Richard Burgin - The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

“I’m up here on a timber appraisal,” I said. “For Morrison. He said anybody who knew Nolan was OK with him.” I tossed in the only local name I knew.

The man nodded. “Come here,” he said.

I didn’t move.

“Come here or I’ll shoot you and leave you there,” he said. I walked toward him and we started down the trail together, with me in front. As we went forward, I heard noise. I’d heard the same noise once before, in a logging camp in Quebec. Dog fights.

There was an old barn, half falling down, and a bunch of guys standing on an old concrete foundation, looking down in. I could hear the dogs ripping into each other, low growls, yelps, then a sound like strips of Velcro being pulled apart. Bodies hitting the concrete walls. And the scraping of claws on the concrete slab floor. They had a long handler’s stick set up and it looked like they yoked the dogs into a crate and then used pulleys to haul it up to the rim of the foundation. Nobody went into the pit except the dogs. That was the fight area.

A couple of the guys standing around were state cops, I sort of recognized them. A DEP cop stood right there in his uniform, giving his bet money to a man behind a makeshift desk in the barn. My escort with the rifle took me over to a fat guy sitting on a stool near the barn entrance. There was an old car there, a Plymouth Barracuda, light blue, and as I walked past, a pit bull slammed with everything he had against the window trying to get at me. I jumped back a few steps and the fat guy laughed at me. I looked at the chrome fish emblem on the car and thought about how barracuda are supposed to have rows of sharp teeth and the chrome brought me back to the surgical tools from the hospital. Fear made my mouth taste like hot metal.

“Christ,” I said.

“He’s in the car,” Fatman said. “He ain’t gonna hurt you.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“What’s his name?” Fatman said. “What are you, five years old? Want to name your doggy? His name is bite the living shit out of anything that moves. He’s a fighting dog, what the fuck does he need a name for? He’ll be dead in a month.” He coughed. “Call him Barracuda.”

“I found him walking through the woods,” my escort said, pointing the rifle at me.

Fatman shook his head. “What the fuck do you need a name for?” he asked, pissed, looking around. “Do you know anybody here, can you help yourself out of this? This is a serious fucking hole you’re in.”

I looked around. A guy with a ball cap on, near the foundation, I swore I had gone fishing with his brother years and years ago. I think the guy had just got out of prison. I pointed at the guy. “I used to go fishing with Russell Work and I think that’s his brother Jimmy over there, the big quiet guy with the baseball hat on straight.” Men were handing him money, so his dog must have just won the fight. They were starting to load the dog from the Barracuda into a crate, two big guys with the full-length leather gloves and another guy with a neck harness made from a belt wrench. The dog looked to be around a hundred pounds of pure black and white muscle. Once they had him in the crate, they lowered him into the pit.

Fatman yelled, “Hey Jimmy come here.”

The guy I thought was Jimmy Work walked over to us.

“Know him?” asked Fatman.

His brother Russell and I had driven through a snowstorm once to visit Jimmy up in Dannemora. I think after he got out, he’d done more time somewhere. He was at least ten years older than me and I hadn’t seen Russell in over five years. He looked at me hard. The scars on my face and the way I held myself after the accident and the beating. I must have looked totally different. His mind tried to place me.

“John,” he said. “You’re John, but I can’t get your last name.” He turned to Fatman. “He’s OK. Friend of my brother’s.”

I started to breathe again. “How is Russell?” I asked.

Jimmy Work was already walking back to the dog pit. “Passed on,” he said over his shoulder. My guard walked into the woods as sweat rolled down my ribs under my T-shirt. I sat on a plastic milk crate for a minute to cool down. It happened then.

The DEP cop shoved Jimmy Work over the edge of the concrete pit. I heard Jimmy hit the floor and the dog was on him. I got to the edge of the pit and the dog already had hold of his leg, clamped on, and had bit Jimmy in two spots on the arm. He was bleeding and the floor of the pit was covered in shit and blood and it smelled. Somebody shot the dog, and we all hit the deck, the ricochet buzzed out of the pit through the woods, sizzling through the leaves. Two guys jumped into the pit and cut the dog off Jimmy, they had to practically skin the thing to get at the jaw and get that loose. Blood was everywhere. The fucking DEP cop was next to me.

“Saw man,” he said. “He just got hurt in logging accident and you and I are taking him to the hospital.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “And the next time we see a cherry picker with a single load going around the reservoir, we’ll stop it. And the next time. And the next time. Until your eighteen-wheeled friend loses his license. You must think we’re stupid, running single loads up here before the big crew shows up.”

At the hospital, a different one from the one I’d gone to, closer to Syracuse, the doctor pulled me to one side, behind a curtain. He was obviously from India, very serious-looking. Concerned. His English was a little tight but good.

“These wounds, sir,” he said to me. “They are from an animal, probably a dog. Not a chain saw, as you told me. As the officer told me.”

In his world, you called people sir and expected them to act accordingly. With truth and honesty and human concern. I wanted to act like someone who deserved to be called sir, but I couldn’t.

“It was a saw,” I said. “He was climbing, way up, with the small limb saw and he fell, with the chain going, and really did a number on himself.” I nodded to myself and him.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “That is what happened in the lie the officer told you to speak. This man could die from his punctured arteries. Be honest with me now.”

I wondered if in India they had trees and chain saws and men who fought dogs in the afternoon. “Chain saw,” I said.

“Yes,” the doctor said again. “Never.” He shook his head and walked past the curtain back to the emergency room. The DEP cop hung around, to make sure Jimmy Work lived, then took off. It took Jimmy almost two months to recover. The cop had bet a hundred to one against Jimmy’s dog and lost. I missed my rendezvous with Dave, I never turned in the appraisal. I knew Molly at Hayes wouldn’t work with me again. If any Hayes crew ever came down to the site, they saw the marking tape. They’re not stupid. I visited Jimmy Work twice and he stayed at my new apartment for a month. I had to move out of my old cabin because I couldn’t make rent.

The first time I saw the DEP cop after that was in a bar, Cody’s, a one-pool-table joint a mile off the reservoir. It was night and snowing. The DEP cop was parked behind my truck when I came out.

“Hey,” he called out his window. “Where’s your friend Jimmy?”

Jimmy had moved in with this woman he knew, not far down the road. “I have no idea,” I said.

“Tell him I’m trying to get some money together,” he said. “In fact, why don’t you give me what you’ve got in your wallet?”

Nobody else was in the parking lot. “Piss on you,” I said.

He took his foot off the brake of his patrol car and tapped the back of my truck. “I could total it,” he said. “You’re drunk, and this car isn’t going to hurt me.”

I couldn’t afford a new truck. I took fifty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to him.