Chapter Ten: On Death Row

That guy was the dogcatcher, see, and when he got out of his pickup and started creeping toward me with a butterfly net, I began to suspect that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Hold still, doggie,” he said. “Just two more steps and I’ll take you for a little ride.”

Who did he think he was talking to? I mean, how dumb would you have to be to fall for that “hold still doggie” business? I showed him a few fangs and gave him a growl, and fellers, he dropped that butterfly net and flew back into the pickup.

“Mobile three to city hall! Larry, he attacked me, almost got my leg, for gosh sakes send some police and the ambulance, this mutt has hydro­phobia, I ain’t kidding!”

It occurred to me that I had better make a run for the high and lonesome. I could have gone back into the yard, but I didn’t want to cause trouble for Maggie, not after she’d been so nice and fixed me the special supper.

I headed south down the alley. I was still feeling a little weak, don’t you see, and my back end didn’t follow my front end. By this time the dogcatcher was perched on the cab of his pickup, talking on the radio.

“Mobile three to city hall. Suspect is proceeding south and holy cow, Larry, he’s got the blind staggers, better tell ’em to seal off the whole south end of town, Larry, I mean he’s out of his head and extremely dangerous!”

I could hear the sirens now, three or four of ’em moving down Main Street. I started running. The derned bubbles were still coming out of my mouth.

What the heck had brought on all the bubbles? I’d had indigestion before, ate some aged mutton with a bunch of coyotes one time and it sure made me sick, but I’d never made bubbles or foamed at the mouth.

I looked up ahead and saw a police car in the alley, so I veered off to the left and started across a vacant lot but there was a fire truck coming straight at me. I wheeled around and ran back to the alley, figgered I’d leap over a fence and vanish in somebody’s backyard, but my leaper was out of commission. Too weak in the knees.

I was trapped against the fence, surrounded by police with guns and firemen with axes and the dogcatcher with his net. They were closing in on me.

I heard a sound on the fence above me. I looked around and saw that same fat yellow cat and her three kittens. “You see, children? The chickens have come home to roost. Crime never pays if you’re dumb enough to get caught. Let this be a lesson to you.”

On a better day I might have given them cats a few more lessons, but with the Depart­ment of Defense closing in on me, I just didn’t have time.

I looked for a place to run but they had me cornered. One of the policemen had his shotgun pointed in my direction and one of the things you learn in security work is that arguing with a shotgun will mess up your coat and produce lead poisoning.

Instead of making a run for it, I sat down. The dogcatcher came creeping up with his net in the air, and if I’d made the slightest growl, I bet he would have jumped back into last week. But I didn’t. He dropped the net around me and I was caught.

“Easy now, stand back, boys, I’m telling you this dog is out of his mind, he tried to tear my leg off back yonder and when I ran for the pickup he attacked one of my tires!”

Just then the guy in the T-shirt, the one who belonged to that sorry collection of cats, came out the gate and talked to the police. “Yeah, he’s the one that tried to kill my cats. I thought there was something peculiar about that dog. And he’s got rabies, huh? I suspected it all along, sure did.”

They carried me to the dogcatcher’s wagon and throwed me into the wire cage and locked the door. Then two or three of them stood around, staring at me and talking. The dogcatcher got a long stick and started poking at me with it. What was I supposed to do? I let him poke me a couple of times and then I bit the stick in half.

“Look at that! Did you see that? We got us a sick dog, boys, and did I tell you about how he tried to attack a child before y’all got here?”

“The heck he did!”

“Yes sir, and I’ll tell you this, boys, and it comes from the bottom of my heart: if this town hadn’t had a dogcatcher, half the little children on this end of town would be running around with hydrophobia right this minute!”

“Kids these days are bad enough without hydrophobia.”

“That’s right, Burt, and the next time that city council takes up the business of salaries, they better remember who goes out and saves the little children of this town from mad dogs.”

One of the policemen bent down and looked at me. He made an ugly face, and I made one right back at him. “What do you do with a mad dog, Jimmy Joe?”

“Oh, we’ll call the vet out to the pound tomorrow and he’ll run a test.”

“What’s the test?”

“Cut off his head and send it to the state lab.”

HUH? Cut . . . say, that didn’t sound good at all. As a matter of fact, it sounded real bad. What the heck did they do if the test came out negative? I had a couple more questions I wanted answers to, but about that time Jimmy Joe Dogcatcher got into the pickup and hauled me off to the city dog pound.

It was on the south edge of town, on a lonely windblown hill. As we approached the place, I could hear the wind moaning through the chain link fences. Jimmy Joe backed up to a pen with a high fence around it and opened the gates so I could go into the pen.

He started poking me again with a stick. “Go on, you crazy devil, get out of there! This is the end of the road. No more biting innocent children for you, pal.”

I don’t know where he came up with that business about biting innocent children. I never bit an innocent child in my life, never even bit one who wasn’t innocent. When you’re Head of Ranch Security, you don’t go around biting kids. Monsters, yes. Coyotes and coons and criminal dogs, yes. But kids, no.

Seemed to me the dogcatcher needed to have his head sent to the state lab, but nobody was interested in my opinion.

I went into the cell and laid down in a back corner. The dogcatcher slammed the door and stood there for a minute. “No collar, no dog tags, no name, no identification. We won’t have to feed you long, old pup. You better have a good time tonight because tomorrow . . .”

He drew a finger across his throat and made a wicked sound. He flashed a big grin, got into his pickup, and drove away.

There was something about that dogcatcher I didn’t like.

Well, I lay there for a long time, listening to the wind and thinking about my situation. All at once I got the feeling that I was being watched. I raised my head, cut my eyes to both sides, perked my ears, and tested the wind.

Then I saw him: a basset hound in the cell next to mine. He had a long body, short, stubby legs, long drooping ears, and the saddest, most mournful face you could imagine.

“Howdy,” he said in a slow-talking voice. “My name’s Ralph.”

“I’m Hank the Cowdog, Head of Ranch Se­curity.”

“Welcome to Death Row.”

“Thanks. It’s a real pleasure to be here.”

“You really mean that?”

“What do you think?”

He sniffed his nose. “I ’spect not. You scared?”

“Maybe.”

“I’d be scared if I was you. You really got hydrophobia like they said?”

“I don’t know. Everybody thinks I do. Maybe I do.” I told him the whole story, starting with the Ivory Dog Bar I ate at Maggie’s place. Ralph didn’t strike me as being real bright but I didn’t have anything better to do than make conversation with him. It took my mind off my troubles.

It took me a while to tell the story. Ralph’s eyelids were drooping when I started—I mean, I think that was just his normal condition. His whole face drooped: eyes, ears, jowls, everything. He was just a droopy kind of dog. Well, by the time I finished the story, he was asleep.

Kind of hacked me off, him falling asleep. I got up and sneaked over to the fence, put my mouth right down by his ear and yelled, “HEY!”

His whole body rose off the ground an inch or two and he opened his eyes. “Soap,” he said.

“Well soap to you too! You shouldn’t go around asking questions if you can’t stay awake for the answers. Even a dog on Death Row deserves a little courtesy.”

He blinked his eyes. “Soap’s the answer.”

“Yeah, but what’s the question? It doesn’t help to know the answer if you don’t . . . what are you talking about?”

He pushed himself up and walked over to a water pan near the front of his cell. It was dark by this time and I could hear his claws clicking on the cement floor. He lapped up some water and came clicking back and sat down.

“Mouth gets dry when I talk too much.” He ran his tongue over his chops and wiped off some excess water. “Seems to me you were the victim of a hoax.”

“Not likely, friend. I’ve been in security work for a long time. I can smell a hoax half a mile away.”

“Uh-huh, but it was soap.”

“You said that before. It didn’t make sense then and it don’t make sense now.”

“Well, if you’ll shut up a minute, maybe I can explain.”

I glared at him. “You’re telling me to shut up, is that it?”

“Uh-huh, that’s what I was driving at.”

I sat down. “I can handle that. Tell me about soap.”

“One time they was washing out the dog pens. They don’t do it very often but this time they did. They had some little white bars that had ‘Ivory’ written on ’em.”

“Okay, them was Ivory Dog Bars,” I said. “The question here is, why would they use Ivory Dog Bars for cleaning the pen?”

Ralph stuck his nose against the chain link fence. “Because it was soap, ya dope.”

“HUH?”

“You ain’t got hydrophobia. You ate a bar of soap, is why you was foamin’ at the mouth.”

“Wait a minute, hold everything!” I sprang to my feet and began pacing. “It’s coming clear now, all the clues are pointing in the same direction. At last the pieces of this puzzle are falling into place. I was duped into eating a bar of soap, which explains why it tasted so awful. I knew something wasn’t right. Ivory Dog Bar indeed!

“It was soap, Ralph, don’t you understand? They gave me soap, knowing it would produce the symptoms of hydrophobia. So all at once this case is leading in a new and startling direction, for you see, Ralph, they not only duped me, but also my sister, Maggie! Which brings us to the crux of the matter, the throbbing heart of the mystery.”

I whirled around and faced him. “The question now is, who are THEY and why did they want . . .”

Ralph was asleep again.