IQ(35)

“Take this fella here,” Harry said. A fawn-colored pit bull had its paws up on the chain link of its kennel and was barking relentlessly like it wouldn’t stop until it was let out, fed, yelled at, played with, talked to. Anything. Dodson looked a little panicky, hurrying ahead to get past the dog. “Fella brought her in yesterday,” Harry said. “Tells me he got the dog to protect his sports car while he was at work, it was some sort of classic. He left the dog in the garage all day. Well, I guess the dog got fed up because the fella comes home and the car’s convertible top was torn off, the seats were ripped up, and the running boards were chewed right off the car and you know what this idiot said? I didn’t expect the dog to do something like that. I didn’t expect the dog to do something like that. I said how would you feel if I locked you in a garage all day? Wouldn’t you want to destroy my car? Go buy a burglar alarm, you cheap bastard. Time to feed the birds.”

“I like birds,” Dodson said.


Harry peered into a wire cage at five baby crows in a salad bowl lined with paper towels. They had no feathers yet, just patchy fur with gray skin showing through. They were waiting to be fed, squalling with their beaks wide open. Harry fed them cat food on an ice cream stick. “You know,” he said, “you may find this hard to believe but there was a time when the pit bull was the dog least likely to bite you. It’s true.”

“None of them live around me,” Dodson said. “I know pits that’ll dress up like Santa Claus and come down your chimney to bite you.”

Harry looked at him. “This goes back to England in the 1800s,” he said. “Dogfighting was as popular as cage fighting is today. Now you’d think fighting dogs would be high-strung and dangerous around people but they weren’t. They couldn’t be. Before the fight started you had to let your opponent wash your dog just in case you put something on the dog’s coat that was slippery or tasted bad. So you couldn’t have a dog that would bite a stranger even if the man was pouring water on its head. And the dogs were valuable. If your dog got hurt during a fight you took a break and patched him up. Well, if you’re going to get bit that’s the likeliest time, when the dog’s all hyped up and in pain. So even if the dog had a tendency to bite you culled him. Put him down. In other words, human aggressiveness was bred out of the breed.”

“Yeah, well, it’s back in again,” Dodson said.

“You can blame your teenagers for that,” Harry said. “It’s Murphy’s other law. Anything that involves a teenager will be a goddamn horror show. Little brain-dead creeps breed aggressive dogs to aggressive dogs and then train them to be vicious. Sick, if you ask me. You treat a pit like a member of the family, socialize it, train it, and you’ll never get a better pet. But most people are stupid and lazy and when they find out how much work that is they throw up their hands and chain the dog to a tree like it’s the dog’s fault.”

Isaiah had a copy of the surveillance tape on his tablet. “Take a look at this, Harry,” he said.

Harry watched the tape, tipping his head back to find the sweet spot on his bifocals. “Just when you think you’ve seen everything,” he said. “Your average pit weighs around sixty pounds. This dog must be a hundred and thirty. That’s as big as a bull mastiff. Unheard of. Go back to the beginning where the dog is in the kitchen.” Harry watched the dog come through the doggie door, hold there for a few moments, and then go after Cal. “I don’t like this,” Harry said, “I don’t like this one bit. The dog saw that fella and attacked. No warning, no posturing, no hesitation—and dogs, unlike your goddamn teenagers, need a reason to attack. It might be a dog reason but it’s still a reason and I don’t see one. This fella wasn’t on the dog’s territory. He wasn’t being threatening and there was nothing to fight over like food or a female and he didn’t run until the dog went after him.” Harry seemed to shrink a little, the fierce eyes weary now. “Dogs,” he said. “Devoted, courageous, love you even if you’re an *. They’ll do anything we ask of them and you know what this breeder did? He trained the dog to attack on sight.”

Harry closed the cage and moved on to another. Three baby hummingbirds huddled together in a ball of cotton, each no bigger than a bumblebee. Harry fed them sugar water with a syringe. “I told my neighbor Peterman not to cut back his boxwood until nesting season was over but he went and did it anyway. Lucky I found these little guys. Their metabolism is so high you’ve got to feed them every twenty minutes. Peterman. Ought to be sterilized.”

“Harry, how did that dog get so big?” Isaiah said.

“Well, it might be a one-off, like a kid that grows up to be seven feet tall and all his brothers and sisters are normal heights. But one-offs are rarer than hens’ teeth. You could breed a hundred litters and not get one and with a dog this big you’d expect the conformation to be out of whack. You know, his proportions would be way off and there’d be a deformity or two. But this dog looks like any other pit. Definitely not show quality but good enough for most people. If I was to guess I’d say the dog was bred this way. Bred for size. Not an easy thing to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, let’s say you do have a big dog. Well, you could mate it to a regular-size dog and you might get big pups and you might not. The surest way is to go out and find another big dog. Now it’s no guarantee but you’re more likely to get big pups that way and if you’re lucky one of them will grow up to be bigger than its parents. Then you take that dog, breed it to another big dog, get an even bigger pup, and then it’s wash, rinse, and repeat, each generation getting bigger and bigger until you’ve got the giant on your video. It’s like my brother, Barry. He wasn’t too bright to begin with and he goes and marries a woman who’s thirty-four years old and flunked her GED twice. Then they have a son that’s dumber than a box of hair, he gets married and has kids that play hide-and-seek in the rosebushes. Can I see that kitchen shot again?” Harry held the tablet this way and that. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. “This dog has been crossbred. Somewhere in his pedigree, a pit bull parent was bred to something else. Happens all the time. People breed pits to Dobermans, Rottweilers, Catahoula Leopard dogs, all kinds of things. Now it’s hard to make out here but your dog has some dewlap, wrinkling on the forehead, the legs are a little long and the tail’s got a curve in it. Could be Great Dane or mastiff but I’m thinking Presa Canario, which would explain a lot of things.”