Chapter Twelve
“All we can do is block now. No way to win,” Damon Swindell grumbled, yanking on Lucifer’s leash.
Leo ignored the grumble, focusing on the dog. “Don’t pull. Remember, it’s a pop. Get low, make it short. You want to get his attention, not physically move him.”
Damon growled and continued dragging.
“Sit,” he ordered.
Lucifer stared straight ahead.
“Sit,” Damon shouted.
Lucifer stared straight ahead.
Damon yanked on the leash.
Lucifer’s head came forward slightly, but his derriere didn’t drop.
The man yanked harder.
Clearly, he’d never heard the wisdom that the neck is one of the strongest parts of a dog’s body.
I’ll admit, smugness wrapped around me.
As even-voiced as ever, Leo said, “Time’s up. Take him back to his place. Showing your frustration is never a useful training tool.”
Bryon made no effort to hide his gloating. “Maybe no way to win, but that’s the sure way to lose.”
Damon took a step toward him and Bryon came partway out of his chair, but Leo was there between them. Not obviously breaking up a fight, but creating a barrier. With his usual calm, he said, “Gracie, next.”
Smug rarely gets its potential comeuppance this quickly.
I sent a quick wish to the universe that if there was karmic punishment for smug it fell on me and not on Gracie.
By the time we got to the grid, both the men in the Gang of Four were seated and looking ostentatiously away from each other.
Gracie added to the resumption of calm by sitting quickly inside the box after my command, then giving a little bounce that drew relieved and nervous chuckles from several humans.
The tic-tac-toe exercise went smoothly after that.
Oh, except for Berrie, who failed with each of the Bostons.
By that time, I had no idea who’d won or lost.
With a look toward the wall clock, Leo said, “I’d hoped we’d have a couple more games of tic-tac-toe. Another time.”
Had to admire his staunch upbeatness. I wanted to hide under a chair.
As Leo wrapped up class, Clara and I exchanged a look that agreed we’d hang back long enough to ensure the Gang of Four was gone before we approached the door.
Apparently, everyone else had the same thought . . . except Berrie.
There wasn’t a repeat of the unpleasantness from the beginning of the first class — the Gang of Four plus their dogs departed before Berrie pulled herself together.
The rest of us dawdled, waiting for her to leave, too, then fed out into the main part of the building with pleasantries and smiles that almost wiped out the memory of the tension among the other humans.
Whoever set up Zepke’s had this exit from the training room pass through a gauntlet of dog treats on one side and dog toys on the other — on shelves of different heights, to offer nose-level experiences for various-sized dogs.
I noticed the cat toys and treats sat at human eye-level. Cats didn’t come in for training.
Zepke’s was no slouch in separating a pet owner from his or her money.
My bills had drifted down from when I first adopted Gracie. Spending didn’t drop on food or treats, of course. But eventually I acquired the durable accoutrements, like beds and collars and leashes.
Also, the attrition rate on toys eased. Oh, Gracie could still destuff a Lamb Chop with alacrity, but she spread out the mayhem these days.
Yes, we shopped for treats, as did most of the others from class who’d lingered with us.
Given a loose leash, Gracie zoomed to a particular package.
I bent to see what the package was and recoiled.
“What is that?” Clara asked, apparently trying not to breathe.
“It says sprats on the label.”
LuLu had joined Gracie in snuffling at the package.
“Dogs love those,” Leo said.
I noticed he said it from farther down the aisle.
“They stink.”
“That’s why they love them. They’re tiny fish. Lots of good nutrition.”
Giving our olfactory senses a break, we picked a packet of beef and bacon chews.
After paying, Clara and I and our dogs were the last group out the main door, which was set in the corner of the original portion of Zepke’s and opened to angled steps, giving equal access to two intersecting streets.
From our elevation, we could look across Tanner Street to the back of the old-time hardware store. Its front faced the near end of Haines Tavern’s unsquare town square.
Oscar and Quasar — the gray-haired man and his small black dog — stood on the sidewalk near the hardware store’s back corner, talking with a young woman I couldn’t see well, both because of shadows and because she bent to pet the dog.
She pushed her hair back as she twisted away, following the moving target that was cavorting Quasar.
That hardware store exerted a strange draw for Teague and Ned.
Strange, since every purchase there meant more work for them around the house.
Teague also did carpentry. Less now that he worked for the sheriff’s department in addition to substitute teaching.
Both guys swore their purchases made work easier, but I was skeptical.
The hardware store did not exert any draw for me. Or Clara. I had proof of that in the moment because she’d dug her elbow into my side and when I looked at her, she was looking away from the hardware store.
“Do you see them? Over there.”
I shifted my focus to the right.
The Gang of Four and their dogs were in a knot by a pickup that must have had a yacht in its recent lineage.
Damon Swindell stood by the open driver’s door, trying too hard to look like he was unaffected by Bryon George’s vehement delivery of words we couldn’t hear.
You’d think the man would shout when he was clearly that worked up. But no. He had no consideration for distant eavesdroppers.
Zoley Georger tugged ineffectually at Bryon’s arm, while Pammy Swindell remained still.
Calm? Frozen by events? No way to tell from here.
We could hear Zoley now and then as her voice rose, imparting snatches about not that way, not what you think, not the way it looked.
Their unsettled dogs milled around the people, ignored by all.
Damon’s voice rose enough over Bryon’s for us to catch phrases. No big deal was one. Nothing you can do about it was another.
In response, Bryon’s voice topped Damon’s, reaching full audible range.
“You like to play games. People like you always do. Don’t have what it takes to build a real career in a real profession.
Shifting from deal to deal to deal, a grifter more than anything.
You think you’re showing the world you’re standing up to me?
You’re not. I’m not a game-player. I’m a man of action.
Don’t know how you haven’t figured that out.
Now I’m telling you — know it now. And, and .
. . You want to try to play, big boy? It’s not going to turn out well. ”
Zoley stopped tugging at Bryon and focused on Damon, possibly expecting an explosive response, though we couldn’t read her expression, since she had her back mostly to us.
All four of them went motionless.
Even at this distance, Clara and I held our breath.
Into this moment — charged with emotion and uncertainty — blundered Berrie and the two Boston youngsters.
They had crossed Tanner Street, their path taking them directly through the tense cluster of the Gang of Four.
That might have passed almost unnoticed amid the drama, but then one of the Bostons, quickly joined by the other, objected strenuously to finding Lucifer and Izolde directly in front of them, to the apparent surprise of Berrie, who hadn’t been watching where she was going.
Noise erupted, dominated by barking.
Pammy corralled Lucifer and got him in the back of the big-boat truck. Damon kept yapping. At Berrie, at Bryon, then at Pammy.
Neither Zoley nor Bryon exercised any control over Izolde, who bounced around — literally, with hops from side to side, interspersed with play bows — clearly thinking this was a great game.
One of the Bostons bowed back.
Before the dogs could elaborate on those invitations, Damon shouted a curse at Berrie.
“Well— I never,” she huffed. “I have never been spoken to like that.”
I knew first-hand she had been. Same word, as a matter of fact.
Not me doing the shouting, despite numerous temptations, but dog park attendees in the small-dog enclosures where Berrie and, to a lesser extent, her Bostons regularly drove others to expressions of extreme frustration.
In this moment, she made a show of flouncing away. That took her right into Damon’s path as he jerked open the driver’s door of the truck. It hit her in the derriere.
Not hard enough to hurt, much less knock her over. But plenty to incense her.
She said something to him. He swore at her again.
She spun away — as if that would bother him — and screamed for the Bostons, who were actually in front of her. It took her a second to spot them.
Damon slammed the driver’s door.
Bryon started away. “Let’s go, Zoley,” he said shortly.
She cast a look over her shoulder toward Damon, but he’d started the engine, even before Pammy reached the passenger door on the other side.
Damon barely looked around as he began to back out.
Something sharp and imbued with vise-like strength dug into the flesh of my forearm.
I garbled a protest.
“Look, look,” my friend hissed at me.
I couldn’t. My vision was clouded by pain at her hold.
“Clara,” I pleaded.
“Look.” She pressed harder.
To get away from the advanced torture, I pivoted in the direction she wanted me to look, which was a recessed doorway on the same side of the street as Zepke’s and farther down the block from where the Gang of Four and Berrie and the Bostons had tangled.
The best I could make out was the shadowy form of what looked to be a man. Taller and broader than average.
Movement shifted my gaze to a nearer doorway. This one was illuminated by a street light and contained a woman in a hooded raincoat. I could see dark hair and the general impression of a pale face.
She was intent on the truck, seemingly focused on the driver’s seat occupied by Damon.
It was impossible to tell where the other figure was looking. Could have been at her or the truck.
“You know who they are?” Clara asked in a low voice.
“No idea.”
“She’s the woman I saw with Damon and he’s the guy I saw watching them.”
Maybe she could see the woman well enough to recognize her, but unless her eyesight was a whole lot better than mine, she could not identify that male-shaped shadow as anyone specific. I suspected what she’d seen before was coloring her interpretation of what we could see — and couldn’t see — now.
“It’s awfully dark,” I protested.
The Swindell truck, now in the street, backed up a few more feet before Damon gunned it forward.
Backing up had spread enough light from the headlights to see the woman in the doorway better, confirming the raincoat, dark hair, pale face . . . and a combination of a full-grill smile and mean-crinkled eyes that made me think of someone who’d just snookered an opponent.
“That’s definitely her,” Clara said. “Oh, darn. He’s gone — lurker guy — so we won’t get a closer look at him. Darn. Now she’s walking the wrong way for us to see her, either.”
She gusted a sigh.
“C’mon, we might as well go. Nothing more to see here.”
I rubbed my arm. I’d carry evidence from Clara’s attention-getting tactic for a while.