Wondered what to do.
Much later when the first light came to her windows, Bettina knew, all right: endure it. Avenge it if you can, someday, somehow. But for now, no police. No denials. No he said, she said. Nothing of tequila shots and tight jeans and were you flirting? No reports, no charges, no testimony, no public anything.
Let it become something buried down deep. Like a diseased corpse that she knew, even then, she would never forget.
Which brings her full circle to the Queen Palms Motel on this March night to wonder: What did that have to do with Billy?
She knows damned well what it has to do with Billy.
Nothing and everything.
The nothing part is easy to understand because Billy has nothing to do with what happened. The first time Billy walked into her cubicle at Coastal Eddy, however, she thought of J: a faint physical resemblance, the athletic stature, the easy face. She didn’t want Billy to remind her of J, but he did. That was the limit of Billy’s culpability — he walked into her cubicle.
The everything part is harder for her to deal with because it’s not a memory, not a piece of personal history, but her own reaction to it: J had stolen not only her once-easy trust of men but also her natural affection for them, her empathy, her spiritual attachment. J had spoiled half the world. Spoiled all the Billys and the Toms and the Tylers, the Nathans and the Marks and the Juans, the Albertos and Kendricks and Jamals. All of them.
Spoiled any chance of friendship with the lacrosse player, John Torres, who had offered to talk to the police about what he’d seen, and tried to keep in touch with Bettina after that night.
J had even spoiled Bettina’s brothers and father, forced them to be a part of a separate vile gender.
Felix comes to her bed and jumps aboard. A first! He licks her face and Bettina sets her left hand protectively over the trigger guard of the Winchester.
Later she turns off the lights. Propped up in bed with the gun on one side and her dog on the other, Bettina looks out at the parking lot and the other units, two stories of them, facing her from just a few hundred feet away. Everybody in everybody’s face. Some with lights on inside, most not. Faint lights over the doors, flecked by moths. A compact car arrives; a van departs. Doors open and close and voices drift through the damp March air. English. Spanish.
At the sound of the Spanish, she goes to the window and finds the source: two men at the door of a downstairs unit directly across from her. They look old and tired. One has trouble with the card key, in and out and again, and the door finally opens.
Shame on you, thinks Bettina: these guys are workers.
Back under the covers she can’t sleep. Can’t believe how good it feels to have a dog in bed again. Can’t believe that just yesterday life was more than good, but now she’s trying to protect a former DEA drug dog from the Sinaloa Cartel, which is possibly in Laguna right now, looking to dognap Felix, or worse. Or so says a pain-in-the butt DEA agent with “credible but unverified” evidence.
She checks her laptop with the free Wi-Fi, sees the pictures of Felix’s “relatives” still coming in. Some of them really do look like him.
She closes the computer, wondering if it might be time to open the box in her brain, give J his name back, let him be a real man instead of a living curse, time to deal with him face-to-face, once and for all and forever.
Bettina strokes the top of Felix’s perfectly round head, the “doggen noggin,” as her mother would say. Then she works his funny ears with her fingers, scratches under his front legs, feels his heart beating deep in his chest. She can’t quite believe how much she loves him. How easy it is to fall in love with a dog. You just do. They make you.
Her last thought before tumbling into sleep is about Felix: You can’t take him.
He’s mine.
Joe lies beside Bettina, his back flush to her. He feels the faint thump of her heart and the sounds inside her, draws in her river of smells. He thinks of his mother and the sweet milk and the other puppies all around him jostling each other for position and the way she would suddenly get up and go away, yanking that wonderful warm tube from his mouth and leaving him rolling and roiling with his brothers and sisters in the sudden emptiness of their crate. It’s one of his best memories, being buried in live, warm, friendly bodies that smell good.
He thinks of swimming in the pool with Teddy, and at the beach with Dan.
Remembers the mouse he killed working with Dan before they shot him.
Thinks of the boy holding him tight and running to where he was taken care of by Good Man and Woman.
He knows this Woman Bettina loves him. He sees it on her face and hears it in her words. These are clear and unmistakable signs. Faces are easy to understand; words, too, if you go by sound. When she looks at him in that certain way, Joe is starting to love her back.
He doesn’t know the word for love. Just that it’s all good feeling and happiness. For sleeping next to.
Six Months After Joe’s First Visit to Excalibur K-9 Training Center...
15
On a bright spring day, Teddy, his father, Wade, and year-old Joe got ready for a mock Class I detection exam at the Excalibur K-9 Training Center. It’s a present from father to son in reward for good grades in fifth grade. Teddy has been talking a lot about being a dog handler when he’s old enough: for rescues, maybe, or tracking lost people, or maybe catching criminals or terrorists. His dad wants him to get a taste of what it might be like.
Joe knew none of this. He was happy to be here at a place he loves, doing things he loves for people he loves.
This test was an edited version of the detection test that Wade would give any Excalibur candidate headed to the ranks of federal, state, county, and municipal officers, or private citizens willing to pay top dollar for a top dog — minus the drugs and dangerous opioids because of Teddy’s age. If a dog passed all four parts of the real Class I exam — detection, security, patrol, and protection — the next step was to place this “green” dog with his handler-to-be for a week of compatibility-training to assure a good canine — human fit. And if that happened, Wade would sign away yet another of his beloved dogs for five years of hard and sometimes dangerous work.
If the dog didn’t pass, Wade always tried to find a good owner, hopefully a family, and passed his failed friend into a safer world. It was a little tough sometimes, since many of the dogs were patrol, security, and protection trained, so prospective civilian owners could be liability-shy, if not downright afraid to bring a trained attack dog into their home.
The three of them — and occasionally Dad — had been here Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends for six months now, and Wade wanted to see how Joe could do on a timed, intense examination with steep scoring penalties for false and missed alerts.
They started with on-leash obedience — hand and voice directed — at which Joe had always excelled. They did it right out in the grassy park with the dozens of other dogs and handlers. Half the battle for a dog was distraction.
Joe was distraction-prone, to say the least, but that day he sensed the gravity of what they were doing in Teddy, whose voice was stern and hand signals more forceful than usual. Joe saw that Wade’s wrinkled old face was serious, and that he carried a flat black slab with a screen that tilted up, and, as many people do, was poking it with his fingers. So Joe tried extra hard — sitting extra fast, keeping still as a rock as Teddy circled him, going down hard with a humph, rolling over completely, and raising his paw the second he heard Shake or Teddy offered his hand.