Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“How do you mean?”

“Catch him ourselves.” He took his time lighting the cigar. “They always try it again. We can stake out the place as easily as the cops can, and when we take him we can operate more flexibly than they can. There’s a method I’ve worked out. It lets them understand our operation, gives them a better perspective.”

“I think I understand.”

“But it means staying up all night for the next night or two, so it’s a question of whether you want to give up the time.”

“Sure.”

“Won’t be more than two nights, I would say. He’ll be back.”

“How do you know there’s just one of them?”

“Because there was only one dead animal, son. If you got two there’s going to be a minimum of two dead animals. Everybody has to have a turn. It always seems to work that way, anyhow.”

We staked out the place that night and the night after. We took turns sleeping during daylight hours, and we were both planted behind cover in the barnyard all through the dark hours. The killer stayed away two nights running. We decided to give it three more tries, but one was all we needed.

Around one in the morning of the third night we heard someone at the fence. I could just make out a shape in the darkness. He would climb halfway up the fence, then hesitate and drop back to the ground. He seemed to be trying to get up the courage to climb all the way over.

I had a tranquilizer dart pistol and I was dying to try dropping him then and there while he was outlined against the fence. I was afraid he would sense our presence and be warned off, but I forced myself to wait. Finally he climbed all the way up, poised there on the balls of his tennis shoes, and jumped toward us.

We had our flashlights on him before he hit the ground, big five-cell jobs that threw a blinding beam.

“Hold it right there,” Will boomed out, striding toward him. He had a dart pistol in his right hand and was holding it out in front of the flashlight so that the boy could see it. All it could shoot were the trank darts, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at it.

Either the kid panicked or he figured nobody would shoot him for climbing a barnyard fence. He was quick as a snake. He got three-quarters of the way up the fence when Will put a dart into his shoulder, and he hit the ground the way Rex had hit the floor of his cage.

Will hoisted him easily onto his shoulder and toted him into the office. We turned on a desk lamp and propped the kid in a chair. He was about thirteen or fourteen, skinny, with a mop of lifeless black hair. In the pockets of his jeans we found three clasp knives and a switchblade, and on his belt he had a hunting knife in a sheath. There were stains in the hunting knife’s blood groove, and in one of the clasp knives we found bits of bloody wool.

“Just follow my play, Eddie,” Will told me. “There’s a technique I worked out and you’ll see how it goes.”

We keep milk in a little fridge, mostly for the cats and puppies. Will poured out a glass of it and put it on the desk. The kid opened his eyes after about twelve minutes. His face was deadly pale and his blue eyes burned in the white face.

Will said, “How you feeling? Never run, son, when someone holds a gun on you. There’s milk in front of you. You look a little peaked and it’ll do you good.”

“I don’t want any milk.”

“Well, it’s there if you change your mind. I guess you wanted to have a look at our animals. Just your hard luck you picked tonight.” He reached over and rumpled the boy’s hair affectionately. “See, there was a gang of troublemakers here a few nights ago. We know who they are, we had trouble with them before. They hang out in Sayreville over to the north. They broke in the other night and killed a poor little lamb.”

I was watching the kid’s face. His mind wasn’t all that quick and it dawned on him rather slowly that we didn’t know he was Fluff’s killer.

“But it’s one thing to know who they are and another thing to prove it,” Will went on. “So we thought we’d try catching them in the act. You just happened to drop in at the wrong time. I thought you were too young to be one of them, but when you started to bolt I couldn’t take chances. That was a tranquilizer dart, by the way. We use it on animals that are impossible to control.”

Like the kid himself, I thought, but Will was talking to him now in the gentle voice he uses on high-strung dogs and spooked ponies, showing him the pistol and the darts and explaining how they work.

“I guess those punks won’t be here tonight after all,” Will said. “You wouldn’t believe what they did to a poor innocent creature. Well, they’ll be back sooner or later, and when they do return we’ll get them.”

“What will happen to them then?” the kid asked.

“A whole lot more than they counted on, son. First off the cops will take them in the back room and pound hell out of them — kill a cop or an animal in this town and the police tend to throw the book away — but those kids won’t have a mark on them. Then they’ll sit in jail until their case comes up, and then they’ll be in a reformatory for a minimum of three years. And I wouldn’t want to tell you what happens to them in reform school. Let’s just say it won’t be a Sunday school picnic and let it go at that.”

“Well, I guess they deserve it,” the kid said.

“You bet they do.”

“Anybody who’d do a thing like that,” the kid added.

Will heaved a sigh. “Well, now that you’re here, son, maybe we can make it up to you for scaring you like that. How about a guided tour of the place? Give you some kind of an idea of the operation we’re running here.”

I don’t know whether the kid was enthusiastic about the idea or whether he just had the sense to give that impression. Either way, he tagged along as we led him all through the place, inside and out. We showed him around the barnyard, pointed out Fluff’s mother, talked about how Fluff had been born. We showed him the dog and cat cages and the small animal section with mice and hamsters and gerbils. He was full of questions and Will gave him detailed answers.

It wasn’t hard to see what Will was doing. First, we were making it obvious that we knew a decent kid like him couldn’t possibly be an animal killer. We let him know that we suspected somebody else for the act and that he was home free. We reinforced things by telling him his act would have earned him precisely the sort of treatment it should have earned him — a good beating and a stiff sentence. Then, while all that soaked in, we made him feel a part of the animal shelter instead of an enemy.

It looked good, but I had my doubts. The kid was having too much fun making the most of the situation. He was going to go home convinced we were a couple of damn fools who couldn’t recognize a villain when he almost literally fell into our laps. Still, I didn’t see how we could get worse results than the police got by following the book — and Will had done this before, so I wasn’t going to give him an argument.

“And this here is the incinerator,” Will said finally.

“For garbage?”

“Used to be. But there’s an ordinance against burning garbage within city limits, on account of the air pollution. What we use it for is disposal of dead animals.” He hung his head. “Poor little Fluff went in here. All that was left of her was enough ashes to fill an envelope — a small one at that.”

The kid was impressed. “How long does it take?”

“No time at all. She heats up to something like three thousand degrees Fahrenheit and nothing lasts long at that temperature.” Will unhooked the cover, raised it up. “You’re just about tall enough to see in there. Enough room for two or three big dogs at a time.”