«I’ll play with you,» he said softly, and put a moist fishy little paw in mine. I shook it carefully, so as not to bend it.
I told him where I was staying and went back out to the sunny street and walked a block down to where I had left my Chrysler. I got into it and poked it forward from around the corner, far enough so that I could see the DeSoto and the front of Sharp’s place.
I sat like that for half an hour. Then Dr. Sharp came out of his place in street clothes and got into the DeSoto. He drove it off around the corner and swung into the alley that ran behind his yard.
I got the Chrysler going and shot up the block the other way, took a plant at the other end of the alley.
A third of the way down the block I heard growling, barking, snarling. This went on for some time. Then the DeSoto backed out of the concrete yard and came towards me. I ran away from it to the next corner.
The DeSoto went south to Arguello Boulevard, then east on that. A big police dog with a muzzle on his head was chained in the back of the sedan. I could just see his head straining at the chain.
I trailed the DeSoto.
TWO
Carolina Street was away off at the edge of the little beach city. The end of it ran into a disused interurban right of way, beyond which stretched a waste of Japanese truck farms. There were just two houses in the last block, so I hid behind the first, which was on the corner, with a weedy grass plot and a high dusty red and yellow lantana fighting with a honeysuckle vine against the front wall.
Beyond that two or three burned over lots with a few weed stalks sticking up out of the charred grass and then a ramshackle mud-colored bungalow with a wire fence. The DeSoto stopped in front of that.
Its door slammed open and Dr. Sharp dragged the muzzled dog out of the back and fought him through a gate and up the walk. A big barrel-shaped palm tree kept me from seeing him at the front door of the house. I backed my Chrysler and turned it in the shelter of the corner house, went three blocks over and turned along a street parallel to Carolina. This street also ended at the right of way. The rails were rusted in a forest of weeds, came down the other side on to a dirt road, and started back towards Carolina.
The dirt road dropped until I couldn’t see over the embankment. When I had gone what felt like three blocks I pulled up and got out, went up the side of the bank and sneaked a look over it.
The house with the wire gate was half a block from me. The DeSoto was still in front of it. Boomingly on the afternoon air came the deep-toned woof-woofing of the police dog. I put my stomach down in the weeds and sighted on the bungalow and waited.
Nothing happened for about fifteen minutes except that the dog kept right on barking. Then the barking suddenly got harder and harsher. Then somebody shouted. Then a man screamed.
I picked myself up out of the weeds and sprinted across the right of way, down the other side to the street end. As I got near the house I heard the low, furious growling of the dog worrying something, and behind it the staccato rattle of a woman’s voice in anger, more than in fear.
Behind the wire gate was a patch of lawn mostly dandelions and devil grass. There was a shred of cardboard hanging from the barrel-shaped palm, the remains of a sign. The roots of the tree had wrecked the walk, cracked it wide open and lifted the rough edges into steps.
I went through the gate and thumped up wooden steps to a sagging porch. I banged on the door.
The growling was still going on inside, but the scolding voice had stopped. Nobody came to the door.
I tried the knob, opened the door and went in. There was a heavy smell of chloroform.
In the middle of the floor, on a twisted rug, Dr. Sharp lay spread-eagled on his back, with blood pumping out of the side of his neck. The blood had made a thick glossy pool around his head. The dog leaned away from it, crouched on his forelegs, his ears flat to his head, fragments of a torn muzzle hanging about his neck. His throat bristled and the hair on his spine stood up and there was a low pulsing growl deep in his throat.
Behind the dog a closet door was smashed back against the wall and on the floor of the closet a big wad of cotton-wool sent sickening waves of chloroform out on the air.
A dark handsome woman in a print house dress held a big automatic pointed at the dog and didn’t fire it.
She threw a quick glance at me over her shoulder, started to turn. The dog watched her, with narrow, black-rimmed eyes. I took my Luger out and held it down at my side.
Something creaked and a tall black-eyed man in faded blue overalls and a blue work shirt came through the swing door at the back with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun in his hands. He pointed it at me.
«Hey, you! Drop that gat!» he said angrily.
I moved my jaw with the idea of saying something. The man’s finger tightened on the front trigger. My gun went off — without my having much to do with it. The slug hit the stock of the shotgun, knocked it clean out of the man’s hands. It pounded on the floor and the dog jumped sideways about seven feet and crouched again.
With an utterly incredulous look on his face the man put his hands up in the air.
I couldn’t lose. I said: «Down yours too, lady.»
She worked her tongue along her lips and lowered the automatic to her side and walked away from the body on the floor.
The man said: «Hell, don’t shoot him. I can handle him.»
I blinked, then I got the idea. He had been afraid I was going to shoot the dog. He hadn’t been worrying about himself.
I lowered the Luger a little. «What happened?»
«That — tried to chloroform — him, a fighting dog!»
I said: ’Yeah. If you’ve got a phone, you’d better call an ambulance. Sharp won’t last long with that tear in his neck.»
The woman said tonelessly: «I thought you were law.»
I didn’t say anything. She went along the wall to a window seat full of crumpled newspapers, reached down for a phone at one end of it.
I looked down at the little vet. The blood had stopped coming out of his neck. His face was the whitest face I had ever seen.
«Never mind the ambulance,» I told the woman. «Just call Police Headquarters.»
The man in the overalls put his hands down and dropped on one knee, began to pat the floor and talk soothingly to the dog.
’Steady, old-timer. Steady. We’re all friends now — all friends. Steady, Voss.»
The dog growled and swung his hind end a little. The man kept on talking to him. The dog stopped growling and the hackles on his back went down. The man in overalls kept on crooning to him.
The woman on the window seat put the phone aside and said: «On the way. Think you can handle it, Jerry?»
«Sure,» the man said, without taking his eyes off the dog.
The dog let his belly touch the floor now and opened his mouth and let his tongue hang out. The tongue dripped saliva, pink saliva with blood mixed in it. The hair at the side of the dog’s mouth was stained with blood.
THREE
The man called Jerry said: «Hey, Voss. Hey, Voss old kid. You’re fine now. You’re fine.»
The dog panted, didn’t move. The man straightened up and went close to him, pulled one of the dog’s ears. The dog turned his head sideways and let his ear be pulled. The man stroked his head, unbuckled the chewed muzzle and got it off.
He stood up with the end of the broken chain and the dog came up on his feet obediently, went out through the swing door into the back part of the house, at the man’s side.
I moved a little, out of line with the swing door. Jerry might have more shotguns. There was something about Jerry’s face that worried me. As if I had seen him before, but not very lately, or in a newspaper photo.