happened.”
“Could be.”
“I get that. Well. Whatever y’all need.”
“Thanks, Atlanta.”
Holger asks. Atlanta answers. All as honestly as she can tell it. She leaves Guy and Shane out of it. Says she was looking into some missing dogs for a friend. That put her into Bird and Bodie’s orbit. Here she leaves out what they did to her and how she stole Whitey. She mostly just plays it like she was there sniffing for information and when she saw what she saw she couldn’t abide it—and so she called Holger. It’s a simplified version of the truth but it works. No real gaps to speak of long as nobody else tells Holger differently.
When they’re done, Holger nods and says, “You’re a tough little girl.”
“I’m not so little.”
“No, I suppose you’re not. Girls grow up faster than ever.”
“I guess we have to.”
“Let’s go get your dog and get you home.”
* * *
They way it all happens seems like a nightmare. It’s impossible and unthinkable and yet it happens just the same.
She and Holger walk down past the cubicles and desks of this middling police department and they head to the stairwell—metal door opens, clangs, cement steps down toward the basement.
Holger’s making small talk, something about how there’s an ice cream place just down the road that has pink bubblegum ice cream and how she used to love that flavor when she was a girl.
Atlanta doesn’t know why they’re talking about it or how they even got onto the subject of ice cream because all of that escapes her head when she hears the gunshot.
The shot, loud. A quick echoing pop. Just one. From downstairs in the basement.
Atlanta’s whole body feels like it’s falling through itself.
Upstairs, she didn’t see Petry.
Where had he gone?
This is a warning. It may not be my last…
She breaks into a run. Holger after her.
The downstairs is all cement blocks and concrete floors. Austere. Functional. A hall with many doors. One of them open.
Atlanta calls to her dog, starts yelling out for Whitey to come to her.
No dog answers.
She hauls ass to the break-room door.
It’s there she finds him.
On his side. Pool of blood under his head. A red hole in the ridge above his eye.
Petry leans against the back corner of the break-room. Gun set on the counter. His hand is bleeding and he’s swaddling it in napkins. “Don’t know what happened. Dog came at me. Bit my hand—“
But then Atlanta is screaming. The sound that comes out of her is like a banshee, a wail like a storm wind through a broken shutter—it drowns his voice out.
She clambers up over the break-room table like a rabid animal. Claws for him. Shoves him against the counter. Thinks to grab the gun. Grab it, stick it under his chin, pull the trigger—
Hands find her. Holger. Pulling her back. Her hip bangs into a chair. She screams. Weeps. Yells again and again how he killed her dog, he killed her dog, he killed her dog—
Other cops come into the room. How could they not? Gun discharged inside the station? Alert. All hands on deck. Full-tilt-boogie. But Atlanta doesn’t care. She can’t get to Petry but she can get to her dog. She drops next to Whitey and feels him and holds him and kneels in his blood. She cradles his limp head to her own. The dog made a promise to her—he had her back, and she thought he had his but soon as she turned her eyes away…
Atlanta lays upon the dog, wetting his side with her tears.
Whitey is dead.
Part Four: Bait Girl
She was there when her father died. He had an aneurysm out in his workshop. Blood balloon swelled at the base of his brain and just as he was about to hammer another nail—he was out there in the dust and the cobwebs fixing one of their dining room chairs—the balloon went pop and Daddy dropped.
Atlanta was the one who found him. Laying on the stone floor. Bits of sawdust in his hair like the snow they never saw much of down South. And the thing she remembers about that moment is how she knew he was dead. Was like something had left him—and now what remained was just a department store mannequin of meat and bones but no soul, pale and tight and missing that essential human spark that makes us who we are.
All that was made worse at the funeral when she got a look at the man in the box. Her father had turned into