“Hold it right there,” Will boomed out, striding toward him. He had a dart pistol in his right hand and was holding it out in front of the flashlight so that the boy could see it. All it could shoot were the trank darts, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at it.
Either the kid panicked or he figured nobody would shoot him for climbing a barnyard fence. He was quick as a snake. He got three-quarters of the way up the fence when Will put a dart into his shoulder, and he hit the ground the way Rex had hit the floor of his cage.
Will hoisted him easily onto his shoulder and toted him into the office. We turned on a desk lamp and propped the kid in a chair. He was about thirteen or fourteen, skinny, with a mop of lifeless black hair. In the pockets of his jeans we found three clasp knives and a switchblade, and on his belt he had a hunting knife in a sheath. There were stains in the hunting knife’s blood groove, and in one of the clasp knives we found bits of bloody wool.
“Just follow my play, Eddie,” Will told me. “There’s a technique I worked out and you’ll see how it goes.”
We keep milk in a little fridge, mostly for the cats and puppies. Will poured out a glass of it and put it on the desk. The kid opened his eyes after about twelve minutes. His face was deadly pale and his blue eyes burned in the white face.
Will said, “How you feeling? Never run, son, when someone holds a gun on you. There’s milk in front of you. You look a little peaked and it’ll do you good.”
“I don’t want any milk.”
“Well, it’s there if you change your mind. I guess you wanted to have a look at our animals. Just your hard luck you picked tonight.” He reached over and rumpled the boy’s hair affectionately. “See, there was a gang of troublemakers here a few nights ago. We know who they are, we had trouble with them before. They hang out in Sayreville over to the north. They broke in the other night and killed a poor little lamb.”
I was watching the kid’s face. His mind wasn’t all that quick and it dawned on him rather slowly that we didn’t know he was Fluff’s killer.
“But it’s one thing to know who they are and another thing to prove it,” Will went on. “So we thought we’d try catching them in the act. You just happened to drop in at the wrong time. I thought you were too young to be one of them, but when you started to bolt I couldn’t take chances. That was a tranquilizer dart, by the way. We use it on animals that are impossible to control.”
Like the kid himself, I thought, but Will was talking to him now in the gentle voice he uses on high-strung dogs and spooked ponies, showing him the pistol and the darts and explaining how they work.
“I guess those punks won’t be here tonight after all,” Will said. “You wouldn’t believe what they did to a poor innocent creature. Well, they’ll be back sooner or later, and when they do return we’ll get them.”
“What will happen to them then?” the kid asked.
“A whole lot more than they counted on, son. First off the cops will take them in the back room and pound hell out of them — kill a cop or an animal in this town and the police tend to throw the book away — but those kids won’t have a mark on them. Then they’ll sit in jail until their case comes up, and then they’ll be in a reformatory for a minimum of three years. And I wouldn’t want to tell you what happens to them in reform school. Let’s just say it won’t be a Sunday school picnic and let it go at that.”
“Well, I guess they deserve it,” the kid said.
“You bet they do.”
“Anybody who’d do a thing like that,” the kid added.
Will heaved a sigh. “Well, now that you’re here, son, maybe we can make it up to you for scaring you like that. How about a guided tour of the place? Give you some kind of an idea of the operation we’re running here.”
I don’t know whether the kid was enthusiastic about the idea or whether he just had the sense to give that impression. Either way, he tagged along as we led him all through the place, inside and out. We showed him around the barnyard, pointed out Fluff’s mother, talked about how Fluff had been born. We showed him the dog and cat cages and the small animal section with mice and hamsters and gerbils. He was full of questions and Will gave him detailed answers.
It wasn’t hard to see what Will was doing. First, we were making it obvious that we knew a decent kid like him couldn’t possibly be an animal killer. We let him know that we suspected somebody else for the act and that he was home free. We reinforced things by telling him his act would have earned him precisely the sort of treatment it should have earned him — a good beating and a stiff sentence. Then, while all that soaked in, we made him feel a part of the animal shelter instead of an enemy.
It looked good, but I had my doubts. The kid was having too much fun making the most of the situation. He was going to go home convinced we were a couple of damn fools who couldn’t recognize a villain when he almost literally fell into our laps. Still, I didn’t see how we could get worse results than the police got by following the book — and Will had done this before, so I wasn’t going to give him an argument.
“And this here is the incinerator,” Will said finally.
“For garbage?”
“Used to be. But there’s an ordinance against burning garbage within city limits, on account of the air pollution. What we use it for is disposal of dead animals.” He hung his head. “Poor little Fluff went in here. All that was left of her was enough ashes to fill an envelope — a small one at that.”
The kid was impressed. “How long does it take?”
“No time at all. She heats up to something like three thousand degrees Fahrenheit and nothing lasts long at that temperature.” Will unhooked the cover, raised it up. “You’re just about tall enough to see in there. Enough room for two or three big dogs at a time.”
“I’ll say.”
“You could pretty near fit a pony in there.”
“You sure could,” the kid said. He thought for a moment, still staring down into the oven. “What would happen if you put an animal in there while it was still alive?”
“Now there’s an interesting question,” Will allowed. “Of course I would never do that to an animal.”
“Of course not.”
“Because it would be cruel.”
“Sure, but I was just wondering.”
“But a dirty little lamb-killing brat like you,” he said, talking and moving at the same time, gripping the boy by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and heaving him in one motion into the incinerator, “a brat like you is another story entirely.”
The lid was closing before the kid even thought to scream. When it slammed shut and Will hooked the catch, you could barely hear the boy’s voice. You could tell that he was yelling in terror, and there were also sounds of him kicking at the walls. Of course the big metal box didn’t budge an inch.
“If that isn’t brilliant,” I said.
“I was wondering if you knew what I was leading up to.”
“I didn’t. I followed the psychology but didn’t think it would really work. But this is just perfect.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Just perfect. Why, after the scare he’s getting right now, he’ll never want to look at another animal.”
“The scare?” Will’s face had a look on it I had never seen before. “You think all this is to scare him?”
He reached over and threw the switch.
Going Through the Motions
On the way home I had picked up a sack of burgers and fries at the fast-food place near the Interstate off-ramp. I popped a beer, but before I got it poured or the meal eaten I checked my phone answering machine. There was a message from Anson Pollard asking me to call him right away. His voice didn’t sound right, and there was something familiar in what was wrong with it.