Devoted(110)
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Bradley Knacker had never gotten a degree in psychology, had never gone to college, had never seen any purpose for high school other than that it provided a convenient pool of targets, smaller kids he could intimidate and beat senseless and from whom he could steal. His talent and genius were for violence, from common street thuggery to the planning and execution of murders made to look like accidents and suicides, or that set up innocent people to take the fall for the crime. In spite of his high homicidal intelligence, Bradley was in other matters often slow on the uptake. When he heard the howling, he looked to the drapery-covered windows, because he could not conceive that such a large pack of animals could be in the house. When the beasts erupted into the living room, he was amazed, but he didn’t at once realize that they were anything more than an uncommon number of pets, until they attacked Verbotski and took him down as if he really were nothing more than a candy-ass Bureau agent instead of a hard-core blood junkie who killed people for money and fun. It was his nature to think of the animals not as defenders of home and family but instead as attack dogs trained to kill. At that instant, Bradley Knacker’s homicidal brilliance kicked in big-time, and with the mathematical felicity of a certified public accountant, he required half a second to compute that the snarling horde bolting toward him constituted an overwhelming force against which a ten-round pistol and a Taser were inadequate. He then did what he had done in high school when a brute bigger than he was made a move on him: He turned and ran, this time toward the connecting door to the dining room. That didn’t work out well.
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Speer admired snakes. His only pets were garden snakes kept in a large aquarium and a freedom-of-the-house boa constrictor to which he fed mice and gerbils and rabbits that he bought in quantity. A tattoo of a rattlesnake twined around his left forearm and biceps; on his right arm, it was a cobra. He envied snakes their quickness, their cruelty, and he tried to style himself after them. The moment the dogs appeared, he knew intuitively that somehow they were not just ordinary dogs. Speer wasn’t a complex man. He believed in only five things—violence, sex, money, snakes, and intuition—and he believed in them profoundly, passionately. The instant he saw the coordination among the scores of dogs, he hissed and pivoted and took two steps and hissed and grabbed the boy, intuitively convinced that the dogs would not harm him if he was holding a knife to the kid’s throat. But as he pulled the switchblade from a coat pocket, before he could push the button to spring the blade from the handle, he realized that his snake-quick response to the snarling dogs had been matched by Ben Hawkins’s snake-quick reaction to him, when the cold muzzle of a pistol pressed hard against his right temple.
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When Verbotski reached under his suit coat, cross-body with his right hand, going boldly for the pistol on his left hip, instead of reaching with his left hand for his Taser, Rodchenko knew that his partner had picked up on some tell, some detail that convinced him the operation was about to go wrong. Rodchenko reached for his own pistol, intent on killing them all, everyone except Megan Bookman. It would take about four seconds—two of them sitting down, easy head shots, easier chest shots. He actually got the weapon out of his holster, and then all the dogs in the world cascaded down the steps, through the foyer, into the living room, big bitches and big sonsofbitches, enough teeth for ten nightmares. There was supposed to be a dog, one dog, and Rodchenko had been given permission to kill it, a pleasure to which he looked forward. Now it seemed that the dog had known Rodchenko was coming for it and had called in backup of its own kind, more dogs than Rodchenko could kill before they took him down. Over the years, he’d been bitten three times, and every dog that had ever crossed his path had looked at him as though it wanted not only to bite him but to tear out his throat. All dogs looked at him the way wise cops looked at him, the way attractive women with street smarts looked at him, the way mothers with tender young daughters looked at him: with suspicion, disgust, and contempt.
Although Rodchenko had his pistol out and pointed at the head of the Latina in the armchair, Megan Bookman held a 9 mm Heckler & Koch in a professional two-hand grip, aimed at his face. Point-blank. Maybe ten or eleven feet. In spite of her grip and stance, maybe she was a piss-poor shot. If he drilled the brain of the Latina, and Megan squeezed off a round but missed him, and he pivoted and fired and took her out, at least he’d have the satisfaction of wasting two of them before he was dragged down and savaged. Better to go out with a double score than to die having failed to make this douchebag and her friends pay a price. This strategy made perfect sense to Rodchenko—except that all the mean-eyed dogs staring at him and that forest of dripping teeth so unnerved him, he wasn’t able to keep a steady grip on his pistol. His heart boomed, shaking his arms, and the gun jumped left, right, off target, so maybe he wouldn’t be able to hit even an elephant at four feet.
“Drop it, drop it now, shithead,” she said, and as she spoke, people appeared in the foyer, having come down the stairs in the wake of the dogs. Men and women, all ages and races. Twenty, thirty, maybe more. Some of them had guns.
As dogs jostled around Rodchenko, snarling and nipping at his shoes, at his pants, he understood that something extraordinary was going on here, something stranger than just the startling number of animals, and he dropped the weapon. “Don’t let them kill me.”