Devoted(83)
Seeing the pistol in Megan’s hand, the woman rose to her feet. “What’s happening here, what is this?”
“We’re not the problem,” Ben assured her. “Maybe the guy coming up the front walk is. Step aside. Get behind Megan.”
As the man came onto the porch, Ben said, “Megan, do you know him?”
She looked at the visitor through the sidelight, and he nodded at her, and she said, “I’ve seen him around a few times. I think maybe he works for the city.”
“Stay ready,” Ben said, and he opened the door.
The guy had a business card. “I need to see Mrs. Bookman. It’s an urgent matter.”
According to the card, he was Dr. Carson Conroy, the medical examiner for Pinehaven County.
“See her about what?” Ben asked.
“Lee Shacket has escaped psychiatric confinement at the county hospital.”
Kipp pivoted from Rosa Leon and raced up the stairs to Woody.
From a distance came the rising scream of sirens.
Bella on the Wire
Santa Rosa, California. The family room of the Montell house.
Bella finally had to return The Magician’s Elephant to the bookshelf from which she’d removed it.
The story was so good, she didn’t want it to be spoiled by all the interruptions.
And there were a lot of interruptions.
Something was definitely happening out there.
History was being made tonight.
The Mysterium culture and history were not conveyed generation to generation in written texts. Their kind had no hands with which to write.
Their culture was vocal, if telepathic conversation qualified as vocal.
They passed their stories from generation to generation on the Wire, as if around a campfire.
Their history, such as they knew it, dated back only four generations. Or about fifty years.
Even as smart as they were and even though they considered the maintenance of their oral history to be a sacred duty, they knew that not everything in it was reliable.
When a story was passed from one friend to another, details inevitably changed in the retelling.
This wasn’t because anyone lied.
Anyway, dogs didn’t lie. They couldn’t.
They weren’t sure why they couldn’t, but they couldn’t.
Yet details changed in the retelling, because their memories were, like those of human beings, not perfectly reliable.
Their history, therefore, had a certain quality of myth.
Regarding their origins, every story attributed their genesis to human beings.
The first of their kind came, so the legend had it, from a genetics laboratory. Born from experiments in enhanced intelligence.
They said the Pentagon funded this research.
The military was hoping to create intelligent dogs to serve as spies and perform reconnaissance in urban warfare.
Legend identified several places in California where those experiments might have taken place.
Devoted Mysterians had visited every potential cradle of their civilization, but found no laboratories.
They found housing developments. A supermarket. A shabby mini-mall. An athletic club. A tract of marshland.
They found a retirement home. A cheesy strip club with pole dancers. A sports park with baseball and soccer fields.
Of course the facility might be secret, lying underground or otherwise disguised.
Nothing, however, could be concealed from canine olfactory perception. Their noses revealed to them more clues than all the wits of all the detectives ever born.
But they found no hint of a hidden laboratory.
Now, on this night of nights, when the Wire hummed with news, Bella sensed history in the making. A history different from any they had ever imagined.
Something was happening out there.
Something big. Something wonderful.
Just today, in Pinehaven, Kipp had found a boy who could use the Wire.
Vulcan, a German shepherd, had reported a previously unknown community of their kind in Southern California.
Caesar and Cleo Ishigawa of San Jose had produced a healthy litter of six.
Just half an hour earlier, word came that Lucy and Ricky, companions of Nancy Peltz, of Vallejo, were parents of five pups.
More of their kind had been born in one day than in the past three or four years combined.
And now, from out of Oregon issued a transmission on the Wire alike to that from Vulcan in distant La Jolla.
According to a mixed breed named Ginger, a community of forty lived in and around the town of Corvallis.
The Oregon group had long hoped to make contact with other communities on the Wire, which they called “the Network.” They had tried for years without success—until now.
Event by event, Bella became more excited.
While the Montell family slept, Bella moved restlessly through the house.
She went to her water dish.
She went to the kitchen drawer where her cookies were kept.
She went to her toy box in a corner of the family room.
She didn’t want water or cookies or a toy.
At first she didn’t understand what she wanted.
And then she knew. She wanted to run.
All of the good news had incited in her such joy that she could not be still.
Bella ran through the family room. Sprinted along the first-floor hall.