Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Will had said all the right things and they left, smiling bravely. When they were gone Will sighed and went back to look at the dog and talk to him. He turned to me. “We could put a fifty-dollar adoption tag on him and move him out of here in a week, Eddie, but I won’t do it. A farm — now this is just what your average farmer needs, isn’t it? Good old Rex is a killer. He’d rip up cats and chickens. Give him room to run and he’d go after sheep and calves. No Dobe is worth a damn unless he’s trained by an expert and the best experts won’t get a hundred percent success. Train one right and he’s still no family pet. He’ll be a good guard dog, a good attack dog, but who wants to live with one of those? I know people who swear by them, but I never yet met a Dobe I could trust.”

“So what happens now?”

“We tag the cage ‘Not For Adoption’ and give the poor beast food and water. Maybe I’ll turn up a trainer who wants to take a chance on him, but frankly I doubt it. Rex here is just too old and too mean. It’s not teaching him new tricks but making him forget the ones he already knows, and that’s a whole lot easier said than done.”

Rex was the first animal we had to put away since I went to work for Will. There must have been a dozen people who walked past the cage and asked to adopt him. Some of them wanted to give him a try even after they heard why he wasn’t available. We wouldn’t let him go. Will worked with him a few times and only confirmed what he already knew. The dog was vicious, and his first taste of blood had finished him; but we kept him around for weeks even after we knew what we had to do.

We were standing in front of the Doberman’s cage when Will dropped a big hand on my shoulder and shook his head sadly. “No sense putting it off anymore,” he said. “That cage is no place for him and there’s no other place he can go. Might as well get it over.”

“You want me to help?”

“He’s a big old boy and it’d be easier with two of us, but I’m not going to tell you to. God knows I got no stomach for it myself.”

I said I’d stick around.

He got a pistol and loaded it with tranquilizer darts, then filled a hypodermic syringe with morphine. We walked back to Rex’s cage and Will kept the pistol out of sight at his side until Rex was facing the other way. He raised the gun and fired quickly, planting two darts an inch apart in the big dog’s shoulder. Rex dropped like a stone.

Will crawled into the cage and hunkered down next to him. He had the needle poised but hesitated. The tranquilizer darts would keep the dog unconscious for fifteen or twenty minutes. The morphine would kill. There were tears flowing down Will Haggerty’s weathered face. I tried to look away but couldn’t, and I watched him find a vein and fill the comatose dog with a lethal dose of morphine.

We put him in the wheelbarrow and took him inside. The other animals seemed restless, but that may have been my imagination. I had opened the lid of the incinerator while Will was preparing the morphine. The two of us got the dead dog out of the wheelbarrow and into the big metal box. I closed the lid and Will threw the switch without hesitation. Then we turned away and walked into another room.

We had used the oven before. We would pick up dogs on the street, dogs run down in traffic. Or dogs would die at home and people would bring us their bodies for disposal. Twice in the time I’d been there we’d had auto victims who were alive when we found them but could not possibly be saved. Those had received morphine shots and gone into the incinerator, but that had been very different. Rex was a beautiful animal in splendid health and it went against the grain to kill him.

“I hate it,” Will had told me. “There’s nothing worse. I’ll keep an animal forever if there’s any chance of placing him. There are those in this business who burn half the dogs they get and sell the others to research labs. I never yet let one go for research and never will. And I never yet burned one that I had the slightest hope for.”

I opened the oven and swept out a little pile of powdery white ash, unable to believe that nothing more remained of the Doberman. I was glad when the job was done and the oven closed. It was a relief to get busy with the routine work of feeding and watering the dogs and cats, cleaning cages, sweeping up.

Then I went out to the barnyard and found the dead lamb.

The shelter is in the middle of the city, a drab, gray, hopeless part of a generally hopeless town. The barnyard covers about a quarter of an acre girdled by eight feet of cyclone fencing. We keep farm animals there; chickens, ducks and geese, ponies and pigs and sheep. Some had been pets that outgrew their welcome. Others were injured animals we had patched up. Some of them came through cruelty cases we prosecuted, on the rare occasions when Will managed to get a court order divesting the owner of his charges. Supermarkets brought us their distressed produce as feed, and a farmer who owed Will a favor had sent over a load of hay a couple of weeks ago. The barnyard was open to the public during normal business hours, and kids from all over the city would come in and play with the animals.

In theory, the barnyard exists to generate goodwill for the shelter operation. The stray-dog contract with the city is a virtual guarantee of Will’s operating expenses. I hadn’t worked for him a week, however, before I knew that was just an excuse. He loved to walk among his animals, loved to slip a sugar cube to a pony, scratch a pig’s back with a long stick, or just stand chewing a dead cigar and watching the ducks and geese.

The lamb had been born at the shelter shortly after I started working there. Ewes often need assistance at lambing time, and Will had delivered her while I stood around feeling nervous. We named the lamb Fluff, which was accurate if unimaginative, and she was predictably the hit of the barnyard. Everybody loved her — except for the person who killed her.

He had used a knife, and he had used it over and over again. The ground was littered with bloody patches of wool. I took one look and was violently ill, something that hadn’t happened since the days of college beer parties. I stood there for what must have been a long time. Then I went inside and called Will.

“You’d better come down here,” I said. “Somebody killed Fluff.”

When he got here we put her in the oven and he threw the switch. We made coffee and sat in the office letting it get cold on the desk in front of us. It was past nine and time to open the front doors, but neither of us was in a hurry.

After a while he said, “Well, we haven’t had one of these for six months. I suppose we were overdue.”

“This has happened before?”

He looked at me. “I keep forgetting how young you are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It may have sounded nastier than I meant it. I guess I’m feeling nasty, that’s all. Yes, it’s happened before, and it will happen again. Kids. They come over the fence and kill something.”

“Why?”

“Because they want to. Because they’d like to kill a person but they’re not ready for that yet, so they practice on an animal that never knew there was evil on earth. One time, two years ago, a batch of them killed fifteen chickens, the whole flock. Chopped their heads off. Left everything else alone, just killed the chickens. The police asked them why and they said it was fun watching them run around headless. It was fun. ”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s always kids, Eddie. Rotten kids from rotten homes. The police pick them up, but they’re children, so they run them through juvenile court and it shakes up the kids and terrifies the parents. The kids are released in their parents’ custody and maybe the parents pay a fine and the kids learn a lesson. They learn not to break into this particular barnyard and not to kill these particular animals.” He took the cellophane from a cigar and rolled it between his palms. “Some of the time I don’t call the police. There’s a gentler way to go about it and it works better in the long run. I’d rather do it that way this time, but I’d need your help.”