Winter at the Door by Sarah Graves Page B

dogs need, anyway?
    Spud grinned. It didn’t make him attractive, precisely, but it went a long way toward diluting the effect of the dreadlocks and piercings; not much could be done about the tattoos, she supposed, other than long sleeves. But hey, it wasn’t like she’d be sending him to conferences of law-enforcement professionals.
    “That’s Carl Bogart’s dog, isn’t it?” Spud went on. “You’ve got him now? That’s great, it’s a good place for a dog where you live, way out there on the edge of town.”
    “Yeah, well, in Bearkill that’s only a ten-minute walk,” she began jokingly, then recalled suddenly the dark shape that had barreled past her the night before, out of her place.
    It struck her also that the tattoos covering Spud’s arms and neckweren’t hearts with the word
Mom
inked in them, drawings of nude women, or other such traditional decorations.
    Lightning bolts, blood-dripping daggers, screaming skulls … Spud went for the violent end of the body-art spectrum. Even the jewelry in his piercings looked like weaponry: bent silver nails, spikes twisted into gleaming spirals.
    “Really, you’re sure you don’t want me to take him out?” the boy persisted, crouching by the dog.
    What she wanted, suddenly, was for Spud to go away and leave her alone to think. “Thanks, but I haven’t gotten any supplies for him yet, and you’d need a leash to—”
    But Spud was undeterred. “He won’t run away. Only reason he took off when Bogart died was that Carl couldn’t call him back.”
    He hefted the trash bag. “Why’n’t you go on and pick up the stuff you need for him at the Food King. I’ll meet you back here so you can take him home.”
    Not waiting for an answer, he went to the door with the dog right alongside him, then turned back a final time. “It’s nice of you to take Rascal,” he said seriously. “Old Carl loved that dog. And I’ll bet he’s really going to like your backyard.”
    Right
, she thought as he vanished with the trash bag and the dog.
My backyard, yet another thing you know about … how?
    But then the smells of woodsmoke and clothes needing a wash wafted from him again and she realized: if it had been him running past her at her house last night, she’d have known it.
    And he knew where she lived because everyone did, of course, and about the yard, too. Probably the whole town knew her blood type and her bank balance, in fact; all grist for the rumor mill that Missy Brantwell had warned her about.
    Besides, Spud had grown up here. He knew everything about the place.
So don’t get paranoid, Lizzie
, she instructed herself, and let her new helper take Rascal for his evening walk while she went to the Food King, where it turned out a king’s ransom was about what it cost to get ready for pet ownership.
    Counting out the bills at the cash register, she hoped that hiringSpud wouldn’t turn out to be similarly expensive, or if it was, that money wasn’t the only thing her own snap decision to go along with his wishes on the matter ended up costing her.
    She was still thinking this, meanwhile loading bags of dog kibble, biscuits, a leash, and a synthetic chew-bone the size of a brontosaurus femur (its packaging said Bacon! Flavored!) into the car’s back seat when from the shadows at the rear of the store’s parking lot came a yell of distress.
    And then a whole lot more of them.
    “Help! Help! Help!” Just the one word, wailed over and over again in a voice that was high and ragged, left no doubt in her mind that this was not a joke.
    Vaulting a concrete Jersey barrier, she jogged sideways to avoid a stray shopping cart and raced across the asphalt. Under the lights by the store entrance, she swerved around to where the compressors, the trash bins, and the loading dock stood, casting deep shadows that hid …
    “Help!” At the far end of the lot where old shopping carts and trash lay scattered …“Help! They’re killing me!”
    Finally she