Mercy Dogs Read online

  “Thank you,” you say to her. “You saved our lives.”

  Grace laughs at the hyperbole and hands you a bag of ground Starbucks House Blend, decaf. You feel like an idiot.

  Half an hour ago, you’d been on the verge of an anxiety attack because Peter was already up and asking for coffee and you hadn’t realized you’d run out until you tried to brew the morning pot. You hadn’t showered. You were still wearing the sweatpants and T-shirt you’d worn to bed. You were still trying to shake off the nightmare that woke you an hour later than usual.

  Then you heard a tapping on the patio door and saw Grace outside. You opened the door and she said, “I’m going to Ralphs. You guys need anything?”

  Now, with a cup of coffee in each hand, you go out and join her and your father at the patio table. If either of them can tell you’ve been crying, they don’t let on.

  He stood there in the middle of the room, staring at the pale-yellow wall behind the king bed’s headboard. It had really worked. Even more surprising was that when he opened his hand and held it in front of his chest, it was no longer shaking.

  What had happened? Just a few minutes earlier, he’d been in the lobby trying to derail an impending anxiety attack, and now here he was in Rob’s hotel room. The idea had come to him and he’d acted on it. He hadn’t thought about it. He hadn’t considered his options. He hadn’t doubted.

  Ben had taken action and now, at least for a moment, he felt a kind of satisfaction that seemed unfamiliar to him. The more he thought about it, though, the more he felt the calmness beginning to slip away.

  Focus, he reminded himself. Breathe.

  No one else was inside.

  In front of him, the bed looked like Rob had made it himself after he’d gotten up. It wasn’t as neat and tightly tucked as it would have been if the housekeeping staff had done it, but it was more than a rudimentary effort. Did people do that in hotels? Make the beds themselves? He didn’t think so. At least, he’d never done it himself.

  On the desk was a thick manila folder. Before he examined it, though, he took a quick look around the room. In the closet hung an unwrinkled navy-blue suit and what he believed was the shirt Rob had been wearing when they’d had lunch downstairs. A carry-on-sized suitcase was perched on the folding luggage stand. There were no extra shoes or dirty clothes. In the bathroom on the counter was a small waxed-canvas toiletry bag, and one apparently used towel was balled up on the floor next to the shower. A blue toothbrush had been placed in a water glass so the bristles wouldn’t touch the counter.

  Rob kept things neat.

  Ben made his way over to the desk by the window that looked out toward the airport. A jet was taking off. He watched as it sped up the runway and into the sky. As it grew smaller in the distance, he couldn’t help but wonder if his father had been watching.

  What he’d been hoping to find when he made the snap decision to lie his way into the room, he wasn’t sure. He’d been concerned for Rob, sure, but a part of him knew even before he came upstairs that wasn’t really what was driving his impulsivity. No, it was information he was after.

  Rob knew things about Grace.

  Ben wanted to know them, too. He wondered how much time he had before Rob came back. It was worth the risk, he decided, so he sat down at the desk and opened the folder.

  The first page was a printout of cell-phone records. It had been years since he’d looked at something like that, and the formatting was different than it had been back when documents like that had been a regular part of his job. There was more information now, more columns, more numbers that he didn’t know the meaning of. He started turning the pages—there were maybe forty or fifty here—and saw similar documents. Not all phone records—some were bank and credit-card statements, others were spreadsheets and forms he didn’t immediately recognize. Some were stapled, some paper-clipped, others single sheets. Disappointment washed over him.

  There was nothing here that would be helpful without analysis, and maybe not even then, without the context he was sorely lacking. He had hoped for straightforward reports and case notes. Names. Addresses. Photos.

  A more thorough search of the room revealed nothing. The dresser drawers were empty. Rob’s suitcase only held a few spare items of clothing, socks and underwear, a T-shirt. The kinds of things you don’t hang up.

  Maybe there was something in the small safe on the closet shelf, but it was locked and he’d never know.

  He still had no idea how much time he had, but he decided to try to make the most of the opportunity and went back to the desk. He opened the file folder again, took out his phone, and opened the camera app. Slowly and methodically, he worked his way through the pages and took a photo of each one, careful to replace the paper clips and stapled packets just as they had been.

  Forty-eight pages into the process, he heard the unmistakable key-card click of someone unlocking the hotel-room door.

  TWELVE

  Ben quickly closed the folder, stood up from the desk, and faced the door, his mind grasping for possible explanations that Rob might buy for his presence in the room.

  But the man who opened the door wasn’t Rob.

  The stranger took two steps into the room before he realized he wasn’t alone. He was clearly as surprised as Ben. Immediately he shifted his stance, taking a small step forward with his left foot and turning his right hip back toward the door. He lifted his right shoulder as his hand opened and slid around behind him. “Who are you?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  The door closed itself behind him with a click.

  Two things were obvious to Ben. One, the guy was armed, and two, he was trained well enough to instinctually prepare himself to draw his weapon, but not so well that he was at all subtle about it. The man was about the same height as Ben but leaner and more muscular, with blond hair cut short.

  “What am I doing here?” Ben said. “Rob gave me his key and told me to meet him here. Who the fuck are you?”

  There was confusion in the man’s eyes.

  Ben watched and waited for what seemed like a very long time.

  Something seemed to click in the man’s head and the confusion gave way to an angry gleam.

  Before the stranger’s hand could clear his shirt and get a solid grip on his gun, Ben’s shoulder was already buried in his chest, driving him backward and ramming him into the door.

  Ben pulled him back into the room and body slammed him to the floor, bringing his own weight down on top of the stranger. The man was gasping for air, but Ben didn’t give him a chance to catch his breath as he punched him wildly again and again, only stopping when he felt a sharp pain shoot up his hand and into his wrist.

  Looking down at the bloody and swollen face lolling to the side on the gray carpet, Ben tried to understand what had happened. He rolled the stranger onto his side, pulled the Glock out of the holster behind his hip—it was the same model Ben had carried himself when he’d been on the job—and tossed it onto the bed. It was clear the man wasn’t going to be getting up on his own anytime soon.

  Ben hoisted himself to his feet while the last ninety seconds replayed in his head. He had to steady himself on the wall with his hand.

  His left hand. The right was throbbing and bloody. Was it the stranger’s blood or his own? It took a few seconds for him to realize it was both.

  The man he’d beaten was nearly motionless on the floor, and Ben realized that from the sink in the bathroom he’d still be able to see the man’s feet if he started moving. He went in and ran cold water on his swollen right hand. As the blood rinsed away, the throbbing became more intense. Outside the door, one of the feet moved. Ben shut off the water, grabbed a hand towel from the rod next to the counter, and went to check. The stranger had rolled onto his side and thrown up on the carpet.

  The sour acidic odor reached Ben and stimulated his gag reflex. The sensation of having to hold back his own vomit triggered something, and the adrenaline-fueled confidence and certainty f
lowing through him were flushed away and it felt like a hand had taken hold of his intestines and started twisting. He looked across the room and saw the folder on the desk. Cautiously, he stepped around the softly moaning body on the floor. As he reached out for the documents, he tried to steady his shaking hand.

  Wait.

  Could the folder be what the stranger had come for?

  And if it was, would they come after him to get it?

  Almost everything in it was now in Ben’s phone. Could there be anything in the last few pages worth taking the risk?

  No, Ben decided. It wasn’t worth it.

  He squatted down. “Can you hear me?”

  The man mumbled something Ben couldn’t understand. He wasn’t unresponsive, but he wasn’t alert, either. Ben patted him down. No wallet. No ID. Just a Samsung smartphone, a spare magazine for the Glock, and a few hundred dollars folded into a money clip.

  He couldn’t open the phone without a code. There didn’t seem to be a fingerprint sensor he could use to access it, so he went back into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet. Then he picked up the Glock on the bed and tucked it into his waistband at the small of his back.

  As he stood surveying the room, a flash of memory struck him.

  Another hotel room, a long time ago, somewhere far away, quadruple checking to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, Kate grinning and teasing him about his obsessiveness.

  Should he try to wipe everything clean of his fingerprints? Not enough time. And he doubted he could even remember everything he’d touched.

  Should he try to help the stranger? Maybe. He probably had a concussion. A broken nose. Maybe the jaw, too. If he fully lost consciousness, he could choke on his own blood and phlegm. No. Fuck him. He’d been going for his gun. He wouldn’t have done that unless he was willing to use it.

  Should he do something else? The answer to that question had to be yes, but Ben knew he’d never be able to figure out what else it should be.

  He glanced one more time in the bathroom, grabbed the towel spotted with the blood from his knuckles, took one more deep breath, and went to the door. Just as he was about to grasp the handle, he stopped and turned around to look at the stranger on the floor.

  Ben cautiously walked back to him. He was still only semiconscious, but there was a hint of fear in him as he saw Ben stand over him and reach into his pocket.

  Ben took out his phone and snapped half a dozen pictures of the man’s swollen and battered face. An ID might be difficult, but it would still be better to have the photos.

  He was out in the hall and halfway to the elevator when he heard the door close itself behind him.

  Downstairs, he exited the hotel through a side door to the parking lot so he wouldn’t have to pass the front desk.

  It had started to rain again, just a drizzle, really, but the forecast had said it would come down harder that night.

  When he pulled the car up to the curb, Ben realized he had no memory of the drive home. He’d been so focused on what had happened, what he’d done and what the repercussions might be, that he had zoned out and made the trip on autopilot. The realization frightened him. During the early months of his recovery, he’d often lose time. Sometimes he’d have complete blackouts, but later, as his health improved, they became less frequent and were supplanted by incidents where his mind would get fixated on something—an idea, a fear, a memory—and he’d find himself somewhere with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. He’d be on the couch watching TV one minute, get lost in his head, and find himself in the backyard. Once he’d even gone from sitting down at lunch with a turkey sandwich to washing the dishes from a dinner he couldn’t remember eating. Had it ever happened while he was driving? He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The blood on his knuckles was starting to dry and scab, and his whole hand was swollen and throbbing. He needed ice and something for the pain, but he was afraid to go into the house. What would he tell Peter?

  On his way to the door, he realized the sole of his left shoe was brushing the concrete with each step. What was happening? His gait was off. The same way it had been after his shooting. It had taken him two years of physical therapy to overcome it. High steppage, the neurologist had called it. He’d worked as hard on that as he had on anything, because he knew if he could get past it, he’d finally be able to walk through a crowd again without anyone noticing him.

  Why was it back now? Was it just the stress and exertion, or had he injured something other than his hand? Could it be neurological? Jesus. If it was, he might—

  The door opened and Peter said, “Are you okay?” Ben could hear the worry in the high timbre of his voice.

  “I will be.” Ben carefully stepped up onto the porch, right foot first so his father wouldn’t notice what was going on with the left. “I tripped and fell down in the parking lot at the drugstore.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “It’s not too bad.” He lifted his arm and displayed his scraped and swollen knuckles. “Fell on top of my hand, though. Need to put some ice on it.”

  Peter helped him dig an old pot they hadn’t used for years out of the cupboard. They dumped half the ice from the freezer into it and filled it the rest of the way with water. Peter lugged it over to the dining-room table, careful not to let any slosh over the sides.

  The ice water stung at first, but soon his hand started to numb. Ben looked at the empty coffee cup on the counter. His father had fashioned a makeshift lid out of a paper towel folded into quarters. “You need something to eat, don’t you?”

  “No, I’m okay,” Peter said. “I had a . . .” He couldn’t find the word he was looking for. “A little one?” He held his thumb and forefinger up, half an inch apart.

  “A Hershey’s bar?” That was pretty much the only thing he still got for himself. Sometimes he’d get a bottle of water out of the fridge, but usually if he opened up the door, he’d spot the chocolate in the butter compartment and break off a piece.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Ben bought them by the package, six each, specifically for his father, but somehow Peter always thought he was doing something wrong when he ate them, taking candy away from his child.

  “That’s all right, Dad. You can always have as much chocolate as you want. We’re still trying to gain some weight, okay?”

  Peter nodded. “Does it hurt bad?”

  Even the sting of the icy water had faded. When he moved his fingers in the pot, he still felt a sharp pain in the back of his hand and there was stiffness in his wrist, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been. “No, I think it’s going to be okay.”

  He hadn’t noticed that the Echo on the counter was still playing music until Peter smiled and started tapping the table in rhythm to Buck Owens singing “Act Naturally.”

  After three cycles of twenty minutes in and twenty minutes out of the ice water, Ben’s hand felt pretty good. The knuckles weren’t as bad as he had feared—only the first two had lost any skin, and they didn’t look like much more than scrapes. Most of the swelling had disappeared, too. He’d been worried about a metacarpal fracture, but that was seeming less likely.

  Ben knew he had to talk to Rob as soon as he could. He didn’t know how to get a hold of him, though. The burner phone Rob wanted him to call had been in the hotel room. Would it still be there? Would Rob have it by now? Ben thought about how long it had taken Rob to reply to some of the text messages. Maybe he always left the phone in the room. That would make sense. He’d go out and do something, then only check it and answer when he came back.

  Could he have come back already? Ben tried to figure out how long he’d been in the room. He really had no idea. The initial search and then the later altercation hadn’t taken that much time at all, maybe two or three minutes each at the most. The variable he couldn’t account for was how long he had spent taking photos of the documents in the folder. It could have been five minutes or it could have been twenty-five. He re
ally had no idea. Was there a way to figure it out?

  He opened the camera on his phone and looked at the picture of the first page. The time stamp told him it was taken at 10:14 a.m. The last at 10:23. He must have been out of the room by 10:30 at the very latest.

  It wasn’t a stretch at all that Rob could have been half an hour late. And without the only phone he used to talk to Ben, how could he have let him know he’d be late?

  The stiffness in his hand made typing difficult and clumsy, but he sent Rob a text message. Thinking vagueness would be to his advantage if the stranger had somehow managed to recover enough to leave with the phone, he wrote I was there. Contact me ASAP and hit “Send.”

  Ten minutes later, when Ben had just about given up on a quick reply, he got one.

  we need to meet

  Where? When?

  An hour later, when he got up to ice his hand again, there was still no answer.

  The real rain hadn’t come yet, so Ben spent half an hour walking back and forth on the damp grass in the backyard. One thousand four hundred thirty-eight steps. His gait seemed to have returned to normal. What had been going on when he’d come back from the hotel, he couldn’t figure out. It could have just been the stress. He’d taken a lorazepam to calm himself down while he was waiting for the text from Rob that never came, so stress would make sense. Maybe it was just coming down from the adrenaline rush from the fight. He hadn’t experienced anything like that since before his injury, so he had no frame of reference by which to judge it.

  Or did he?

  During Peter’s recovery from the last surgery, about two-thirds of the way through the two-week hospital stay, one of his father’s doctors saw Ben walking back from the cafeteria and asked if he was all right. He’d said he was just exhausted, and the doctor asked if he was still seeing a neurologist. Most of the staff knew about his history—one of the night-shift nurses had recognized Ben from his own hospitalization years earlier, and soon everyone else seemed to know the story. He told the doctor he was two months away from his next neuro consult and asked why she was curious. She said he’d been shuffling in a way she hadn’t seen before and wanted to make sure he was okay.