IQ(48)
When Magnus got out of prison he couldn’t pay Lucky’s boarding fees so Gunderson let him work it off. He was in poor health and needed some help. Magnus cleaned the kennels, fed and exercised the dogs, helped train them, and prep them for shows. When Lucky died of canine hepatitis, Magnus had him cremated and put some of the ashes in a sniper shell that he carried around his neck.
During his months with Gunderson, Skip got a PhD in pit bulls. The old man had been in the business for thirty-five years and knew everything there was to know about the breed. His dogs had won dozens of titles for conformation, weight pulling, jumping, and agility. Elsa, Gunderson’s wife, hated the dogs and said if she had to dust one more trophy she’d kill herself.
When Gunderson died of a brain tumor, Elsa wanted to sell the property and live with her sister in Pasadena. A place that wasn’t a hundred degrees every day and you could look out your window and see actual human beings. But the real estate agent told her nobody in their right mind would buy a run-down house in the dead center of nowhere saturated with dogshit, so Elsa quit-claimed the property over to Magnus. With her life insurance money she bought a new Buick and left everything else behind, telling Magnus there wasn’t anything she owned that didn’t have dog on it.
Magnus couldn’t believe his luck. What a fluke! He loved the dogs. He already knew them individually from sleeping in the barn, and as Gunderson got sicker and sicker, Magnus became the pack leader. He started calling himself Skip Hanson and changed the name of the kennel to Blue Hill Pit Bulls. He built new kennels and enlarged the exercise yard. He took the dogs hunting in the desert and swimming in Silver Lake. Obedience and attack training every day. The cattle prod for slackers. A little fear went a long way.
Magnus couldn’t describe how he felt when he watched the dogs in the yard, jawing and chasing each other, their coats gleaming in the desert sun. Or when he opened the gate and they surrounded him, jumping and barking, wanting his attention and no one else’s. Or when he went hunting with them in the desert, his army of pit bulls scouring the brush, Skip the squad leader barking out orders. Or when they were in the house floor-surfing and scarfing up Pop-Tart crusts and lying around on the cool pavers and sleeping with their noses under the bed and putting their paws on the windowsills and barking at the wind. The dogs didn’t fight. Skip wouldn’t allow it. Goliath stayed close to him, at his feet or next to him on the couch while he watched TV. None of the other dogs came near.
With Blue Hill up and running, Skip went back to San Bernardino and dug up the stash of Uncle Hugo’s guns he’d hidden in the desert. He did some target shooting to sharpen up. There was unfinished business to take care of.
Jimmy Bonifant, Skip’s former cellmate at Solano, was doing a booming business selling heroin and cocaine to Hollywood’s elite. He had a house in the Hills, drove a Maserati Quattroporte, and his girlfriend was second-runner-up Miss San Diego. Jimmy hadn’t given a thought to Skip until he saw a story on the news about Hugo Vestergard of Guns America and his bookkeeper, Debbie Bellweather, getting shot at close range with a handgun that shot unusual 10mm FBI rounds. On the same day, Jerry Studdard, the guard at Solano, was shot and killed as he was coming out of Bar None, a hangout for prison personnel. Police said the shooter was nearly a mile away and probably ex-military. Jimmy, who paid a Jamaican psychic two dollars a minute to tell him he wouldn’t be killed or busted in the foreseeable future, believed seeing those stories was no accident. The universe was sending him a message, and not coincidentally, one of Jimmy’s sales associates had made off with five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of black tar heroin and a longtime business rival was threatening Jimmy’s life. And Skip was right. [email protected] was easy to remember.
Over the next few years, Skip did jobs for Bonifant and his circle of criminal associates, making a decent but unspectacular living. Skip was almost happy but even with taking care of the dogs, he still had a lot of hours to kill. Out of curiosity, he went to a dog show and couldn’t believe how stupid it was. A judge, who looked like Skip’s parole officer, molested everybody’s dog, made them trot around in a circle and then picked a winner. How was a f*cking mystery. Every dog there, including Skip’s, looked exactly the same, and if you won you got a ribbon that didn’t even have your name on it. Skip wanted to blow people’s minds, freak them out, get that oh shit reaction, only this time he wanted to do it with the dogs. Skip got the idea for a big dog watching the new Godzilla movie. The humongous lizard was stomping around, crushing buildings, collapsing bridges, and causing tidal waves, the people scurrying around like ants; screaming, hiding, praying, crying, and calling out for their loved ones.
One of Gunderson’s dogs was a seventy-five-pound female named Zelda. Gunderson kept it as a pet but to Skip, Zelda was his ticket-to-ride dog, his breakout dog, his dead-guy-that-looks-like-Gilligan dog. It took a lot of phone calls and emails but Skip found a match. An eighty-two-pound two-year-old stud at All American Pit Bulls in Flagstaff, Arizona. Skip bought the dog, mated it with Zelda, and a pup from that litter grew up to be bigger than either of its parents. He kept repeating the process, adding in new bloodlines and the Presa Canario, the dogs getting bigger and fiercer until Skip got his masterpiece, Goliath. One hundred and thirty-two pounds of muscle and bloodlust. Goliath killed the goats. He killed a wild donkey. He attacked a mail truck and chased it all the way to the landfill. He killed the Presa Canario in a minute and a half.