Mercy Dogs Read online

  ALSO BY TYLER DILTS

  LONG BEACH HOMICIDE SERIES

  A King of Infinite Space

  The Pain Scale

  A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

  Come Twilight

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Tyler Dilts

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503951785

  ISBN-10: 1503951782

  Cover design by Scott Biel

  For my mother, Sharon Dilts, who never does bad things.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “The Krauts called them ‘sanitary dogs,’” the old man said, shaking his head.

  “But when I was lying there in the middle of all that stink and carnage, absolutely sure I was going to bleed to death from where I took the shrapnel in my leg, out of nowhere that collie came up to me with its Red Cross saddlebags and I remembered what they told us about the dogs and I got out the bandages and the tourniquet and I was able to fix myself well enough.” Here he paused to tap the handle of his cane against his prosthetic leg, making a hollow, echoing thump. “I was still alive when the medics finally got to me. While I was waiting, and it was a long wait, I watched that dog.

  “She had moved on. A few bodies to the south of me, she came upon that kid Etheridge, the one who’d only been with us a couple weeks. He was a lot worse off than me. That collie, she knew, I could see it.” He paused for a long moment, as if lost in the memory, then continued. “She nuzzled her head up against his chest, and he took his arm—he just had the one at that point—and he wrapped it around her. I watched her head there on top of him, moving up and down with his breathing. When it stopped moving, she let out this low, sad moan. Then she moved on to the next soldier. And the next. And on and on like that.

  “Fucking Krauts didn’t know what they were talking about. We called them what they were. Mercy dogs.”

  —Peter Shepard, Towards Our Distant Rest: World War I and Its Aftermaths

  ONE

  Grace was gone.

  “Where is she?” Peter asked. Usually by this time she’d be out on the back patio with him, coffee cups on the table in front of them, both of them bundled up against the morning chill as they waved at the early departures from Long Beach Airport jetting overhead.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” Ben said.

  Anxiety crept into Peter’s voice. “She’s not in her place?”

  “No.” Ben had already checked the studio out back. No sign of her. He’d even walked around the attached garage into the alley to see if her Prius was in the parking space along the back fence. It wasn’t there.

  “Did I do something bad?” Peter’s hand started to shake. “Make her mad?”

  “No way.” Ben rubbed his father’s bony shoulder. He still hadn’t regained enough weight after the last surgery. “You never do bad things.”

  Peter looked up at him.

  Ben took the notebook out of his pocket and checked it. Maybe Grace had mentioned something the day before and he’d forgotten. He thumbed back through the pages. A note about his insomnia, written after three that morning, his handwriting even more indecipherable than usual. Then the list of his evening meds with the time, 12:17 a.m., and four check marks to ensure he hadn’t missed anything. Before that he’d watched that new show where everybody dies and Kiefer Sutherland becomes president. Didn’t think it was very good, but watched the whole thing anyway. Okay for Dad??? he’d scribbled. Then Peter’s list of meds, with check marks that looked just like the ones he’d made above. He went back page by page.

  Nothing about Grace.

  “Does it say about her?” Peter asked with hopeful eyes.

  Ben shook his head. “We’ll figure it out. I’m sure it’s okay.”

  “I hope so.”

  “She’s just renting the studio from us. She doesn’t have to tell us everything about where she goes or when she’ll be home.”

  “She’s nice,” Peter said.

  “I know she is, Dad. I know.”

  As Ben scribbled in his notebook, he heard the scream of jet engines rising in the east. He watched his father turn his eyes to the sky and wait for the plane to make itself visible beyond the edge of the roof. Peter’s eyes widened when he saw it and he lifted his hand, but his wave was half-hearted and there was no smile on his face.

  Peter lay back on the exam table and pulled up his flannel shirt.

  Dr. Riyaz checked the scar on his stomach from the last surgery. “This looks good. How long has it been?”

  Ben knew the question was directed at him. “Seven months.” He watched the doctor palpate his father’s abdomen. “We’ve finally gotten some weight back on him,” he said. “But I know he still needs to gain more. The most we’ve been able to get down in a day is sixteen hundred calories.”

  “Does this hurt?” Riyaz asked.

  “No,” Peter said.

  He pressed in more places and watched Peter’s face. After the last one, he said, “Good. You can sit up.”

  Peter pulled his shirt down and winced as he pushed himself upright. The doctor was typing and didn’t see his face.

  “Did that hurt, Dad?” Ben asked.

  “A little bit,” Peter said.

  The doctor looked back at him. “Where?”

  Peter put his hand over the incision.

  “The abdominal muscles take a long time to heal,” Riyaz said. “How is your stool?”

  Peter looked confused, so Ben answered for him. “Mostly loose and liquidy, but occasionally, maybe every third or fourth day, a little more solid with small, kind of curly pieces.” Ben had double-checked his notes for the last few weeks to make sure he’d be able to answer correctly.

  Riyaz looked both surprised and pleased by the degree of detail. He was always pleasant and unflappable, but seemed especially warm when he said, “You’re a good son.”

  10:45 Dad Gastro Appt

  Healing good, everything ok

  Cont. Miralax daily, adjust dose as needed

  Increase calories / GAIN MORE WEIGHT—Fruit, veg—smoothies, shakes

  Come back three months

  “How about a shake for lunch, Dad?”

  Peter sat at the counter, facing Ben in the kitchen. “Could I have some more?” He held up his coffee cup.

  “Sure. But we need something else, too. I’m going to make you a shake, okay?” Ben took
the cup and filled it halfway with vanilla Boost Plus, then topped it off from the fresh pot of decaf and added a tablespoon of sugar. That was good for another 190 calories. He’d have to check to be sure, but with the breakfast coffee and oatmeal, that should be around 580 so far. Ben blended berries, apple slices, yogurt, milk, and sugar in the NutriBullet. If Peter could get it all down, they’d be well over 1,000 and might be able to get to 1,600 by bedtime.

  “Is she back yet?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. She probably just got called in to work an extra shift or something. I’m sure it’s okay.”

  “Did you look to see?”

  “No.”

  Peter looked down at his hands.

  “I will, okay?” Ben poured the smoothie into a cup and put it on the woven blue placemat in front of his father. “Drink that and I’ll go outside and check on Grace.”

  “Okay.” Peter made a sour face as he took another sip.

  “Alexa.” Ben waited for the blue ring on top of the black cylinder on the counter to light up. “Play Willie Nelson.”

  “Shuffling songs by Willie Nelson,” she answered. As he walked out the patio door on the other side of the dining table, he heard the opening chords of “Always on My Mind” fading behind him.

  He stepped off the concrete and crossed the large back lawn to the small second patio in the back, along the alley. When he’d grown up in the house, all that was attached to the garage was an unfinished bonus room the family used for storage. His mom had always wanted to turn it into a small studio guesthouse so Grandma or Aunt Marilyn could stay there when they came to visit. Maybe they could even rent it out someday. But work on the bathroom and kitchenette had barely been finished when she got her diagnosis. No one had ever stayed there for more than a night or two until five years later, when Ben was released from rehab and moved in so Peter could take care of him.

  It didn’t happen often anymore, but as Ben got closer to the studio, he felt the familiar surge of uncontrollable memories assault him.

  You wake to the sound of your own screams, middle of the night, shaking, sweating, the cold cutting down to your bones. The dream, the nightmare, is almost there, you can almost touch it, but as you begin to realize where you are, it recedes, and the faster you chase it, the more swiftly it retreats. You know only that it terrified you, but somehow you think—no, you’re certain—that the terror you’re so desperately trying to reach is the truth of what you lost and that no matter how horrific it is, if you could just reach it, catch even a fleeting glimpse of it, you would be able to shine a light into the darkness of the vast empty chasm of your memory and that you’d be able to see, to understand, to know—

  “Ben!”

  The voice sounds far away.

  But you recognize it.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m here, son, I’m here.” You feel his arms around you. The cold begins to recede. You’re hardly even shaking anymore.

  But it’s gone.

  You almost saw it.

  You almost knew.

  You feel the darkness but you also feel the warmth.

  Your father holds you, rubs your back like he did when you were a child, and you can’t understand how you got from there to here.

  There was still no sign of Grace. But if she’d been called in to work a breakfast-to-lunch shift, she wouldn’t be back yet. She almost always worked nights. At least in the five months she’d been here. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. She didn’t like weekends. Too busy, she’d told him. She did okay on the weeknights. Okay enough, anyway. They were giving her a great deal on the rent. Probably only about two-thirds of what they could have gotten for the place. But they’d only been half-serious about taking on a tenant when Rob Kessler, Ben’s old partner from his first plainclothes assignment in Narcotics, called out of the blue and asked for a favor.

  “Q-E-D?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, stirring a purple capful of Miralax into a blue Solo cup of water. Had to be blue. The red ones didn’t work for Peter. “Q-E-D.”

  Quetiapine fumarate 50 mg. Escitalopram 20 mg. Donepezil 10 mg.

  Ben lined up the three pills and the cup of laxative on the small wooden TV tray next to Peter’s worn armchair in the living room, just as the Jeopardy! theme song finished on the TV. Peter couldn’t answer the questions anymore, but they still watched every night before he went to bed.

  “Quod,” Peter said as Alex Trebek read off the categories for the first round. He put the first pill in his mouth, squinted, and swallowed. He couldn’t go too fast or his stomach would start to hurt.

  After the break in the first round, when Alex chatted with the contestants, Peter said “Erat” and took pill number two. He waited until the end of the next commercial break, and as Alex read off the categories for Double Jeopardy, Peter looked over at Ben, who smiled and nodded.

  “Demonstration.” He took the last pill and sipped the remaining Miralax over the rest of the round. During the last commercial, he held the cup out so Ben could see it was empty.

  “Good job, Dad.” Between Peter’s second and third intestinal-obstruction surgeries, he’d started having hallucinations—paranoid fantasies about the neighbors trying to break in the house in the middle of the night and things like that. His doctor added the quetiapine to the mix with his antidepressant and dementia meds. Ben had been surprised when his father saw the abbreviations for his medications on the notepad and blurted out the old Latin phrase he’d taught his son decades ago. Quod erat demonstrandum. Thus it has been demonstrated.

  Peter got up and went back to his bedroom to brush his teeth and change for bed. Ben was surprised he didn’t ask about Grace again, but after he thought about it, he supposed there was some sense to it. They never saw her at this time of night, so there wasn’t a pattern for Peter to miss. Or maybe he just forgot.

  Ben made the normal evening med notes and added Stomach seemed pretty good. When Peter was feeling more stomach pain, Ben would add an Advil PM and maybe a lorazepam to the mix, but he was glad that wasn’t needed tonight.

  He knew he had another fifteen minutes before Peter would be ready to turn in, so he went outside and checked the studio again. The lights were off and Grace’s Prius still wasn’t in its spot. A hint of anxiety feathered its way into his abdomen. For the first time that day, he began to think something might really be wrong.

  Back inside, as Peter pulled the blankets over himself, he looked up at his son’s face. “Is something the matter?”

  “No, Dad. Nothing.”

  “You look like something’s the matter.”

  “I’ve just got a little bit of a headache is all.”

  “Did you take your medicine?”

  “I’m going to right now.”

  “Good.” Peter rested his head on the pillow. “Let me know if you need something.” He squeezed Ben’s hand and checked to make sure the old AM/FM Walkman radio was on the side of the bed in case he couldn’t sleep. “Good night, Ben.”

  “Good night, Dad.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” Ben turned off the lamp on the dresser, looked at his father in the soft glow of the night-light, and eased the door shut behind him.

  He sat on the sofa in the living room with his phone in his hand and thought about texting Grace. What were the boundaries? Would it be appropriate to ask if she was okay? Was he her friend or still just her landlord?

  His Fitbit said he’d only done 8,272 steps so far that day. Dr. Okada said to try for ten thousand every day. Ben always pushed for at least twelve. When he had still been a cop, he’d always prided himself on exceeding expectations. No one expected much from him anymore. Most nights when he found himself short, he would do laps, either out in the backyard if it was warm enough or inside if it wasn’t. Starting at the fireplace on the far end of the living room and looping around the table in the dining room on the way to the refrigerator was good for seventy-five steps. Some nights he would repeat the circuit for an h
our or more.

  When Ben hit his goal, he’d worked off a lot of the nervous energy he’d been feeling earlier. He sat on the sofa in the living room and looked at his old detective’s badge on the mantel over the fireplace. When he’d come home from the rehab facility, it had been waiting for him, bubble-wrapped in a shipping box: his shield, encased in a brick of Lucite. To remind him of who he used to be. And that’s just what it did, every time he looked at it.

  That’s what it was doing now.

  You used to be someone else.

  For six years you wore a Long Beach Police Department uniform, for two you worked plainclothes Narcotics, and for eight more after that you wore a suit and tie in the Violent Crimes Detail. Then you got shot in the head. And, more or less, you survived. Except for the dent in the back of your skull where the bullet went in, which you can’t really see unless you get your hair cut too short, and the scar under your right eye where the bullet came out, you look pretty much the same. A bit thicker, maybe, a little shaggier, older. But pretty much the same.

  Sometimes, though, people you’ve known for years, people the old Ben Shepard knew, will walk right past you without a hint of recognition.

  You understand.

  You get it.

  Because sometimes you’ll look in the mirror and even you won’t see who you used to be.

  Those are the good days.

  TWO

  Ben didn’t know what woke him. A noise. It must have been a noise. But it was quiet now. One moment he’d been asleep, the next sitting up in his California king, alert and awake.

  He listened to the darkness.

  Maybe his father was up—Peter went to the bathroom two or three times most nights. Ben knew the sounds. The shuffle-scrape of slippers on the hardwood floor. The running faucet. The whoosh of the toilet followed by the low hiss of the tank refilling. But he heard none of those. Not even the spinning rattle of the paper rolling into his father’s shaky hand.

  Nothing.

  He waited.

  Nothing.