He got a pistol and loaded it with tranquilizer darts, then filled a hypodermic syringe with morphine. We walked back to Rex’s cage and Will kept the pistol out of sight at his side until Rex was facing the other way. He raised the gun and fired quickly, planting two darts an inch apart in the big dog’s shoulder. Rex dropped like a stone.
Will crawled into the cage and hunkered down next to him. He had the needle poised but hesitated. The tranquilizer darts would keep the dog unconscious for fifteen or twenty minutes. The morphine would kill. There were tears flowing down Will Haggerty’s weathered face. I tried to look away but couldn’t, and I watched him find a vein and fill the comatose dog with a lethal dose of morphine.
We put him in the wheelbarrow and took him inside. The other animals seemed restless, but that may have been my imagination. I had opened the lid of the incinerator while Will was preparing the morphine. The two of us got the dead dog out of the wheelbarrow and into the big metal box. I closed the lid and Will threw the switch without hesitation. Then we turned away and walked into another room.
We had used the oven before. We would pick up dogs on the street, dogs run down in traffic. Or dogs would die at home and people would bring us their bodies for disposal. Twice in the time I’d been there we’d had auto victims who were alive when we found them but could not possibly be saved. Those had received morphine shots and gone into the incinerator, but that had been very different. Rex was a beautiful animal in splendid health and it went against the grain to kill him.
“I hate it,” Will had told me. “There’s nothing worse. I’ll keep an animal forever if there’s any chance of placing him. There are those in this business who burn half the dogs they get and sell the others to research labs. I never yet let one go for research and never will. And I never yet burned one that I had the slightest hope for.”
I opened the oven and swept out a little pile of powdery white ash, unable to believe that nothing more remained of the Doberman. I was glad when the job was done and the oven closed. It was a relief to get busy with the routine work of feeding and watering the dogs and cats, cleaning cages, sweeping up.
Then I went out to the barnyard and found the dead lamb.
The shelter is in the middle of the city, a drab, gray, hopeless part of a generally hopeless town. The barnyard covers about a quarter of an acre girdled by eight feet of cyclone fencing. We keep farm animals there; chickens, ducks and geese, ponies and pigs and sheep. Some had been pets that outgrew their welcome. Others were injured animals we had patched up. Some of them came through cruelty cases we prosecuted, on the rare occasions when Will managed to get a court order divesting the owner of his charges. Supermarkets brought us their distressed produce as feed, and a farmer who owed Will a favor had sent over a load of hay a couple of weeks ago. The barnyard was open to the public during normal business hours, and kids from all over the city would come in and play with the animals.
In theory, the barnyard exists to generate goodwill for the shelter operation. The stray-dog contract with the city is a virtual guarantee of Will’s operating expenses. I hadn’t worked for him a week, however, before I knew that was just an excuse. He loved to walk among his animals, loved to slip a sugar cube to a pony, scratch a pig’s back with a long stick, or just stand chewing a dead cigar and watching the ducks and geese.
The lamb had been born at the shelter shortly after I started working there. Ewes often need assistance at lambing time, and Will had delivered her while I stood around feeling nervous. We named the lamb Fluff, which was accurate if unimaginative, and she was predictably the hit of the barnyard. Everybody loved her — except for the person who killed her.
He had used a knife, and he had used it over and over again. The ground was littered with bloody patches of wool. I took one look and was violently ill, something that hadn’t happened since the days of college beer parties. I stood there for what must have been a long time. Then I went inside and called Will.
“You’d better come down here,” I said. “Somebody killed Fluff.”
When he got here we put her in the oven and he threw the switch. We made coffee and sat in the office letting it get cold on the desk in front of us. It was past nine and time to open the front doors, but neither of us was in a hurry.
After a while he said, “Well, we haven’t had one of these for six months. I suppose we were overdue.”
“This has happened before?”
He looked at me. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It may have sounded nastier than I meant it. I guess I’m feeling nasty, that’s all. Yes, it’s happened before, and it will happen again. Kids. They come over the fence and kill something.”
“Why?”
“Because they want to. Because they’d like to kill a person but they’re not ready for that yet, so they practice on an animal that never knew there was evil on earth. One time, two years ago, a batch of them killed fifteen chickens, the whole flock. Chopped their heads off. Left everything else alone, just killed the chickens. The police asked them why and they said it was fun watching them run around headless. It was fun.”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s always kids, Eddie. Rotten kids from rotten homes. The police pick them up, but they’re children, so they run them through juvenile court and it shakes up the kids and terrifies the parents. The kids are released in their parents’ custody and maybe the parents pay a fine and the kids learn a lesson. They learn not to break into this particular barnyard and not to kill these particular animals.” He took the cellophane from a cigar and rolled it between his palms. “Some of the time I don’t call the police. There’s a gentler way to go about it and it works better in the long run. I’d rather do it that way this time, but I’d need your help.”
“How do you mean?”
“Catch him ourselves.” He took his time lighting the cigar. “They always try it again. We can stake out the place as easily as the cops can, and when we take him we can operate more flexibly than they can. There’s a method I’ve worked out. It lets them understand our operation, gives them a better perspective.”
“I think I understand.”
“But it means staying up all night for the next night or two, so it’s a question of whether you want to give up the time.”
“Sure.”
“Won’t be more than two nights, I would say. He’ll be back.”
“How do you know there’s just one of them?”
“Because there was only one dead animal, son. If you got two there’s going to be a minimum of two dead animals. Everybody has to have a turn. It always seems to work that way, anyhow.”
We staked out the place that night and the night after. We took turns sleeping during daylight hours, and we were both planted behind cover in the barnyard all through the dark hours. The killer stayed away two nights running. We decided to give it three more tries, but one was all we needed.
Around one in the morning of the third night we heard someone at the fence. I could just make out a shape in the darkness. He would climb halfway up the fence, then hesitate and drop back to the ground. He seemed to be trying to get up the courage to climb all the way over.
I had a tranquilizer dart pistol and I was dying to try dropping him then and there while he was outlined against the fence. I was afraid he would sense our presence and be warned off, but I forced myself to wait. Finally he climbed all the way up, poised there on the balls of his tennis shoes, and jumped toward us.
We had our flashlights on him before he hit the ground, big five-cell jobs that threw a blinding beam.