Dog Warrior Page 3

  I have a brother. He's a Dog Warrior. A bunch of religious loons tried to destroy him utterly.

  The door to the master bathroom reflected in the window, a rectangle of light, the quiet sounds of Ru getting ready for bed. The light snapped off, the clouds covered the moon, and he was in darkness.

  "It's like seeing into the past." Ru came to stare out the window with him. "I look at him, and I see you back when we first met."

  "Is that how I looked to you? Like some wild creature?"

  Ru laughed softly. "Okay, so he's like a wolf-man version of you. That stare he has—it's like he looks right down into your soul." Ru breathed out and his breath smoked the glass. "I wonder what happened to him that he's like that."

  The wind gusted and roared against the house.

  "This has really weirded you out, hasn't it?" Ru asked.

  "When I touch him, I can't tell where he ends and I begin. I can feel his emotions. When I walk around the house, it's like I have a compass needle in me, and he's north. I can't smell him over my own scent. When I touch things he's used, I only feel myself on the item. He's so close that's he's invisible."

  "Like he's you and you're him."

  "Like we're one person, yes." Atticus sighed. "What are we going to do with him? We can't keep him locked in the basement."

  "He's not going anywhere soon. We give him a phone to keep him happy, stuff him with food, and let him sleep. It's only for a few days, and then when we're done here, we can deal with him properly."

  "If we let him call the Dog Warriors, they might come here."

  "He doesn't know where he is. We picked him up a hundred miles from here, and he was in a car with Pennsylvania plates—who knows where those butchers actually killed him?"

  "He'll ask."

  "You are just so fucking truthful sometimes it hurts." Ru laughed softly. "We lie to him."

  "What if he knows this area? He'll recognize it."

  "We improvise. It's what we're good at."

  "I don't want you hurt," Atticus said.

  Ru reached out and brushed his hand down Atticus's side and paused, letting it rest on Atticus's hip. And they stood a moment in quiet prelude—the wordless question waiting for a silent answer. One would think, after all this time, he'd be less hesitant, more comfortable with their relationship, with himself. There was still that point, though, where love and desire didn't completely mesh. So delicate was the act of engaging both, that a single word could derail him. So they learned this silent dance, temporarily reversing their normal roles—Ru taking lead and he nearly passive—until they could bump over some deep-seated block.

  Atticus nodded, and Ru stepped close, hands warm on his back, mouth softly coaxing him into the full unity of love and want.

  Chapter Two

  Hyannis

  Cape Cod, Massachusetts

  Monday, September 20, 2004

  Kyle's anxious whisper woke Atticus. He stood at the foot of the bed, jiggling the mattress. "Atticus. Atticus."

  "What?" Atticus untangled himself from Ru, who was awake but not stirring. Wise man.

  "The power is out." Kyle wore pink bunny slippers and black silk pajamas that he plucked at nervously.

  Atticus fumbled for his wristwatch. He'd been asleep only four hours. Outside, the howl of the wind drowned out the roar of the surf. "Fuck."

  "I can't run the security systems without power. My laptop has only six hours of power, max. The outside line is dead too."

  "Fuck," Atticus repeated, scrubbing at his face. "Remind me to kill Sumpter next time I see him."

  "What do I do?"

  The heat must be off too—the air was chilly. The temperature had dropped outside, sucking the heat of the house through the great expanse of glass.

  "Take the Explorer and find a rental place," Atticus told Kyle. "Pick up a generator. Get fuel for it. There's a fireplace downstairs, right? See if you can pick up some firewood."

  That was all that was needed. Kyle nodded, calmed by having a direction pointed out to him. "Okay. It will take me about an hour or two."

  Atticus crawled out of bed.

  "What are you doing?" Ru grunted, not even opening his eyes.

  "Scouting around the house, getting used to the lay of the land."

  "I'll come with you." Ru stirred feebly.

  "Get more sleep. One of us should be sharp enough to deal. Besides, I want you to stay with my little brother." It felt weird saying that. Little brother.

  "Hmmm? Hmm! Oh, yeah. The Dog Warrior. Okay."

  Atticus took a cold shower, leaving the hot water for Ru. Dressing, he pondered his taste in clothes. He would have thought such outward choices were dictated by upbringing, not something genetic. Somehow it seemed impossible that Ukiah could be so feral and yet wear the exact same boots. Atticus laid out warm clothes for his brother, and then tried to banish him out of his mind; he had bigger things to think about.

  Putting on a windbreaker to cut the cold wind, Atticus went outside to explore the area.

  Lasker's place sat on a low bluff, flanked by other luxury beach houses, which Atticus cautiously circled. He found them empty: weekend retreats closed up for the week. While fringed by a stand of stunted hemlocks, the hilltop had only sand and dune grass, giving it an impression of barren isolation even though he could pick out sounds of distant traffic, screened by the trees.

  The houses shared a narrow beach facing south, looking out over Nantucket Sound. The storm surf pounded the shore; the water rolled deep green until it broke to white, reeking of salt and a billion fishy organisms, alive and dead. Atticus knew Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket lay out across the water, but the fog hazed the sky to a smothering level.

  Atticus had never put his hand in a bag full of scorpions. He assumed that he had too much common sense and intelligence to ever attempt doing so. There was also the little matter of someone finding a good enough reason for him to try. Yet here he was, about to do the equivalent—and worse, it wasn't going to be his hand alone dipping into the bag.

  We should just leave. How could this ever have sounded like a good idea?

  To be truthful, it never had. It had always sounded like a bag of scorpions.

  They were chasing after a phantom, a new designer drug with street names like Pixie Dust, Mojo, Liquidlust, Blissfire, and Desire. They'd first heard about Pixie Dust in raves around Baltimore, elusive as an urban legend. The supply was so erratic and the demand was so high—and still growing quickly—that they'd never even seen a sample of the drug. No one knew where Pixie Dust was coming from. As Atticus and Ru set up deals for old favorites inside the Beltway, others tracked the new drug to Upstate New York. Outside of Buffalo, things had gone horribly wrong.

  Atticus had worked with Boyes, Scroggins, and German. Despite what Sumpter might think, the men had given new meaning to the word "paranoid;" it was unlikely that they would have been careless. Whoever ambushed them had done a ruthlessly thorough job, killing everyone at the warehouse, buyer and seller alike, and smashing all the security equipment.

  He and Ru had driven up to Buffalo to identify the bodies. Early Sunday morning, he'd slipped under the police tape and searched the warehouse with his inhumanly sharp senses, but there had been little to find. Scroggins and German had emptied their guns—both carried a SIG Sauer P229 in forty-caliber Smith & Wesson—but not into the dead drug dealers, who had been killed with shotguns. The lack of bullet holes in the back wall indicated that they'd hit someone—only all the blood splatters matched up with accounted-for dead bodies. Also there'd been a mysterious swath of clean floor, as if something had been dragged across it. During the long drive from Buffalo to Cape Cod, he'd reviewed his perfect memory, recalling every inch of the floor and walls in minute detail, and found nothing he'd overlooked.

  Both sides had reasons to keep the meeting secret, so who would have ambushed the buy and walked away unscathed? Atticus would have suspected the man who had acted as the go-between—Jay Lasker—but he had
dropped dead suddenly after setting up a second meeting. With Lasker had gone all the details about the Pixie Dust and the people selling it.

  So here Atticus and his team were: at a dead man's house, meeting with people who had no names, seeking a drug they'd never seen. Unfamiliar with the area, they didn't know the secret ways, the ancient history, and things long ago buried but not forgotten. And now his brother was thrown into the mix.

  One thing was clear: If things went badly, there wouldn't be any place to run to, no one to turn to, no place to hide.

  When he got back to the house, Ru was up. Still damp from his shower, he padded around the kitchen, trying to figure out what to cook for breakfast with the power out.

  "I'm going to wake up Ukiah," Atticus told him. "That way we can feed him and put him back to bed, out of the way for most of the day."

  "Sounds like a plan."

  Atticus unlocked the door to the basement bedroom and opened it, half expecting to find either an empty room or a snarling, angry stranger. Ukiah, though, still lay in the bed as they had left him, apparently so deeply asleep he'd not moved all night. In sleep, his brother was just a young man, badly battered but healing.

  He should wake the boy, and yet he stood at the door, watching Ukiah. All the possibilities of the world existed in his sleeping brother. A family. A friend. A belonging complete beyond any he had ever hoped for. A bitter enemy. A cold mirror reflecting back how inhuman he truly was. Once he was awake, time would flow, a single path taken, a course he probably couldn't control. A part of him hardened over the years by the real world foresaw that the crudest road most likely would be taken.

  Atticus stood watching his brother, hoarding this moment before things went wrong. If he stored it away, no matter what, he would have this one moment of peace.

  "We're almost out of eggs," Ru called from the kitchen. "So we're going to have pancakes."

  Time started again.

  "Okay," Atticus called back. "I'll have him up in a minute."

  Ukiah was sluggish to get roused and up the stairs. Atticus could feel his brother's bone-deep weariness as his body slaved to knit bones, repair organs, and deal with the massive blood loss that the mice represented.

  At the top of the steps, though, Ukiah suddenly veered off toward the back door. The blanket around Ukiah's shoulders slipped to the floor as he opened the door and stepped out onto the deck. Hunching against the stiff cold wind sweeping off the ocean, the boy started for the railing, faltered, and came to a halt. Atticus felt disorientation flooding into his brother, sweeping away both dismay and sense of self.

  He's never seen the ocean before!

  Picking up the blanket, Atticus went out to rescue him. The feral look was gone, replaced by more human confusion and distress. Naked, the boy was shivering but too overwhelmed to move.

  "Come on." Atticus wrapped the blanket around his brother's shoulders and pulled him back inside the house, shutting the door on the roar and the salt-laden spray.

  "I could hear it roaring all night." Ukiah whimpered like a lost puppy, his gaze still trapped by the endless gray of ocean. "I could feel it pounding against the land, but I couldn't figure out what it was."

  "It's the Atlantic Ocean."

  Ukiah tore his gaze away, dismay creeping back in. "Where am I?"

  If he'd never seen the sea before, he didn't know the New England coastline.

  "Gloucester, Massachusetts," Atticus said. They had decided on the town in case—like Atticus—Ukiah had maps stored in his perfect memory. Gloucester faced water to its south, and had islands across its bay. Not a perfect match for Nantucket Sound, but Gloucester gave them a hundred-mile margin for error. They kept within the state to account for the proliferation of Massachusetts license plates if they had to move him any distance.

  "How did I end up here?"

  "Ru and I drove in from Buffalo last night. We stopped at the Ludlow service area on the Mass Turnpike and found you locked in the trunk of a car." Atticus described the car, only to get a blank look and a slow shake of the head. "We were hoping you could tell us about it."

  "Last thing I remember," Ukiah said slowly, "I was with Rennie in a parking garage."

  Through years of experience, Atticus was able to treat the comment as just a data point and file it away to be reacted to later.

  Ukiah eyed the cage of black mice on the kitchen's desk. "Are those my mice or yours?"

  "Yours." It came out naturally, yet Atticus still found the concept of someone else that bled mice stunning. "All twelve. We've fed them."

  On Ukiah's face, desire to remember everything forgotten warred with knowledge of his limits. He was too weak to take back the mice and he knew it.

  "Eat and then sleep some more." Ru added water to the pancake mix and then started to stir. "You can deal with them later."

  Ukiah grunted acknowledgment of this truth, eyeing the batter hungrily.

  "Here." Atticus patted the stack of clothes he'd laid out for his brother. "Let's get you dressed first."

  After two awkward minutes of Atticus trying to help Ukiah into the boxers, Ru took pity. "Why don't you cook, and I'll get him dressed?"

  So they switched, Atticus lighting the gas burner on the range, while Ru helped Ukiah put on the boxers.

  Atticus had always been too hurt to appreciate Ru's bedside manner—he hadn't noticed how Ru could get another man in and out of underwear with such clinical impassiveness. Sweatpants and a pair of tube socks followed boxers.

  "Sweater?" Ru asked after watching how carefully Ukiah moved his newly mended arm.

  "No, please!" Ukiah winced at the thought.

  "Then that will have to do for a while." Ru resettled the blanket around Ukiah's shoulders.

  Ukiah fingered the sweater where it lay on the counter, then checked its Lands' End label. "I have this sweater too. Same green color." He inspected his borrowed sweatpants, and then—tugging the front of his sweatpants open—he eyed his boxers.

  "Can I take a look-see?" Ru asked.

  "What?" Ukiah snapped shut his sweatpants.

  Ru looked puzzled and then suddenly grinned. "Your ribs! Can I see them?"

  "Oh!" Ukiah opened up his blanket wrap. "There shouldn't be much to look at."

  Ru ran light fingers over Ukiah's chest. "It just blows me away how you two heal. Just apply food and sleep. It ends up being like making bread. Cover the mess up with a blanket and keep it warm, and poof, it transforms itself while you aren't looking."

  Ukiah struggled not to laugh. "My ribs still hurt like hell."

  "Yes, but they look fine. Here, let me see your arm. Yes, that's healing nicely."

  "I've got some use of it back." Ukiah demonstrated. "But the slightest pressure will break it again."

  Ru produced a sling and tucked Ukiah's arm into it. "Try not to use it, then."

  "Check." Ukiah fiddled to make the sling comfortable.

  So the feral Dog Warrior did have a civilized side, once he healed up.

  Atticus lifted the first of the pancakes off the griddle and drowned them in syrup for Ukiah. The next batch Atticus split with Ru, but the rest, a monster's share, went to his brother.

  After wolfing it all down and licking his plate clean, Ukiah looked longingly at the empty bowl. "Is there anything else?"

  "Oh, what pleading puppy eyes." Ru stood and tousled Ukiah's hair, ending the move with a pat on the head. "I had a dog that would beg at the table with that same woebegone look."

  Ukiah grinned in response to the affectionate teasing. "Bowwow."

  "I could never say no." Ru studied the contents of the dark refrigerator. "How about a steak?"

  "Oh, yes! Please," Ukiah said. Whoever raised Atticus's brother had at least taught him manners, despite all the feral appearances. "The power's out?"

  "Yes," Atticus said, and then, sensing the coming question, added, "The phone is still dead."

  "I did manage to charge up my phone before the electricity went out." Ru slid his phone
across the counter. "You can make a call while I get this started. Try to keep it short—it's the only working phone we have."

  Ukiah took it and wobbled off across the open downstairs to the farthest corner for privacy.

  Ru wore a slight puzzled look on his face as he did a quick wash on a skillet.

  "What?" Atticus asked.

  "Just thinking on differences."

  "Like what?"

  "It was weeks before you'd let me touch you that casually." Ru dried the skillet. "You hated it anytime I'd breach your personal space. You still don't like strangers touching you." With a glance toward the roiling surf, Ru added, "And I've never seen you space out like he just did with the ocean."

  "I was over the worst of it by the time we met," Atticus said. "I would lose it like that every time they'd move me to a new foster home. It always made a wonderful first impression on foster parents."

  The quiet conversation across the room had a familiar cadence—a peppering of questions with lots of silences that indicated listening. Atticus had made many such calls—What happened while I was dead?

  Ukiah came back, silent and sullen. The feral look was back in his eyes. What triggered the sudden change? He put the phone down beside him on the counter, not offering to return it.

  "How do you like your steak? Bloody?" Ru guessed, probably because it was how Atticus liked his steak.

  "Yes."

  "Then this is done." Ru gave Ukiah a sincere smile, one of the ones that went soul deep, the kind he usually gave only to people he loved.

  The feral look gave way before Ru's smile. "Thank you."

  Still, he ate with wolflike ferocity.

  It was good Ukiah would be sleeping soon, Atticus decided. He found that the boy absorbed all his attention. Surely some of it was that Ukiah was new and unknown—Atticus's own personal ocean to be lost in. He could ill afford the distraction.

  Ukiah lifted his head and went still.

  "What is it?" Ru asked.

  "Harleys. Ten of them."

  Atticus listened and heard them now, a rumble of multiple motorcycle engines growing closer. He couldn't tell the make or the exact number, although he could pick out six or seven distinct engines.