3. THE TRAINING DEMO
three
"THE TRAINING DEMO"
She came back on the fourth day, in daylight, in the same dark coat, and Casey put her to work, because work was the only honest scale he had for taking the measure of a person.
"You'll hold the timer," he said, and handed her his phone with the stopwatch already up. "When I send Junebug, start it. When she sits, stop it. Don't tell me the number. Just hold it."
"Why don't you want the number?"
"I do want it. I don't want it in my head while I'm reading her.
" He set the line of scent articles out across the frostbitten grass of the training yard, six steel cans, one handled an hour ago and five of them clean.
"A handler who watches the clock starts pushing the dog to beat the clock.
Then you've trained the clock and not the nose.
The nose doesn't care what time it is. Neither should I. "
She filed that away. She filed everything; he had noticed it the first night, how she banked what he said and spent none of it loose.
He sent the dog with a flat word and a flat hand.
Junebug worked the line all business, no theater, nose down and tail level and the whole engine running quiet under the surface.
She passed the first clean can without slowing.
The second. At the third she checked, then circled back a half step: a clean dog testing a thing that smelled almost interesting and deciding it wasn't. She moved on.
Casey felt Hannah register the check beside him and not call it an alert, which most people would have.
"You didn't flinch," he said, low, eyes on the dog.
"It wasn't a sit. You told me to wait for the sit."
Junebug came to the sixth can and sat. Solid. No bark. The dogs out here didn't bark to tell him things; he had trained the bark out and the truth in.
"Stop it," he said.
Hannah stopped the timer and didn't tell him the number, and the corner of her mouth moved, the first thing close to a smile he had gotten off her in four days.
"Good girl," Casey told the dog, and paid her with a tug and thirty seconds on the rope, and Junebug came up off the sit into the game with her ears finally loose.
"She's something to watch," Hannah said. "She doesn't waste a motion."
"She's six and she's never had a bad day in her life.
That's the whole difference between her and the old man.
" He nodded back toward the porch, where Mose lay with his chin on his paws, watching the proceedings with the air of a foreman who had seen better crews.
"Mose carries his work everywhere he goes.
She just does hers and sets it down. I'd take a yard full of the second kind and call myself lucky, but the first kind is the one that finds your dead. "
"Is that what you were," Hannah said. "Before the dogs. The kind that carries it."
He didn't answer right off. He coiled the rope and let the quiet sit, and she let it sit with him, and he noticed that too.
"I was federal eighteen years," he said finally.
"ATF, handler the back half of it. You run enough operations, some of them go wrong, and a man finds out which kind he is by what he does with the wrong ones.
" He hung the rope on the fence nail. "I do this now.
It's cleaner. A frightened dog, you can fix.
You hand him calm a day at a time, and one morning he takes food off your palm, and the work is done, and nobody's dead at the end of it.
" He heard how the last word landed in the cold air and moved past it.
"Anyway. You didn't drive out here to hear about me. "
"No." She watched him, and didn't reach for the thing he had set down and stepped over. "But I'm keeping it. In case it matters later."
"It won't."
"You'd be surprised what matters later." She said it without weight, almost kind, and he understood she had spent a career learning that nobody got to decide in advance which small thing the end would turn on.
She let her eyes go past him while he checked the dog's pad, to the back of the ranch house. Half a porch stood new-framed against the old siding; the other half was still bones: fresh joists, a stack of decking under a tarp, a level resting on the top rail where he'd left off.
"You're building that yourself," she said. "One weekend at a time, by the look of it."
"By the look of it." He didn't glance up. "Some things you don't hire out. My father put the first one on. I'm putting the last one on. In between it fell down, like things do." He set the paw back down. "It'll be done by spring. Probably. Porches and cases, you learn not to promise a date."
Mose chose that moment to heave himself up off the cold ground, amble over, and remove the leather work glove from Casey's back pocket with the delicacy of a pickpocket. He carried it three dignified steps and lay back down with it between his paws like a prize.
"He does that," Casey said, without turning around. "He's been stealing that same glove for two years. I've stopped fighting him for it."
"What does he want with it?"
"Nothing. He wants me to come get it. It's the only game he's got left in him.
" Casey crossed and crouched and did not take the glove; he scratched the long ears instead, and the old dog closed his eyes, and the glove stayed exactly where it was, surrendered to nobody.
"That's the whole negotiation. He keeps the glove, I come over.
Everybody wins but the glove." He stood.
"Don't tell the state's evidence chain my key witness is a thief. "
It startled a real laugh out of her, the first one in longer than she could place, and she saw him hear it and decide not to make anything of it, which she was beginning to understand was its own small kindness.
She crossed to the half-built porch while he worked and laid her palm flat on the new top rail, where the wood was still pale and unweathered and smelled of the saw.
The level sat where he'd left it, the little green bubble dead center; he'd stopped mid-true, in the middle of getting one board exactly right.
"You leave it level even when you quit for the day," she said.
"No point leaving it crooked. You'd only have to fix it twice.
" He came over and picked up the level and set it down again, and for a moment they both looked at the unfinished thing like it was the case and not a porch.
"A board at a time. You don't get the porch by wanting the porch.
You get it by truing one board and then the next one and not skipping ahead to the part where you're done.
" He said it lightly, but she heard the other thing under it, the instruction folded into the lumber, and she kept that too.
He toweled Junebug down at the tailgate.
The dog had gone through a frost puddle on her victory lap and come up filthy to the hocks.
Then he did a thing he hadn't planned, which was hand the towel across and let Hannah finish the back legs while he lifted a front paw to check the pad.
He understood, a second too late, that he had set a test he hadn't meant to set.
Junebug let her.
Junebug stood for a stranger's hands on her hocks and didn't shift her weight or roll an eye back or so much as stiffen. Casey watched the dog allow it and felt something settle in his own chest that he wasn't ready to look at straight on.
"She let you towel her," he said. "She doesn't, mostly.
Not new hands. Takes most people a month, if she gives it at all.
" He took the towel back and folded it over the tailgate.
"That right there was the inflection point.
You'll have spent four days wondering whether I'd run your sister's case.
That's your answer. The dogs took to you before I did, and I trust them further than I trust myself. "
Hannah crouched and let Junebug bump her under the chin. "Then we should talk about days," she said, careful with it.
"We're talking about them."
"There's a calendar on this thing." She straightened, and took her phone back, and before she pocketed it he watched her thumb find the calendar and check a date.
A fast, private look, a person confirming a number she carried and wouldn't say out loud.
"I'm not going to set the date on your kitchen table and make it your weight to haul.
But it's narrow, Casey. Narrower than anybody would want for a case gone this cold. "
"I heard you the first night." He shut the tailgate.
"Wednesday. I'll run Mose on a Hagen article Wednesday.
Cold-scent, off whatever's been near the man, if your tape's right that there's a jacket findable.
Clean sit on Hagen, clean pass on the clean ground, and that's your match, and the state can't pretend it isn't one. "
He said it level. He did not say the rest, that Wednesday cost him a morning he had promised a paying client and a fee he could have used, that he had already moved the client and eaten the fee and didn't intend to mention either.
A man who tells you what a thing cost him is asking to be thanked, and Casey didn't want thanks.
He wanted the case, and he was starting to want a few things past the case that he was not going to look at straight on a Tuesday in a cold yard.
She heard the schedule and not the cost, which was how he had built the sentence. "Wednesday," she said.
"Dress warmer." It got out before he had weighed it.
She looked down at the coat, the thin county-issue parka cut for the walk from a heated car to a heated house.
He looked at it too and saw it for what it was, a garment for a woman who spent her cold hours indoors with the dying.
"The rim's open quarry. The wind comes off it with an opinion.
That parka's built for hospice doorways.
It won't be near enough for standing still three hours in November while an old dog quarters a hill. "
"I have a real coat at home."
"Bring it. Bring gloves you can lose the feeling in." He gathered Junebug's lead. "We'll be out there as long as the dog needs and not one minute less. The dog sets the clock. Not you, not me, not your calendar."
"You keep saying that. The dog sets the clock."
"Because it's the only true thing I know about any of this yet.
" He whistled the old bloodhound up off the porch.
Mose came down and crossed the whole yard and pressed himself against Hannah's hip before he ever came around to Casey, every time now, like it had stopped being a question anybody got to ask.
Casey watched the old dog choose her again and said nothing about it, because he didn't have a word for it that wouldn't sound like more than he was ready to mean.
"Wednesday, then. Eight years cold, one old dog, and a hill of wind.
Don't get your hopes up higher than they can fall. "
"They're already up," Hannah said. "That happened the night he came off the porch for me." She set her hand on Mose's head, light, a touch she would give a patient she meant to keep. "I'll mind the height of them myself. It's the one thing in all of this I know how to do."