He hadn’t thought they’d risk releasing the animals, for free of their brutal handler and running as a pack they would be unpredictable, seemingly posing as much danger to his hunters as to him; but when he saw the three dark shapes glide through a patch of moonlight next to the high-voltage fence separating him from the river on his right he knew he’d been wrong, had underestimated the hatred and desperation of the men who would kill him. He cut to his left, started to climb the steep embankment toward the rock face fifty yards above him, grimaced with pain when he felt his left ankle give and twist in the loamy soil. He went down on his right side, brought his left leg up, and tentatively touched the ankle. It did not seem broken, only sprained, but in his situation it made little difference, for immobilization here among the trees and thick brush surely meant death, if not in a blunt needle-spray of gunfire, then with his throat torn out by the fangs of the creatures who might or might not be stalking him in their mutilated silence. He willed himself to move, rolling over on his back and awkwardly crab-walking up the slope, dragging his left leg. He expected at any moment to hear a rustle in the brush that would presage his death, but there remained in the woods only the sound of his own heavy breathing as he struggled upward. Then he emerged from the tree line at the edge of the sloping field of broken rock at the base of the sheer wall of trap rock that was the eastern face of an abandoned quarry that formed the western boundary of Floyd Kunkel’s inherited riverfront estate. He twisted around onto his stomach and snaked his way through the sharp riprap up to the base of the escarpment, where, exhausted, he sank down behind a large boulder and gasped for breath. He wiped his bleeding palms on his thighs, and then gently kneaded his sprained ankle as he looked around him. From here he could see above the trees to a shimmering, silver-coated section of the river near where Mary had been the first to sight the exhausted animal swimming in the middle of the deep channel, struggling against both tide and current, directly in the path of an oncoming tanker.
“Garth,” Mary cried, pointing to the bobbing patch of dark fur off their starboard side, “there’s a dog out there! We have to save it!”
Garth Frederickson glanced up at the steel shrouds on either side of the fourteen-foot catamaran where plastic telltales fluttered in a wind that remained between fifteen and eighteen knots, coming directly from the southwest. In order to avoid the tanker approaching from the north, he had just tacked out of the deep channel, sailing to the port side of a large, green buoy that marked the edge of the shipping lane in the vast, four-mile-wide section of the Hudson River between Piermont and Haverstraw, New York, that the first Dutch settlers had called the “Tappan Sea.” They were on a run, with the wind at their backs. Their speed would increase considerably if he fell off to either port or starboard, left or right. On their port side, across the river, was Rockland County and their home in Cairn; to fall off to starboard was to invite an abrupt and brutal end to their lives.
“The tanker’s too close, Mary. There isn’t time.”
“There is if you turn now! We’ll be on a reach! We can make it! You can’t just let it be run over!”
“I’m not about to risk my wife’s life for a dog.”
“They’ll turn when they see our sail!”
“That’s a seventy-five-ton tanker, Mary, not a sports car. In the position they’re in now and at the speed they’re traveling, they can’t swerve to avoid the dog or us. The ship’s too big. You know that.”
“Garth, listen to me,” Mary Tree said in a voice that had suddenly grown low and husky, quavering and desperate. “You know how crazy I get about animals. It’s just very important to me for us to try to save that dog. Please just try.”
Garth turned his head slightly in order to look at his wife, who was sitting next to him on the port side of the catamaran. Strands of her waist-length, silver-streaked blond hair had worked free of the cotton band that held it in a ponytail and were whipping across her face. Tears welled in her sea-blue eyes, rolled down her cheeks. She was rhythmically pounding her fists in helpless frustration against the front of her heavy life jacket. Garth knew what he had to do. His wife’s exquisite madness was the sometimes-dark engine that powered her music, and her vehement passion for small as well as great things was one of the reasons he loved her so much. At this moment the most important thing in the world to her was not her life, or even his, but saving an animal that was on some inexplicable and hopeless mission, swimming, struggling against the tide, toward its certain death. He would feel bad if the dog were run over and ground up by the tanker’s propeller blades, but it was Mary who would enter the soul and body of the dog in recurring nightmares, Mary who would suffer the bone-smashing collision with steel, feel the river filling her lungs, hear through the water the deadly song of whirring blades of steel.
“Swim to the buoy,” he said as he swept her off the catamaran with his left arm at the same time as he pulled on the tiller to turn the cat ninety degrees to starboard.
He ducked under the swinging boom, slid across the cat’s canvas trampoline to the opposite side as the wind filled the sail and the starboard hull began to lift out of the water. He sheeted out the sail slightly, released the traveler to the three-quarter’s mark, and then anchored his feet in the hiking straps and leaned far back in order to counterbalance the force of the wind that was sending the cat streaking like some misshapen white arrow directly into the path of the oncoming tanker. Mary shouted something at him, but her words were lost first in the hiss of the port hull slicing through the water, then drowned out completely by the ominous, deep-throated bray of the tanker’s horn warning him away.
Despite the brisk breeze, the surface of the river was relatively smooth, allowing Garth to plane, flying the starboard hull on which he was sitting a foot or so above the water and increasing his speed. He glanced up once at the tanker, which had become a moving wall of steel filling the horizon, then looked away, focusing his vision and all his concentration on the furry, dark head bobbing just above the surface seventy-five yards away. He had dismissed from his mind fear of being crushed by the tanker the moment he had committed and veered sharply to starboard; he would simply either make it under the bow of the tanker or he wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t take many heartbeats for him to find out which was going to be the case. The task at hand required all his attention, for it was a complicated one; if he miscalculated, he could shoot right past the dog, which would make it all a wasted exercise; or the sudden addition of weight as he pulled the dog from the water could cause the cat to flip backward, and they would both die anyway.
The tanker was almost on him now, its great horn wailing its mournful dirge even as the ship’s bow wave rolled under his port hull, lifting the cat slightly. Above him, at the edge of his peripheral vision, he glimpsed perhaps a half-dozen men standing at the railing, shouting and waving their arms, urging him on. The tip of the flying starboard hull passed just in front of the dog’s head. He sheeted in the mainsail hard, causing the hull on which he was sitting to begin to rise even higher into the air. The small cat would have flipped over if at the same time he hadn’t arched his back, reached down and grabbed a handful of fur and skin on the neck of the animal struggling in the water behind and below him. Pain shot up his arm and into his back as the sudden tug of the animal’s weight combined with the speed of the catamaran insulted bone and muscle and threatened to pull his right shoulder from its socket. The raised hull of the cat abruptly slammed down into the water Garth hauled the animal up out of the water and onto the center of the trampoline. He sheeted out instantly and shifted his weight to prevent the cat from flipping over backward, and then the surge of the ship’s bow wave carried him away from the tanker, just inches from the painted steel wall that now rushed past him. When the wake had passed he came about and began the series of short tacks that would take him back to the green buoy where Mary was, and as he looked into the glazed, golden eyes of the exhausted animal beside him, noted the long, spindly legs and large feet, he realized that the animal he had rescued from the river was not a dog.
“It’s a wolf,” Garth said to his wife the next day when she came around the side of the house to the area where he had staked the animal next to the river on a heavy chain wound around a boulder erupting from their beach a few yards above the high-tide mark. He had been working the animal all morning, repeatedly wrestling it to the ground, cuffing it sharply on one side of the head and then the other when it tried to resist.
He waited for a response, but Mary Tree simply stood and stared at him, her limpid blue eyes moist, her face a kind of diary of unspoken thoughts. Garth straddled the wolf, squeezing its rib cage with his knees, and smiled at this woman whom he loved so much, the only person besides his brother who had ever made him feel complete. He had always found this professional folk singer terribly fragile, often conflicted and inarticulate without a guitar in her hands and with no music to accompany her words. She had spoken little since the day before when he had picked her up at the buoy, but she had expressed her feelings most adequately with her body, clinging to him throughout the rest of the day and into the night, repeatedly taking him into her until finally, exhausted, they had fallen asleep.
At last she said in a small voice, “A wolf?”
“Yep. Somebody’s idea of a pet.” He grabbed the thick leather collar he had put around the wolf’s neck, brought the animal’s head back, then used the fingers of his left hand to part the fur on its throat to reveal a circular scar the size of a quarter. “Its vocal cords have been cut. I guess his owner didn’t want him bothering the neighbors.”
Mary winced, put a hand to her cheek. “My God. How cruel.” She came forward, knelt down on the sand beside Garth, a few inches from the large, dark gray head with its bright golden eyes. “It’s beautiful.”
The animal started to turn its head in Mary’s direction. Garth pressed down on the back of its neck, and then cuffed it lightly on the side of the jaw. “Yes. It’s most likely a hybrid, with a little dog in it—but not much.”
“Is that why you play so rough with it?”
“I’m not playing. Remember that this is a wolf, Mary, not a dog. They may look alike, but there the similarity ends. This fellow can snap your face off, and it will if you don’t constantly pay attention to what’s happening when you’re around it. You can’t domesticate a wolf. You can live with one, but you have to know the rules. The first rule is that you must physically dominate it, and you have to keep doing it, because a wolf will keep testing you. This morning’s workout was intended to show him who’s leader of the pack around here.”
Mary reached out and stroked the animal’s fur, then rested her head on her husband’s shoulder. “Garth, I … I …”
“I know what you want to say, Mary. It isn’t necessary.”
“Yes it is. I have to get it out. I can’t imagine what I was thinking about yesterday. I just kind of went out of my mind when I saw this guy out there in front of the ship. But that’s no excuse for the way I behaved. I can’t believe I made you … Garth, I almost killed you.”
“Hell, you could have been killed too. You weren’t exactly expecting me to dump you in the river. Besides, you didn’t make me do anything. I wasn’t very happy with the situation either. It was the right thing to do, and we did it.”
“You did it. And I not only let you risk your life, I damn well insisted on it.”
“Mary, I really do under—”
“Oh, Garth, I love you so much. Truly, I don’t know what I’d do without you. In so many ways, I feel I owe you everything.”
“Come on, sweetheart, you were famous long before my brother introduced us.”
“When you met me I was a has-been, and hiding out here in Cairn. You gave me back my confidence.”
Garth waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, kissed his wife the cheek, and then, still keeping a firm grip on the wolf’s collar, stood up. “Move back a little. I want to take our friend here to the vet get his shots, in case he hasn’t had any, and I have to go get the muzzle I bought him.”
“I’m all right here. He seems friendly enough—which is a wonder considering the way you’ve been swatting him around. Let me stay here with him. He has to get used to me as well as you.”
Garth thought about it, nodded. “Okay. Scratch him behind the ears; he likes that. But keep a firm grip on the chain, right behind his head, and don’t put your face close to his.”
When Mary gripped the chain as he had instructed her, Garth released his hold on the animal’s collar, and then went back up the beach and into the boathouse to get the muzzle and heavy leather leash he had purchased earlier in the morning. When he returned he found Mary staring down at a stain on her pants leg.
“Garth,” she said with a nervous laugh, “he peed on my leg!”
Garth walked quickly to where Mary was standing, grabbed the wolf’s collar, and forced it down onto the sand. He turned it over on its back, sat on its stomach, and then gripped its throat with both hands.
“Garth—?!”
“I know what I’m doing, Mary. I’m not punishing it—but you have to do exactly as I say. Bite him on the nose. Hard.”
“What?! I can’t do that.”
“Well, you’re going to have to if this animal is going to stay with us. When he pissed on your leg, he was challenging you. That was his way of seeing if he could push you around. Now you have to push back—only harder. If you don’t, you’ll constantly be in danger. I’ll turn it over to the animal shelter rather than risk having it attack you, and they’ll almost certainly end up having to put it down. This animal could be a big problem. If you want him to live, you have to show him you’re the boss, if you want yesterday’s rescue to mean anything, you’ll do as I say.”
Mary slowly knelt down, bent over toward the wolf’s head, hesitated.
“Do it!” Garth said sharply. “It’s for his own good! Bite him hard!” Mary closed her eyes, opened her mouth, closed her teeth gently on the moist, black leather nose, then snapped her head back in alarm when she heard an anguished, raspy whimper from somewhere deep within the animal’s chest.
Garth released his grip on the wolf’s throat, got up off its stomach. The animal turned over, but remained flat on the sand, its head down between its forelegs. Garth grunted with satisfaction, and then fitted the muzzle over the wolf’s jaws and replaced the tether chain on the collar with the leather leash. “That wasn’t very hard,” he said, stroking his wife’s cheek, “but I think it may have done the job.”
“How do you know so much about wolves? Mining for gold in Alaska?”
“Partly. Actually, it was my brother who taught me that little trick.”
“Your brother?”
“Uh-huh. You know the story about the lobox, but you’ve never seen it. One of these days we’ll visit one of the closed, experimental breeding pens at the Bronx Zoo and I’ll show you the fellow he took on. In the meantime, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do with our own beastie here. Call The Journal News, have them run an ad in the Classified—make it an eighth of a page, with a border around it. Have it read: ‘Unusual Pet Rescued From River. For Information Call—’ and give our number.”
“You’re going to give him back?”
“Hardly. You might also want to make a run to the butcher.”
“Meat for the wolf?”
Garth laughed, and described a circle in the air with his finger to include the three of them. “Wolf has already had tonight’s pork chops for his breakfast,” he replied, and would later recall his words with a certain grim amusement when he was trapped with an entire pack of the creatures that could, sooner or later, be considering him as a candidate for a meal.
Throughout the night he had seen pairs of eyes glowing among the trees at the edge of the rock fall as members of the pack came and went, but none of the animals attempted to negotiate the treacherous slope of broken rock to get at him. He knew that in the wild wolves will go to extreme lengths to avoid contact with humans, so all things being equal, he should not be in great danger of imminent attack. But all things were not equal. These hybrid wolves were not in the wild; they were trapped, like him, in a giant enclosure where he was the only pork chop around, and he had no idea when they had last eaten. In addition, they had been brutalized, first as cubs by having their vocal cords cut out, and then, presumably, through the kind of training that had conditioned in them the savage reactions he had observed in the aI doubtnimal he had rescued from the river. In short, the behavior of these animals, as individuals and as a pack, would be unpredictable. And he had only the rocks he held in each hand to defend himself against the pack’s fangs and the guns of the men who would come during the day.
As dawn broke he found one animal, a male who was either very hungry or intent on establishing territory, standing at the edge of the rock fall and looking up at him. Almost five minutes passed, and then the wolf bared his fangs and started up toward him, picking its way carefully through the sharp riprap. Garth casually tossed the rocks he was holding in the wolf’s direction, and then picked up two more. He was not so much concerned with holding off the wolf, which could not maneuver well in the broken rock, as he was with the stalking animal giving away his position to Kunkel’s young, would-be storm troopers, perhaps led by Franz Heitman, who had certainly begun fanning out through the enclosure at first light. The worry became academic when a burst of fire from an automatic weapon caused the animal to spin around and bound back into the trees.
Garth recognized the young man who emerged from the tree line twenty-five yards away, to his right, as one of the two companions of the acne-scarred man whose jaw he had broken at Hook Mountain in Nyack. Then he had worn black leather, but now he was dressed in an ill-fitting khaki uniform with the group’s lightning-bolt-and-cross patch on the left sleeve. Although the morning was cool, with a steady breeze from the river, the young man’s shaved head glistened with sweat, and his hand trembled slightly as he raised his Ingram MAC 10 machine pistol and aimed it at the spot where Garth sat behind the boulder.
“That’s a lot of firepower you’re carrying there, kiddo,” Garth said easily, “but the problem with it is that it sprays bullets all over the damn place. Be careful you don’t shoot your dick off.”
“You’re not such a big shot now, are you, Frederickson?” the man said in a tight voice that cracked. “Get down here!”
Garth wriggled his damaged left ankle in his boot. It was still decidedly sore, but there was no longer the stabbing pain that had disabled him before. It would hold his weight. “I can’t. I twisted my ankle.”
“Get up or I’ll kill you!” the man shouted, his eyes glinting with both hatred and fear as he started to advance up the slope toward Garth.
“So kill me. What do you have to lose, except twenty to twenty-five years tacked onto the prison sentence you’re already likely to get? You’ll certainly make Kunkel and the man you call Otto, not to mention your birdbrain buddies, happy, at least in the short term, because right now they’re probably trying to figure out what to do with me if they find me. Like you said, I’m a big shot.”
The man advanced another ten yards, and Garth threw a rock with a hard sidearm motion, aiming at the man’s head. He missed, but the sharp stone sailing past his left ear made the man flinch, and then stumble on the rocks at his feet. By the time he recovered, Garth was on him, punching him in the throat, then on the side of the head. The man fell, hitting his head against a boulder, and did not move. Garth did not check to see if he was dead or alive, for he didn’t care. He picked up the machine pistol, checked to make certain that the specially treated cloth he carried in his jacket pocket was hidden yet secure, and then, limping only slightly, headed down into the trees. Now that he had a weapon, he was no longer interested in running or hiding, or trying to find a way to escape from the enclosure. He would see how these young men and their masters, who dreamed of the deaths of so many, liked it when they faced their own deaths at the hands of a man who loathed them as much as they loathed their intended victims. And he knew there was an outraged veterinarian who would very much approve of his present course of action.
“You know,” Sarah Bleekman had said, eyeing Garth suspiciously as she removed the needle from the flank of the muzzled animal that lay on the examining table under the tall man’s firm grip, “what you’ve got here is mostly wolf.”
“I do know, Doctor,” Garth replied evenly, stroking the animal’s quivering hide as the veterinarian prepared a second hypodermic. “It’s a hybrid. It’s got some dog in it, but not much—maybe five percent or less, just enough for some breeder to leave a paper trail that would make it legal to own in some states.”
“Not in this state,” the round-faced woman with short, dark hair replied in a clipped tone that displayed her severe disapproval. “It doesn’t belong here. This is a very dangerous animal. You need a special license to keep one, and then you have to show a special reason. Wanting to own an unusual pet to impress the neighbors isn’t good enough.”
“I appreciate the information.”
Sarah Bleekman studied the famous man with the shoulder-length, wheat-colored hair and dark brown eyes who stood across from her on the opposite side of the examining table. He had, she thought, a mysterious, perhaps mystical, aura of gentleness combined with an implacable toughness, was probably not afraid of anything, and would be very dangerous to the wrong kinds of people. This was the first time she had ever spoken to Garth Frederickson, but like virtually everyone else in Cairn, she knew who he was; he was a celebrity, like his folk singer wife, whose career had blossomed the sixties, been eclipsed, and was now once more in ascendance. She had read the newspaper stories and heard the wild rumors about this man who, teamed with his even more famous brother, ran what was probably the world’s best-known private investigation agency, an enterprise that seemed to virtually specialize in bizarre cases that made headlines. But she often saw Garth Frederickson and Mary Tree in town and they never acted like the celebrities they were, never put on airs. She certainly did not believe all the stories she’d heard about the fantastic exploits of the Frederickson brothers, but if even half of them were true, Garth Frederickson was a brave man indeed. He did not seem like the type of man who would need to keep a dangerous pet to bolster his ego. “Did you have his vocal cords cut out?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I was going to ask you if you knew any other veterinarian in the area who might have been persuaded to perform such a procedure.”
She shook her head, and then tears misted her eyes. “Then it doesn’t belong to you?”
“I fished it out of the river yesterday. It was going someplace, or was after something, that was very important to it; he’d been swimming against the tide and current to the point where he was exhausted. Even if he hadn’t been about to be run over by a tanker, I believe he would have kept swimming until he drowned, or his heart burst.”
“Do you know where he was going, or what he was after?”
“No.”
She finished, patted the animal’s flank and stroked its fur. “Except for the fact that it’s been mutilated and can’t communicate vocally with its own kind, it’s healthy. And now he’s had his shots against rabies and distemper. But you do agree that it isn’t a suitable pet?”
“I thought I’d said so,” Garth replied quietly, holding the wolf’s leash tightly as the animal bounded off the table and looked up at Garth with its golden eyes. “How much do I owe you, Doctor?”
“You saved his life, and I gave him his shots. We’ll call it even. May I ask what you plan to do with him?”
“Try to find a suitable home.”
“That won’t be easy, Mr. Frederickson. The only suitable home for this animal is in the wild, and he can’t go back there.”
I don’t think he’s ever been in the wild; my guess is that he was bred. Are you recommending that I have him put down?”
Sarah Bleekman quickly shook her head. “I’m not recommending that at all.”
“Then I’ll just have to do the best I can, won’t I?”
“Let me know if I can help you. Seeing what’s been done to this animal makes me very angry.”
“You can let me know if anybody else with a wolf comes to see you, or if you can think of a skilled amateur who might have cut this animal.”
“I will. You might want to touch base with the police or Animal Control about having this animal.”
“Oh, I certainly plan to.”
Jeffrey Bond, the Cairn chief of police, was in his office, a grim expression on his face as he sorted through a small pile of crudely printed posters and pamphlets. The thickset man with the crooked nose looked up as Garth knocked and entered, and then smiled thinly and motioned Garth to a chair.
“Got a couple of minutes, Chief?”
“For you, my friend, I’ve always got a couple of minutes.” He paused, pushed the pamphlets and posters aside with a gesture of distaste. “Besides, I’m tired of looking at this garbage.”
“What kind of garbage?”
“We’ve got ourselves a neo-Nazi outfit in town. They call themselves Angry Cross. They opened up a storefront down at the end of Main Street, staffed by a bunch of skinheads. They’re trying to turn Cairn into Creep City. They seem to be having an influence on some of the more dysfunctional members of our little community, and we’re getting a rash of synagogue and Jewish cemetery desecrations. I can’t stand it.”
“Bust them.”
“Can’t. Protected speech.”
“Defacing synagogues and desecrating cemeteries isn’t protected speech.”
“No, but we have to catch somebody actually doing that, and then tie them to Angry Cross. We haven’t been able to do that so far—but we will.” Bond cursed softly under his breath as he swept the papers onto the floor, then sighed as he turned back to Garth. “How’s your smart little brother? Usually he’s up here every weekend during the summer, but I haven’t seen him around lately.”
“My smart little brother is over in Europe taking care of business with some corporate clients while I hold down the fort here.”
“What can I do for you, Garth?”
“A couple of things. First, I want to report what I think could be a crime in progress.
“And what crime do you think could be progressing?”
“I’ve got a hybrid wolf out in my van. I fished it out of the river yesterday.”
“What the hell is a hybrid wolf?”
“A big, bad wolf with a little dog bred into it. They breed them legally in Alaska, where they’re a hot item as pets. I’ve got a small mining claim in Alaska, and I used to spend some time there before I got married, so I’ve seen a lot of hybrid wolves. They’re dangerous.”
“How dangerous?”
“Keeping one as a household pet would be about the equivalent of bringing a leopard, or a bear, into your home; you could do it, but you’d best not be prone to carelessness.”
“So it’s very dangerous,” Bond said with a curt nod. “And that makes it illegal in New York State. Any tags on it?”
“No. And there’s more to it. This animal had its vocal cords cut, and it’s an old scar. That indicates to me that the owner, or breeder, planned from the time it was a pup on bringing it into a heavily populated area. When you hear a wolf howl, you know it’s no dog—and wolves howl a lot. It would be bound to attract attention. Cut their vocal cords, and they don’t howl. Maybe only this animal was cut, and then delivered on special order. But maybe not.”
“You’re suggesting that a breeder may be attempting some market expansion?”
“I think it’s possible that mutilated wolf cubs are being shipped down here from Alaska to people willing to pay a premium for them, or even that they’re being bred around here. Now, some people might ask, who the hell would want to keep a wolf in the city, or in a town like Cairn? Well, you and I know there are lots of folks who think they might want a wolf—but especially people who are into intimidation, personally or professionally.”
Bond slowly nodded. “Like drug dealers thinking to make a switch from pit bulls as the attack dog of choice to wolves.”
“The thought occurred to me, and I wanted to share it with you.”
“What are you going to do with it, Garth?”
“If I turn it over to the shelter or the state police, my guess is that they’ll eventually feel they have no choice but to destroy it. Mary would certainly not be pleased, and I’d hate to think I saved it from drowning only to have it killed. It’s not the animal’s fault that it was brought here, or that its vocal cords were cut and it can’t be put out into the wild. I’d like to try to find a home for it, maybe with one of my friends in Alaska, or in one of the western states where they’re legal. But I need some time. I have no right to keep a dangerous animal in Cairn for any length of time, and I don’t want to. I was hoping you could give me some kind of short-term special license.”
“How much time do you need?”
“Hard to say, Chief.”
“How about a month?”
“That should be more than enough.”
“You’ve got it. I can’t do anything in Cairn that would supercede the laws of New York State, but I’m going to have to get some very specific information on laws regarding a hybrid wolf, and that could take me just about a month. In the meantime, I’ll give you a letter specifying the conditions under which you found the animal, the fact that you immediately brought it to my attention, and so on. You may consider yourself the holder of a temporary permit to keep it—at least until I officially tell you otherwise.”
Garth left his friend feeling satisfied with the situation, and he felt even better later in the day when Mary spent the afternoon with the animal, feeding it, walking it around the house, frequently wrestling it to the ground as he had taught her, and even occasionally gently nipping it on the ear to drive home the point, or illusion, of her dominance. Garth judged that the wolf now respected Mary, accepted her as master, and even liked her. He could also plainly see that Mary was quickly growing very attached to the wolf, not as a symbol of an endangered species about which she cared passionately, but as an individual. That worried him, but he would attend to the problem of their inevitable separation when he had to. In the meantime, he was satisfied that Mary would be safe with the wolf when he was not around. His usual good judgment in such matters made the wolf’s reaction the next morning when Mary came down to the beach where he was working it even more startling.
“Garth, there’s somebody on the phone calling about the ad. He says—“ The wolf‘s reaction was so quick and unexpected that Garth was caught totally by surprise. The animal had been lying on its side, tongue lolling out as Garth brushed his coat, but when Mary appeared he suddenly sprang to his feet, bared his fangs in a savage, silent snarl, and leaped forward. It was brought up short when it reached the end of its chain and fell down, but it immediately got up again and lunged at her. But then Garth was on its back, pressing it to the ground, gripping it by the throat.
“Get back around the house!” he shouted at Mary.
Trembling, eyes wide with shock, Mary slowly backed away until she was around the side of the house, out of sight. Gradually the wolf stopped its struggles and grew very still, its body limp. It closed its eyes, made breathy mewling sounds in its throat. Garth released his grip on the animal’s throat, but kept his hands in front of him as he slowly got up. The wolf remained on its side, limp, softly mewling—almost, Garth thought, as if it were ashamed. He retrieved the muzzle from the boathouse, put it on the unresisting wolf, and then went to his wife.
Mary was wearing a jacket against the mild morning chill, but she had her arms wrapped around herself, as if she were cold. She was still trembling and ashen, her blue eyes flooded with tears.
Garth stepped forward, held her tightly.
“Garth, what did I do?!”
“Nothing,” Garth replied, then stepped back and thoughtfully studied his wife standing in front of him in her black leather jacket with its white leather piping and long fringes on the sleeves and bottom. “Take your jacket off.
“What?”
“Take off your jacket. Put it on the ground.”
“Garth, there’s a man on the phone.”
“He’ll wait, or he’ll call back. Just do as I say, please. I want to see something.”
Mary was thoroughly puzzled, but she did as her husband asked, removing her black and white leather jacket and tossing it behind her on the lawn.
Garth nodded, continued, “Now pull yourself together. Wait about a minute, and then go back around to where the wolf can see you. It’s important that you don’t show fear; act as if nothing had happened.”
“All right.”
Garth walked back down to the beach where the wolf was still lying on its side, head resting on the sand, staring almost wistfully out at the river. Garth knelt down beside it, scratched it behind the ears. A few moments later Mary, a determined smile on her face, strode purposefully around the side of the house. The wolf saw her at once, but its reaction this time was totally different from what it had been less than five minutes before. It rolled over on its stomach, and slowly got to its feet and shuddered. With head down and tail drooping, it slouched toward her, and when it reached the end of its chain it dropped to its belly, once again resting its head on the sand.
Garth was too far away to stop Mary as she abruptly walked to the wolf and dropped to her knees beside its head. “You have been a very bad boy,” she said sternly, wagging a finger in its face and cuffing it lightly on the jaw. Then she lay down on top of the animal and draped her arms lovingly around its neck.
Garth stood close by, watching the wolf‘s reactions carefully, and he didn’t object when Mary removed the animal’s muzzle. On his way back to the house he picked up the jacket off the lawn, then put it at the back of the top shelf of a closet before going to the phone.
“Yeah.”
“You took your goddamn sweet time, pal.”
“You want to tell me what’s on your mind, or do you want me to hang up?”
“I’m calling about the ad in the paper. You’ve got something that belongs to me.”
“What?”
“A wolf.”
“Right.”
“I want it back. I’ll give you a couple of bucks for your trouble.”
“Where are you?”
“Blauvelt.”
“I’ll meet you at Hook Mountain in Nyack, in the parking lot down by the beach, in half an hour,” Garth said, and then hung up without waiting for a reply.
He checked on Mary, who was playing with, “working,” the wolf, then went to his car and drove south to the state park in Upper Nyack, where he was waiting, sitting on a picnic table, when the wolf’s owner arrived in a battered, rusting Jeep with two bumper stickers proclaiming White Power and a large window decal depicting a white bolt of lightning flashing across a red cross on a yellow background. The three young men in the car looked like identical triplets with their shaved heads; they were dressed alike in studded black leather jackets, pants, and boots, and even wore the same contemptuous sneers.
The man driving the Jeep got out, looked around, settled on Garth, and swaggered over to him. Garth put his age at twenty-three or four. His face was a map work of purplish acne scars that almost matched his maroon eyes. He stopped in front of Garth, put his hands on his hips.
“You the guy I talked to on the phone about the wolf?”
“Yep.”
“Where is it?”
“Home.”
“What the hell-?!”
“The ad said to call for information, which is what I’m looking for. I’m not here to give the wolf back. I want to know how you got it.”
“It’s none of your damn business,” the man replied in a tone that was marked as much by surprise as anger. Then he signaled to his two companions. “You must be out of your mind, pal.”
The other two identically dressed young men sauntered across the parking lot, stopped on either side of the scar-faced man to form a wall of flesh and studded black leather.
The wolf’s owner leaned very close to Garth. “Now, what were you saying about not giving me back my wolf?”
“It’s my wife’s fault that I can’t give him back to you,” Garth replied easily. “She’s an animal lover, and she doesn’t like the way you’ve been treating him. She wondered how he happened to end up in the river.”
“He ended up in the river because I kicked his ass off my friend’s boat,” the scar-faced man said with a humorless laugh that was filled with malice. “I’ve got two of ’em, and they were acting up and pissing all over the place. Now I can’t do anything with the other one, and I’m thinking of blowing the bitch’s brains out. I may shoot this one too if it doesn’t come around, but that’ll be my choice. Now why don’t you come along with us? We’ll go to your house to pick up my wolf, and then we’ll bring you back to your car.”
It explained what the wolf was doing in the river, Garth thought, as well as its desperate struggle against tide and current; it was swimming in the direction where its mate had gone. “I don’t think there’s room in your Jeep for all of us,” Garth said, and when he saw the owner’s two companions reach into their pockets, he slammed his foot into the groin of the man on his right, then abruptly shoved off the table as he brought the heel of his right hand up under the scar-faced man’s jaw, breaking it. The wolf’s owner slumped unconscious to the ground next to his writhing companion. Garth stepped over the body, then turned to face the third man, who was standing as if frozen to the spot, his mouth open. Finally he brought his hand, which held a knife, all the way out of his pocket. He flicked his wrist, and a six-inch blade snapped out of the handle.
“That’s a mistake,” Garth said to the young man who would later come upon him on Floyd Kunkel’s estate after pointing him to it. He stooped down over the scar-faced man at his feet and unbuckled the thick leather belt the man wore, snapping it from around his waist. Then, lazily swinging the buckle end of the belt over his head, he slowly advanced on the young man holding the knife. “I doubt very much that you’ve ever killed anyone, my young friend. You like to try to scare people to death. I’m just the opposite; I don’t care if you’re scared, but I will kill you if you don’t drop that knife. Look around, and you’ll see lots of people staring at us. They’ll testify that I was attacked by three skinhead thugs. No problem.”
When the man suddenly threw the knife to the ground, turned and started to run for the car, Garth snapped, “Hold it!” The man stopped, slowly turned back. Garth pointed to the two men on the ground. “There’s no littering here. Take your garbage with you.”
Still lazily swinging the belt, Garth sat back down on the bench and watched as the man with the large, muddy brown eyes helped the man Garth had kicked in the groin to his feet. Together, they carried the scar-faced man back to the Jeep, threw him in the back, and quickly drove away. Garth noted the plate number, intending to pass it on to Jeffrey Bond, whom he found waiting for him when he returned home. The Cairn chief of police was sitting in the music room with Mary, who looked pale and upset.
“We’ve got a problem with your wolf, Garth,” the policeman said, rising to his feet as Garth entered the room. “A report just came in of an incident up in Ulster County. Yesterday an animal described as a wolf was let loose in a synagogue. There was a group of men, a minyan, praying in there. The wolf attacked. It killed one man, managed to get at his throat, and chewed up three others pretty good before somebody managed to get to a phone and call the police. They came and shot it.”
Garth looked away as he felt sorrow well in him at the thought of the shock and horror the men must have felt as a gray juggernaut of death suddenly exploded into their midst. He would never understand the thinking of those responsible for the releasing of the wolf, but he did understand hatred. He hated. He despised these purveyors of hatred and death to the core of his being, and their very existence offended him. They were the human pustules on the face of life his mother had spoken of so often to his brother and him when they were children, the holes in the world through which good escaped and evil entered. He looked back at Jeffrey Bond, said, “The attack took place yesterday. It wasn’t our wolf.”
Bond stared at Garth for a few moments, slowly blinked. “That’s an odd reaction.”
“What’s an odd reaction?”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“I’m not surprised.” Garth reached into his pocket, took out the slip of paper on which he had written the plate number of the Jeep, handed it to the policeman, “That’s the license-plate number of a Jeep that I think belongs to the wolf’s owner. He may live in Blauvelt, but if he doesn’t, it should be easy enough to find out where he does live. I just met him and two of his buddies. They’re skinheads, neo-Nazis probably allied with the Angry Cross people who run your friendly little bookshop here in town. You should have the Orangetown Police check this guy out, because he says he has another wolf—a female.”
Bond studied his friend’s face, nodded. “I’ll certainly do that. How did you come to meet these skinheads?”
“I put an ad in the paper about the wolf. One of them answered it.”
“You were thinking of giving the wolf back?”
“I was thinking of trying to find out who’s breeding those animals here, or carting them down from Alaska.”
“I appreciate your bringing this matter to my attention,” Bond said carefully, narrowing his eyes slightly. “Everybody knows that you and your brother are the best private investigators in the business, but this has become a personal thing with you. Now, why don’t you call your friends in Alaska like you said you would, and let me do my job?”
“I’m not interfering with the police, Jeff. And I am looking into this on behalf of a client.”
“You didn’t tell me that. May I ask who it is?”
“Mary, give me a dollar.”
Mary looked at her husband in surprise. “What? My purse is in the bedroom.”
“Jeff, lend Mary a dollar, would you?”
The police chief sighed and rolled his eyes, then took out his wallet and handed Mary a dollar bill, which Garth immediately took from her. “I’d hate to have you think I was acting like an amateur, Chief,” Garth said with a slight smile. “Now Mary’s officially my client. She’s a very serious animal rights person, and this business of wolf captivity and mutilation offends her.”
“That’s right,” Mary said, stepping close to her husband and kissing him loudly on the cheek.
The police chief grunted, shook his head. “Why don’t you two righteous animal lovers take me to see this hairy friend of yours?”
Garth and Mary led the police chief out of and around the house to where the wolf was staked. The animal looked up, immediately leaped to its feet, bared its fangs, and charged to the end of its chain, where it was yanked back. It charged again, ears back flat against its head as it struggled to get at the man standing between Garth and Mary.
Jeffrey Bond paled, took a step backward, and reached for his gun.
“Jeff, no!” Mary cried, clutching the policeman’s arm. “Don’t shoot him!”
“To call that animal dangerous is a serious understatement, Mary,” Bond said in a low, tense voice. “It would be irresponsible for you to give it to anyone, in Alaska or anywhere else. There’s no place for it. It’s going to end up being killed anyway, so you may as well let me do the job for you right now and get it over with before it kills somebody. There are people who walk along this beach.”
“It reacted to me the same way once, Jeff! There’s something wrong with him! Somebody’s done something to him to make him react that way!”
Bond kept his hand on his gun as he stared at the animal that was still straining at its chain, clawing at the sand under its feet, trying to get at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know why he came at you like that, Jeff! But—”
“I think I do,” Garth said as he took his friend’s arm and gently but firmly led him back around the house. “Give me your jacket and hat, Jeff.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just give them to me. Please.”
Bond hesitated, but finally removed the articles of clothing and gave them to Garth, who put them on and walked back down toward the beach. There was no reaction from the wolf, which was what Garth had expected. He returned to the side of the house, gave the blue jacket and hat back to the police chief. “It’s not the uniform,” Garth said. “My guess is that he came at you because you’re black. He’s been conditioned to attack blacks—and Jews, when he thinks he sees one.
“What?”
“You said the wolf up in Ulster County attacked a group of men inside a synagogue. A wolf won’t normally attack people. Unless it was cornered, which I seriously doubt, it would have slunk all over that synagogue, hidden under pews, whatever. That wolf had been conditioned to attack those men, probably because of what they were wearing, the same as this wolf was conditioned to attack you because of the color of your skin. If I’m right, we’re talking about more than the illegal importation and the keeping of dangerous animals in the state. Now we’re looking at murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. Somebody’s using trained animals as murder weapons.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I know something about wolves, and the rest is an educated guess based on my observations of this wolf‘s behavior. Give me time and I’ll prove it. The way the wolf reacted to you isn’t the wolf’s fault, any more than having its vocal cords cut was its fault. If it was conditioned, it can be unconditioned. If you want to see that I’m right, have Orangetown pick up that creep in Blauvelt and sweat him. And you can pick up whoever it is that’s running that hate factory in town. I think it’s Angry Cross people who are responsible for these wolves. If the police don’t act quickly, I predict there are going to be more wolf attacks, and more deaths:’’
Bond thought about it, gave a curt nod. “God knows you and your brother have some kind of track record at nosing out things like this. I’ll look into it. I’ll also check with the local cops upstate and see if I can’t get the state police interested. In the meantime, you’ve got a week to get rid of that animal.”
“The wolf may be material evidence.”
“Then the state police can take it, along with the responsibility.”
“You said I had a month,” Garth said to the policeman’s back as the other man headed up toward the driveway.
Jeffrey Bond stopped, turned back. “Garth, you said the animal was dangerous, and you were right. I’m sorry, but right now I’ll be responsible if some kid in this town gets eaten. If that wolf gets loose, or, God forbid, some kid walking the beach comes too close to it and gets hurt, it’s my ass—because I know you’re keeping it here. One week. Start making your calls to your friends.
He called a friend and neighbor, an Orthodox Jew who lived in the next block. When he had the item he had asked to borrow, he went to his computer, punched in the code for DMV listings, and in a few minutes had the name and address of Conrad Regent, the Jeep’s owner, who was just coming out of his mother’s house where he lived when Garth pulled up in front. It was not the acne-scarred man, but the skinhead with the mud-colored eyes, and when he saw Garth he bolted for the Jeep parked in the driveway. But Garth was on him before he could get in, knocking him across the hood of the Jeep, wrapping the black and white fringed tallis around his neck, dragging him across the lawn to the curb where his van, with the wolf inside, was parked.
“I brought your friend’s pet back,” Garth said quietly. “I’ve had a change of heart, and thought it was time you were all reunited.”
“It’ll kill me if you put me in there!” the young man said in a strangled whisper as he clawed at the prayer shawl wrapped around his throat and gazed in wide-eyed horror as the wolf snapped and clawed at the window separating them. “It’ll be murder!”
Garth pressed the man’s face up against the saliva-streaked glass, rested his hand on the door handle. “Murder?” he said easily. “This is your friend’s wolf. He wants it back, doesn’t he? In fact, you came to help him pick it up, and you didn’t seem all that nervous then. Is there something wrong?”
“You … know! It’s the shawl! The wolf’s trained to go after anyone wearing one!”
“And people with dark skin?”
The young man with the shaved head nodded.
“Who trains them?”
“I don’t know!”
Garth banged the man’s head against the window, and the wolf redoubled its efforts to get at him, fangs striking against the glass.
“Otto who?”
“Just Otto! That’s what everybody calls him! He raises and trains them, cuts their vocal cords when they’re cubs! He works for Mr. Kunkel!”
“Who’s this Mr. Kunkel?”
“Floyd Kunkel! He’s the one who gives away the wolves! He’s the head of Angry Cross!”
Garth yanked on the prayer shawl, throwing the man to the pavement. “Where do I find Floyd Kunkel?”
The skinhead averted his eyes, swallowed hard. When he spoke, his voice quavered slightly, as if he were about to cry. “He lives in Cairn. He’s got a big mansion down by the river, next to the quarry.”
“Why does Kunkel give away the wolves? What are you supposed to do with them?”
The man had told him, and the rage that had surged through Garth then returned now, blotting out the pain in his ankle as he marched purposefully through the wooded grounds of Floyd Kunkel’s estate, heading back to the mansion that afforded the only exit from the enclosure. He came across three of Kunkel’s uniformed Angry Cross skinheads standing in an open, grassy area separating a firing range and an obstacle course. Garth made no effort to avoid the men as he stepped from the trees and walked at a fast pace directly toward them. The men saw him, started. The man on the left raised his weapon, and Garth shot him in the head. The other two men threw down their machine pistols, turned and ran. Garth tossed the MAC 10s into a clump of brush and continued on in the direction of the mansion, toward the little man with the ill-fitting toupee and the most dangerous storm trooper of them all, the real one, the professional soldier who was behind everything, the savage mercenary who would kill not only him, but also his brother, and even his wife, who had gently stroked his back as he’d checked his camera with its zoom lens and the miniature tape recorder strapped to his waist.
“I think what’s been done to those animals upsets you even more than it does me.”
“It certainly does upset me,” Garth replied evenly as, satisfied that his equipment was in order, he replaced the camera and zoom lens in their case.
Mary wrapped her arms around her husband’s waist, rested her head between his shoulder blades, and hugged him. “I love you so very much, you very strange man.
Garth laughed, reached back, and patted his wife’s bottom. “Now there’s a wonderful compliment.”
“There are so many things, so much feeling deep inside you that you never show to other people.”
“Well, whatever it is you think you see, I’m glad you approve.”
“If you know who’s breeding the wolves and giving them away, why don’t you just go to Jeff and tell him?”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do before the end of the day. But what you have to remember is that Jeff, as good a cop as he is, is only the head of a town police force. He’ll need all the help he can get to shut these people down, and it has to be done quickly, before anybody else gets mauled or killed. There’s only so much Jeff can do on his own, and there are strict legal procedures he has to follow. Judging from the place he owns, Kunkel has a lot of money, and the first thing he’s going to do when the police start showing interest in him is to hire a squad of sharp lawyers. Then the state police will come and impound our wolf, which will probably eventually be destroyed. The only killing that we know of that’s connected with the wolves and Angry Cross took place near Kingston, which is a hundred miles outside Jeff’s jurisdiction. We don’t know how many more wolves there are out there, where they are, or the mental state of the crackpots who have them. Kunkel isn’t going to give out those names to the police until he’s under a lot of pressure, after a long time. Meanwhile, I don’t want to wake up one morning and read in the paper about another wolf in a synagogue, or let loose on a playground filled with black children.”
“You think you can make him give you the names of the people he’s given wolves to?”
“I’m going to try.”
“But how?”
“Sweet reason,” Garth said with a smile as he gently pulled away from his wife’s grasp, turned and kissed her before heading for the door.
“Garth, you’re the lone wolf around here!” she called after him. “You and your brother are just the same. And when the two of you work together, what you have is a two-headed lone wolf.”
“He’ll love that description.”
“You’re not going to take a gun?”
Garth paused in the doorway, turned back. “I’m not planning on killing anyone—and if I was, I wouldn’t be doing it in our home town. My guess is that the publicity wouldn’t do anything for our privacy, and I don’t think it’s the land of publicity your record company or music publisher would much appreciate.”
“Garth—?!”
“I’ll be home before dinner.”
“Where does this Floyd Kunkel live?”
“Way too close,” Garth had replied, and in less than ten minutes was pulling onto the rutted dirt access road threading along the side of the abandoned trap rock quarry at the edge of Cairn. He drove as far as he could go on the weed-choked road, then got out and with the camera case slung over his shoulder, clambered up the rock fall at the base of the escarpment where great mechanical behemoths had once sheared huge slices of stone that would eventually be crushed and used for the building of roads in New York City. He managed to climb a few yards up the wall itself to a ledge, where he sat, legs dangling over the edge, and looked down onto Floyd Kunkel’s property. Through the zoom lens he could see that the spacious grounds included a shooting range, as well as a military-style obstacle course where perhaps a half-dozen men in tan uniforms were working out. At the southern end of the property was what appeared to be a kennel, with more than a dozen wooden shelters. Staked outside each shelter was a dark gray animal. Surrounding the entire complex were double chain-link fences, and the inside fence appeared to be electrified.
Garth shot two rolls of film, concentrating on the animal pens, and then climbed down. He put the camera and rolls of film in the trunk of his car, and then drove around to the front of Floyd Kunkel’s mansion, parked at the top of the circular driveway. There were a number of cars in a parking area off to the side, and one enclosed van with Alaska license plates. He activated the tape recorder strapped to his waist, then went up to the front door of the Victorian mansion and knocked.
The man who came to the door was no more than five foot three or four. He had a wispy brown moustache that only served to highlight his sallow complexion, and he wore a bushy, absurd-looking toupee that came halfway down over his forehead. His dark eyes were like the button eyes of a doll, without light, the eyes of a man in whom things had died, dreams and ambitions and a sense of self-worth, and then, like a crippled phoenix, had been resurrected as murderous hatred.
“Floyd Kunkel?”
“Maybe,” the man replied nervously. “What do you want?”
“My name’s Garth Frederickson. I’m a neighbor, and I’m here to try to do you a favor.”
“Go away,” Kunkel said, starting to close the door. “Whatever it is you’re selling, I don’t want any.”
“It’s about those hybrid wolves you’ve got in your backyard,” Garth said, planting a large, strong hand on the door and pushing it back open. “The favor I’m doing is inviting you to come down to the police station to give up the names of the people you’ve given those hybrid wolves to. That won’t stop the lawsuits that are going to cost you this house and everything else you own, but that kind of cooperation just might keep you out of prison.”
Floyd Kunkel’s pinched mouth opened and closed, and his button eyes opened wide. “Wh—? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Yes, you do. You’ve been training those animals to attack blacks and Jews, and then giving them away to your punk skinheads like membership cards, or merit badges. One of your boys decided to test his out to see if it would really do what you said it would. It did. It makes you a kind of accessory to murder. In the interest of saving time, why don’t you just give me the names? How many wolves have you given away?”
The door abruptly swung all the way open, and Garth found himself looking at his own death. He had come to this place filled with contempt for spiritually crippled men he considered weaklings and cowards, but Franz Heitman was neither weak nor a coward. And the ex-Stasi agent had every reason in the world to want to kill him.
“’Otto,’ I presume?”
The man with the very pale blue eyes and close-cropped blond hair stepped back, but kept the gun in his hand pointed directly at Garth’s forehead. “Do come in, Frederickson.”
“Fancy meeting you here, Franz. Interpol’s looking very hard for you, you know, just like the citizens of your former country. There are a lot of people who’d dearly love to get their hands on you.”
“You don’t say? I guess I’d better stay in the United States for a while longer.
Kunkel, a bewildered expression on his face, looked at the German. “Otto? Why does this man call you Franz? How does he know you?”
“Leave us!” Franz Heitman snapped.
Garth turned to the slight man with the bushy toupee. “You know who you have working for you—or think you have working for you?” he asked just before the white-eyed man brought the barrel of the gun up against the side of his head.
When he regained consciousness he found himself tied to a straight-backed chair in what appeared to be a small den or office. He was very much surprised to find he was still alive.
“So what’s up, Frederickson?”
“You tell me, Franz. What’s a professional murderer and torturer like you doing hanging around with a bunch of wimpy, wannabe Nazis? They’re all amateurs; you’re the real McCoy. What the hell are you up to?”
The white-eyed man sitting across from him behind a desk leaned back in his swivel chair, pushed aside the tape recorder he had removed from Garth’s waist, and then folded his hands behind his neck. “I owe you and your smartass little brother, Frederickson. The two of you put five bullets in me.”
“Yeah, Franz, but you know how hard it is to kill a snake. You’re actually looking quite fit, I’m sorry to say.”
“Speaking of your smartass little brother, where is he? It’s funny, isn’t it, how I have trouble picturing one of you without the other? Wherever there’s one Frederickson, the other usually can’t be far behind.”
The reason he was still alive, Garth thought. The German wanted to know who might be covering him, and who else might know about the wolves. He knew that Franz Heitman was unlikely to believe anything he said, so he decided he might as well tell the truth. “He’s in Europe.”
“You don’t say. Who are you working for? Who hired you to look into this wolf business?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody? Then why are you here?”
“I found one of the animals you carved up drowning in the river. What had been done to it pissed me off, so I decided to try to find out who was behind it. One thing led to another.”
The German grunted. “You know, I think you may just be telling the truth. You told that fool Kunkel you were a neighbor. You live here in Cairn?”
Garth felt his heart begin to beat faster, and he struggled to keep his face impassive. “No. Whom are you really working for?”
The other man laughed. “The usual suspects, of course.”
“Abu Nidal’s people? Saddam? Castro?”
Heitman smiled thinly. “Why go to the trouble of trying to smuggle bands of foreign-speaking terrorists into the United States when you have whole groups of American terrorists here all ready and willing, with just the slightest nudge in the right direction, to do all your work for you? It’s true that your Klansmen and Nazis aren’t too bright, but I’ve found that to work to my various employers’ distinct advantage.”
“We don’t have the Europeans’ centuries of practice at hating and murdering our own people. You let the wolf loose in that synagogue, didn’t you?”
“A test of my training methods, with a most satisfactory result. Now it’s time for a Day of the Wolf. The people who have the wolves are simply waiting eagerly for me to give the word. Of course, I must pick a suitable occasion—perhaps Rosh Hashana, or Yom Kippur, when there are lots of Jews wearing prayer shawls on the streets. At the same time, a number of the wolves will be let loose in black neighborhoods. I believe it will make quite a splash, in a manner of speaking.”
“For what reason, Heitman?”
“You think Kunkel and his skinheads need a reason? They just want to kill blacks and Jews, and they think that using the wolves is a way for them to get away with it.
“You sold them the idea, of course.”
“Of course.”
“What’s your reason? What’s the point? You’re a professional killer, not a goofy ideologue.
The other man shrugged. “Striking terror into the hearts of your enemies is always its own reason. You know the theory. That’s my job. My employers consider the United States their enemy; terrorism is not only their weapon of choice, but also their only weapon. There will be other operations like the Day of the Wolf. As you know, I’m rather clever at manipulating fools like Kunkel and his skinheads, and putting things like this together. The United States is a very big country, and I plan to keep busy here for some time.”
“How many wolves are out there, Franz?”
“Enough,” Heitman said, glancing at his watch and rising. “I’ll leave you to your own devices for now, while we wait to see who may show up looking for you. I really do hope it will be your smartass little brother.”
Left to his own devices, Garth practiced one other thing his brother had taught him, muzukashi jotai kara deru, which could be roughly translated as “extricating oneself from knotty situations,” and which was a Japanese technique of muscle tensing and relaxation. What Garth had dismissed as a joke, or at most a parlor trick, his brother had used to save their lives inside a Swiss castle, and only then had Garth insisted that his brother teach him. What would have taken his brother ten minutes took him an hour, but at last he was free.
What he wanted was a telephone, but if there had been one in the office it had been removed. However, rifling through the desk drawers, he found a spiral notebook. Inside the notebook was written the name and address of a hybrid wolf farm in Alaska. There was also a list of men’s names, addresses, and telephone numbers. The addresses were scattered all over the southern half of New York State, with close to a third in New York City. Twenty-five names, including that of a man in Kingston, had dark checks beside them. He ripped the pages with the names out of the notebook, folded them and put them in his wallet, then headed for the door, which opened out into a much larger study at what appeared to be the rear of the mansion.
He was halfway across the room when Franz Heitman entered. The German cursed and clawed for the gun in his shoulder holster, but by then Garth was running the rest of the way across the room, diving for a window. He put his forearms across his face and dived headfirst through the glass as a gun exploded behind him. He hit the ground on his left shoulder, rolled, and was up and sprinting across the well-manicured lawn toward a wooded area running along the base of the abandoned quarry. As he ran he thought of Mary, wondered what she was thinking and doing. He had said he would be home before dinner, and so by now she would be worried, perhaps already have called the police. He had told her where he was going, but that did not mean the police, without a proper search warrant, would be able to find him. Heitman would certainly have moved his car out of sight, and Kunkel would simply deny he had ever been there. There would be nothing Jeff could do.
His greatest fear, the anxiety that had gnawed at his heart throughout the long night, was now realized as he approached the house and saw Mary’s station wagon parked at the back of the mansion, where it had been placed in plain view to tell him that Franz Heitman had his wife. He threw his gun off to one side and entered the house through the back door into the kitchen, where he found Floyd Kunkel’s corpse on the floor, a single bullet hole in his forehead.
“I’m here, Heitman.”
“Right this way, Frederickson,” Heitman’s voice called. “Straight ahead.”
Garth walked down a corridor with walls decorated with garish Nazi posters, into the spacious living room of the mansion. Mary was sitting very straight in a chair that had been placed in the middle of the room a few feet away from where the German sat on a couch, legs crossed, an automatic pistol resting in his lap. The wolf, lying on its stomach at Mary’s feet, raised its head and began to wag its tail as Garth walked in.
“I knew those idiots wouldn’t get you, Frederickson,” the German continued, glancing at his watch. “In fact, you’re here just about the time I thought you would be.”
Garth looked at his wife. “Are you all right?” Mary nodded. “You?”
“Yes.”
“By the way,” Heitman said with a thin smile, “the police did come around looking for you. Kunkel told them he didn’t know what they were talking about. What were they to do? When your smartass little brother didn’t show up like I expected him to, I decided that you must have been telling the truth when you said he was in Europe. I remembered you also telling Kunkel that you were a neighbor, so I went into town and made some inquiries-told people I was a long-lost friend of yours who’d misplaced your address and phone number. Everybody knows you; people were very helpful in giving me directions to your home. Incidentally, you and your lovely wife have done some nice work with that wolf. It’s downright docile. I think I’m going to keep it for myself.”
“He came to the house,” Mary said in a small voice. “He said you needed my help right away, and that I should follow him and bring the wolf. I didn’t know what else to do but what he asked.”
Garth nodded, looked back into the cold, blue-white eyes of the ex-Stasi agent. “I saw the mess you left out in the kitchen. You must be getting ready to move on.”
“Indeed. You’ve managed to make things uncomfortable for me here. But first I want to make some phone calls, and you have the numbers of the people I want to call. I’m thinking that today would make as good a Day of the Wolf as any. You have the list of names and phone numbers?”
“If you were certain I had the list with me, I wouldn’t be alive right now.
“The thought did cross my mind that you might stash the list away someplace after you saw your wife’s car, just to annoy me. Did you? You won’t annoy me for long. I’d hate to put a bullet in your wife’s kneecap to prompt an honest answer, so why don’t you just tell me where to find the list?”
“If I do, will you let Mary go?”
“Give me a break, Frederickson. You want me to insult you by lying to you? Interpol and various other police forces I can handle, but I don’t need your smartass little brother dedicating the rest of his life to hunting me down. I can’t leave any witnesses. I will promise that neither of you will suffer.”
“Under the circumstances, that seems fair enough,” Garth said. He removed his wallet from his pocket, took out the folded pages, flipped them in the direction of the German. As the man reached out to catch them, Garth took the prayer shawl out of his jacket pocket and tossed it at the man’s head. “You might as well take this, too.”
In the instant before the billowing prayer shawl settled down over his head, the German’s pale eyes went wide with shock and horror. He grabbed for the gun in his lap with one hand, while with the other he frantically clawed at the fringed black and white cloth, but by then the wolf, which had sprung to its feet at first sight of the tallis, was at him. Heitman screamed as he and the wolf toppled over backwards. Garth quickly walked around the overturned sofa, gripped the wolf’s collar, and pulled him away from the German’s head. The man had managed to protect his throat and was still alive, but his face was gone. Franz Heitman writhed on the floor, screaming, legs thrashing, his hands spasmodically reaching for, but never quite touching, his shredded flesh. Garth pulled the animal back around the sofa, brought it over to Mary, who gripped its collar while wrapping her free arm around its neck.
“Our wolf is going to need a lot of love and counter-training if he’s going to unlearn the nasty habits he’s been taught, which is essential if he’s going to be allowed to live,” Garth said to Mary as he walked across the room and picked up a phone to call the police and an ambulance. “Considering the fact that he’s played a large part in saving a lot of people’s lives, including our own, maybe we should keep him. I could look into getting a special permit, and we could build an appropriate enclosure. Would you like that?”