He slept very well with the aid of several Ambien and a large scotch, until about four thirty in the morning when he woke up and felt Dempsey moving around at the bottom of the bed. The drugs made his thought processes muddy. It took him a few seconds of leaning over and putting the coverlet at the bottom of the bed to bring his consciousness up to speed. Dempsey wasn’t there.
Yet he’d felt the dog, he would have sworn to it on a stack of Bibles, getting up and walking around and around on the same spot, padding down the bed until it was comfortable for him.
He lay back on the pillow and drifted back to sleep, but it wasn’t a healthy sleep thereafter. He kept half-waking, and staring down at the darkness of the bottom of the bed, wondering if Dempsey was a ghost now, and would haunt his heels until the dog had the sense to go on his way to heaven.
He slept in until ten, when Marco brought him the phone with a woman called Rosalie from the Pet Cremation Service. She was pleasant in her no-nonsense way; no doubt she often had people in near hysteria at the other end of the telephone, so a little professional distance was necessary. She had already been in contact with the Hospital this morning, she said, and they had informed her that Dempsey had a collar and quilt with him. Did Todd want these items returned, or were they to be cremated with his pet?
“They were his,” Todd said, “so they should go with him.”
“Fine.” said Rosalie. “Then the only other question is the matter of the urn. We have three varieties — ”
“Just the best you’ve got.”
“That would be our Bronze Grecian Style.”
“That sounds fine.”
“All I need now is your credit card number.”
“I’ll pass you back to my assistant. He can help you with all that.”
“Just one other question?”
“Yes.”
“Are you … the Todd Pickett?”
Yes, of course, he was the real Todd Pickett. But he didn’t feel like the real thing; more like a badly bruised lookalike. Things like this didn’t happen to the real Todd Pickett. He had a way with life that always made it show the bright side.
He went back to sleep until noon then got up and ate some lunch, his body aching as though he was catching a heavy dose of the flu. His food unfinished he sat in the breakfast nook, staring blankly at the potted plants artfully arranged on the patio; plants he’d never persuaded Dempsey not to cock his leg against every time he passed.
“I’m going back to bed,” he told Marco.
“You don’t want to put a holding call into Maxine? She’s called nine times this morning. She says she has news about a foreign buyer for Warrior.”
“Did you tell her what happened to Dempsey?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“She said: oh. Then she went back to talking about the buyer.”
Todd sighed, defeated by the woman’s incomprehension. “Maybe it’s time I got out of this fucking business,” he said to Marco. “I don’t have the balls for it any longer. Or the energy.”
Marco put up no protest at this. He hated everything about the business, except Todd, and always had. “Why don’t we go down to Key West like we always promised ourselves? Open a bar. Get fat and drunk — ”
” — and die of heart attacks at fifty.”
“You’re feeling morbid right now.”
“A little.”
“Well it won’t last forever. And one of these days, we’ll have to honour Dempsey and get another dog.”
“That wouldn’t be honouring him, that’d be replacing him. And he was irreplaceable. You know why?”
“Why?”
“Because he was there when I was nobody.”
“You were pups together.”
This got a smile out of Todd; the first in forty-eight hours. “Yeah … ” he said, his voice close to breaking again. “We were pups together.” He tried to hold back the tears, but they came anyway. “What is wrong with me?” he said. “He was a dog. I mean … come on. Tell me honestly, do you think Tom Cruise cries for a day if one of his dogs dies?”