as a hobby.
The Dobies were at rest one beside the other, facing the same direction, back legs crossed at the ankles, forelegs crossed at the wrists, their positions synchronized but their snoring contrapuntal. I have always been a neatness freak, which is a good trait in a fry-cook who wants to poison as few people as possible, but I probably have the potential to succumb to obsessive-compulsive disorder. All the scene needed to make a perfect illustration for a children’s book were three blankets, three red-and-white-striped nightcaps, and a night-light shaped like a running cat.
If someone came out from the house to the car park—nervously chanting “Frankfurter, frankfurter, frankfurter”—he probably would not hear the snoring. But if he did hear it, he would take it for the grumbling and gnarling of a single wild beast lurking at the edge of the forest and in the mood for a snack. His imagination would conjure up everything from a bear to Bigfoot, and he wouldn’t be inclined to get a closer look to satisfy his curiosity.
At a minimum, I had an hour before the Dobies woke, remembered what had happened to them, sniffed one another’s butts to confirm their identities, pledged eternal commitment to total vengeance, and came looking for me. Long before then, I would be gone with the seventeen children. If I were still here an hour from now, the dogs would be the least of my concerns, because I’d be either imprisoned or dead.
Twenty-five
I NO LONGER HELD THE RHINESTONE COWBOY’S IMAGE in my mind’s eye. He was on this property, very close. If I sought him out with psychic magnetism, I risked drawing him to me instead of being drawn to him, as when I had been in the Ford Explorer and he had run me off the highway.
Instead, I thought of the Payton kids—Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan—and hoped that I would be drawn to them sooner than later. Wherever the Paytons were, the other kids would likely be there, too. Right now, I couldn’t feel them pulling at me.