miscreants who ignored the signage, he drove off the county road and onto the buckled and cracked blacktop of that forlorn property. The most vehicles he’d ever seen here before was one, always at night. One teenage couple or another with nowhere else to go, doing the Meat Loaf thing, like he sang about in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
Standing side by side in the pelting rain, these vehicles all appeared to be without drivers or passengers, unless everyone was lying down, which Foster didn’t credit. There were Hondas and BMWs, SUVs and crew-cab pickups, a couple of vans with sliding side doors. Most of the license plates were from California, but three were from Oregon. He counted forty-one vehicles.
Not sure what to do, he called the current watch commander, Cecil Kalstrom, and Cecil said, “Did you have a close-up look at ’em, see if there’s maybe dead people slumped in ’em or something?”
“Why would there be so many dead people?”
“Could be some cult, like that Jim Jones thing years ago, and they all met to kill themselves.”
“You’ve got some imagination, Sarge.”
“All my imagination ten times over couldn’t keep up with the weirdness that’s really out there. Look in some of the cars.”
“The way it’s raining, some Noah somewhere is building himself an ark.”
“It’s a rough life being a uniformed hero.”
“Ten-four,” Foster said.
120
Thunder and rain and voices below.
Kipp in the upstairs hall, at the top of the stairs, standing ready, head raised. Every muscle tense.
Trembling with the expectation of action.
Woody on the Wire: Now, now, now!
Kipp howled, not just on the Wire, but for real.
Behind him in the hall, other dogs howled, as did still others in the bedrooms.
The dogs he had summoned on the Wire. Before dawn of this very day. According to the plan worked out with Ben and Megan.
These Mysterians had been silent, waiting. They had been still and poised.
Now they cried their outrage and flew to the fight.
Kipp raced down the stairs.
A thunder separate from the thunder of the storm filled the house, the booming of paws pounding down the steps behind him.
121
Verbotski reached under his suit for a cross-body draw, and all the demons in Hell howled at once. As he pulled the pistol from his belt holster, the pack exploded off the stairs, across the foyer—German shepherds, golden retrievers, Labradors, Dobermans, mastiffs, rottweilers—barking, snarling, teeth flashing, a score of dogs, a double score, even more than that, a crashing sea of dogs breaking onto the shore of the living room. A mastiff leaped, a hundred-plus pounds of irresistible force, and John Verbotski proved not to be an immovable object, staggering backward as the dog slammed into him. A golden retriever seized his wrist in its mouth, the pistol flew from his grip, he stumbled sideways and collided hard with an end table, lost his balance, fell to his knees. Dogs swarmed him, nipping at his hands when he tried to reach for his Taser, for the pressurized can that would stream chloroform. When he attempted to struggle back onto his feet, they tore at the sleeves and panels of his suit coat and pulled him to the floor, flattened him facedown, flopped across his back and legs to pin him in place. A rottweiler licked the back of his neck and breathed on it, every hot exhalation a mortal threat that Verbotski, even in his bewilderment, took seriously.
Bradley Knacker had never gotten a degree in psychology, had never gone to college, had never seen any purpose for high school other than that it provided a convenient pool of targets, smaller kids he could intimidate and beat senseless and from whom he could steal. His talent and genius were for violence, from common street thuggery to the planning and execution of murders made to look like accidents and suicides, or that set up innocent people to take the fall for the crime. In spite of his high homicidal intelligence, Bradley was in other matters often slow on the uptake. When he heard the howling, he looked to the drapery-covered windows, because he could not conceive that such a large pack of animals could be in the house. When the beasts erupted into the living room, he was amazed, but he didn’t at once realize that they were anything more than an uncommon number of pets, until they attacked Verbotski and took him down as if he really were nothing more than a candy-ass Bureau agent instead of a hard-core blood junkie who