The Death & Life of an American Dog Read online

  “I was…somewhere else…somewhere…” the dog stammered. “There was fire, and explosions and a voice…there was a voice shouting at me…blood…and fire…”

  “All right, calm down, it was just a dream,” Yoda cut in as the dog’s tone began to rise. “We all have bad dreams from time to time but we wake up and we know they are not real.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” the dog barked. “I don’t know if it was just a dream…I don’t think so…think it was real.”

  “What’s your name?” Yoda asked, trying to get the dog’s mind off the dream, or memory, or whatever it was that upset him so much. “Like I said, my name is Yoda. Tell me you name.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t?” Yoda asked incredulously. “Not at all?”

  “In the dream…the voice…calling me…”

  “What’s the voice saying?”

  “Calling me something, a name, I think,” the dog replied. “I don’t recognize the word…but, it’s what the voice calls me.”

  “What does it call you?” Yoda urged.

  “Iblis…”

  Iblis? Yoda tilted his head in confusion. He had heard a lot of goofy names for dogs in his time—though, he reflected, anyone named Yoda could hardly make fun of any other dog’s name, though he did it all the time—but what kind of name was Iblis? The names given to or adopted by dogs invariably had some meaning, either to the naming companion or to the dog himself, but whatever meaning lurked behind the vaguely sinister sounding Iblis escaped him. He suspected it was likely foreign, and with all the languages in the world it could come from anywhere and mean anything. It was a puzzlement, but it was something to be solved when he got the mystery dog back home, and to do that he was going to have to somehow coax him out of hiding.

  “I’ll tell you what, Iblis, come on out of there, and I’ll take you home with me,” Yoda said. “You’ll be safe there.”

  “Safe?” the dog who might be named Iblis said hesitantly.

  “A heck of a lot safer than in this alley,” Yoda pointed out. “I think the enemies you’re afraid of are just in your dreams, but there are lots of real dangers out here too—outlaw gangs of dogs or cats, animal control officers, skunks and possums, and all manner of wild things. Some ferals and strays can take care of themselves on the mean streets, but, seeing the, uh, stronghold you have, I don’t think you’re one of them. Come on, Iblis, let me help you.”

  “Why would you want to help me?” Iblis asked.

  “That’s what we do,” Yoda explained. “Help those in need.”

  “We?”

  “Me and my friends,” Yoda said. “We’re detectives.”

  The cardboard boxes rustled and shifted as the dog within edged a bit forward to get a better view of his unlikely rescuer.

  “You? A detective?”

  “Don’t let this compact and dapper package fool you, buddy,” Yoda challenged as he bristled in indignation. He was momentarily distracted as a breeze swept through the alley and ruffled his fur, giving him an unexpected Fabio moment, but he forced himself to concentrate on the problem at paw. “I’m a detective, and the Three Dog Detective Agency wants to help you, so quit fooling around and come out of there right now.”

  The boxes moved, but no dog came out.

  “Iblis, out!” Yoda snapped, mimicking the tone and tenor Levi had taught him for just such moments.

  The boxes exploded outward as the dog within reacted to the sound of an alpha command. Though Yoda was not a natural alpha, as was Levi, he had learned enough tricks of the trade to fake it, at least for the moment it took to exert his will. For all his feistiness and exuberance, Yoda knew he was not an alpha and would never be, but he felt no guilt about temporarily taking on the mantle. In his time, he had known dogs who were no more an alpha than was he and who yet used tricks, gimmicks and subterfuges to exert control over an entire pack, The difference between such pretenders and himself, Yoda thought, was that he never claimed to be something he wasn’t, and when he did exert control it was only a momentary response to a problem, and always for the sake of others.

  Yoda’s jaw dropped a little and he took a half-step back, but he quickly recovered, holding his ground.

  Iblis was a German Shepherd, towering over the Pomeranian, his neck erect, ears pricked, back straight as if he had an iron rod for a spine, and legs stiff and quivering at attention. More startling than Iblis’ appearance was the fact that he had been hiding like a scared teacup Poodle. Looking at him, Yoda could not imagine any situation the muscular German Shepherd could not handle by tooth or nail, if not by sheer force of presence alone. His body was black and tan, but there seemed to be scars beneath, and there was a splash of black across his face. His eyes glittered like obsidian.

  Around the German Shepherd’s neck was a wide collar of dark leather, very worn, secured with a buckle made from some non-reflective metal, an oddity these days, Yoda thought, when canine fashion seemed dominated by artificial materials, designer motifs, and plastic snaps. Iblis’ collar seemed designed to withstand a lot of wear, and had. Dangling from the collar was a dull metal disc, but when Yoda stepped closer for a better look Iblis abruptly crouched low and snarled, his teeth bared and his eyes clouded with menace.

  “There’s no need for that,” Yoda said in a calming tone, but he took two steps back, making sure he did not crowd the German Shepherd in any way. “Like I said, it’s just you and me here, and I don’t want to do anything but help you.”

  Iblis made no reply. Although he did not stand down from his warning crouch, his eyes did seem to soften a bit as he regarded the comparatively small Pomeranian. Slowly, his gaze swept up and down the alley.

  “Just the two of us,” Yoda repeated. “No enemies.”

  Though Yoda uttered assurances, he was no longer as certain about the safety of the alley as he had been previously. His hearing still gave him no indication of the presence of any animal, or other source of danger, but there was a certainty to Iblis’ wariness that almost made him doubt his keen natural senses. Despite the vast blueness of the sky and the brightness of the sun, the alley seemed suddenly a place of shadows and potential menace.

  Yoda upbraided himself for letting the German Shepherd’s fear and paranoia overcome his own self-confidence, if even for only a moment. He took one step forward and woofed softly to regain Iblis’ attention.

  “Everything is all right, Iblis,” Yoda said. “There’s no one here who’s going to hurt you, but you’re right about this alley not being a safe place. Gangs, traffic, ferals—they can all be bad news, but we can avoid them by leaving now, by you coming home with me.”

  “Home?” Iblis murmured. “Headquarters?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, our headquarters,” Yoda urged, seeing a way to perhaps get past whatever had knocked this big guy for such a loop. “You’ll be safe at our headquarters. You can relax, have something to eat and drink, then tell me and my friends what the problem is. We can put our heads together and come up with a solution, make all your problems go away, maybe even find a way to get you back to your companion. I’m sure that someone is…”

  As Yoda spoke, just babbling on, really, saying words to fill the void, to penetrate the tense silence which gripped Iblis, he realized he could see the fear and anxiety start to ebb away from Iblis. He breathed an inaudible sigh of relief as he saw the other dog’s eyes start to return to the glittering brightness that was the mark of a dog in balance with his environment, and lose the cloudiness of terror and hysteria.

  His muscles, which had seemed like steel cords on the verge of snapping, began to loosen, and he started to recover from the ready-to-lunge position he had adopted at Yoda’s approach. Yoda felt his own nervousness start to ebb as Iblis began to calm. The change in Iblis came not from anything in the meaning of Yoda’s words, he understood, but from their soothing tone, the measured cadence that overtook the racing of his heart. As the sense of danger ebbed away, Yoda kept murmuring
reassurances, talking the frightened German Shepherd down from whatever emotional cliff he had become stranded on.

  When Iblis’ tongue started to loll from out a muzzle that was no longer clenched in an attack mode, Yoda knew he had finally brought the other dog to an easy state of relaxation and trust, where a dog’s natural good temperament could finally take control. All he had to do now was maintain that state of being in Iblis, and keep him that way until he got the big fellow home. Once there, he knew, he could turn the German Shepherd over to Levi and Sunny, for Levi to maintain with the authority of a real alpha and for Sunny to nurture, which was at the heart of her nature.

  Abruptly, the shrill screaming of tortured tires cut through the air, shattering the aura of calmness Yoda had brought about. Someone was turning off Broadway too fast to maintain control of the car. The shrieking of tires was followed by a loud crashing sound as a car clipped the corner of the building, barreled into the alley, and struck a nearby parked car.

  Instantly, Iblis returned to a state of heightened wariness and alarm. Every muscle tightened and his fur bristled. The clarity of his eyes was immediately replaced by the same clouds of panic and hysteria that had blinded Iblis to his surroundings.

  “Position compromised!” he shouted, breaking into a run that Yoda had no hope of matching. “The enemy! The enemy! Must find Headquarters! Must warn headquarters!”

  “Wait, Iblis!” Yoda shouted at the fleeing dog. “Come back!”

  But Iblis did not slacken his speed and in just a few moments had vanished into the warren of buildings that was the Motel 7, which not only had exits in the alley and on Broadway but on a back street parallel to the main drag and on a small side street that intersected Broadway on the opposite side of the motel.

  Yoda stood for a moment in indecision. His natural impulse was to chase after Iblis, but he knew he could neither outpace the bigger dog nor track him. The only thing to do, he knew, was to return home, relate his experience to Levi and Sunny, and hope that they could do together what he could not do alone.

  After a frustrated and lingering look in the direction Iblis had bolted, Yoda turned and started out of the alley. He was so upset by the encounter and his inability to help the severely troubled dog that he passed through the aromas wafting from the restaurant without so much as a stomach growl.

  The car that had hit the restaurant and careened into another car after taking the corner too fast still blocked the mouth of the alley. Steam hissed from a cracked radiator, fluids leaked from beneath, and most of the body was crumpled, dented or scratched, but the foolish companion at the controls not only seemed unhurt but unaware of what had happened, still gripping the steering wheel and singing at the top of his lungs.

  Yoda approached the wrecked car, snorted derisively, lifted his hind leg, and vented his opinion upon the tire.

  Chapter 2

  Zain emerged cautiously from the slight cover provided by two parked cars in the side lot of the restaurant.

  He edged forward far enough to see the German Shepherd run away from the Pomeranian at the sudden sound near the unseen mouth of the alley, but not so far as to see where the big dog had gone, and certainly not so far as to be seen by the small black dog with the wild fur. His orders were to watch without being seen, to follow Iblis now that he had been found, but not to intercept.

  It was a disappointment, of course, losing the trail after having spent so much time searching. He would find Iblis again, before the arrival of Anila and the others revealed he had ever lost the trail. Yes, most certainly before that, he told himself, quivering a little as he thought what Anila might do to him.

  She was very beautiful, that Afghan Hound, but she was not known for compassion, mercy or sympathy. It was said, though not within her hearing or to Abasi, her lieutenant whose name meant stern and understated his nature, that when she was whelped the Dog at the Well reached down from Paradise and took her heart, holding it. Zain did not know whether the story held in it any nugget of truth, but in the years he had served her, Zain had never seen anything that would prove the old tale a falsehood.

  The brindle-coated Gull Dong, a Bulldog-like canine of Central Asia, held his position between the cars until the Pomeranian took off in the opposite direction, then emerged into the parking lot and loped casually down the alley, doing nothing to draw any undue attention to himself.

  He sighed as he looked for some sign of Iblis and found none. He had a double disadvantage: he was not a scent hound and though he had arrived in Chula Vista a month earlier he was still very much a stranger in a strange land. He sighed again, dismissing those drawbacks from his mind. They were naught but excuses, and while he did not know the truthfulness of the campfire story about Anila’s heart, he did know the essence of her nature, of which he was reminded at various times, like now, when the scar tissue in his left side ached. That had been the result of what Anila called a mild chastisement, administered not so much for a failure on his part but for his justification of failure. He had learned she never accepted excuses from anyone, not for any reason, certainly not in the case of Iblis, where her own honor was at stake.

  And only the very foolish offered excuses more than once.

  He glanced at the sun and frowned. If all had gone to plan, Anila and the others would arrive this evening on the cargo ship. By that time, Zain vowed, he would learn where Iblis was hiding and deliver him to them.

  One way or another.

  * * *

  “That is quite a story, Yoda,” Sunny said. “But you should have been more cautious. A dog like that could have really hurt you. You should have run back here and got us.”

  “There wasn’t time,” Yoda countered. “I evaluated the situation and made an executive decision. If I had not acted when I did, who knows what would have happened to the big fellow?”

  “Well, maybe,” Sunny conceded, even though she doubted the validity of Yoda’s argument. Yoda was courageous beyond his size, but the shaggy Golden Retriever had always maintained that sooner or later his impetuousness would be his undoing.

  “No maybe about it,” Yoda replied, hoping to end the argument of what he should have or not have done. “I felt it in my gut.”

  “If you felt you had no choice, truly felt it that is,” Levi said, “then you have to go with your gut.”

  Yoda smiled triumphantly at Sunny.

  Sunny frowned at Levi.

  “But, next time, Yoda,” Levi added, “have a longer debate with your gut. Sunny is quite right in that it could have ended very badly for you. This dog could have turned violent.”

  “But he didn’t,” Yoda insisted. “He was very frightened, very confused about who and where he was.”

  “And he did not seem to know how he even came to be in Chula Vista?” Levi asked.

  “Just asked if he was in Kandahar, wherever that is.”

  “It’s a city in Afghanistan,” said Little Kitty from the top of the couch, where she was stretched out, apparently asleep, seemingly paying no attention to Yoda’s account of his adventures.

  “Tell me about that collar and the disc on it,” Levi said.

  Yoda let his eyelids half close as he thought back to that brief moment in the alley. He remembered the leather collar well enough because it had been so different from what everyone else wore, but that metal disc was another matter. Just as he had stepped forward to see it better Iblis had decisively warned him off, leaving him with nothing but a dimly recalled memory.

  “Don’t force it,” Levi said softly. “Let it rise to the surface of your mind on its own.”

  The three dogs were assembled in the living room of their home on Fifth Avenue, facing each other in a generally triangular formation, all in what was known in the canine world as the Sphinx Position, haunches tucked, paws resting easily before them, head raised in alertness but without any strain whatsoever upon the neck and back. It was a pose that could be held for hours without pain or stress. It also imposed calmness upon the dogs, the r
eason Levi had insisted upon it when Yoda returned in such a excited state.

  Levi was the alpha of the small pack, lead investigator of the Three Dog Detective Agency, and by far the oldest of the three, nearly nineteen. Long ago, when he had first found his way from a life that would have ended in certain death to this haven, he had been blacker than a coal-dusted dog dipped in ink, but the passage of years had marked him. His coat was more salt than pepper, his chest was snowy, and the whiteness that had started on his muzzle now covered his face like a ghost-mask. As to Levi’s breed, it was agreed that he was part Dachshund, for there was no denying the tremendous length of his body, the barrel-like swell of his chest, or the shape of his head, and his paws were typical of the dog bred anciently to burrow down into the hidden lairs of badgers.

  While everyone was in accord about his Dachshund legacy, no one could see eye to eye about the other side of his family tree. The tail was not quite up to standard for the breed and the shape of his ears was just a bit off, but his legs were the real problem, the cause of endless arguments and theories, ranging from the logical to the well-meaning to the outright ludicrous. In all the history of the Dachshund breed never had there lived an individual dog with such long legs. While the normal doodle-dog stumped about on legs that barely kept his belly off the ground, Levi coursed at speeds that would have made Greyhounds envious and could make jumps that seemed to flaunt the law of gravity.

  Sunny was also of mixed ancestry, with Golden Retriever in dominance, but in her case there was no real mystery as to identity of her dam’s handsome stranger. The roughness of her coat, the narrowness of her muzzle, and the sharp melody of her bark all pointed to the noble bloodline of the Collie, a rural breed, which made sense in that Sunny had been born on a farm. She had lived there through her puppy hood and formative years before a series of unfortunate incidents brought her to the house on Fifth Avenue and her destiny with the Three Dog Detective Agency. She was a little younger than Levi, seventeen, an almost unheard of longevity for either Golden Retrievers or Collies.