trained to open locks and latches.
The retriever gazed longingly at the last morsel of chocolate, but Travis
withheld the goody for a moment.
The timing, for God’s sake, had been uncanny. Two seconds after Travis had
referred to the chocolate, the dog had gone for it.
“Did you understand what I said?” Travis asked, feeling foolish for suspecting a
dog of possessing language skills. Nevertheless, he repeated the question: “Did
you? Did you understand?”
Reluctantly, the retriever raised its gaze from the last of the candy. Their
eyes met. Again Travis sensed that something uncanny was happening; he shivered
not unpleasantly, as before.
He hesitated, cleared his throat. “Uh . . . would it be all right with you if I
had the last piece of chocolate?”
The dog turned its eyes to the two small squares of the Hershey’s bar still in
Travis’s hand. It chuffed once, as if with regret, then looked through the
windshield..
“I’ll be damned,” Travis said.
The dog yawned.
Being careful not to move his hand, not holding the chocolate out, not calling
attention to the chocolate in any manner except with words, he addressed the big
tattered dog again: “Well, maybe you need it more than I do, boy. If you want
it, the last bit’s yours.”
The retriever looked at him.
Still not moving his hand, keeping it close to his own body in a way that
implied he was withholding the chocolate, he said, “If you want it, take it.
Otherwise, I’ll just throw it away.”
The retriever shifted on the seat, leaned close to him, and gently snatched the
chocolate off his palm.
“I’ll be double-damned,” he said.
The dog rose onto all fours, standing on the seat, which brought its head almost
to the ceiling. It looked through the back window of the cab and growled softly.
Travis glanced at the rearview mirror, then at the side-mounted mirror, but he
saw nothing unusual behind them. Just the two-lane blacktop, the narrow berm,
the weed-covered hillside sloping down on their right side. “You think we should
get moving? Is that it?”
The dog looked at him, peered out the rear window, then turned and sat with its
hind legs tucked to one side, facing forward again.
Travis started the engine, put the truck in gear, pulled onto Santiago Canyon
Road, and headed north. Glancing at his companion, he said, “Are you really more
than you appear to be . . . or am I just cracking up? And if you are more than
you appear to be . . . what the devil are you?”
At the rural eastern end of Chapman Avenue, he turned west toward the McDonald’s
of which he’d spoken.
He said, “Can’t turn you loose now or take you to a pound.” And a minute later,
he said, “If I didn’t keep you, I’d die of curiosity, wondering about you.”
They drove about two miles and swung into the McDonald’s parking lot.
Travis said, “So I guess you’re my dog now.”
The retriever said nothing.
Two
1
Nora Devon was afraid of the television repairman. Although he appeared to be
about thirty (her age), he had the offensive cockiness of a know-it-all
teenager. When she answered the doorbell, he boldly looked her up and down as he
identified himself—”Art Streck, Wadlow’s TV”—and when he met her eyes again, he
winked. He was tall and lean and well-scrubbed, dressed in white uniform slacks
and shirt. He was clean-shaven. His darkish-blond hair was cut short and neatly
combed. He looked like any mother’s son, not a rapist or psycho, yet Nora was
instantly afraid of him, maybe because his boldness and cockiness seemed at odds
with his appearance.
“You need service?” he asked when she hesitated in the doorway.
Although his question appeared innocent, the inflection he put on the word
“service” seemed creepy and sexually suggestive to Nora. She did not think she
was overreacting. But she had called Wadlow TV, after all, and she could not
turn Streck away without explanation. An explanation would probably lead to an
argument, and she was not a confrontational person, so she let him inside.
As she escorted him along the wide, cool hallway to the living-room arch, she