Missing Dog
By Nick Hickman
Before the call came in, while staring through the patrol car’s windshield at an empty road, Deputy Roy Gibson wondered whether Deputy Huntley regularly assumed the department’s field training roles or if, in his case, she’d merely pulled the short straw. He glanced at her from behind his shades and watched her eyes track a rickety Volkswagen turn out of the Stop ’n Fuel gas station, head southbound on County Road 9. She wasn’t the county’s senior deputy, but after five weeks of field training, Gipson had decided she was probably the most sharp and astute. That, and entirely unconcerned with department politics. If she had, in fact, drawn the proverbial straw, he doubted it had come with a complaint. Her daily Red Bull and homemade turkey sandwich were maybe the most personal of anything he’d gleaned in their five weeks together. The list was short: North Carolina native; a decade in the department; married; no kids. Red Bull enthusiast, that too. That’s where the list ended, which was fine. Nice, actually, in that it established a boundary a safe distance away from topics he didn’t want to get into.
Gipson thought of what probably existed on his list, in Huntley’s mind: department rookie, youngest son of former Lieutenant Rick Gipson, local kid, Army discharge—hopefully with honorable footnoted there. He guessed Huntley probably had an accurate assumption of his childhood as one where joining the Whistle County Sheriff’s Department was expected the way college was laid out for kids in the suburbs.
He wondered how much she knew about his brother, Owen. Maybe that Owen had been sent away, but she wouldn’t know where. And she definitely didn’t know why. No one in the department knew why; Gipson’s father had made sure of that.
The call came as a familiar electric crackle from dispatch: “723?”
Huntley snagged the radio. “This is 723. Go ahead.”
“723, respond to 16 Spring Street for a possible cold burglary. RP is a female resident of the home, Natalie Truitt. A five-year-old child is on the premises.”
“Copy, show me en route,” Huntley said. She pulled out and used the empty street to turn north while Gipson silently translated lingo he’d been absorbing most of his life in one form or another. Cold, no longer in progress, and the RP—reporting party—a female resident and a child, who probably came home to signs of outside intrusion and rummaging, items knocked over and scattered around the house. His mind went to the scene of a disheveled bathroom thick with a noxious scent of bleach, anonymous powders, and soapy ooze on the counter, cupboards and drawers left open with prescription bottles strewn like the aftermath of a small explosion. Destructive quests for booze and pills weren’t uncommon in Whistle County.
Natalie Truitt. Gipson couldn’t place the surname, which would’ve been unusual twenty years ago, but people had come and gone while he was away, even his folks had sold the house, moved down south, one of those Florida neighborhoods where everyone was retired. That was okay. It just meant that his hit rate on names would take time to become what it was. He’d grown up at his father’s hip and had spent many hours around the department and deputies and riding along in patrol cars. Still, now as a deputy himself, actually in it, there were things about Whistle County and its residents that looked different.
“723, contact dispatch when able.”
“Affirm.” Huntley cruised past the only other vehicle on CR-9, a purple Honda sedan like the one Gipson’s mom used to drive. And at that, the switch tripped in his memory. Natalie Truitt was the name of the woman Beau Hardy had cozied up with recently. Gipson had seen them together. He hadn’t met her, which was to say she hadn’t found herself in any recent legal trouble, but Beau Hardy was a name he knew all too well.
Gipson thought of it often now that he was back. How he could have—should have—stopped it and didn’t. He was only fourteen and still a year away from his learner’s permit, but he could’ve taken the wheel from Owen and insisted on driving. He knew how much Owen drank and how often. His brother had gotten his license the year prior, but Owen had started drinking at least two years before that. Maybe more. It was never hard to tell—and he had known Owen was toasted and still sat silently in the passenger seat anyway. Owen was the only one available to pick him up that night. Owen, seventeen years old and drunker than a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle.
The snow. The truck. The way the dog’s eyes reflected their headlights just before the thick thud. He and Owen, bruised and battered from several rolls before the truck finally settled at the bottom of the hill, crawling through fresh snow to confirm the lifeless black lab lying in the middle of the road with dark specks of blood freezing into the ice.
Their father, just promoted to lieutenant the month before, hadn’t asked questions when he arrived. He’d stood at the top of the hill, not far from the dog Owen had hit despite his frantic attempt to swerve, peering down at the truck resting on its side and had known enough. He’d driven Owen to a treatment facility the next morning.
From the patrol car’s radio, dispatch stated the time—12:14 hours—to punctuate the transmission record.
Gipson learned at school the week after the accident that the dog had belonged to the Hardy family. Beau Hardy, a junior then, began his campaign of vengeance almost immediately and ramped it up as soon as Gipson got his own license and started driving to school—slashed tires in the school parking lot, cracked windows, vulgar names scrawled in window chalk that other kids used to announce messages like SENIOR YEAR or GO LIONS. Even a few dead animals—two raccoons and a squirrel—were left on the car’s hood while parked in Gipson’s driveway. Putting an end to Beau’s vengeance was Gipson’s main motivation for joining the army before the sheriff’s department, anything to get out of town for a bit. And yet he still hadn’t heard from Owen, not since rehab. Owen had gotten out. Gipson knew that. But even their father had no idea where he’d gone after that, except it wasn’t back to Whistle County.
Huntley glanced at the vehicle’s center computer as she drove. She angled it at Gipson so he could read the footnote dispatch had logged. “Burglars left a note,” she said.
They turned onto Spring Street just under ten minutes later. For a rural county with three stoplights and a cluster of shops generously constituting a downtown, it’s network of backroads meandered into just about every neighborhood in their small nook of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Dense groves of slender pine trees acquiesced to a single-story home beside an accompanying trailer and, a half-mile later, a small A-frame cabin before the dirt driveway of 16 Spring Street, which dog-legged immediately to the right and up a slight hill. Gipson glanced in the mirror, a reflection of nothing but thin trees standing sentry. There was no view of the road, meaning likely no luck with neighbors recounting suspicious vehicles, even at noon on a Sunday.
Gipson wondered at the note left at the scene. His mind conjured old crime scene photos of the Manson Family murders where Death to Pigs and Helter Skelter were among the deranged phrases scrawled on the walls in blood. There was no chance this note would be anywhere in that realm of brutality—not something dispatch would’ve equivocated on—though it was extremely unusual for an intruder to bother leaving a note at all.
The driveway widened as it reached a doublewide mobile home that sagged into a ground of sparse grass and dark soil. Huntley parked behind a blue Ford sedan and radioed a 10-23 into the mic. Arrived at scene.
If Beau Hardy was home, Natalie Truitt hadn’t mentioned it to dispatch.
Gipson’s first thought was that the small home displayed no immediate signs of disturbance. He scanned the perimeter and followed Huntley to the front door, pausing to examine the Ford’s windows. Neither the car nor the home appeared vandalized.
Huntley knocked and stood with hands resting on her belt, her dark hair pulled into a tight bun fit for a ballerina. Gipson felt eerily certain it’d be Beau to open the door, but the woman who opened the door was short and slight with a black long-sleeved shirt and hair the same color pulled back and tied in loose knots. Her face looked worn in the ways that arise from circumstances rather than time. Gipson judged her to be no older than himself.
“Natalie Truitt?” Huntley asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Deputy Huntley, this is Deputy Gipson. Did you report a break-in?”
She nodded. “Somebody stole our dog.”
“Okay. Do you mind if we come inside?”
Natalie moved to the side and allowed Huntley and Gipson into a living room and combined kitchen. The air smelled of pets, cigarettes, and burnt food, the effect of inhaling a smoker’s warm, stale breath. A box fan whirred loudly from the floor beneath a wall of windows muted by plastic blinds. The carpeted floor was bare but for a small couch and blue recliner, both coated in dog hair, and a TV on a nondescript stand. The walls were an empty white but for a decorative wood cross on the wall opposite the TV. The carpet transitioned to linoleum kitchen tile, where opened and unopened mail, a carton of Marlboro Reds, and a small Transformers backpack covered the table. The place was cluttered but not ransacked.
“What’s your dog’s name?” he asked.
“Marshall. He’s a boy.”
“And what type of dog is he?”
“A black lab,” Natalie said, and instantly, a dirty ghost of old guilt rose in Gipson’s chest.
Those eyes turning into the car lights. The thud.
“Do you remember if he was inside or outside when you left?” Huntley asked.
“He was outside when we left for church this morning.”
“Is it possible he wandered off on his own?” Huntley asked. Gipson was about to ask the same thing. He hadn’t noticed any sort of fenced yard when they pulled up.
“No, he doesn’t leave the yard,” Natalie said. “He’s gettin’ older and trained real well. He doesn’t leave home unless it’s to go huntin’.”
Gipson took the opportunity to appraise the woman. He thought his assumption of her age was accurate. She had a thin face with big brown eyes sitting above bony cheeks. Her shoulders protruded under her black shirt like two opposing fists. She could absorb twenty pounds overnight and look nothing but healthier for it.
“Have you noticed anything else missing?” he asked.
Natalie shook her head. She hadn’t moved from beside the front door, arms crossed as if trying to fold into herself. The box fan spat hot, stuffy air and Gipson could already feel sweat wetting his back, popping out on his forehead. A woman who wore long sleeves in this heat wasn’t doing it to keep warm. Gipson hadn’t pegged her as an addict. He hoped there weren’t bruises under those sleeves.
“No, but there’s a note on the table over there,” Natalie said.
Huntley walked over and stood over the round kitchen table. “You found it here?” she asked. She exchanged a glanced with Gipson. “Inside?”
He took her meaning. Dog outside, note inside. They were dealing with a break-in after all. What, then, was the point of coming inside?
The note was sitting on top of scattered envelopes and what looked like enough mail coupons to plaster the kitchen walls. He looked at the note, then exchanged another glance with Huntley. It was typed.
Huntley applied gloves. Gipson put on his own. Her face remained expressionless as she read, then handed it to Gipson.
Your dog’s gone and you’ll never see it again unless you hand over $500. Heed the word of Leviticus 24:19: if someone injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him. Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
Gipson laid the note down. He considered the rest of the kitchen, the charred clump of hashbrowns in a pan on the stove. Plates crusty with breakfast residue were stacked in the sink. Everything else, it seemed, was undisturbed and put neatly away.
“Do y’all usually lock the door when you leave?” he asked.
Natalie shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Gipson wondered if their dog thief might be someone with a key to the house. Someone with easy access. He didn’t like the tone in the note, the familiarity in it. Taking the dog on its own was a misdemeanor property crime but using it to extort five-hundred dollars was a fast and sloppy step into Felony Land without bothering to include any instructions on how, when, or where that money was to be delivered.
If someone injures his neighbor, just as he has done, so it shall be done to him. Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
There was nothing random about this. That note, typed and premeditated. The whole thing reeked of a vendetta. Something personal and close to home.
Huntly tugged up her belt in a shrugging motion. “Is there anyone else home with you?” she asked.
“My son, Jonah.” Natalie called for him over her shoulder. A faint murmur came from down the hall. “Come ’n out here,” she coaxed. The boy passed quickly through the hallway and wrapped an arm around one of Natalie’s legs like a bird grasping for a branch.
“You’na introduce yourself to the police?” she asked. “They’re gonna help find Marshall.” Gipson was struck by how much she softened in the boy’s presence. Her arms had come uncrossed, her entire posture opening up.
“Jonah,” he said in a small, timid breath. He rubbed at cheeks that were puffy and red, twisting small fists into his eyes to wipe the tears. He had Natalie’s big, brown eyes.
“Mr. Jonah, my name is Deputy Huntley. Can you tell me how old you are?”
He unlatched from Natalie’s leg to raise small fingers slick with tears and goobers. “I used to be four, but now I’m five.”
Huntley’s gentle laugh was one Gipson had never heard from her. He liked the sound of it. Natalie smiled as she twisted a curl in the boy’s hair, and Gipson noticed that she didn’t wear a ring.
There was a possibility they might be dealing with a spiteful ex, one with an old key to the home. Someone who wanted to get back at Natalie, or Beau Hardy, or both. If that was the case, and Beau wasn’t here, he was probably out dealing with it on his own.
“Is there anyone else with a key to the home?” Gipson asked her.
She gave a short nod. “My boyfriend, Beau. He lives with us.”
He didn’t need to, but he asked anyway. “Beau Hardy?”
Another nod, meek but affirmative.
Gipson could feel Huntley watching him. “Do you know where he’s at right now?” he asked.
“I think he’s out looking for Marshall.” Her tone was one that had learned to tread lightly on the topic of Beau’s whereabouts.
“Can you get in touch with him for us?” Gipson asked.
Natalie shook her head. “He left his phone.”
Of course, Gipson thought. “When did you see him last?”
“He was here when Jonah and I went to church.”
“What time was that?”
“’Bout nine this mornin’.”
That was over three hours ago. Gipson looked at Jonah, the tears streaked down his cheeks, merging with snot under his nose. Had Beau cried like this that night, more than a decade ago, when his family dog hadn’t come home? Or had he channeled it all into rage, not at Owen, but at the next best option?
Gipson had adopted his own dog as soon as he was discharged and returned home. He’d imagined adopting a young German Shepherd or Belgian Malinois, something he could train and nurture, mold into an intelligent—maybe even a crime-fighting—K-9 companion. But Gipson found himself at the local animal shelter, standing in front of a gene-muddled mutt whose tail was thumping, ears perked—one straight forward and the other just slightly tweaked right—and had known right away. Dolly, a name he hadn’t been immediately fond of but couldn’t bring himself to change. She had a story, and so did he—two outcasts who found new lives in each other. Dolly came with Gipson everywhere but work, sitting shotgun in his blue Silverado or occasionally hitching a ride in the truck bed. The shelter had classified her as a Jack Russell terrier and beagle mix, though Gipson had come to suspect a goofy ounce of corgi somewhere in there, too.
“Are you missin’ your puppy dog?” Gipson asked, finding a tone that felt both foreign and comfortable.
Jonah turned in and mumbled a reply into his mom’s jeans.
“Can you say that a little louder?” Gipson asked. Jonah’s second attempt sounded more like Dolly gently gnawing her favorite toy—the stuffed lobster she refused to shred like the others.
Natalie glanced almost apologetically at Gipson. “He’s just saying that Marshall’s not a puppy anymore.” The amount of expression in her big, brown eyes made Gipson consider again how much Jonah softened her. Natalie’s timid, leery demeanor dissolved away in front of her son. Gipson liked her for it.
“No, but that’s okay,” Gipson said. “We can rescue old doggies too. We’re going bring him home to you.”
“Do you mind if we take a look around, Ms. Truitt?” Huntley asked.
Natalie pulled Jonah closer and told them to go right ahead. Huntley gave Gipson a nod, indicating that he should survey the back of the home while she stayed with Natalie and Jonah.
He started down the only hall in the house. On the immediate right was an open door to what was clearly Jonah’s room. Gipson had been expecting bare carpet consistent with the living room, but the floor of the bedroom was cluttered with toys. He scanned over battery-powered dinosaurs, Hot Wheels, and Star Wars figurines. Tucked against the wall was a racecar bedframe. The only window was consumed by an AC unit, one sufficiently preventing any outside entry. Gipson checked the window anyway and found it locked.
He stepped back into the hall, aware he was tracing Beau Hardy’s steps and feeling a phantom presence looming in the carpeted hallway.
The door across was slightly ajar. Gipson pushed it open and flipped the lights—a small bathroom with a smudged mirror, a single sink, and crusted blue toothpaste on the counter. No indications of rummaging, searching, or looting. He stepped in and pushed back the shower curtain. There was a ventilation window that a plump woodchuck couldn’t fit through.
This whole thing felt off—the note, the sloppy ransom, and such a personal biblical reference. No Beau, who was almost surely out dealing with whoever had Gipson and Huntley here circling a dummy scent like a pair of olfactory-stunted bloodhounds.
The only other door in the hall opened to the master bedroom. Again came the feeling that Beau was hovering in the room, somewhere just out of sight. Gipson scanned the empty walls, and the unmade queen bed and walked over to a window that was, he found, latched shut and locked. Not a single indication of forced entry anywhere in the house. There was a dresser against the wall with a box fan wha-wapping hot air and an open drawer, second from the bottom, with a white t-shirt hanging off the edge.
Gipson was drawn to the only photo in the room, a small frame on top of the dresser. The face staring back at him wasn’t all that far from the one that had tormented him in high school. Same slouching shoulders, the beard that had been sprouting since freshman year now grown into a thick extension of his square, angry face. Beau stood with his arm around Natalie, neither one particularly smiling or frowning but simply gazing as if making passive eye contact with the lens. Beau’s were the same eyes that had glared at Gipson from the corner of the high school parking lot. The same eyes Gipson had imagined watching from him between pine trees outside his family home as he removed dead critters from the hood of his mom’s car. Such depraved, savage taunts. How many nights had Gipson lain there, wondering if Beau Hardy was lurking outside? Imagining the wicked process that must precede the staging of dead animals on someone’s car. Wondering what kind of person could enact pain and suffering on other animals in the mere spirit of revenge for the death of their own animal companion.
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
Gipson’s airways pinched. His stomach clenched in a small, panicked ball. He set the photo down and drew a breath through his nose. Those poor critters Gipson had pulled off his car—his family had never owned a dog. But Gipson did.
He sprinted into the living room, was aware of Huntley talking but cut her off; “Ms. Truitt, there’s something we need to tend to”—he was tugging Huntley’s arm, guiding her to the door— “we’ll get back to you soon with any updates.”
Gipson made for the driver’s-side door without looking back. Huntley stood outside the car, watching the house as if willing Natalie to chase after them. He waited while the ignition was rolling, and the car was already in reverse. When Huntley was in, he threw his foot down on the gas.
***
Less than ten miles north, Beau Hardy drove with his foot (resting much softer than Gipson’s) on the pedal of a red truck, one hand on the wheel and the other hovering over half a can of Bud Lite, with Marshall sitting shotgun. The floor below Marshall was littered with newly emptied cans reeking of sour malted hops and barley. As most did, Natalie’s dog enjoyed riding with the window down, but Beau didn’t want to risk it. He had a pretty good idea that the only two cops out on Sundays were Roy Gipson and the lady cop Beau had seen with him, but why chance it?
Beau had seen Roy Gipson occasionally around town for the last year, maybe more. Back from the Army, huh? Beau had thought. What a joke. Beau had cousins in the Army, ones who had done real tours overseas. No doubt Roy Gipson’s time had been spent hosing down equipment or serving lunch at some base down in Alabama or Georgia. Now he was back, following Daddy’s footsteps and riding around town like that lady cop’s walking purse. Every Sunday, Beau saw them grabbing coffee at the gas station on CR-9 or hovering around First Methodist when service got out. But his plan had first taken form the morning Beau had seen Gipson walking his dog just a few miles past the tire shop.
After Natalie and Jonah left for church this morning, Beau came with a leash and tools to jimmy inside Gipson’s house, but the dog was outside in a fenced side yard with a latch but no lock. Beau chuckled at that. For a cop, he thought Gipson made a pretty stupid one.
The truck’s right tires drifted off the road, kicked up gravel, and Beau jerked the wheel. He straightened the truck, took a sip from his can, and glanced through the rearview mirror at the dog in the backseat with Dolly printed on its tag. It probably also enjoyed having the windows rolled down, but he kept them up back there, too.
***
“What the hell was that?” Huntley had asked as they pulled out from Natalie Truitt’s driveway.
Gipson hadn’t said a thing. Huntley, who rarely raised her voice, even at a perp, had come unglued on the young deputy in training—his utter abandonment of professionalism and protocol and, even more crucially, his complete disregard for communication. His training and her role as his FTO were temporary, but trust needed to be enduring. Gipson didn’t even look over. After a few minutes, she gave up, decided she’d handle it later, back at the department. She had pivoted the center computer toward the passenger seat and began filling out the incident report, an exercise that had been Gipson’s responsibility for the last few weeks.
Now, they were turning into a new driveway and coming to an abrupt stop. Huntley watched Gipson rush out of the car, sprint to a side yard with an open gate, and then to the house’s front door—his house, she assumed but hadn’t asked.
Huntly got out, walked over, and plucked the keys from the ignition. She followed through the front door Gipson had left open. The home appeared to be a well-maintained -post-World War Two era farmhouse, one she’d unwittingly driven past many times. The living room was a scene of incongruent furniture, dog toys, and a plant that looked like it’d last seen water during the Obama administration. An upholstered green chair squatted beside a leather sectional couch like two angry neighbors. She guessed the enormous flat-screen TV at the front of the room might be the only piece not acquired from a flea market or estate auction. Huntley stood there scanning the room and feeling thankful to return to her two-female household every night.
She walked over to the nearest photo: a much younger Gipson, still round in the chin, wearing blue swim trunks and goggles half askew on his forehead, standing beside an older boy, assumedly his brother—same eyes and nose—dressed in a black shirt and swim trunks with red flames.
There came the sound of heavy steps descending the stairs.
Gipson stopped at the base and looked at her. He had discarded his uniform and belt and was wearing jeans and a dark, tight-fitting compression t-shirt. “I’m feeling sick,” he said. Would you mind driving me up to the station so I can get my car?”
#
Beau imagined Roy Gipson and the lady cop were probably at his—actually, it was Natalie’s—house by now, probably giving Natalie the runaround on procedures and protocols. Good, that’s exactly where he wanted them. He figured he’d left them just enough of a bluff to spin their wheels on suspects, motivations, and that phony five-hundred-dollar ransom. It was all a diversion—a clever one, he thought.
Roy Gipson would be completely lost on the scripture from Leviticus because Beau had never once seen him at church. But penance came due even for sinners, and if it must happen by Beau’s hands, then so be it.
Beau stopped his truck at what he thought of as the spot. Browning Road was no more than a mile up the hill on the back of his parent’s old place, but he’d avoided it since high school. Avoided it since Roy Gipson and his brother ran down their dog, General, and left him in the street like shredded tire tread.
Beau’s plan had come together with what he could only describe as a feeling of divine intervention. When he’d first spotted Roy Gipson walking his dog several weeks back, his first thought was that Roy and his pooch looked like something Beau’s F-250 would handle with hardly a bump, and wouldn’t that be fitting? But he’d stifled the impulse. Retribution ought to come by way of consequence, and at that thought, the rest had clicked into place.
Except now that he was at the spot, a few finer details were tripping up his good plan. He’d assumed the dog would dumbly cooperate in everything, kind of like a vehicular game of skeet, so he’d never really figured a way to force it to run out in front of the car, and now that there were out here, it wouldn’t sit still.
Beau staggered up to a yellow street sign, one with several curving black arrows to indicate a series of tight turns ahead, pulling the dog on the leash he’d brought from home. He stopped, swaying and catching himself against the sign. He strung a few knots to allow enough slack for the dog to stand a few feet into the street. At that spot, Beau figured he had enough space to pick up speed and clip it with his right fender. And he supposed if he needed to, he could reverse and do it all again.
He returned to the truck and reached for his beer but found it empty. With the sort of rote motion honed only from hours and experience, Beau leaned back, cracked open the back window to the truck bed, and tossed the empty can while reaching into a cooler of truck-temperature beer in the backseat. In the same motion, he cracked open a new can, breathlessly downed half, and mounted the wheel. He rolled his window down, let a meaty arm hang out, then rolled the passenger window down for Marshall. The best part was, when he came home with Marshall and spun a story for Natalie and the little snot-nose kid about watching someone drive away with their lab, chasing them down, rescuing him, and returning him safe, they’d treat him like a hero.
He pulled the column shifter into Reverse and eyed the newly paved road in his mirror. And who paid for that? he wondered. His tax dollars, undoubtedly. So the real question was what government dipshit had put money towards paving such an empty, hopeless backroad? The road saw less than a handful of cars on a weekday. On a Sunday, Beau guessed there was a good chance he would be the only car up here. And with his head cocked over his shoulder as he loosely guided the truck in reverse, he decided that was another good bit of fortune. The fewer cars, the better. This message was for one person only, and it was shaping up perfectly.
***
Gipson, behind the wheel of his own Chevy Silverado, crested the very same hill that Beau Hardy had first reversed and then accelerated down not five minutes earlier. It was Gipson’s first time on this backstretch since the accident.
Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
If Beau was going to enact some perverse version of cruel, delusional revenge, Gipson knew it would be right here.
Since retrieving his vehicle from the department parking lot, he’d driven without hardly lifting his foot off the accelerator. Now that he was here, though, Gipson drove slowly. The road had been paved, he noticed. A voice far beneath his immediate awareness questioned whether it would’ve made any difference on that cold, snowy night. Probably not.
Just a few more turns and he’d be at the turn where he had seen those two eyes staring flatly at them as Owen desperately yanked the wheel. The skidding. The thud.
Gipson could feel himself accelerating again as he rounded the final bend. He dropped one hand to the butt of his personal Glock .22. He crested the curve, eyes scanning across every inch of the windshield, then slammed his brakes with enough force to engage the grinding noise of the anti-lock brakes, streaking the pavement with two parallel skid marks. He stared at the scene in front of him. He lifted his foot from the brake, not applying any gas, and rolled forward at no more than a crawl.
His eyes found dark stains near the edge of the road with intermittent pieces of smeared flesh, signs of the impact point where skin first meets tarmac. Beau Hardy’s lifeless body was just a few feet further. Just over the side of the hill was an utterly demolished red truck, not far from where Gipson and Owen had ended up all those years ago.
Gipson’s eyes flicked to a yellow caution sign and what looked like a line of rope that barely stood out against the forest backdrop—a leash.
He punched the gas.
The leash sloped off the side of the hill, down to a pile of spotted fur. Dolly was perched as if told to sit like the good girl she was. Her mouth was open in a panting, cartoonish grin. She stood at the sight of his truck, wiggling in a full-body ripple cast by the wag of her tail.
Gipson parked, got out, and Dolly jumped at his approach, heaving her front paws up on his chest as Gipson threw his arms around her neck and nuzzled her head. She smelled of warm familiarity. He unclipped her, left the leash knotted to the sign, and followed as she ran with emphatic recognition to the truck's open door. She hopped in, leaping over the center console to her rightful spot in the passenger seat just as she’d done nearly every day of the last two years. Gipson let down the window for her as he walked to Beau’s lifeless body. He checked for a pulse and confirmed what he already knew.
He drew his cellphone and dialed dispatch.
“Hey, it’s Gipson—someone 10-50’d out here on Browning Road, top of the hill, about four miles up. Got an older red pickup, Ford F-250, by the look. It’s on its side off the edge of the road, close to the bottom of the hill. Beer cans all over the road, the driver was probably hammered. Looks like he was goin’ too fast, lost it on the turn and rolled a few times. Driver was ejected, no pulse. Can hold the ambulance, but Don’s gonna need to come out.” And going to be annoyed for it, Gipson thought. He remembered thinking the county coroner had to be nearing retirement a decade ago, and yet here he was, almost eighty and still getting elected, still shuffling out to inspect the dead.
“Hey, uh, can you ask Huntley to head up here, too?” Gipson asked.
He heard the jingling a second before his mind made the association. Gipson turned as a dog mounted the hill—a black lab, though with a good amount of gray speckled fur in his coat. It approached his truck in a limping trot.
“Hey, buddy.” Gipson crouched down. The dog plopped in his open arms, lifting his front left paw to relieve the weight. Gipson held it, gently pushing and pressing and gladly noting the dog’s allowance for his prodding. Probably no broken bones, but a vet would need to confirm. Gipson slid the collar to better read the tags. He smiled.
“Hey, Marshall. You alright? I’ve got a boy cross-town who’s been lookin’ for you. How about we get you home, huh?”
Gipson hoisted Marshall into the truck bed of his Silverado as Dolly watched from the backseat, no doubt wondering why this new dog was drinking water from her bowl. After a few laps of water, Marshall rolled comfortably to his side, favoring his paw but looking—remarkably, Gipson thought—no worse for the wear. The old pup must have picked the right time to bail from Beau’s speeding truck. Gipson looked back at the sign where Dolly had been tied and staged for Beau Hardy’s depraved satisfaction. He cursed Beau, cursed this road, and then vowed to never curse either again.
By the time Huntley coasted to a stop, parking the same vehicle Gipson had frantically commandeered not an hour earlier beside his Silverado, both Marshall and Dolly had dozed off into a gentle, summer snooze.
