He gave her a last, affectionate thump on the shoulder and scrambled to his feet. As he flicked the beam of the flashlight around, he wondered what way would a nineteen-year-old go in the dark and the rain.
Something low and bigger than a cat reflected red eye-shine back from an alley. It was probably a racoon. There were coyotes in the area—there’d been an uptick in missing cats and litters of coydogs in the neighboring houses—but they usually gave Bourneville a wide berth. Racoons didn’t give a damn.
He went to the left. Every time Janet turned, it was to the left. Bourneville ranged in a loose arc around him as she searched for one last sniff of Janet. There were a few lights in the surrounding buildings, the last holdouts against the area’s collapse, and a few dusty curtains twitched on second floors. Around there it was enough of a burden for people to mind their own business. They gave other people’s a pass.
Cloister stretched out the five minutes closer to ten, but the trail was gone. Even Bourneville had started to flag, tail down and ears flat, and she kept looking back at Cloister for direction.
“I know,” he sympathized. “But it’s not your fault, Bourneville. You’re a good dog.”
She heaved a massive sigh and gave herself a shake. It made her coat stick up in messy, wet spikes and shook the length of the leash back to Cloister’s hand. He sighed and reached for the radio to tell Mel he was on his way back.
It wasn’t much of a scream—it was distant and strangled. If Cloister had been on his own, he might have dismissed it as part of the storm or a pissed-off bird. He’d been jarred away more than once by what sounded like mass murder and was just a couple of gulls in a fight over a fish.
Bourneville had better hearing. She whined and pricked her ears as she leaned into the leash.
“Wait,” Cloister said sharply. He didn’t know what had happened, and he didn’t want to send Bon in blind. She could scare Janet or get hurt herself, or both. Some of the buildings were just empty, but others were gutted.
He kept the tension on the lead as he closed the distance between them. Unusually for her, Bourneville ignored his voice and strained forward. The harness dug into her shoulders as she threw her weight into it to drag them both forward.
“Hey. No.” Cloister twisted the leash around his arm and anchored it under his elbow. It wasn’t easy to hold on to her. He was a big guy. The bones came from the Wittes—his dad’s family ran tall and mean—and running away from his problems kept him lean, but Bourneville was seventy pounds of muscle and no reserve. He hauled her back and gave her a shake to get her attention. “Fuss,Bourneville! Now!”
He’d trained her himself. She knew the English commands, but it was the German he used for work. “Heel” was a suggestion. “Fuss” was the word of God. Bourneville subsided obediently, but her attention stayed pinned out in the dark where the noise had originated. It was silent out there now, at least to Cloister, but something out there kept Bourneville on alert.
Cloister nudged her with his knee. She didn’t look around at him, but her ear flicked toward him to catch what he said. “Bring,” he said and let the tension off the lead.
It was what she wanted to hear, and she took off at a run. Cloister let her outpace him, but not by as much as usual. He stayed on her heels across the road and around a primer-colored truck left to rust on the dented rims of its tires.
The rain cut off as they reached the underpass, which was ripe with the smell of piss and spray paint. Rats scattered at the intrusion, fat bodies and skinny tails squeezed back into the shadows, and the covey of tramps huddled against the rain watched him with sharply unfriendly eyes. A halfhearted mutter of resentment spluttered out of them and then faded again.
Cloister couldn’t blame them. On another day he might have been down there to move them on, although no one ever had a good suggestion for where the dusty homeless should go.
One shabby bundle of shirts and newspapers huddled at the other side of the underpass lurched away as they approached him.
“There was a ghost here,” he croaked. His eyes were wild under a grease-felted cap of wiry gray hair, and he’d been beaten up recently. Blood crusted in the rough stubble on his jaw, and his nose probably hadn’t faced that way until recently. He pressed himself against the wet concrete, his face turned away. “I told her she was a ghost, but she didn’t believe me. Poor fucking ghosts, right? Thinking they’re alive. Maybe we’re the ghosts. Wouldn’t that be great? We’re the ones who really died. Pass the word and fill the goddamn glass.”
His legs gave out under him before Cloister had to do anything. The man sank down, his hand already out to grope for a bottle of dubiously labeled gin, and he started to laugh hysterically. On the way past him, Bourneville growled a rumble of warning just about audible in her chest.
Then they were out in the street again, and Cloister grimaced as the rain sluiced down over his face. He ducked his chin and wiped his face on his shoulder. Behind them, the homeless man still muttered his excuses into the wall.
Suddenly Bourneville wrenched his arm to the right and gave two clear, quick barks—her “found it” tell. It was a good thing Cloister hadn’t given up.
Janet Morrow lay in the middle of the road like someone had dropped her there. Her bright rag-doll red hair was sprayed out over the concrete, and her feet were bare. Cloister’s stomach twisted with the usual sour regret at being right.
It was the Witte luck. If you had a bad feeling about something, you were probably right, but never about anything good. It was never a lucky guess at the lottery or a feeling about a fast horse, just bad breakups and broken bodies in the rain.
Not Bourneville’s fault, though.
“Good job,” he praised her. “Best dog in the department.Platz.”
He added the hand gesture for emphasis—down—and Bourneville obediently flattened herself against the pavement. She rested her chin on her paws and focused on him as she waited for her next command.
Cloister jogged over the road and crouched down next to Janet. The red on the road wasn’t all her hair. Rivulets of blood had run out from under her head to mix with the rain. Her clothes were stained and torn, her shirt ripped open to expose pale skin and a jade green lizard tattoo that wriggled up under her grubby gray bra.
She hadn’t expected anyone to see that, Cloister supposed.
“Hey, Janet,” he said, just in case she could hear him as he pressed his fingers under her jaw to check for a pulse. “My name’s Deputy Witte. I’ve been looking for you.”
Her skin was the same temperature as the rain, and it was clammy. For a long second, there was nothing, and then Cloister felt the flutter of blood move through her throat. She was still alive. He sat back on his heels and thumbed the call button on his radio to get the update to the station.
