Mongrels Read online

  “It her?” I said, stepping across, ready to run out and meet her, but Darren held his hand up, keeping me in place.

  “Sheriff’s deputy,” he said, and looked around the living room for anything illegal, and for the first time I saw the grey shot all through his buzz cut. It was from shifting every night for so long, now. He was using up his man-years.

  Used to, he’d been the runt of the litter, the one lifted out last. The little brother. Maybe he still was. Except he was probably four years older than Libby now. As clean-shaven as the day he was born.

  “Did she call?” he asked, the curtains behind him still glowing yellow, then blue-and-red, blue-and-red.

  “We don’t have a phone, Darren.”

  Darren looked over to the counter where I guess the phone would have been for a better family, and he hissed through his teeth. Nothing was working. I could have told him that.

  And now the cops were here.

  “She doesn’t live here anymore,” he said, staring at me so it would stick.

  I nodded once.

  Two seconds later, the butt of a nightstick knocked hard on the top of the door, over to the side. Because that’s where the sheriff’s deputy was standing, out of the way of the shotgun we didn’t have.

  What had Libby done?

  Darren rubbed his eyes red, leaned one arm up on the paneling above the door, and creaked the door out, wincing from the sheriff’s deputy’s flashlight, raising his lip about the K-9 the backup deputy was holding on a leash. The dog filled the night with its species panic, with what-all it was screaming to the law, about us.

  “Some of that chicken,” he said back to me, his breath frosting with the cold.

  I stood there trying to process this, and then went to the refrigerator to see if Santa’d delivered us a bucket of mixed.

  “Problem?” Darren said to the sheriff’s deputy, still blocking the door with his scrawny, shirtless self.

  Mumble-mumble. A light hot on Darren’s chest.

  “Oh, yeah, her,” Darren said, massaging his smooth chin in memory. “What’d she do this time, Officer?”

  I popped the knuckle of each of my middle fingers.

  It’s what Billy the Kid would have done.

  I couldn’t make out what the sheriff’s deputy was saying about Libby, but the way Darren looked away as if trying to make this make sense, I had an idea.

  “Shit, she left—what was it?” Darren said back to me.

  At which point the sheriff’s deputy backed around off the steps, to shine his light in on me.

  I was holding the plastic bowl of breaded owl I’d forgotten to burn.

  “Three weeks?” I said.

  “Maybe even a month,” Darren said. “You know what she drives, right? Little Datsun racing truck.” He had to laugh about this. “Or maybe it’s a pace car with a bed, I don’t know. She’s always been into El Caminos, El Rancheros. Even had a Brat once. But, come on in, you want. Nothing to hide.”

  From outside, hesitation.

  From the small of Darren’s back, two secret fingers, hooking me over.

  I drifted to him, my feet numb, my face numb, my heart slamming.

  He took the bowl from me, peeled up a cold soggy strip, bit into it and chewed, chewed.

  “Some?” he said, offering his bit-off piece to the sheriff’s deputy.

  The sheriff’s deputy didn’t answer, was studying me, now.

  “I bet he’s hungry,” Darren said, and, neat as anything, arced that stringy piece of meat past the sheriff’s deputy, right into the dog’s face. The dog caught it more out of reflex than hunger, but, when it was what it was, it slurped the big bite down.

  “He likes it,” Darren said around the mouthful he had, fingering another piece up from the bowl.

  “Sir,” the sheriff’s deputy said, his elbow cocked back, hand to his gun, and Darren, being the good citizen he was, flung his hands up, dropping the bowl in the process. With some guidance from his knee—pure accident, just bad luck, Officer—the bowl tumbled down to the lower step and slingshot the rest of the meat at the sheriff’s deputy’s pants legs. The sheriff’s deputy stepped out of the way like he’d been trained, his gun fully drawn.

  Behind him, where he couldn’t look now, the dog was feasting, and growling while he did it, his eyes never leaving Darren.

  “What do you feed him?” Darren said, leaning over to spit his own poisoned bite out, his hands still up. “Donuts?”

  The LeSabre wasn’t close to street legal anymore, and still had wrong plates on it—the front was from an Audi at a rest stop, the rear from a farm truck at a diner—and the water pump probably hadn’t fixed its own self, but it got us into Decatur, Texas, by nightfall.

  Because the sheriff’s deputy hadn’t had anything to charge Darren with, after searching the house, actually smelling Libby’s bedsheets like that would tell him when she’d last been in them, he left, with instructions for us to call if she showed.

  “Phone’s right on the counter,” Darren had said, daring the sheriff’s deputy to look back in, be sure he hadn’t seen what he was pretty sure he hadn’t seen.

  His K-9 unit was surely dead by now, or wishing it was. Circled back on itself to chew its own intestines out, and go deeper, try to get its teeth all the way around the pain, the spasms.

  We pulled into a single-story motel to siphon gas from some sad-sack station wagon. Darren was as casual about it as could be, studying the fresh end of his toothpick like he was just getting water from a public well, here.

  “So she lose it?” I asked. “Libby?”

  “More like she found it,” Darren said, staring hard at the manager’s office, “only, it was four or five inches inside somebody else’s throat. Serious as that cop was, I’m guessing it was one of his little brothers.”

  “His little—?”

  “Security guard,” Darren said, pulling his siphon hose from the car and holding it up to drain the last of the gas across. “It’s good news,” he added.

  “How?”

  “If they’re still looking for her, then that means they don’t have her, right?”

  We eased away from the motel parking lot, found a high place for Darren to kill the car.

  He stood from his seat, one foot on the rocker panel, turning his head this way and that. Listening to the city.

  I did too.

  “There,” he said, nodding into a warren of what looked like condemned buildings. “Dogs.”

  When you’re a werewolf, the way you say “dogs,” it’s the same as spitting out a hard bite of macaroni.

  I looked at Darren, wanting to ask, but we were already moving.

  He’d never put a shirt on. Werewolves aren’t into shirts, even in January in North Texas.

  “They’re all looking for her back at her work,” Darren said, cruising slow through the narrow streets. “But she ran flat out of there, right? On all fours, if I know her.”

  I studied ahead of us, and beside us, and in my mirror.

  “What’s wrong with her?” I said, then had to squint from the headlights filling my mirror.

  Animal Control, with the low, flat light bar above the cab cycling. No sound, but still.

  Darren let the van pass, then crept in behind it.

  “Thirty minutes or less, right?” he said, clicking the LeSabre’s headlights off.

  It took me a moment to get it: The dogcatcher, he was delivering himself. To the commotion Libby was causing, but, really, to Libby.

  She was going to be hungry.

  We walked the last two blocks.

  “You going to . . . you know?” I asked. I was ready to keep up with his pants when he shifted. They were his only pair.

  “This is town,” he said like an answer.

  “For her too,” I told him.

  The first dog we walked onto was dying. Its guts were trailing behind it for maybe three feet.

  “Worth it?” Darren said to the dog, and shook his head, impressed.
r />   I looked back to the dog, its tongue hanging out on the concrete. There were already ants crawling in and out its mouth. I’d thought they only came out in the daytime. But maybe there are night ants. Maybe it’s that nobody ever sees them.

  The next dog was a St. Bernard. Its head was in the gutter, its body on somebody’s stoop.

  “They’re rescue dogs, aren’t they?” Darren said, squatting down to stare into the dog’s face. He picked it up to look into it better. “Rescue thyself,” he said, walking on, his fingers curled in the top hair of the St. Bernard’s head. He looked like a kid going trick-or-treating, his spooky Halloween bag swinging by his leg.

  He lobbed the shaggy head up onto a roof thirty yards down. The house’s porch light came on. We didn’t step around it to hide from whoever’d turned it on, just walked right through it, daring them to say something.

  “She’s right, you know,” Darren said. “About my hand.”

  He held up his index finger like it was glowing with silver.

  “That you can’t keep it?” I asked.

  “Her—remember Red, from back when? He used to melt silverware, pour it onto his skin just to watch the smoke.”

  “Red,” I said up. It was the first time I’d said his name in years.

  “Good riddance,” Darren said.

  “Grandpa said werewolves mate for life,” I said.

  “May be,” Darren said. “Doesn’t mean they have to like it, though. This is better for her anyway, probably.”

  “This?” I said.

  We were walking into the outer edge of a milling crowd.

  Because people are sheep and know it, they parted, let us approach the barrier.

  It wasn’t one dogcatcher, it was all of them—including Denton, going by the jackets.

  In the middle, in swirling flashes of fur, was what had to be some kind of dire wolf, to them, except with longer front legs, and taller ears, worse eyes, less hair. Fingers where there should have been toes. I couldn’t see her all at once, though. Too many dogcatchers. Too many dead dogs.

  If she would just be still, just stop spinning, stop snapping at the giant of a mastiff-Rott behind her, trying to climb over her. No, not just behind her, hooked to her. Hooked into her.

  “She’s in heat,” I said, just out loud.

  “Big-ass man of a dog,” Darren said, and flinched away just as water sprayed our whole part of the crowd.

  Somebody’d spun the cap off a fire hydrant. To throw a bucket onto these two lovers.

  It barely got them but was hitting us full force, knocking us all back, letting me see even less of Libby, who was always shy about being wolfed out, always tried to hide it—the same way Darren had triggered her to change when they were ten, maybe she thought seeing her would trigger me.

  It made me lean in farther, fight for a line of sight.

  Two of the dogcatchers used the distraction of the gouting water to slip their metal nooses around Libby’s neck, and pull opposite directions.

  She came alive in a new way, curling around farther than her spine should have allowed. Just for a flash I tried to take a mental snapshot of, I saw her through the mist, biting behind her, her black lips pulled back from her flashing white teeth, her eyes burning a hole through that massive Rott.

  This time she hooked a mouthful of his right foreleg, and then the water closed over them again.

  A few moments later, that right leg and its shoulder and half of the rib cage came clumping out.

  Five seconds later, the Rott’s limp body flung the other way, taking a kid out at the stomach.

  “No!” Darren yelled, stepping forward, wiping the stinging water from his eyes, but it was too late: One of the dogcatchers had a hot shot, was holding it like a stubby spear, even though underhand is the way to use them, because everything’s belly skin is thinner, more conductive.

  He applied it to Libby somewhere in that rush of water and she screamed, snapped at him, pulling her two noose-bearers to their knees before they even realized they needed to set their feet.

  Then a town cop parted the crowd, stepped into the ring with a pistol. Not standard-issue either, but a full-on Dirty Harry hand cannon.

  I was diving for his legs before I even realized I’d jumped. My right shoulder caught him perfect at the back of the knees and we rolled in the water and the grime of the street, and the pistol clattered away. I tracked its slide. I tracked it right into the square toe of Darren’s truck-stop boot.

  He squatted, picked the gun up, looked to the cop wrenching my arm around behind my back, my feet leaving the ground for it.

  The world slowed down, was hardly moving.

  Now Libby was lunging forward out of the water, for the cop. To protect me. To keep Darren from having to do it, like she had to know he was about to, damn the manhunt that would follow. The wolf hunt. She was going to make it too. She was going to chew through that cop, the dogcatchers, the bystanders, and not stop until all of Texas was in bloody clumps behind her.

  At which point Darren did the last thing I would have guessed in ten thousand lifetimes.

  He angled the pistol over to Libby, shot her.

  Three hours later we walked away from the burbling flood the street was—walked, not ran. We weren’t in handcuffs anymore.

  Darren had explained that that overgrown Rott had been mine. Clint Eastwood was his name. I had been mad with grief. I knew better than to ever tackle the law.

  And—and he was sorry for having discharged the weapon. But somebody had to.

  It was a different Darren than I’d ever known.

  We were sitting in the LeSabre before I said it: “You killed her.”

  “I wish,” he said, twisting the ignition. “Pissed as she’s going to be. Takes more than one slug to keep one of us down, man. Takes a wall of lead, serious. I’ve seen it. And sometimes even that’s not enough. You can always get one more bite in. Remember that.”

  I stared at him.

  “You shot her,” I said.

  “I saved her,” he said. “Same as you were doing.”

  I was breathing deep now, the whole scene catching up with me.

  We were supposed to report to the precinct in the morning. Because, bare-chested like we were, we were obviously just up from bed, didn’t have our identification. They were going to officially commend Darren, they said.

  It was so obviously a trap that we didn’t even have to talk about it.

  By dawn, we needed to be in Georgia, or South Carolina.

  At the gas station on the corner we filled the LeSabre’s radiator, then filled all four milk jugs in the trunk as well. And then we waited for what Darren knew was coming: a certain Animal Control van. We followed it in, gave them an hour to unload, decompress, tell their war stories. Tell themselves the war was over.

  Because the LeSabre had more change in it than we thought we’d left from the last dig-through, we split a hot dog. It was one of the three best hot dogs ever eaten in the whole history of Texas. Because two of the quarters turned out being early sixties, still silver—Darren’s infected hand was like silver radar, now—he’d let me carry them in, trade them for a hot dog.

  I’d rubbed them hard between my thumb and finger, to see if they’d burn.

  At five, dawn just starting to lighten the bottom edge of the sky, Darren stood from the car, looked back to me once, licked his lips and stepped forward, no shirt, no identification, no nothing.

  I wasn’t supposed to, but I followed.

  We knocked until a tech came out, unlocked the door.

  Darren explained how we were moving, how we were driving out right now, but we’d gotten a call about my black Lab mix, that we just needed to pick her up. It was now or never. By saying no, the tech was going to be serving that imaginary black Lab mix a death sentence. Was that what she wanted? To give it the pink juice like all the other rejects?

  “Who called?” she said.

  “Thought it was you,” Darren said back.


  She led us in, not liking it.

  Because we were what we were, the dogs all exploded in their kennels, turned instantly into the living barking definition of batshit.

  “I’m good with animals,” Darren said to the tech.

  Down at the end of a run, in the back corner, the one probably reserved for exotics, was Libby.

  She’d shifted back since they’d deposited her here to die. She was naked, had pushed herself back into the corner, was trying to hide behind her hair. There was blood seeping from her left side, electric burns on her shoulders, and her eyes were haunted and mad and sorry and crying and, mostly, they were trying to look far enough away from this kennel that they could maybe take her with them.

  “Yeah,” Darren said. “That’s her, right there.”

  “Ma’am, ma’am,” the tech was saying, fumbling with her keys, “how did you get in there, what did—”

  Darren guided the shaking key into the lock for her.

  “You okay?” he said to Libby.

  She stood, steadying herself on the wall.

  “I don’t want to be here,” she said, and then the tech was there, acting as a crutch so Libby wouldn’t fall over.

  Together they walked through the short door, Libby having to duck.

  When her eyes caught mine, she pursed her lips, had to look away.

  “Here,” Darren said, stepping in to support Libby.

  “Your hair’s going grey,” Libby told him.

  “Don’t you dare tell me I look like him,” Darren said.

  “What do you think?” she said to me, and I nodded yes, yes yes yes, couldn’t speak around the lump in my throat.

  The tech beat us to the front desk, was trying to tell somebody on the phone what was happening.

  Because mine was the free hand, I guided her handset back to its cradle, held it there.

  “But, but—” the tech was saying, and in answer Darren held his swollen index finger up for her like a magic trick, inserted it all the way into his mouth, his teeth chocked as close to the knuckle as they’d go, then he widened his eyes out and slammed his chin with the heel of his hand.

  He spit the still-curling finger out onto the counter.

  “For your trouble,” he said, winking a truly scary wink, and Libby pulled his new stump to her mouth to stop the bleeding, or for strength, and like that we left, me driving a car for the first time in my thirteen years, going the exact other way from the little white rent house, the lights of Texas falling away behind us.