Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,41

it that way.

“I dunno.”

“No, you do know. You are. You’re a richie-rich.” She looks him up and down. “But you dress like you’re poor.”

“I do?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Sorry.”

She smacks her lips. Tastes the pukey cottonmouth film on her tongue. “No skin off my knuckles. Hey, what do you know about the dog? The… dead one.”

“I dunno. He was cute.”

“She. Sailor was a she.”

“Oh.”

“Where’d they find the body?”

“They didn’t find it.”

She takes a step closer. “Huh?”

“They didn’t find the dog. The dog came home.”

“Came home. Looking like that.”

“Yeah. Scratching at the door wanting to be let in. I guess he—uhh, she—died about a half-hour later on Jenny’s bed.” He pauses, like he’s not sure he should say the next part. “They had to get rid of the mattress.” Now a look—a wince, a flinch—that says he shouldn’t have said it. All he does then is shrug.

“Holy crap,” Atlanta says. “The dog came home.”

“Yeah.”

Maybe it was time to revise her assessment of dogs. Because that shit was pretty incredible.

Chomp-Chomp goes, straddles the four-wheeler’s saddle, waits expectantly. Atlanta goes to get on behind him, and he reaches back to pull her hands around his middle—

“You need to hold on when—“

Alarm bells. Klaxons. Hands hot like they’re touching a casserole dish without oven mitts. She staggers backward off the thing, bowlegged and nearly falling over. Every inch of her body feels like it’s covered with spider legs doing a creepy little waltz across her skin.

That smell again: expended gunpowder. A ringing in her ears.

“You go ahead,” she croaks. Voice dry.

“But you’re not feeling—“

“I’m fine.” A harsh protestation but there it is. “I’m fine. Go on, now. Go. Don’t want to lose my breakfast on the back of your neck.” Not that she ate breakfast. And not that she’s going to, now. She sends Chomp-Chomp away. He hesitates, doesn’t want to go, but she yells at him and that makes him drive off—slow like a sad donkey, head hung low, Eeyore in a death metal t-shirt.

* * *

Atlanta isn’t a big fan of dogs. You walk into somebody’s house that owns a dog, you know it. You can smell it, and you can see it. Chewed corner of the coffee table. Musky musty pissy odor. Ratty toys on the floor. A half-eaten rawhide gummy with saliva and stuck fur. And dogs are all drooly. Jumpy. Needy.

Atlanta doesn’t like needy people, so she damn sure doesn’t care for needy animals. Dogs are like that little kid in the grocery store who won’t stop tugging on his mother’s ovaries: Mom mom mom mom mommy mommy mom.

Not that she likes cats much better. Because, seriously, fuck cats. Those dismissive emperors of the living room. You don’t own a cat so much as you petition them for your time.

Plus, cat smell? Makes that dog odor smell like Old Spice. Cat stink crawls deep. Into carpets. And subflooring. Wood will hold a cat piss smell until the sun flares up and burns out and all of mankind is left to die in a cold godless galaxy. On a hot, windy day, the cross-breeze coming from the Cat Lady’s house next door smells like a doom-wind. Rankling ammoniac smell heralding the end of days.

Cats. Dogs. Ugh.

If Atlanta were allowed a pet, she’d choose a lizard. Maybe a snake, too. Or a tarantula.

Small. Not cute. Doesn’t give a shit and doesn’t need much.

And doesn’t piss on your stuff.

But just the same, not liking dogs doesn’t mean she feels good about what happened to Jenny’s little lady. You just don’t do that to an animal whether you like animals or not.

* * *

Going back home doesn’t sound appealing. It’s there her mother will be making a nest out of ruined Kleenex, sitting there and hatching little pity eggs like the saddest bird on the block. When the woman gets on a crying jag, it goes and it goes with all the energy of that stupid-ass battery bunny.

She wanders around town for a while. Not sure what to do next. She’s a shitty shamus, she knows. Atlanta’s not so sure what she expected: she’d turn the corner just past that little coffee café on the corner and there, in front of Dosie Sawicki’s kielbasa stand she’d see some canine serial killer tying a noose around a Newfoundland’s neck? Performing dentistry on a Chihuahua? Stuffing a Jack Russell into a cannon?

In the midst of her floundering, a kielbasa starts to sound pretty dang good. Throwing up does that to you, sometimes—leaves you hollow, ragged, but feeling like