Night Moves (Doc Ford) - By RandyWayne White Page 0,100

the retriever at my feet, and reviewed the legal documents I had scanned, signed, and that were waiting to be returned to Dr. Arlis Milton.

The forms looked in order. After a second review, I opened the e-mail to which I’d attached the documents and placed the cursor on the Send button. Nothing to it. Click the button and the rightful owner could claim the retriever whenever he chose. But then the jet-set assassin’s adage came into my mind and caused my finger to hesitate.

Pull the trigger and you can never stop the bullet.

I sat there for several seconds, the concept percolating in my brain. The adage was true. I knew it better than most. The long-term resonance that pulling a trigger, any form of trigger, guaranteed was another truth I had experienced. But there was something else I knew: facts are the least malleable derivative of truth, and a singular fact in this instance was this: the dog wasn’t mine.

Pulling triggers is something you’re good at, I reminded myself. It was an accusation that fit my perverse mood. So I did it. Used my middle finger to hit the Send button with conviction—WHAP!—and, a moment later, my decision was irrevocable.

Interested, the retriever looked up.

“It was the right thing to do,” I told him. “At least I’ll find out who the hell you really are.”

The dog’s rump arched into a pyramid while he yawned and got his legs under him. He took two steps, then dropped a heavy chin on my knee, his yellow eyes staring into mine.

“Too late for that boloney,” I warned him. “Your psychic powers suck.”

The dog’s ears perked until his brain discarded the words as unrecognizable. Did the same thing when I added, “The cat—Crunch & Des—he’d just make your life miserable anyway.”

I was scratching the dog’s neck just above the snakebite, the area greasy with salve, which I bent to examine. Big snake, so a big chunk of skin was missing—four inches of flesh fringed by a scimitar of scabs. The boa’s recurved teeth had buried themselves there while the two animals had battled it out. Seeing the puncture wounds, the size of the bite, caused me to scratch at the bandage that covered what remained of the teeth marks on my arm and also re-created the reality of what had happened that day. One hell of a fight, I’d told Tomlinson. I smiled, picturing it.

Soon, my smile flattened because what I visualized was not amusing. A sixty-pound snake, lying in wait, strikes, locks his teeth into the dog just above the shoulder, then begins to subdue its thrashing prey with the first systematic loop as its body coils. One hell of a fight? No, I was wrong about that. What I visualized was life attempting to snatch fuel from death . . . the indifferent struggle of selection . . . one energized entity determined to ingest the beating heart of another.

The outcome, however, had made a mockery of my Darwinian script. The results defied all odds, all logic, all reason: a reptile perfected over eons, a dog—once a wolf—whose genetics had been artificially selected by hobbyists . . . tinkered with, refined, into a purebred mold that should have banished it from the food chain hierarchy and deposited it inside the snake’s belly.

In this dog, though, the wolf had resurfaced. He had attacked his attacker and made a meal of him. Imagining how the encounter had actually gone produced in me the briefest flicker of . . . something. It wasn’t emotion—a sense of clarity, the Brazilian might have described it—and my mood changed.

“Screw reason,” I told the dog. “You’re a survivor.”

Impatient with my gibberish, the animal shifted his attention to the chunk of rope as if comparing its entertainment value to my own.

“Screw logic, too,” I added, and that did it. The chunk of hawser won out. The dog turned his butt to me and carried the rope to the only clean spot on the floor and began shredding it.

Outside, the moon overhead, I looked north toward the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay. Because my cell phone happened to be in my pocket, I called Hannah Smith.

28

AN HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE, I IDLED PAST THE SLEEPING portholes and listless halyards of A-Dock, where, just beyond solar lights that rimmed Seduci, I noticed a gaping hole in the mooring pattern: the Stiletto ocean racer was gone.

How the hell had I missed hearing those big engines fire up?

Well, probably because I’d been on the phone past midnight