The Good Boy (7 page)

When Pete releases the rear locks, he finds Butch in there shaking, nerves hamstrung, and he wonders if somebody discovered the squad anyway, tapped on the windows. Kids, probably. It’s usually kids.

“Sorry, Butch,” he says, thinking it’s been a hell of a day for the dog, too: the storm, the vet, the rest of the nonsense. “Come on. You have to pee?
Voraus.
” Butch obeys, soft-pawing it to the pavement and heeling to Pete’s left.

They cross Flournoy to an empty, overgrown lot between duplexes and Butch runs the perimeter, sniffing his way around to a patch of tall grass where he stops to do his business. He looks flustered—not to anthropomorphize him like Joel does, but when he drops his back end, he always has this look—as if he’s actually being caught with his pants down. Pete faces the street, gives him some privacy.

While he waits he watches Swigart, a cop he knows, pull his beat car into the lot. He’s a tall kid, a mouth quicker than his feet. The three of them worked together a while back—wintertime, Pete remembers: there was a wet snow falling, no wind. Butch chased the offender into a waste-management lot and Pete told Swigart they were done for; no way the dog could work amid the millions of rotting, microbial distractions, his paws caked with ice. But Butch stayed on the trail, and when he flushed the suspect out from behind a mountain heap of trash so warm it had a pulse, he sat down and barked as the offender ran, hit a slick patch of who knows what, and ate shit.

It was Swigart’s case, so the kid bought Pete coffee and they shot the breeze while the suspect had his ulna reset at Pres St. Luke’s.

If Swigart knew anything about Pete—the rumors about Kitty and him were rampant back then—he knew better than to act like he did. It was nice, talking to a kid who showed some respect. A kid like Pete once was.

Pete waves, gets nothing back. He tells himself Swigart didn’t see him, but then he looks in the same direction the kid is looking and sees a group of reporters gathered a hundred yards down the way at the station’s main entrance: they’re documenting Ja’Kobe White’s exit. If Swigart did see Pete, he knew better than to act like he did.

“For fuck’s sake.” Pete couldn’t have tried to run into the guy again today.

White’s mouth is going, cameras and mics following him to the backseat of a black showroom-caliber sedan waiting curbside. Once he gets in, the driver lets him finish whatever he’s going on about before easing the car to a crawl, the photographers desperate to keep up—thankfully—since the car is headed right toward Pete on the one-way.

Pete folds his arms, watches the car pass. He won’t pick a fight but he sure as hell won’t turn away, either, get camera-shot in the back.

When the sedan passes by, White is saying, “… the motherfucker right there waiting for me! Close up this window, he’s going to sic his dog on me again!”

“Give me a break, Ja’Kobe,” Pete says and then the car stops, abrupt, middle of the street.

The front-passenger window comes down and the driver, a man with too much hair to be his own and a tie the color of his strange rosy lips, leans over and looks at Pete like he’s the dog and says, “Back away, Officer.”

“I’m standing here. Move along.”

White says, “The dog, man—”

The driver puts his hand up, a shush. “Have you been waiting for Mr. White?”

Pete tears a plastic bag off the spool he keeps in his pocket, rubs its thin sides together to loosen the opening, and pulls it over his hand like a glove. He says, “I’m waiting to pick up dog shit.”

“Mr. White is afraid of your dog.”

“Then why don’t you move the fuck along, like I said?”

The driver looks in his rearview: a couple of the reporters have noticed his brake lights, and probably Pete, and hopefully not Butch.

Pete steps back, checks over his shoulder: Butch is oblivious, scratching his back on the grass.

“Is your dog neutered?” the driver asks.

“What?” Pete whistles and the dog flips onto his feet and starts toward them.

“Is he neutered.”

“No.”

The driver leans over just a little more and Pete watches his mouth as he says, “Then I think I’ll ask the court to take his balls, too.”

In the backseat, Ja’Kobe smiles, fearless, even though Butch has come up, right there at Pete’s side.

Then both windows go up and the sedan moves on ahead of the reporters, and as Pete jogs Butch back to the squad, he guesses he just met David fucking Cardinale.

*   *   *

Pete backs into the garbage can next to the garage as AM 780 restarts its top-of-the-hour newscast, and he realizes they’ve been out for nearly thirty-six hours.

“Son of a…” he says, brake lights illuminating the trash now splayed out behind the car.

In the back, Butch turns over and keeps right on snoring, having given it up on the way home.

“I wish you could drive sometimes,” Pete says, and gets out to pick up the mess.

An empty pizza box reminds him he was hungry a long time ago and he wonders what was for dinner. He hopes he can persuade Sarah to tell him Joel’s trouble while he microwaves some leftovers or something. The last thing he had was his fourth cup of coffee, powdered creamer the only thing keeping it from sluicing right through his system. His stomach quit growling some time before that, sustenance as forgone as sleep.

He gets into the car and as he successfully backs into the garage the radio announcer on WBBM says,
“Coming up, traffic and weather together on the eights,”
and he decides to idle, wait for tonight’s forecast.

“WBBM news time 9:05 … A civil suit has been filed against the Chicago Police Department and K9 officer Peter Murphy after his dog bit a civilian late this morning. Ja’Kobe White claims Officer Murphy ordered his dog to attack and says Murphy was, quote, still banging for the judge.… Our listeners may remember White’s mother, Trissa, attempted to sue Judge Katherine Crawford over the death of her son Felan … at the time, Murphy served as Crawford’s protection. White is suing for harassment, excessive force, and wrongful arrest—still, he says, a ruling won’t be good enough. This from his attorney, David Cardinale—”

“Son of a bitch,” Pete says, wondering if Sarah heard the news, if it’s what made her call back three times since they spoke, no voice mail. He switches off the engine and, thankfully, the radio with it.

“You comatose back there?” he asks Butch, who’s still sawing logs, so he leaves the dog while he lets himself into the locker underneath his workbench where he keeps their training arsenal: a licensed supply of coke, heroin, meth, mary jane, oxycodone, and methadone—all of it either synthetic or dittoed, since Butch only needs the slightest whiff to detect the stuff. This is also where Pete keeps a secret supply of tobacco—a pack of Marlboro reds—because his own training never did completely take. He lights one and steps outside, checks the moon, the house.

Fucking Ja’Kobe White. Pete knows what’s not good enough for him and that’s the sorry salary of a cop. And now that he’s got Cardinale shooting for him, he’s aiming higher—the city’s pocketbook. And why not? Pete just bought him a ticket to play the ghetto lottery.

No wonder Finn was so rock-ribbed about the report. Excessive force was an obvious choice due to the dog bite, but harassment and wrongful arrest—White must’ve trumped those up from history.
His
story, that is.

Up at the house, a light comes on in the kitchen. Pete stomps out his cigarette. Time to find out Joel’s story.

He returns to the squad, opens the back door. “Hey, Butch? We’re here.”

The big dog rears his sleep-doped head and shakes off whatever he’d been dreaming.

“We’re home,” Pete tells him. “Where we live. C’mon.”

Butch jumps out and heads for his usual tree—the only tree in the yard, actually—to lift his leg.

Pete closes the garage and follows, gets the hose going to refill the dog’s water bowl. He’s kneeling there, side of the dog run, when Butch comes over and sits, head cocked, panting.

Pete finds his own breath catching. Excessive force might be a charge that sticks. Then what happens to Butch? Pete’s the one who got him worked up this morning. And for a moment—the single moment he gave the dog just enough slack on the leash—Pete
wanted
Butch to get to White. Whether or not White was making a move. Was that based on history?

Of course Butch couldn’t have known any better. He only wanted to please his master.

Pete takes the dog’s head in his hands and whispers in his ear—that he’s a good boy and
Does he know what a good boy he is?
and that he’ll be okay. He feels like a liar, the reassuring tone of his voice. What if the dog’s loyalty makes him a liability?

Butch nuzzles his chest and Pete sits back and pulls him into a hug. It’s the only affection he’ll count on tonight.

When Butch gets restless Pete says, “Okay, boy,” and ushers the dog into his run. He locks the gate and resets the resting lock numbers; he changes them every night to make sure nobody’s coming around—kids, of course. The tarp over the top is another security measure, because Pete knows of a couple of dogs killed by the unthinkable lobbed-over hamburger patty made of ground beef and crushed glass. Not kids.

Pete rattles the fence, says, “Night, partner.”

Butch blinks a goodbye and noses his old blanket around, making tonight’s bed.

No one is there to greet Pete when he lets himself inside the house. It still doesn’t smell like home—not that a rental would ever feel that way. Still, he thought he’d get used to it, once they moved all their stuff in—like Butch and his old blanket. But every time Pete steps in, he flashes back to a summerhouse in 1978. It was a place his parents rented in Wisconsin. It was down a dirt road and shaded by huge elm trees and it was nowhere near the beach, like they promised, though it smelled of lake water. And also mold. And what he now knows to be death: faint and sweet, occasional but ever lingering.

When they moved in, Sarah made every improvement the landlord allowed—she repainted one room, ripped out the carpet in another, plugged air freshener into every single light socket. Now, the place smells like Lilac Spring. And sometimes mold. And sometimes death.

“Sarah?” Pete says, without much behind it. His mind’s on a meal now, and then maybe a shower, before he’s supposed to play policeman with Joel.

He’s at the kitchen table waiting on a leg of a rotisserie chicken that’s warming in the oven, a box of crackers and a cold beer in front of him, when Sarah finally comes downstairs.

“Hi,” she says, hair up, makeup off. She used to be pretty this way, when she smiled.

“Hi.” Pete used to be a lot of things. He knows that.

Sarah opens the fridge and looks inside and then lets it close. She probably hasn’t had anything for dinner, and she probably won’t. She always looks, and always says she isn’t hungry.

Pete tips the box of crackers.

“I’m not hungry.” She places her hands on the back of the seat across from him, the pose as stiff as her lip. She looks at his beer. “I thought you’d be home this morning.”

“Yeah. You said.”

“Joel’s school called. They suspended him.”

“What for?”

“He urinated on another boy’s uniform.”

“On another kid?”

“On the boy’s clothes. Robert Schnapper. They were in gym class. Mr. Wells caught Joel in the locker room as he was … relieving himself. In Robert’s locker. I’m going to make an appointment with Dr. Drake.…” While Sarah’s talking, she’s so serious, her face a picture of concern and embarrassment and guilt, that Pete half expects her to reveal a prankish smile—a conspiratorial
Can you believe it? Joel, the little shit!—
because she would have, before.

And then he’s the one with the smile. He can’t help it.

“This is not funny.”

“It’s kind of funny.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, but as soon as he says it he realizes he’s trying not to laugh and then he can’t help that, either. This must be a good one, whatever set Joel off? Whatever made Sarah so damn serious?

“I can’t believe you,” she says, and then she’s saying a bunch of other stuff but Pete can’t make out any of it because he’s really cracking up. He tries—he hears her say something about a bladder-control issue, and how Joel could have completely internalized everything that’s happened—but listening to her go on just makes it worse. He puts his head in his hands. It’s not
that
funny, but something about it, something kills him.

“Pete.”

“Hang on a second,” Pete says. “Just a second.” That extra second is because he had to wipe his eyes after the first one. He says, “This Robert Snapper—”

“Schnapper.”

“I meant Schnapp—” the rest of it lost. His stomach cramping. He doesn’t even know why he’s laughing, exactly, but he might as well fall off his chair.

“You’re an asshole.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

And then he realizes he doesn’t mean it, and that what he’s laughing at is
her,
or to spite her, at least. He never wanted it to be like this, but it is. And it’s his fault, and it’s her fault, and it’s maddening.

He sits back, sobered. “What did Joel say?”

“I don’t know, Pete. He came home with a headache. He looked awful. I put him to bed.”

“You didn’t talk to him?”

“I’m his mother. Not a cop.”

“You’re not a doctor, either, but I’ll bet you gave him pills.”

“You’re not going to make
me
feel bad. I’ve been trying to tell you something’s going on with him for months and you refuse to hear me.”

“I think you’re making too much of this.”

“I think you are making a mess of it. Like everything else.” She finds the back of the chair again, this time for balance, because now she’s not looking at him.

Not looking at him is what she does to drive him insane. She knows it drives him insane, and yet at times she acts like it’s simply impossible to face him. During a heated argument not too long ago, Pete held her head and tried to force her to look at him directly. She wouldn’t. Short of torture, there is no good way to induce eye contact.