Flawed Dogs (21 page)

This was the best Westminster ever.

Sam reached the top of the stairs, the arena ceiling blocking further ascent. Cassius was nearly there himself. Sam looked around for escape. A single narrow steel catwalk stretched the length of the ceiling, reaching the huge, angled score boxes hanging from the center of the roof, just below the skylight. Sam dashed across. Cassius reached the girders himself and followed.

Heidy was close behind. She looked down to the distant floor and all the people staring up like ants and she had to fight off dizziness. She sucked in a deep breath and started moving across the spidery walkway toward Sam and Cassius.

Sam reached the score boxes and leapt to the top of the first one of the four, each pointed slightly downward toward the seats in different directions. He lost his footing and nearly slid off, his rear foot at the edge.

The red carpet was directly below, almost two hundred feet.

Cassius landed several yards in front of him, facing him straight on. His voice was calm. Cold. Cruel. And familiar.
“It’s time, dear, departed Sam. Three years later . . . and you’re in the same place, aren’t you, old boy? Another broken, lost, unwanted stray. Just take a single step backward and make things simple. It’s so easy. You did it before.”

Cassius was right, thought Sam. There was nothing left. No reason to keep going, really. No purpose remaining. There was that word for a dog again. Purpose.

Do I have one left now?
Sam thought.

He looked down to the floor far below. Stepping off would be easy.

“Cassius,” said a voice behind them. They both turned to see Heidy on the box with them, crouched on her hands and knees. Cassius’s heart sank as he saw the look on her face. A look of coldness and contempt. “Cassius . . . it was always you, wasn’t it? You took the baby. You turned us against Sam. It was you.”

Suddenly, the great beautiful show dog knew that his life could never be the same now that Heidi knew. She would hate him. Fear him. Resent him. And finally, he would become that which no dog can ever really endure:

And in that same instant, Cassius’s heart took the full impact and it did what all dog hearts can do, whether bright or dark, warm or cold, pure or foul:

It broke.

Cassius turned toward Heidy, his lips curled into a new and different rage. His wrath was now upon
her.
He lowered his perfectly groomed head and moved toward the young woman. Fear swept Heidy’s face and she crawled backward . . . but had nowhere to go.

Cassius bent his long legs low, ready to spring toward Heidy with muscles taut. He opened his jaws.

But Sam leapt first.

With a guttural scream, the small dachshund was suddenly upon him from behind, wrapping his long jaws tightly around the perfectly shaved neck while he wrapped his front legs around the poodle’s frizzy chest. They fell on their side, teeth flashing and jaws snapping, their legs and feet kicking the air and each other in a blurred frenzy of violent movement.

Far below, the crowd screamed, too stunned to move. The announcer on the loudspeakers urged calm until order could be returned.

Order was not close to returning.

The flailing dogs caused Heidy to move backward and slip off the large score box, falling six feet to a smaller box hanging below, holding the clock. Her feet then lost their purchase on the smooth surface and she slid off this, catching herself to keep from falling to her death by a weak grasp on the single brace of aluminum with a single hand.

In the roaring audience Hamish stared up in horror at his niece. Mrs. Beaglehole sat next to him, mouth agape, words stuck in her bovine throat like a chicken leg.

Sam’s commando squad of mutts watched the fighting dogs and the now-dangling Heidy from the catwalk fifty feet away at the edge of the arena ceiling. Ol’ Blue saw a large coil of thin rope, used to pull up crates of replacement bulbs for the scoreboard. He picked it up in his teeth and dropped half of it to the floor far below. Several men ran to it and grasped it, since that’s what humans seem to do when faced with a dangling rope.

Ol’ Blue faced Pooft. “How’s the digestion today, top gun?” Blue asked. Pooft looked down at the floor hundreds of feet below and then back at the blue dog.

“Troublesome,” he said. This was good news.

Blue turned to Jeeves. “Good day to fly, pal.”

“Why not?” said the hound.

She turned to the six-ounce Willy. “Willy, secure the goods.”

“Right,” said the tiny terrier.

With that, Pooft hopped onto Jeeves’s back and lay down, much as a jet engine might sit atop a Cessna. Willy took the rope end in his mouth and did what a pair of hands might have: zip around the two dogs, building a hasty but effective harness that strapped them tightly together. Ol’ Blue pointed the two of them at Heidy, still dangling and close to losing her grip. Bug and Fabio steadied the catwalk and made sure the rope was clear.

“Ignition,” said Blue.

The explosive blast suddenly hushed the crowd below. High above their heads, they watched two inelegant mutts rocket off the end of the catwalk on a small but explosive burst of flaming gas from poorly digested kibble. Maintaining altitude with the help of wing-like jowls, they sailed just over the head of the young woman hanging from the clock box and then plunged earthward, their momentum and fuel exhausted.

They dropped only a few feet since the rope grew taut across the clock box framework and was held firm by the men far below. The dogs dangled, as a very heavy kite might from a very high tree.

As targeted, the rope lay within inches of Heidy’s free hand. She grasped the line and held on, her feet wrapping around the rope.

Slowly, the men on the ground fed out their end of the rope and lowered the entire group to the red carpet two hundred feet below.

Heidy pushed away from Uncle Hamish, who’d rushed to help her. She looked back up at the dogs still fighting to the death above their heads.

“SAM! SAM!” she yelled, but the crowd was too loud for her voice to carry.

High overhead, caught in Cassius’s death grip, Sam’s strength was giving out. Blood streamed from tooth punctures, and his flesh was ripped across his back from manicured nails. Cassius held a fold of his neck in his teeth, slowly suffocating the small dog. Sam—on his back—pushed against the big poodle with paws too short. He had only enough breath to croak out a final question in a whispered rasp.

“Someday . . . somewhere . . . you’re going to kill her too, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Cassius, whispering through the teeth clenched on Sam’s neck. “If she won’t love me.”

“She won’t,” said Sam.

Sam moved his eyes up past the reddening face of Cassius and saw Tusk and Madam staring down in horror at him through the roof skylight.

“Now!” called out Sam, despite the jaws that pulled his neck.

Madam stared down. She thought she’d heard him say the word, but couldn’t believe it. It would kill them.

“Now,” said Sam again, mustering up the last shreds of his strength. “NOW!”

On the roof, Madam turned to her huge partner and yelled, “Now, Tusk! Do it now!”

Tusk turned and leapt. His full weight hit the fourth leg of the water tank support, buckling it. The tank groaned as the other steel legs bent and broke and finally gave way to gravity. As Tusk and Madam dove to safety, the round tank landed flat on its side, bursting its roof with a cannon shot explosion, releasing its ten thousand gallons of pudding-like mud onto the skylight. The glass shattered and the liquid burst through like a brown waterfall, hitting the top of the score boxes just below it. Cassius never knew what it was that slammed into them, carrying both dogs over the edge and falling, tumbling, spinning to the never-to-be-clean-again red carpet two hundred feet below.