“Is this them?” Dodson said, like he was looking at a nest of tarantulas.
“Yup,” Skip said, beaming. The litter was in a pen made from temporary fencing. The cement floor was covered with wood shavings, a child’s swimming pool full of shredded paper in the middle. Next to the pen, a lightbulb on a wire hung over an old couch bowed in the middle, a slumping pile of magazines on the floor.
“Want to get in there with them?” Skip said.
“No thank you,” Dodson said. “A baby shark is still a shark. He’ll just eat you in smaller chunks.”
Isaiah and Skip sat in the pen, the puppies bumbling over their laps, yipping, tugging on Isaiah’s shoestrings, and chewing on Skip’s Crocs. Each pup had a different-colored spot of nail polish on the top of its head. The green pup was twice the size of the others.
“How old are they?” Isaiah said.
“Ten weeks,” Skip said.
“What about this one?” Isaiah said, scratching the green pup. “Can’t be ten weeks. Is it from the same litter?”
“Looks good, right? His eyes are set right, full dentition, good tail set, topline, bone structure. Could be a winner.”
“Are you going to show him?”
“No, but I’m gonna take him to dog shows.” Skip batted the red puppy around with his hands. “Come on, red, be tough,” he said. “That’s it, there you go, mix it up, mix it up. My dogs have great bloodlines. Redboy, Carver, Bourdaux. Every one of them game bred.”
“What’s game bred?” Dodson said.
“Game bred means the dog’s parents fought in the ring,” Skip said. “It’s like your mom and dad are Mike Tyson and Ronda Rousey. A game dog has like a really high pain tolerance and won’t back down no matter what. Like it’ll keep fighting even if it’s losing, even if it’s getting torn apart and dying. You should see my dogs. They won’t quit even if they’re winning. Seriously? If the other dog was dead and buried my dog would dig it up and kill it all over again.”
Like that’s something to be proud of, Isaiah thought. Training a dog to be good for nothing but killing. Not thinking twice about letting it tear somebody apart. Skip was a sociopath, which only confirmed what Isaiah knew the moment he came out of the house. This was the hit man.
“Oh listen to this,” Skip said. “There’s this Mexican guy lives out near the landfill? He’s got a herd of goats, rents them out for brush clearing. Seriously, those fucking goats will eat anything. So one of my dogs escapes and get this: he kills the whole herd. I’m not kidding, like twenty of them.” Skip grinned. “They were running around, climbing over each other. BAAAH BAAAHH. I got blood all over me.”
Isaiah looked at this creature that murdered people for a living, his eyes impish and depraved, delighted at the carnage he’d caused. Probably thinks he’s a professional like a race car driver or an opera singer. Thinks it’s cool because he saw Tom Cruise play a hit man in a movie. Doesn’t cross his mind that he’s a sick, twisted sociopath, his dogs more human than he is.
“Okay, blue, it’s your turn,” Skip said. “Step up, step up, come on, be tough.”
“How did the dog escape?” Isaiah said. “Did he break out of the barn?”
“He was in the yard. Come on, blue, keep coming, keep coming.”
“The dog climbed over that fence?”
“He’s a pit bull, what can I say?”
“It’s two miles from the diner to your place and the landfill is six. That dog went down the road another four miles to the Mexican guy’s place and found the goats by accident?”
“Seriously? A dog’s sense of smell is two hundred times better than humans’. It can smell a goat if it’s in San Bernardino. I used to live there, what a shithole.”
Isaiah thought, Skip has killed people. Somebody’s mother, father, sister, brother taken away forever just like Marcus. “I don’t understand something,” Isaiah said. “If the dog escaped, how could you be there to watch it kill the goats?”
“Who said I was?” Skip said. He looked puzzled, like the question had come out of the blue.
“You said the goats were climbing over each other and you got blood all over you. How did that happen if you weren’t there?”
“What’s with all the questions?”
“Your dog didn’t escape over a ten-foot electrified fence. You couldn’t escape over a ten-foot electrified fence. You drove the dog over to the Mexican guy’s place and let it loose on those goats. Part of the dog’s training, let it taste blood, get into killing things. Was that the special dog, Skip? The giant one you sent to kill Cal?”
“Cal? Who’s Cal?” Skip said. The twinkling eyes had gone dark, the grin lacquered on. He was holding the blue puppy like he was protecting it from the rain.
Dodson slipped behind Skip, his look saying you’re pushing him too hard, but Isaiah was too angry to care. “Where is he, Skip?” he said. “Where’s the special one?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve got thirteen dogs and fifteen kennels. One of them is Attila’s, who’s the big kennel for? He’s in the house now, isn’t he? That’s why you left the door open so you could whistle if you needed him. Trained him good too, just like the others, that little be-quiet trick was pretty cool. Use that cattle prod a lot?” Isaiah said, nodding at the barbecue fork. “Hung it up there where they could see it, remind them who’s boss. By the way, what happened to the Presa Canario? Served its purpose and you put it down? Matter of fact, what happened to all the other litters? You’d need a lot of them to get size like that. You buried them out there in the desert, didn’t you? Dug a hole and threw dirt on them because they weren’t big enough or game enough or didn’t kill something when you told them to.”
“I gave them away,” Skip said, barely audible.
“Gave them away?” Isaiah said. “Bullshit. You’ve been bullshitting since we got here. The arrows in that target are eighteen inches long. They’re bolts for a crossbow and the crossbow isn’t an Olympic event. What unit, Skip?”
“What?” Skip said.
“What unit? Your father was in the marines. What unit?”
“I forgot,” Skip said.
“Your father wasn’t in the marines any more than you were,” Isaiah said, “and what was all that nonsense about a gun club?”
“You’re lucky they’re not here,” Skip said, his voice in a wringer, his eyes like knife wounds. “They’re not too keen on the brothers.”
“Do all the members of your gun club sit in that one chair? Do they all drink Red Bull? Do all their burgers fit on that one hibachi? Where do they eat them? On the picnic table you don’t have? It’s just you, Skip. Lying on that couch at night reading to the puppies.”
The blue puppy squealed. Skip was squeezing it too hard. “Seriously?” he said. “It’s time for you to go.”
They stopped at McDonald’s and ate inside. Isaiah didn’t want the smell in his car. “I think it’s true these fries got crack in ’em,” Dodson said. “I wonder if you can rock ’em up and smoke ’em? I know some niggas that would try.”
Isaiah was pushing lettuce around with a fork trying to find the premium part of his Premium Southwest Salad. A mess of wilted greens, dried-out chicken cubes, a few black beans, and corn kernels in a plastic box. The dressing looked like snot. “I don’t know what this is,” he said.
At the next table, a woman wearing three cardigans was gurgling Sprite vapor through a straw.
“You want this?” Isaiah said, offering her the salad.
“Sure,” the woman said.
“Well, I guess we found our man,” Dodson said. “That was some cold shit you put on that boy. Do all their burgers fit on that one hibachi. I thought he was going to cry.”