Its umbilical cord was still attached. Iron, the smell of red, reeked off of it as drops of blood splattered onto the tiles.
Charlie rushed the baby inside. He shouted for someone to get a doctor and began pulling off taffy wrappers, cigarette buds, and other trash still stuck to the infant’s sticky skin. I tried getting a better look of the situation, but Charlie kept pushing me away.
“Down, Mars. Down! Get Back!” Charlie kicked my back legs out from under me. He had never disciplined me that way before. I stood back up, but this time made no attempt to get any higher. As other firefighters and cops came into the room, I was shoved away from the desk. They dragged the stench of nicotine from the office room with them.
“She was in the dumpster, right outside Jude’s Parlor. Thought it was a pussy cat yowling at first.”
Charlie’s comment was ridiculous. How could he have made that mistake? Cats smell nothing like people. Their breath smells like dying salmon swimming upstream, and their fur is thick of the stout urine they roll in. This wasn’t the time for making bad jokes. A mother just lost their baby.
“Did anyone see anything?” One of the officers asked over the cries.
“Don’t know. As soon as I found her I brought her here.” Charlie yelled again. “Would someone call the ambulance back over?”
“The Dodge is on the other side of town, just past Acreage.”
“Damnit… well, someone get the wool towel out of the truck. Find some scissors and that bottle of alcohol in the cabinet.”
Men scattered about the station. The air was more metallic now. The blood in their veins rose toward the surface of their skin as they darted place to place. The child’s safety was handled. The investigation was left to me.
The golden tags around my neck jingled as I trotted down the hallway. I held these badges for three years now. They were a token of my authority. At least, that’s what the officers and fighters said about their badges and hats, so the same must be for me. Detective work was not in my expertise. I just kept people back as Charlie put out fires. Sometimes I got to howl down the street if our sirens broke. Such skills, while important, would not be as helpful in this situation.
Off to find Bee.
I nudged the door open to Charlie’s office. It was just big enough for two fold out chairs and a modest wooden desk. Files filtered out of the drawers, save for the one with the lock. I couldn’t understand why the magazines named Star Models and The Male Figure got their own lock and key. It was probably vital evidence in an ongoing investigation. I revered them with distance and respect. What I lacked in skill I made up for in knowledge. Perhaps in time I would learn how to seamlessly identify culprits. This was only my third year on duty. I still had much to learn from Charlie and his vocalized thoughts.
The chair squeaked when my weight fell onto the padded seat. The screws holding the window in place were loose. They had been since the kid in blue suedes threw eggs at the station a week ago. I think his mother whipped him with a rolling pin when she picked him up. That’s what Charlie said. Sometimes he says weird things when he’s upset, especially about the station. The window pane opened with a slight tap. Tires rumbling down the adjacent street scraped the intersection’s pavement. My nose became filled with peeled onions. Charlie’s potted marigolds. Blech. If they could keep away the bad guys like the mosquitos, maybe their perfume would be worth it.
Bee was tied out back, lounging in the shade of the slope roofed dog house. If he wasn’t out on duty tracking down a felon hiding out in a wheat field, he’d be right there. Sun beams glitter across his black nose. They kept him out back because some of the citizens found him scary. I thought it was the snaggletooth. They said he looked like a wolf, and I didn’t have that problem with my spots. People like spots.
“Emergency!”
Bee’s black eyes snapped open. His sniff took in the situation faster than his retinas. The hair along his spine fell, and his muzzle scrunched.
“Sleeping on the job? Good, you’re not busy.” I could hear Bee making a buzzing grumble from his throat. I continued. “There’s a situation that requires your expertise.”
He closed his eyes. “Then wake me when my handler gets back from lunch.”
I pulled the rope around off his neck with my teeth. “It might be too late if we wait! We need to find her now!” I tried grabbing onto the scruff of his neck to pull him out of the house, but he quickly stood up, looking down at me. I could tell he had eaten raw chicken for breakfast, probably had been dropped on the floor.
“Find who?”
“A mother lost their baby. Charlie found it in the trash can. She must be so awfully worried!”
“How could a human lose a baby in the trash?”
I lapped up water from his bowl, my black splotches absorbing the summer heat. “The way I see it… You remember when that Labrador down three blocks had a litter? A lady called saying she saw Mr. Gambles trying to drown them in his backyard kiddie pool. Remember that?”
Bee’s ears fell back. “Don’t remind me.”
“Poor mama. She wouldn’t stop yowling. She kept going on about how it was her fault for not finding them quick enough after Mr. Gambles took ‘em. Rumor is she got all sluggish at the pound. Didn’t hear much after that.”
“So you think someone took a newborn and threw it away?”
“We might have a vile criminal in our town! Just think Bee, there might be another Gambles, another black cat lurking the streets at night.”
“That’s quite the conclusion you came to, Mars.”
“The mother must be scared to death!” I paced around in circles. I was ready to travel a long distance. “If you catch whiff of a trail, we might be able to find her before her heart breaks.”
“Why worry?”
“Bee! When a heart breaks, people die! That’s what happened to Patty May two weeks ago.” “That was a heart attack. That’s not the same-”
“The thing that makes the blood stop working, and they die. If we don’t find her, what if my heart breaks? Is it contagious? I might die.”
“You’re not going to die, Mars.” He began to walk back into his house.
“Please, Bee? We’re supposed to be the good dogs. If we don’t do anything, I think that makes us bad dogs.”
He took a moment before making a long exhale. “I’ll humor you for an hour.”
Everyone was making too many jokes today. That aside, we made our way out of the back and down the street.
The station was planted on the far end of the square. The multi-shop buildings circled around the center fountain. Wafts of jelly filled strudels from the morning’s farmer’s market still lingered. The lunch crowd was just starting to arrive, and the doors to the diner let out the jukeboxes sound. Charlie called the singer The King, which didn’t make much sense. I thought we had a president. It was something about a hound dog. Ribbons climbed up the lamppost, dawning blue, white, and red. At least, I think it was red. That’s what Charlie said. It looked like pine bark to me.
We trotted toward the back of Jude’s Parlor. Crowds outside were sparse. They hid like rats in the shadows since the little dot in the sky they called Sputnik appeared at night. The little dot covered the front page of the daily news for a week now. For big creatures, it was always the small things that scared them. They’d flail their bodies like bucking stallions at wasps taking sips of the puddle water and dropped root beer floats. I, however, was bigger than the mice in the oxidized dumpster, tasting the dried blood on the garbage with the tip of their tongues. They scattered about as we approached the scene of the crime. Bee cleared his nostrils with a forceful huff and went to work. He inhaled the iron and the other elements foreign to my untrained sense. The aluminum of cheap earrings. Salt from sweat and the eyes. A single breath of bile. Cotton fibers lingering in the air. Wilted lettuce ends brought in the plastic bag the day before. Flecks of guano from loose eyelashes. A dribble of cherry chapstick.
Bee stepped down from the lid. “I can smell the mother, but no second party.”
Drat. This case was turning into a real mystery. “Our culprit must have been able to hide his scent.” I ignored Bee’s scoff to this. “Well, at least the mother’s trackable. Do you have the trail?”
“Down there.” His nose pointed to the back of the alley. The gap between the parlor and the watch store lead out to a sprinkling of matching houses down a dirt road.
I took the lead. The kids were all inside gulping down sour lemonade and lunches that had some form of cold cuts jammed between two slices of white bread. Those blue, white, and I guessed red ribbons continued down into the suburbs. I recognized two houses, their embrace to smoke and embers extinguished months ago. The butt of a cigar lit the front lawn up. Charlie made me sit with the kid in the blanket as the front porch crumpled like fallen leaves. They called him Paul. He was nice, except for the tail pulling. The grass has all grown back now, save for the holes where the fence planks were set in. Whoever dropped that light must’ve been an evil man. Every action is intentional. Every lion knows when they sink their canines down the throat of a gazelle who hasn’t even grown their pronged horns. I couldn’t smell the black and white lion inside the black box Charlie called a television, but it didn’t seem like it had any regrets.
Maybe they were a communist. Charlie was always scared of those. He tried convincing the staff to paint the firehouse side of the station blue as well. It was the first time I had realized the station wasn’t the color of defecation. The paint didn’t have the same metals mixed, a thread of hidden lead.
Once Charlie sat up from his bed at midnight, waking me up with salt leaking from his pores.
“Nicolas isn’t a soviet.” He shook his head in his hands. “Crazy. Crazy. Crazy…” He looked down at me on the floor. “I wonder if you could smell one out. There’s gotta be a difference, right? That’s what all the films they send keep saying.”
Unfortunately, my research never produced any results. Perhaps there was an auditory difference. If only I knew what to look for. If I could check his mate, then Charlie could sleep better at night. Or at least, maybe those dreams would go away. I couldn’t help with the ones where the station would catch on fire, and the floor would open up like a bear’s mouth, swallowing us whole. I got those nightmares too.
I waited at the end of the street for Bee to catch up. For each seventh step, he whipped his head around, pricking his ears stiff for a moment. He made his way down to the right lane, and I followed suit. Soon enough, my pace took me ahead.
“What are you watching for?” I asked.
“… I smell black powder.”
“The stuff your handler has in his holster?”
“Mmm.”
“Well, that’s good. Good people are nearby.”
“Or accidents.”
“What?”
Bee’s muzzle scrunched. He froze for a moment, back to a memory. His memory was better than mine, but he said it wasn’t a good thing. Maybe if he told me about those pins on the corkboard, those scenes in life forever embedded in his brain. I’ve never seen a decapitation from a ford and semi crashing head on. The skull was cracked open, and the brain was replaced with sunflower seeds. I’ve seen cats stuck in forty foot trees, but never one’s liver and intestines nailed into the tree branches. A man opened up his wife’s feline alive for her infidelity. I’ve never had to fear Charlie getting shot in the eye by a Five and Dime thief, or a fourteen year old filled with opium. I never had to attend Charlie’s funeral. Markers for time.
He turned back around.
“What is your handler’s name again?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Don’t remember? You have a better memory than I do.”
“Hmph.”
“Is it close to your old handler’s name? What was it… Ben?”
“… No.”
Down three, four, five, and six more streets. Whatever trail we found was diminishing. Bee’s pace became slower along with the moments of looking back.
“We’ll be entering Stewartville soon. She has to be near now.”
“Why couldn’t she be in the next town?” Bee looked back again.
“Now that would be ridiculous.”
“How so?”
I pawed at the dirt on the edge of the road. I let the dust rise and settle on my body, trying to detect whatever the boy in blue could. “The baby’s blood was fresh. The fiend couldn’t have gone far after stealing the child, meaning she must be in this town.”
His eyes rolled for a moment. His head took to the ground again, filtering out information between thin grains of rock. I followed him as he turned down a road half the width of the former streets. Potholes decorated its slender frame. At the end of the path laid a house of yellow paint. The garage was open behind the picket fence.
“The trail ends there,” Bee said.
“Great job Bee! Now we’re closer to bringing the kidnapper to justice.”
“If there’s a kidnapper.”
“Of course there is.” I circled back around to face him. “The bad people do the bad things.”
“Did they? I found no evidence of another party.”
“They covered their tracks. That’s what bad people do.”
“Have you ever considered there was no one else? Why I could smell her tracks so clearly?”
“…Sh-she’s the bad guy?”
“No-”
I bounded down the side of the street. “Now we have even more a reason to find her. Justice must be wrought.”
“You’re not an authority of law. You can’t determine what course of action we take.”
“I know enough to know what is right and wrong.”
“Hardly.”
My mouth felt dry. “What?”
“Are all fire’s bad?”
“Yes-”
“No!” The hair’s along Bee’s spine flared. “Meadows smother themselves to make fresh soil.”
“That’s absurd. Ash is the smell of death.”
“Death has other scents, flavors, and shades.” I could see his black gums above his exposed canines. “They could’ve planted marigolds instead of houses.”
“Shelters are bad?”
“No. Shelter is good, but not in excess. Half of those houses are vacant, growing termite nests inside.”
“And?”
“They’re a breeding ground for pests. You were good, but you did nothing. You breed too.”
“Enough!” I snapped in his face.
He stepped away, but going in the opposite direction, haunches sloped.
“Hey! Where are you going?” I stepped back in front of him once more again.
“I have no business here. It’s not my job. The justice you want is made up by people.” Bee pointed his nose toward the sky, towards the dot the humans called Sputnik. “The same people that fear tiny, tiny stars.”
He continued to press backwards, but my blocking was making it difficult. Slobber drooled down my neck and legs. My spots were on fire, and so was my chest. He barked, and he growled, and he howled, and he put the tips of his fangs against my whiskers.
“Turn around.”
“…”
“We have to find her! We have to find the bad guy!”
“THERE IS NO BAD GUY! I’ve wasted far too much of my time going along with your cat-shit ideology. Now, Out of my way!”
“No! You’re being a bad dog!” “You’re the bad dog.”
I yelled, “We can’t both be bad dogs! We’re going in opposite directions! No wonder they keep you tied out back. Dumb mutt.”
“And no wonder you’re so upset about this mother, considering yours was a bitch.”
The next seconds of my memory failed me. There was salt and water, turning the dirt to mud. A sharp pain erupted from my shoulder. I saw Bees jaws taking hold of my tendons. The sound coming out of my muzzle was not that of a proud protector dashing alongside a red truck, toward a blistering heat coming from twisting devil horns. This was the sound of a plea a rabbit made in distress, calling out to any predator nearby to end its ongoing suffering. I sounded like black cat kicked in the ribs, or the baby it stood over.
The dust around use flew up like a twister. The lines Bee made in the ground by dragging me around were crop circles. The scratches I managed to make across his legs hardly phased him. He continued to gnaw deeper into my shoulder. He was used to this pain. I was not.
He was making me hurt. Charlie said those who hurt others were bad people.
“People should mind their own damn business.” Charlie said when he attached the lock to the drawer. “Right, Mars?”
I couldn’t tell him yes, but he nodded for me. He could read my mind sometimes.
“I’m not hurting anyone. Have I ever hurt anyone?”
There went Charlie again. He would always act silly sometimes. Every time he got silly the scent of his dead skin got stronger. It would flake off as his hairs would stand up across his gooseflesh. Maybe the magazines were from communists. Perhaps communists smelt like male figures.
“If someone ever hurt you Mars, I would probably kill them. I mean- maybe. You’re such a good boy.” He patted the top of my head. “Only the dirtiest of rats would wanna hurt you.”
Bee shook me around like his chew toys. The world was shaking.
Dirty rat.
I kept my mouth open, trying to grab anything. I sensed heat. I closed around the target. A front leg. I crushed harder, and soon, he too was screaming. We yelped like newborns left in trash cans. We shouted like Charlie waking up in cold shivers, shredding magazines one night and books of law in the other. We sounded like animals by the side of road, kicking and screaming, both predators and prey-
The weight on my shoulder fell. I let go of the limb, laying on the ground to catch my breath. Bee was staring into the trees. The whites in his eyes were shining, his ears up and armed.
I coughed and tried to understand. “What is it?”
“Black powder.”
BOOM.
Bee darted toward the other side of the street. I scrambled to my paws, Iron coming from where he had bit me. I peered toward the sky, where a bright light had soared into the clouds. It had exploded into a million tinier lights. Blue lights. White lights. There was a third light I couldn’t tell. They swam from the center of the first spark, every direction possible was accounted for. They all ended up the same, disappearing, fizzling out into nothingness.
I had seen these before. Charlie called them something like wire-smackers. Sometimes the sparks would catch oak trees on fire in the dry years, but no leaf took flame.
I turned-
Bee’s tags jangled from the bushes. Then it became quieter. Quieter, till all that was left of him was the fur and blood stuck to my lips.
The yellow house was vacant. The trail stretched for miles and miles…