Last Call (23 page)

Jim was stunned but up fast, throwing a couple of wild jabs that connected with nothing. Bobcat shoved him away, accelerating his trajectory with a kick to the midsection, slamming him into the fence again. Jim sank to his knees, the world spinning now, and felt something under his foot in the shin-high weeds that fringed the kennel. Bobcat rushed in hard and Jim came up with an old stainless steel dog bowl in his hands, driving its stout rim into Bobcat’s throat, backing him off long enough to gain his feet and grab the rifle. He dropped the bowl to bring the gun around and Bobcat kicked it out his hands.

Jim said,
“Fuck,”
and Bobcat struck him with a powerful left. Badly hurt now, Jim wobbled and saw stars, his legs wanting to fail him. To this point he’d been trying to corral his rage, mete out his punishment with clarity and precision; but he was tiring now and his opponent seemed unfazed by the beating he’d taken so far, and Jim could contain his fury no longer, could actually
see
it rushing into his vision in a crimson tide.

He put his head down and plowed like a ram into the man’s midsection, feeling the top of his head hit a plank-hard abdomen, and now those long arms closed around his middle and lifted him off the ground. Then he was down on his back with Bobcat straddling him, Bobcat raining blow after blow into his face, Jim barely able to raise his arms to protect himself.

With a howl of frustration Jim bucked under Bobcat’s weight, got his hands up around the man’s neck and pulled his face down close to his own, his teeth finding a knob of chin in that scruff of beard and closing on it with the full force of his fury. Bobcat squealed and stopped swinging, trying to pull away now, and Jim savored the hot rush of blood that filled his mouth and heard his own roar eclipse the clamor of the dogs. Bobcat rolled onto his back, taking Jim with him, breaking his grip and frog-kicking him in the chest, Jim coming to his feet as he backpedalled away.

Barely able to stand now, Jim spat a chunk of hairy meat into the dirt and watched Bobcat roll toward the kennel, thinking he was going to release the dogs. Then he had the rifle in his hands and he looked like some terrible blood-drenched Reaper, staggering closer to deliver Jim’s death.

Instead he swung the rifle by the barrel, the heavy oak butt striking Jim in the temple, dropping him to the ground. He squinted at Bobcat coming out of the glare of the Kliegs and knew that he’d done all he could and lost.

But Bobcat wasn’t through with him yet.

“What’d you think,” he said, circling Jim now, the rifle aimed at the ground. “You could
beat
me? Waltzing into my shit like you belong here.” He stomped on Jim’s chest and Jim felt something snap in there. “Biting like a little girl. Well, you’re here now, Pop. How do you like it?” He kicked Jim in the head and Jim felt himself going. “Huh? How do you like it?”

The Rottweilers were yowling and slavering in the light and Bobcat turned to them and said, “You want this piece of meat? Don’t want me to—” kicking Jim again “—tenderize it a bit more for you first?”

Exhausted, barely conscious now, Jim saw the man grasp his own teeth and try to wiggle them. Heard him say, “Huh, Krazy Glue. Amazing shit.”

Then Bobcat grabbed him by the ankle and started dragging him toward the kennel, Bobcat saying, “Play fight’s over.”

The light was burning Jim’s eyes, filling them with tears, and he felt a crushing weight of regret for Dean, a young man he’d come to love and whose death was now on his head. Broken, defeated, he gazed at Bobcat through wet prisms, the warrior triumphant, and saw one of the dogs snap at him through the narrow space between the gate and the latch post. He saw the man remove the cattle prod from its hook and jab it into the dog’s muzzle, watched the animal yelp and slink away.

Bobcat’s back was to him now and Jim remembered the knife. With the final shreds of his will, he reached into his pocket and brought it out, almost dropping it in the dirt. He opened the blade and concealed it with his wrist, waiting for his chance.

Bobcat unlatched the gate and turned his head to face Jim. In the same instant Jim sat up and drove the blade into the back of the man’s knee. Bobcat shrieked, losing his grip on Jim’s ankle, and now he jabbed the prod into the side of Jim’s head, the jolt disconnecting his brain, slamming him nerveless and quivering into the dirt, his connection to this bedlam in the night all but shattered now, more dreamlike than real.

Bobcat cursed and grabbed the gate to slam it shut. As the halves of the latch touched, the stung Rottweiler head-butted the gate open and sank its teeth into Bobcat’s calf. Bobcat screamed and swung the prod, missing his mark as the dog jerked with its powerful jaws, tripping him sideways into the dirt and dragging him partway into the kennel, the other dogs closing in now.

Jim tried to move, tried to lift his leg to kick that gate shut, but he had nothing left.

Clutching the latch post with his free hand, Bobcat rolled onto his back as a second dog seized him by the opposite leg, the combined power of the infuriated animals breaking his grip on the post and dragging him deeper into the kennel, forcing his legs apart like a wishbone. A third dog came for his crotch and Bobcat zapped it with the prod, then went after the others, jolting them one by one and screaming them down, crabbing his way back toward the gate as the dogs relented. Then he scrambled to his feet and turned to face the gate.

Trish was there now, a tarnished ghost in a man’s shirt, and she slammed the gate shut, ran the padlock through the latch holes and locked it down with a
snap
. Then she picked up the rifle and aimed it at Bobcat’s head.

What followed was an instant of freeze frame, in real time no longer than a heartbeat and yet eerily spun out, animal and human intimately entwined in a static tableau: Bobcat realizing he was caught; Trish with her finger on the trigger, deciding; the dogs yielding to the conditioned outcome of conflict with their master while Jim lay beaten on the ground.

It was one of the Rottweilers that broke the spell, the big male with the star-shaped marking on its chest. Slavering, a fierce growl issuing from deep in its throat, it stood at the apex of a ragged V of dogs and turned its head, first left, then right, as if seeking assent from its kennel mates—then it lunged, its vice-like jaws clamping around Bobcat’s wrist, the cattle prod clattering to the ground at his feet. Bobcat screamed—Jim could actually hear the bones in the man’s wrist splintering like tinder—and bent to retrieve the prod.

Then the dogs were on him, bearing him down as they had Julie, ripping flesh from bone. Hopelessly pinned, Bobcat thrust out a beseeching hand, screaming, “Shoot the dogs,
shoot the fucking dogs
,” and Trish said, “Asshole,” and dropped the rifle in the dirt.

Bobcat was still screaming when Trish came over to Jim and did her best to help him to his feet. When he was up Jim hugged her tight, scolding her gently for coming down here, then kissed her and thanked her for saving his life.

After a moment they hobbled over to Dean. In the glare of the Kliegs Jim could see that the bullet had shattered the kid’s clavicle, then exited high up on his shoulder. Jim used his undershirt to fashion a crude pressure dressing, knotting the sleeves over the entry wound, and Dean moaned when he snugged it down tight.

A few feet away Trish stood as if hypnotized, watching the dogs maul her kidnapper, and now Jim rose to block her view and hold her close.

Then, calling on a final reserve of strength, he picked Dean up and carried him into the farmhouse, telling Trish to wait in the kitchen. He lugged Dean down the hallway to a big room at the front of the house, seeing the barber chair now and the workbench and the little dog drowsing in its basket. He lay Dean on a threadbare couch, covered him with a blanket and told him he was going to get help, hoping the kid could hear him. He found an old rotary phone in the kitchen and used it to dial 911. The dispatcher seemed to know the area and Jim told her to hurry, his friend had been shot and his daughter was in shock.

He found another blanket in a hallway closet and wrapped it around Trish’s shoulders. She told him she wanted to wait with Dean and Jim brought her to him, lifting the kid’s head off the couch so she could sit with it in her lap. Then he went back to the kitchen to get her some water.

Filling a glass from the tap, Jim glanced at the kennel through the window over the sink, Bobcat silent out there now, the dogs rag-dolling his savaged remains.

Then he brought the water to Trish and pulled up a chair to wait with her.

* * *

A short while later an orange and white air ambulance settled in the floodlit backyard, the downwash from the rotors raising eddies of litter and dust. Jim led the paramedics to Dean, who was semi-conscious now and in a great deal of pain. They took his vitals, attached him to oxygen and IV fluids and bundled him onto a stretcher. They told Trish they’d be right back with a stretcher for her, but she insisted on walking. Jim helped her along, and at the ambulance doors Trish asked him if he was coming to the hospital with them and Jim said he should probably wait for the cops to show up. “I’ll see you there later,” he said.

As the chopper lifted off, Jim went back into the house to call Sally. She picked up on the first ring, her voice shrill and expectant.

“Yes?”

Jim’s voice broke when he said, “Sal, we found her...she’s alive...”

* * *

Once the stretchers had been secured in the air ambulance, one of the paramedics went to work on Dean while another started an IV on Trish, the man saying, “You’ll feel a needle pick now.” But Trish felt nothing, just the smooth rubber gloves on his hands and an overwhelming sense of relief at being out of that stinking grave and away from the madman.

The paramedic cranked the IV open wide and Trish could feel the cool fluid flowing up her arm. There was chatter in the cockpit now, someone talking on the radio, the details muddied by the chop of the rotors; but Trish got the gist of it, a doctor on the other end giving instructions, telling the paramedics to apply pressure dressings to Dean’s wounds and administer morphine for the pain, telling them to push fluids and use vasopressors as required.

When the initial commotion tapered off, the chopper moving at speed now, Trish reached across the space between the stretchers and found Dean’s hand, ice cold and flaccid under a heating blanket, and gave it a gentle squeeze. At first there was no response, Dean lying stock still with his eyes closed, the fine mist from the oxygen they were giving him condensing on the whiskers around his mouth; but then she felt a feeble twitch, Dean’s fingers flexing, and thought she heard him say her name, barely above a whisper.

She said, “Dean?”

“Trish...” he said again, she was sure of it now. “Will you marry me?”

Trish felt something inside of her spill out warm. But before she could respond, Dean’s hand went slack and a paramedic said, “We’ve got an arrest,” and now a curtain was drawn, blocking her view, and the commotion resumed in earnest.

* * *

After talking to Sally, Jim went outside to the front porch and sat on the steps, unwilling to spend another moment alone in the lunatic’s lair. It was a beautiful night made eerie by the glow of the Klieg lamps, dimmer by half out here at the front of the house, edging the night mists in tattered, rainbow-hued halos. The camper was parked in the turnaround, and for a moment Jim wondered what might be hidden inside.

He was falling asleep on the steps when a black-and-white roared into the yard followed by a green sedan, and Jim stood, as worn out as he’d ever been. Two uniformed officers emerged from the cruiser, and Detective Boland got out of the sedan. The officers fanned out with their weapons drawn, the younger of the two making a beeline for the camper, the other looping around to the outbuildings. Boland came over to Jim.

“Jesus Christ,” the detective said. “You look like you’ve been to war.”

Jim said nothing.

Boland said, “Where is he?”

“Out back.”

“Dead or alive?”

Jim just stared at him, dazed and exhausted, and Boland waved over the young officer. Weapons raised, the two men moved to the back of the house.

After a moment Jim followed. He paused at the edge of the back porch to watch the officer throw up in the dirt, Boland leaving the man to it, some primitive instinct compelling him to witness up close the blood-frenzy in the kennel, the massive dogs tireless in the annihilation of their tormentor.

Turning his attention to the dogs, Jim wondered if they’d have to be put down, thinking they’d at least have to be sedated before anyone could get near what was left of Bobcat.

He stood there for what felt like a long time, drifting in and out, then Boland glanced back at him with a kind of stoic approval and Jim hobbled over to join him. The men stood together in the weeds at the edge of the kennel and watched the dogs with unblinking eyes, most of the brutes tiring now, spent from their feral exertions, only the big male continuing the onslaught with any enthusiasm, working on Bobcat’s neck now, attached to his unsprung torso by a twisted column of vertebrae and a few glistening tendons.

After a moment, Boland put his hand on Jim’s shoulder and said, “Alright, chum, let’s get you to the hospital.” Then he started away.

Before leaving, Jim took one last look at the killing floor and saw a silvery glint in the gape of Bobcat’s mouth, Klieg light gleaming through Trish’s tiny tooth diamond.

––––––––

ON A MILD Sunday evening in May, Trish sat in a circle of somber women in the basement of Sacred Heart Church, a ten-minute walk from the university. She’d regained most of the weight she’d lost down in the pit, and had a full set of perfect white teeth. She knew she looked healthy—she could see it in any mirror—but the youthful sparkle was gone from her eyes; replacing it was a grim watchfulness, a game animal’s wariness. She could see that, too.

Tonight was her first visit to the group, but it was clear that everyone here knew who she was, many of them calling her by name as she mingled in the minutes before the meeting began. It was strange, an ordeal like hers ending in celebrity. ‘The only girl to survive an encounter with
The Dentist
,’ a moniker some reporter had given him that stuck. Her dad had suggested the group, and Trish agreed that it might be worth a try. For the first half hour she listened to some pretty horrific stories—violent spouses, animal attacks, mutilating accidents—and by the time her turn came around she knew she was in the right place.