“More?”
The dog knew no English, of course, but he knew the word’s tone so he wagged his tail and sat again.
Two minutes later he finished his second big plate of scraps and felt the bloating satisfaction inside. He drank the water, then sat by the empty plate and looked at the boy with his very best, most hopeful, most friendly expression.
But the boy wheeled the bucket over, picked up the plate and the white clamshell.
“I got to go back inside. Don’t follow or you’ll get kicked. The manager hates dogs.”
Half an hour later, on his way back to Mexico, Street Mutt suddenly registered the distant scent of a female in heat. It hit him like an old friend, throwing that switch inside him. Next to food, this was his most important smell. His most primal. If he had words, he would have described it as urgent desire, pleasure, maybe even a quest to experience beauty.
It took him another few minutes to find her, following a shallow drainage ditch and narrowing her scent cone to the backyard of a house on Marconi Court. He saw her through the chain links of a tall fence, lying in a patch of sun on her patio. She was pale, much larger than he, and beautiful. A full-bodied beauty. The tag on her collar caught the sun.
He yipped, raking dirt furiously. Pale Beauty came over and paced, watching him. In less than five minutes, Street Mutt excavated a body-sized cavity under the fence. He dug with the efficiency and strength of a machine. Soon as he wriggled under, Pale Beauty bolted for the back door of her house, and when Street Mutt tried to climb her, she threw him off and raced around her home. Then around it again, and again. She was fast and cornered well. So Street Mutt reversed himself, crashing into her head-on at the doghouse entrance. She was heavy enough to knock him inside. He scrambled out and was on her tail again by the time she got halfway across the yard; then she cut and ran back across the grass. Suddenly she wheeled and nipped him, but quick and nimble Street Mutt was behind her in a flash.
Street Mutt finished in a dizzying rush, then got himself back under the fence and out the way he’d come.
He drifted toward sleep in the shade of a decorative hedge lining the McDonald’s parking lot. Lost in the same enjoyable haze he’s been lost in many times before. Dreamed of getting a good lunch when he woke up.
After a nap, Street Mutt went around to the back door again but it was closed. He put his nose to the air and started back for Mexico.
He hadn’t gone far when he picked up the scent of grilling meat and followed it to a backyard barbecue on Siempre Viva Road, hopes high.
Five Days After the Shoot-Out...
5
Apex Self-Defense sits in a tangle of streets, overpasses, power lines, and light rail tracks that link the San Diego Convention Center, downtown, the airport, and the Transit Centers. Some of the buildings are old, some new, and from certain heights the graceful blue span of the Coronado Bridge can be seen reaching across to land. From other angles, it’s all steel and concrete, bright sun and shadow, unhoused people strewn upon the ground like rags.
Apex Self-Defense is a brick industrial structure built in 1938. There is no exterior signage except for the ancient rusted emblem of the former owner, hanging over the dated front door: San Diego Sandblast.
Dan Strickland is hard at work here now, deep in the basement gun range — six stations, motorized target pulleys, walls and ceiling all baffled with soundproof batting. Its far end is a concrete wall faced with railroad ties and hay bales. Despite the earsplitting handguns deployed inside the range, from outside it is silent, thanks to the City of San Diego’s strict noise codes.
Above him is floor 1 — the office, combat ring, wrestling arena, weight room, lockers, and showers.
Floor 2 is classrooms, lounge, gaming arcade, lunchroom, and dormitory.
The first two floors have a drab, not-new feeling; furnished for utility and value.
But the remodeled floor 3 is Strickland’s lair, his pride and joy — a steel-and-glass penthouse, all hard lines and right angles, with views of the city, the Coronado Bridge, and the Pacific. One big room with everything he needs. A space for contemplation, books, art, music. For a gigantic TV. A good kitchen and a big firm bed.
Joe’s crate is in the bedroom, heaped as always with his blankets and pad, his chew hooves and antlers, the plush toys that he preserves rather than destroys. His pink bunny. His chimp. Here at home, Joe was all puppy, even as a retired narcotics and currency specialist. His food and water dishes are on the slate kitchen floor.
Earlier this morning, Strickland looked at all of Joe’s things and wondered again how to get through another day without him.
His heart ached because he loves Joe and he loves the money Joe makes him.
Strickland has been waiting for one of his business associates south of the border to message him with good news: Joe has been found. Joe is alive. Joe was wounded but it was not serious. We have him. He’s waiting for you at Platinum Foreign Car in Otay Mesa.
But only silence from south of the border. Which to Strickland means that the worst has happened.
Now he watches his current undergraduates blasting away in the basement. There are six students, his maximum per class. The course is ten weeks — one day per week for eight hours. He’s booked four days a week with four concurrent courses, well into the year.
Strickland stands behind the firing line with his arms crossed. He’s wearing foam ear inserts and a good sound suppressor but he feels the gunfire in his body, a steady, concussive whop, whop, whop whop whop, that is really not like any other sound on earth, he thinks. From a distance it might sound like firecrackers, but close like this it’s another dimension of sound altogether. It goes through you, just like the bullets would.
Overall, this is a pretty good class for four weeks in, he thinks. He watches Edward trying to keep his rounds in the kill zone of the paper target — a life-sized human torso — ten feet away.
Then there’s Molly, the high school teacher, her glasses starting to fog up again as she inexplicably places another tight group, all in the black, from twenty-five feet out.
Next to her is Kim, who owns a jewelry store in La Jolla, also a good shot.
And Mario, the Starbucks manager, and D’Andre, the nightclub owner, and finally Tucker, the actor from up in Silver Lake.
Strickland doesn’t issue diplomas or certificates but he does promise that each graduate will have the training necessary to effectively defend against a life-threatening attack. If graduates don’t have confidence in their skills and the equipment they’ve bought, then they can take the course again for free. The ten-week course runs $2,000 per person, earning Strickland roughly $480,000 a year for four days of work per week, and twelve weeks off. His business is a great laundry for his jobs with Joe. This is Apex Self-Defense’s fourth year. The only people who have tried to take the course again for free were a woman and, later, a man, both of whom ended up making sexual propositions to Strickland and dropped out shortly thereafter.
He offers training of attack dogs and their owners, but few people will accept the liability for a lethal animal, where a simple verbal miscue can unleash otherworldly violence.
Guns are much easier. He helps his graduates apply for concealed-carry permits, still not easy to get in California, but doable if you have connections in the county, which Strickland does.
He likes this work and he loves not so much the money but what the money buys.
He’s thirty-three years old.
He moves behind Edward, and of course, he has to shout to be understood.
“Edward, keep your elbows in and bend your knees! Relax! Breathe evenly! It’s not about muscle.”