A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

I dropped to my knees and parted the wet fur looking for puncture wounds, but no wounds were on her skin and the color didn’t reach her undercoat anyway. I apologized to Chester and George for my unwarranted suspicions. Luckily I was already on my knees or I might have toppled with the first wave of vertigo. I automatically began examining Chester and George for the source of the blood. My heart was racing. And a fresh wave of vertigo came over me. They, too, had no wounds. I lowered my head to keep myself from passing out.

“Bennett?” I called. I pushed Chester off me as he licked the blood from my hands.

I saw that my new couch, a present from my older brother, Steven, for exiting my twenties and embracing adulthood, was stained. I tried to gather up the dogs, but they kept circling me, making it hard to move toward the bedroom. My apartment was a railroad design, narrow and long, each room opening off the hallway. You could shoot a bullet through and not hit a wall. I could see the bottom half of the bed from where I stood in the living room. I could see Bennett’s leg.

“What happened to the dogs?” I asked.

As I walked down the hall, the red smears lengthened.

Bennett was lying on the bedroom floor facedown, while his leg remained on the bed. Then I saw that the two parts weren’t connected. My first thought was to save him from drowning in his own blood, but when I fell to my knees, I could see he wasn’t facedown. He was looking up, or he would have been if he still had eyes to see. For a moment, illogically, I held fast to the hope that it wasn’t Bennett. Maybe an intruder had broken in and the dogs had attacked him. Even in my shock, enough of my training allowed me to know that the killer wasn’t human. The blood spatter had no pattern of emotion. I had enough forensic experience to know what I was seeing. Blood-pattern analysis is more accurate than one might expect. It tells you the type of injury, the order in which the wounds were received, the type of weapon that caused the injuries, whether the victim was in motion or lying still when the injuries were inflicted. The injuries here were puncture wounds and mauling. Bennett’s hands were degloved, meaning the skin was stripped off when he tried to fight back. His right leg had been torn off at the knee. The “weapon” had been an animal or animals. The wounds were jagged, not the straight lines of a blade, and whole chunks of flesh were missing. The smears of blood indicated that he had been dragged across the bedroom floor. The right foot and lower leg must have been carried onto the bed after he was attacked. Arterial spray was over the headboard and the wall behind it, probably from his carotid artery.

I could hear my dogs panting behind me, waiting to take their cue as to what we would do next. I tried to tamp down the terror. I summoned as calm a voice as I could and told the dogs to stay. I put them into a down-stay. Then I was aware of a new smell crowding out the smell of blood. It seemed to be emanating from me. I stood up slowly and moved in slow motion around the dogs. Cloud rose and would have followed me if I hadn’t again given the command to stay. Chester and George’s full attention was on me though they didn’t move even as I continued toward the bathroom. I finally reached it and slammed the door behind me, throwing my weight against it in case they lunged after me. I heard whimpering on the other side.

I wasn’t yet in shock. That would come soon enough. I was still in the nether state of tearful gratitude that I’d survived. Strangely, I felt heady, as though I had just won a big prize. And I had — my life. But that intoxication lasted only a few seconds. I rallied from this odd trance and knew I had to call an ambulance. He could not have been alive, but what if I was wrong? What if he was suffering? My cell was inside my purse, which I had left with the keys on the mantel. Then I heard the sound of paper crackling and tearing and remembered the bag of cookies. I must have dropped them, and now the dogs had found them. I slowly opened the door and bypassed the bedroom to retrieve my purse. How long would it take them to dispatch the cookies? I was all adrenaline as I checked my impulse to dart for safety; instead I grabbed my purse, never taking my eyes off the dogs. Finally I was back inside the bathroom, secured behind a locked door. I got into the empty bathtub, as if the old claw-foot iron tub would protect me, and pressed 911. It took me two times. When the operator asked what my emergency was, I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even scream.

“Are you in any present danger?” It was a mature-sounding female voice.

I nodded wildly.

“I’ll take your silence as an affirmative. Can you tell me where you are?”

“In the bathroom.” I whispered my address.

“The police are on their way. I’ll stay with you on the phone. Is there an intruder in your house?”

I could hear the dogs outside the bathroom door. The earlier whimpering had escalated. Now they were whining and pawing at the door to be let in.

I didn’t respond.

“If there is an intruder in your house, tap your finger once on the mouthpiece.”

I tapped three times.

“Are weapons involved? Tap once.”

I tapped the receiver once.

“More than one weapon?”

I tapped again.

“Firearms?”

I shook my head no and set down the phone in the empty tub. The operator still spoke to me but she was far away. The shaking of my head — no, no, no — had given me the same comfort as being rocked.

One of the dogs howled with the approaching siren. Cloud. It used to make me laugh when she joined in the urban version of a wolf pack, as if pampered Cloud, whose teeth I brushed every week, had even a mote of beast in her. Now her howl terrified me.

“The police have arrived,” said the tiny voice coming from the phone on the bottom of the tub. “Tap once if the perpetrators are still inside.”

The dogs barked at the approaching footsteps, at the hand trying the front door to see if it was unlocked.

“Police! Open up!”

I tried shouting to them, but the only sound I could make was an infinitesimal moan, tinier than the voice that kept asking me if the perpetrators were inside. The only answer the police heard was barking.

“NYPD! Open the door!”

The barking continued.

“Call Animal Control!” I heard one of the policemen shout.

The next sound was the door breaking open and a single deafening shot. The whimper that followed was as mournful as a human cry. The other two dogs stopped barking.

“Good dogs, that’s a good dog,” one of the policemen said.

“I think this one is dead.”

The footsteps approached cautiously.

“Oh, shit, oh, Jesus,” the other one said.

I could hear him retch.

The bathroom door burst open and a young policeman found me cowering in the empty tub.

He squatted beside me. I could smell his sour breath from when he retched a moment ago.

“Are you hurt?”

My legs were drawn under me, my face tucked against my knees, my hands locked behind my head.

“An ambulance is on its way. Listen, we need to see if you’re bleeding.” He gently set his hand on my back and I screamed. “Okay, okay, no one is going to hurt you.”

I remained frozen in that tucked pose, the same position that schoolchildren assumed during a drop drill to protect themselves from a nuclear blast. I would learn later that one of the symptoms of acute stress disorder was rigid immobility.

“Animal Control is here,” the other cop said.

The ambulance must have arrived at the same time because a male paramedic took my pulse while a female checked me for wounds. I remained crouched in the tub.

“I don’t think the blood is hers, but I can’t get a visual on the abdomen,” said the female. “I’ll start an IV. This is going to pinch, honey.”