It didn’t take him ten minutes. She’d moved on from the gloves to a display of detachable water bottles, reflectors and helmets for all your biking needs, though she didn’t own a bike, and when she looked up he was at the cash register, pretending he didn’t know the guy with the earplugs. He set two handbaskets on the counter, the one filled with expensive freeze-dried meals, the other with what looked to be an outdoor cook kit and a hunting knife in a fancy strap-on sheath that probably ran ninety or a hundred dollars. Not one word passed between him and the checkout guy. He paid with a crumpled twenty and the guy rang something up, popped the cash register, and gave him back a ten and a five. Adam ducked his head, shot him a grin—“You have a nice day,” he said — and then the guy wished him a nice day too and Adam was out the door, his back to her, striding briskly for the car. She gave it a minute, taking up one of the water bottles and then replacing it on the display stand before making her way to the door, trying not to look at the guy with the earplugs, but she wavered just as the door pulled back for her and saw that he was studying her, with interest.
Adam was already in the car when she got there, stuffing the silver-foil packets of food into his backpack. She slid in beside him and shut the door. “Got a good deal, huh?” she offered, turning the key in the ignition and ignoring her seatbelt, which she could do with impunity because she’d long since disabled the dinger or nanny buzzer or whatever you wanted to call it.
“Let’s just say I have a connection.” He gave her a smirk, tearing at the packaging that housed the cook kit (more hard plastic) and casually dropping it out the window. By the time they were rolling out of the lot, he’d slipped the shining aluminum kit into the pack, along with the knife, which he didn’t even glance at, and he was lifting the canteen to his lips again and again offering it to her.
“No,” she said, “not now. Not till we get Kutya.” She smiled. “Then we can celebrate.”
“Party,” he said, and his voice had gone mechanical, as if he were thinking about something else altogether, as if he weren’t even there. “Party on.”
Was he drunk, was that it?
“I’m a party animal,” he said in the same detached voice. “A real, a super, party animal.”
“Yeah,” she said, swinging out onto the highway, “yeah, me too. But you’re going to be all right for this, aren’t you? What we discussed?”
Nothing.
“Listen, Adam—”
“Colter.”
“Colter. I need five minutes, that’s all. And then, if you want, we can go back to my place — in Willits, at the top of the canyon? — and party all we want. I’ve got wine. I can make us omelets. You like omelets?”
No response. He was rigid again, staring through the windshield as if it was the transparent lid of a coffin.
“Okay,” she said, “okay, fine. Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
She got lucky, because when they came through the door at Animal Control, it wasn’t the girl behind the counter but a middle-aged man with dyed hair and a severe comb-over, and he was busy explaining adoption procedures to a couple his own age who sported identical his-and-hers paunches. Adam was grinning, for what reason she couldn’t fathom, except that he was drunk, he must have been drunk, but he’d roused himself when they pulled into the lot and now he edged right in, saying, “Sir? Sir, could I ask you a question?”
The couple turned to stare at him. The man behind the counter, who’d been in the midst of enumerating the virtues of a dog named Dolly, lifted his head to give him an annoyed look. “Just a minute,” he said.
“But”—and here Adam, soft-voiced to the point where you could barely hear him, calibrated his tone till it was a kind of rising whine—“I have a question, just a simple question.”
The man just blinked at him.
And her? She was making like she didn’t know him, as if they’d come in separately, two strangers interested in dogs. And cats. She went over to the brochures and made a show of selecting one of each, a pet lover who only wanted to be informed about the rules and regulations, about safety and health and the special needs of kittens and puppies.
“About spaying?” Adam said. “You do spaying here, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the man behind the counter said, “yes, of course. But if you could just wait a second until I’m done with these people, who were here before you—”
The woman gave Adam an indignant look, then turned back to the conversation. “Dolly’s housetrained, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” the man lied, because how would he know? “They all are.”
And then Adam, inserting himself between husband and wife at the counter so that each had to take a step back, let his voice go a notch higher. “How old do they have to be before you spay them?”
The Animal Control man blinked again, but he was there to inform people and the response was all but automatic. “Six months or so.”
“You use a scalpel, right? Betadine, make it nice and clean. Do you do it yourself — I mean, personally?”
That was when she drifted down along the far side of the counter and away from the little group gathered there behind her, her neck bent as if studying the brochures in her hand, and nobody even glanced at her as she ducked into the hallway, turned the handle of the door and slipped inside. She found herself in a corridor with an office of some sort on her right and an open door at the far end. She moved cautiously, a step at a time. If there was somebody back there she’d play dumb — she was looking to adopt, that was all, and was this the way to the cages? But what if it was the girl from the other day? She could be back here, she would be, dispensing kibble, filling water bowls, hosing down the floors. What then — another stare-down? Or something more, something harder, something worse? There was one thing she knew: she wasn’t leaving here without her dog. A sharp smell of urine hit her. She could hear the animals moving and rustling beyond the door, a clack of nails on concrete, a furtive yip, whining. She steeled herself and went on.
As soon as she came through the door and started down the row of cages, the dogs — there must have been forty or more — sprang up off the concrete floor, scrabbling at the wire mesh and crying out for release, but where was Kutya, where was he? They were barking now, every last one of them, raising a clamor that was sure to bring the attendants running — the girl, wherever she was, and the man from the front desk and who knew who else? “Kutya!” she called, “where are you? Come on, boy! Kutya!”
He was in the last cage down, looking cowed, as if he’d done something wrong, as if it was his fault he’d been locked away in here, and she felt sick with the thought of what he’d been put through. It was a crime, that was what it was, and she was beyond caring now — just let them try to stop her. In the next moment she had the cage door open and she was clicking the leash to his collar and bulling her way out the rear door, the one that gave onto the fenced-in courtyard and the parking lot beyond.