Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken (12 page)

“I’m not sure she’d know a poodle from a sheepdog. But Juan Flores apparently took special pleasure in pointing out that both of his dogs outweighed Christy, who is a hundred and ten pounds.”

Hah. Christy was at least twenty pounds heavier than that.

“Hah.” Honey snorted with derision. “Christy is at least one thirty or one thirty-five.”

“Big dog,” I said.

Adam laughed. “I’ll let you know if there is anything new, and Mercy?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t do anything too interesting.”

He disconnected before I could reply.

“Don’t underestimate Christy,” Honey said. “She’s not nearly as helpless as she pretends to be.”

“I know that,” I said. I glanced at Honey, then looked back at the road. “I thought you liked her.”

She growled. “Helpless bitch had the whole pack—Adam included—hopping to her tune. Couldn’t mow the lawn, change a tire, or carry her own laundry up the stairs. Even Peter fell for it, and he usually had better sense. She didn’t like Warren—I thought at the time she was worried he was going to make a play for Adam, but mostly, I think, he didn’t fall over himself to be her slave. Darryl’s helpless against her, but at least he knows it. All that might not have been too bad, but she played them all off each other. I had my own private celebration when she left Adam.”

Her lips twisted. “I don’t like you,” she told me, but there was a lie in her voice, and she stopped talking, looking almost surprised. She started again, her tones softer than they had been. “I don’t enjoy change,” she said. “And you are change, Mercy. I am comfortable with the old ways, and you are tossing them aside whenever they don’t suit you, while Adam looks on with satisfaction. But one thing I’ve always known is that you were trying your best to make things better. Christy, she looked out for herself first. I don’t imagine that has changed. Only a fool would say the same about you—though I frequently disagree with your methods and goals.”

I cleared my throat. “So. Do you want to see a man about some dogs?”

I pulled into Joel’s driveway, and our presence was announced by a chorus of barking fit to wake the dead. Joel might work in the vineyards and fix cars as a hobby, but dogs were his passion. He and his wife bred, showed, and trained dogs. I figured that he might be able to help us figure out what kind of dogs Christy’s stalker had. It was a shot in the dark, but I was willing to do anything to shorten Christy’s time in my house. I’d called Joel, and he’d told me to meet him at home.

Mostly, the dogs barking at us were just excited, but I heard the true anger of a dog whose territory is breached in at least one bass voice.

“Maybe I should wait,” Honey said. “Dogs are afraid of me.”

I shook my head. “Most dogs get over their fear of werewolves pretty fast, given a chance.”

I hopped down out of the Vanagon. While I waited for Honey to come around the vehicle, the front door opened, and a small woman came out of the door with a leashless dog that was nonetheless at heel. The dog was white, female, and looked to be a purebred Staffordshire terrier. The woman greeted me in Spanish.

I get mistaken for Hispanic a lot.

I shook my head, but didn’t bother objecting to her assumption. “Sorry.
No hablo Español. ¿Esta Joel aqui?
”

She stopped when she was about ten feet away, and the dog sat as soon as she quit moving. All of the dog’s attention was on the woman.

“No,” the woman said, then paused. Maybe she’d had to take a moment to switch languages. “You must be Mercy. Joel called and told me what you wanted. I told him to stay at work because I know the dogs as well as he does.” Her English was good, with only a touch of accent.

She gave Honey a slightly wary look, and the dog focused on her, too. “I am his wife, Lucia. Joel tells me that you are the Mercy who keeps him in parts for his old cars. Come into my house, and I will help you as much as I can.”

Her house, when she ushered us in, was not fancy or large, but it was clean enough that I would have eaten off any surface. We sat on an old leather couch while Lucia retreated to her kitchen.

The big white dog who’d accompanied her outside followed her into the kitchen, leaving us under the watchful care of the three lesser dogs who were occupying the living room. All of the living-room dogs were male and all the same brindle tan. One of them ignored us entirely as he tried to destroy a hard rubber bone. One sat across the room and stared at us. I fought the urge to stare him down and nudged Honey when she started to do just that.

“We’re guests,” I reminded her. “Neutral territory.”

The third dog, the biggest of the three, sat on my foot and put his chin on my knee. I rubbed him gently behind the ears. He closed his eyes and made snuffly-content noises. The dog who’d been staring at us heaved a disgusted sigh and wiggled around until his back was to us, not happy about the intruders but too well trained to object.

None of the dogs seemed to have an issue with having a werewolf in the house.

There was not a lot of furniture, but what there was was good. Some of it handcrafted, so maybe Joel did some woodworking. Maybe Lucia did the woodworking. On the wall across from me was a framed Texas state flag flanked by good amateur paintings of dogs. One of them could have been the big white dog that followed Joel’s wife around, and the other was a yellow Lab with a Frisbee in its mouth. There was a case with a display of championship ribbons. On a bookcase were a number of trophies, some of which had dogs on the top of them.

The dogs Joel bred were expensive, well trained, and obtainable only when he was certain the person buying them was capable of taking good care of them. They were good dogs—better, he’d told me seriously, than most people he knew. He had no use for idiots who didn’t respect the damage dogs could do when left untrained or put in situations where they felt they had to defend themselves.

In addition to breeding, he and his wife rehabbed the “aggressive” dogs that were brought to the local shelters that would otherwise have just put the dogs down. Joel had scars on his arms and a huge one on his leg from a terrified, half-grown Rottweiler who now, Joel had assured me, lived happily with a huge family. Mostly, they had success, he’d told me, but a few were too badly damaged to ever be safe in human company.

The Marrok took damaged werewolves into his pack, where he could control the conditions under which they interacted with the rest of the world. Joel had told me with tears in his eyes about a battered pit-survivor he’d had to put down a few months ago. He was as passionate in his desire to save his dogs as the Marrok was to save his wolves.

Joel’s wife brought in three glasses of sun tea and sat down in the chair opposite the couch while I explained about Christy’s stalker—and how I thought that if the dog breed he had was rare, maybe we could find someone who knew him in the dog world. I gave her the bare-bones description Christy had given me.

“Molossers,” Lucia said, then gave Honey a grin. “It is a type, not a breed. It includes mastiffs and Saint Bernards. How familiar is your husband’s ex-wife with dog breeds?”

I called Adam’s cell phone.

Christy answered yet again. “Adam’s phone,” she said. “He—”

“So how much do you know about dogs?” I asked her without giving her a chance to tell me why she was answering his phone—again—and why he couldn’t talk to me.

“I grew up with golden retrievers,” she said.

“Do you know what a molosser is?”

“No,” she admitted reluctantly.

“Ask her if she could recognize a Newfoundland,” Lucia suggested.

I decided this three-way had gone from awkward to ludicrous, and I handed the phone over to Lucia. Eventually, Christy got on the Internet to look at dog breeds.

“Cane corso,” Christy said. “They look right.”

“Cane corso are smaller than you describe,” Lucia said. “Also, they usually have nice temperaments. But poor handling can turn even a Labrador into a dangerous animal. We will keep the cane corso as a possibility. You said these dogs were black.”

“Yes,” Christy agreed. “Really black. In the sunlight, it looked like they were black striped on black.”

After twenty minutes of questioning and checking out various breeds, Lucia’s tones changed from cautiously professional to profoundly sympathetic. Christy was good, even over the phone.

“What language was the dog’s name in?” Lucia’s voice was soothing.

“I don’t speak any foreign languages,” Christy apologized.

“She’s been to Europe,” I murmured.

“Did it sound German?” Lucia asked. “The Broholmer might fit.”

“Not German,” Christy said even more apologetically. “Maybe it was Spanish or even Latin.”

Lucia stared at her white dog as she thought. Finally she said, “The fila Brasileiro—a Brazilian mastiff—might fit. They are rare and very much one-person dogs. They can be very aggressive if not socialized when they are young.”

Christy made her spell it out so she could look it up. After a few minutes, she said, “No. These dogs … their heads were more in line with their body size. And the fila Brasileiro look like bloodhounds to me. Kind of friendly. There was nothing friendly-looking about his dogs. This is sort of stupid, but I just remembered something.” She paused, and said, sounding embarrassed, “The dog’s breed. It sounded like a bird’s name.”

“Perro de presa Canario,” Lucia said immediately. “Some people call them dogo Canarios, presa Canario, or just presas or Canarios.” She spelled it for Christy without prompting.

After a minute Christy made a disappointed noise. “No. These dogs’ ears are too small. His had long ears, like the last breed we looked at.”

“Presas usually have their ears clipped—like boxers or Doberman pinschers. They do it to the American Staffordshires like my own dogs, too. I chose not to. They say it is because they are used with livestock—to prevent damage. We had a Doberman once who was not ear-clipped, and he always had trouble with his ears being sore where they bent over. But the primary reason for clipping is that it makes them look more fierce. There are people who breed presas who do not crop their ears. See if you can’t find a photo of one with natural ears.”

“I will keep looking…” Christy’s voice trailed off. “There’s one with unclipped ears. That’s it. Presa Canario.”

I took the phone back. “I’ll call Warren and let him know what he’s looking for.”

“I’ll let Adam know, too,” Christy said brightly. “He’ll be glad I figured it out.”

“Sounds good,” I responded after sorting through the things I’d rather have said to her and remembering that I had resolved not to be spiteful or petty today.

I disconnected my phone.

“So,” I asked, “just how rare are presa Canarios?”

“They are rare in the US,” Lucia said. “But a few years ago there was a man who wanted to breed them for pit fighting. He was put in jail, and his lawyers ended up with a pair of his dogs. The dogs had been mistreated, and the lawyers had no idea of how to handle them. The dogs killed a woman in their apartment building who was coming home with her groceries.” Lucia’s pretty mouth tightened, and her white dog bumped her leg to comfort her. “Do you know what happened?”

I nodded, because I remembered the incident, though I hadn’t known what the breed of dog had been. “They became suddenly popular.”

She made a growling noise, and the big dog who had been sleeping with his back to us turned around so he could see her. He didn’t get up, but he remained alert. The dog whose head was on my knee leaned on me a little harder and sighed, groaning a little as I let my fingers search out another good itchy spot.

“Canarios are not evil dogs,” Lucia told me, “any more than my Amstaffs are evil. Canarios are guard dogs, bred to protect their people, their herds—and to hunt for food by taking down big animals. Trained and raised with common sense, they are useful and valuable members of the family.”

It sounded like a rant. I have a few of those, usually involving idiots who try to replace fuses with pennies, people who text while driving, and tax codes so Byzantine not even the IRS really knows what they mean—so I nodded sympathetically.

“I know that you are married to the werewolf,” Lucia told me. “You understand about animals who can be dangerous under the right circumstance. If your friend’s stalker has Canarios—he could train them so that they kill on command.”

Honey bared her teeth and growled. All four dogs rose to their feet and surrounded Lucia—but they didn’t act upset, just ready. Dogs are better than people at reading body language.

“Big dogs are just dogs,” said Honey. “I am a wolf.” She looked at the Amstaffs, who returned her look unafraid and ready to defend their person if they needed to.

“But you, little brave cousins,” Honey said, half-amused under their regard, “you I would take with me on a hunt.”

Not many people could call Lucia’s dogs little and mean it. I would guess that it took a werewolf to feel that way; they looked plenty big to me.

Lucia, far from being intimidated by Honey, smiled. “Brave? Yes. They will take on anything to defend Joel or me.” Her smile dropped away. “Your friend”—Christy had promoted herself from my husband’s ex to my friend—“said that this man’s dogs were difficult, but he had no trouble with them. That tells me that they are
his
dogs and that they are very well trained. His dogs then will be as mine. They will not know that he is a man who attacks women who cannot fight back: a man who is a coward. They will only know that this man is their god, the one they must listen to and protect. Canarios are courageous. They will not run from you just because you are a werewolf.”

“I’m not actually a werewolf,” I told her apologetically. “But I appreciate the insight. Do you know anyone who raises Canarios? Someone we can talk to about other breeders?”

She nodded. “I do.” She left and returned with a card. “These people live in Portland and breed Canarios. They are very well-known and reputable. If Christy’s stalker is a breeder or an avid fancier, they will know of him.”

I called Warren as soon as we were in the van. He took the information and assured me that he was doing his best to find Juan Flores, so Christy could go back to Eugene.