The dog leaped through the open window into Dolly’s red-leather passenger seat as if claiming a cushy vintage doggie bed.
I’d planned to lower the pop-top for after-dark Las Vegas cruising, which it soon would be, so I unlatched the manual locks and hit the chrome control knob that had been futuristic in the fifties and Dolly was gettin’ down.
The sense of freedom and safety the car gave me reminded me of my ignominious introduction to driving at fifteen-and-a-half. It also recalled Father Black. I tried not to think of him. Not that Father Black was a problem; no, the opposite. He was the priest who ministered at Our Lady of the Lake Convent, a slightly shy man in his late thirties with a kind, sometimes worried face. He’d been the only one to notice that I was nearing driving license age and had no one to teach me. So I learned to drive the aging stick shift Volvo the parish had bought him years before. We practiced in the school parking lot on weekends, and moved onto nearby country roads.
I never liked driving stick, but it was all I had and I got good enough to pass muster with it. The lessons ended on a humiliatingly sour note, though.
My dear bitchy classmates, all equipped with fathers and older brothers to teach them to drive their new Miatas and Beamers, started gossiping about Father Black and me. Sarah Anderson’s mother, a hair-sprayed harridan in Prada pumps, stomped into the Mother Superior’s office one day and said the lessons must stop because of the “scandal.”
I was called in soon after, and all the swearing in the world that his instructions were purely fatherly weren’t enough. I’m not sure Mother Superior bought Mrs. Anderson’s line. Although she stopped the lessons, she said Mrs. Anderson had to chauffeur me to my driver’s test and provide a car for me to take it in.
So I was delivered there in a (thank goodness) sporty six-speed manual Lexus that I then put through the paces. I’d vowed to pass the first time, come hell or high water. And I did. Father Black and I never communicated again, except for nods in the hall. He looked shy, worried, and now sad when I saw him. The woman’s false charges had humiliated him as well as me, turning something rare and nice in my life, something fatherly, into something to be disowned.
Mother Superior told me later that the other girls had been jealous of me, but I couldn’t see why they would be, when they had everything and I had nothing.
Anyway, as soon as I was on my own and could buy a car, I switched to automatic.
Dolly was such an extravagant find that she made me forget about my unhappy introduction to driving. She was bigger than a Lexus and way better looking than Mrs. Anderson. Her high horse-power chutzpah always lifted my spirits and that’s what she did now.
Dog howled along with my chosen radio station, so I had to move it to NPR. Downer. Gas prices per gallon were rivaling the cost of Jimmy Choo shoes and the Supreme Court was all-boy again.
We stopped at a Peter Piper Pickle-Eater drive-through to load up on fast food. The shtick here was that everything came with pickles. Dog gobbled three Gargantua Burgers faster than I could order three more. He spit out the pickles even faster.
I sat and contemplated where the heck I could run and walk him so near the Strip. I’d have to buy a gimme cap and sneak him into my motel room as a guest. Hey, the rotating lady tenants brought in some real dogs of “clients.” Why couldn’t I have a genuine one? I’d paid for the week, after all.
* * * *
The sun was long gone by the time we hit the Pet Palace, a pseudo-Taj Mahal affair in a strip mall with the façade outlined in flamingo-pink neon that made Dog howl even louder.
“Shut up,” I told him. “Rescues can’t be choosers. You need a non-wussy leash. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure it’s heavy metal.”
I riffled through the papers I’d signed in Sunset Park in the parking lot’s hot-pink glow. Rabies shot. Right. I’d take care of that in the next day or two. Swear to fix. Neuter. Important. I eyed my boy’s silver-blue eyes. A quick nip and tuck. It would hurt me more than it would hurt him. What do dogs know?
I entered the Pet Palace’s hyper-fluorescent lit interior and spent seventy-some dollars getting Dog-boy a stainless steel bowl set, several chew-bones the size of an Easter Island head, and a short leash with a chain big enough to serve as a watch-fob for King Kong. No dog bed was large enough for his big-boned frame. Why was there a rule that dogs had to sleep on tartan plaid? They weren’t all Scottish. He’d just have to make do with the ratty rug at the Araby Motel. I had to deal with the scratchy sheets.
When I came out the parking lot was deserted for dinnertime down time. I’d put up the top and locked Godzilla of the North in the Caddy with the windows inched down all around.
He was staring soulfully at me, then perked his pointed ears, flaunted his grizzly-size teeth, and started leaping at the window.
Whoa! That’s modern safety glass, Toto! Built to resist impact.
Maybe it was the sight of the Alcatraz-style chain in my hands.
Or maybe it was the jerk behind me who pulled me around to face him and three other guys. They were all so pasty-faced I took them for vamps. Then I noticed their sloping shoulders in plaid shirts and the plastic pocket protectors.
“It is her!” cried the one who’d laid hands on me. He had nails-chewed-to-the-quick hands. Nothing to worry about unless I was a manicurist.
I dropped my bags to the pavement with a steel rattle, gave Geek-boy an elbow in the stomach that cracked a couple of ribs, stomped his pal’s foot in its shabby tennies, spun away from the third guy’s grabbing hands and high-kicked his chin. I picked up Dog’s chain leash and looped it around Bachelor Number Four’s scrawny Adam’s apple. Obviously this guy had not fallen far from the Tree and had been left for fertilizer by the snake.
It was a pleasure to see that my college martial arts training still gave me an instinctual edge.
Meanwhile Dog was howling up a storm.
No one came out to look or help, but the four guys were backing off, whimpering. I bent to retrieve my bags when I heard a nearing growl. I whirled on my attackers, who were crawling away even faster, pushing their plastic-framed glasses onto the bridges of their noses.
They weren’t the problem, so then . . .
The growl grew multiple, mechanical, and closer.
Motorcycles churned into the parking lot, bumping up onto the sidewalks and converging on my disappointed suitors.
And on me, who happened to be still standing there.
“It’s her!” I heard an adenoidal voice whine behind me. “Not us. Get her! She’s Maggie! She’s worth a bundle, dead or alive.”
Motorcycle boots scraped asphalt as the dozen assembled Harleys paused to grumble like a minor volcano contemplating a major eruption.
These biker guys were way more threatening than the Geek Quartet. No helmets. Heads of unkempt hair as big as Afros melding into long sideburns into mustaches into mountain-man beards into industrial strength chest and arm hair under their leather vests into hairy knuckles on handlebars.
Their eyes gleamed yellow from out of the Sleeping Beauty’s castle thicket of snarled hair, and their teeth gleamed yellow too. More like fangs. Parking lot lights glinted off the steel buckles and zippers and chains slathered stylishly over their leather pants and boots and, yeah, those muscle vests. They couldn’t serve any purpose but bluff and glitter. At least these guys weren’t tattooed from here to Kingdom Not-Come; not enough skin for the job, just those hairy ape acres . . . except they were from another animal family entirely.
Werewolves!
We didn’t have those in Kansas. We didn’t have much that was up-to-date in Kansas City. Or even Wichita.
Wait! The moon wasn’t full. I looked up to make sure. While I was doing that three of them bounded off the leather seats of the Harleys and went to make Geek salad of the poor fools behind me. Their pathetic pig squeals propelled me onto the parking lot asphalt. I raced toward my car where Dog was going berserk hurling his handsome howling head at the windows.
Oh, my kingdom for a remote control for a ’56 Cadillac! But I was It. My twelve-yard dash for the car made the motorcycles rev, swoop, and circle me. Not that I’d want Dog free to be jumped by these lethal cousins.
The leader was mounted again, his beard a wet tangle gouted with black blood and white spittle.
“You ride with me,” he ordered, patting the long leather seat behind him.
Right. I didn’t much like my chances with the Dirty Dozen, lupine division. I knew that once a woman is in an attacker’s vehicle, her survival chances plummet to less than zero. I figured I’d be better off eaten or offed than driven away.
“I h-h-heard about h-h-her,” one underling muttered through his fangs. All those overgrown teeth didn’t do much for stage diction.
“She worth something? To who?”
“Aw, those porn movie and snuff film guys. Even some amateur freakos. Big-money collectors. Whole bunch of, you know, people with money.”
I waited. Maybe rabbits had the best idea. Freeze, then run like hell. ’Course, they didn’t survive too long and had to reproduce very soon and fast, at which I was lamentably behind.
The leader of the pack twisted his clawed, hairy hands . . . paws . . . on the Harley handlebars, revving his bike until it bucked to be off and running down something.
Like me.
I eyed my feet. I was wearing my meeting-Ric-in-the-park spike-heeled slides. Not great for rabbiting in. I wondered if my maybe-prince would eventually dowse my body up from some desert wasteland.
Meanwhile, Dog was trouncing the inside of my Caddy, to no avail.
“What’s that racket?” Leader demanded of his minions.
“A domestic slave.”
“Worthless. Balls of a wombat.”
It seemed to me that Dog was getting really, really riled, but I’d locked him in and unless he could develop an opposable thumb, we were both sucked. Maybe the shelter would notice the nice stainless steel bowls and leash that came with him when they were called in to take charge of the dog at the murder scene in the morning. At least we’d had a good, greasy last meal together . . .
Leader was swaggering off his cycle to control or kill me, mincing a bit, because the two-footed strut just didn’t go with his circus-dog-on-hind-legs act.
I waited until he was within three feet.
“You worth delaying my dinner for?” he was snarling when I kicked one rear foot out from under him, looped Dog’s chain around his hairy neck and crossed my fists at his greasy, long-haired nape. Then I stomped his spine with my spike heel.
He howled his pain and anger, impressively, and the pack was circling for the kill—me!—roaring closer and closer.
I heard a crash of broken glass and glimpsed a huge shadow racing straight for the nearest Harley, which went down in a spark shower of chrome scratching pavement.
Dog took them out, Mohammed Ali at his prime on four feet, snapping jaws good for snapping necks, spinning out motorcycles like ducks getting dunked in a carnival game. One by one.
This supernatural quasi-human dogwatch crew was no match for a magnificent canine using all of his animal instincts unclouded by any other agenda than saving the human who’d saved his ass. Which was decidedly not wombat-balled. I resolved then and there to break the first rule of responsible animal ownership and not to “fix” him. Call it an emotional decision.
I figured that by now he kind of owned me.