Rottweiler Rescue (25 page)

The opening wasn’t very wide, and the bar that was supposed to detach and allow the window to swing wider stuck fast. Forgetting everything I’d ever learned about gun safety, I used the butt of the pistol to beat at the bar until it fell away.

Somehow I had to find the strength to boost the uncooperative Robo up and force him to squeeze through the opening. I needn’t have worried. As soon as I turned from the opening toward Robo, he jumped up, front paws on the sill, back legs scrambling. I got under his back end and lifted, taking a beating from his hind legs as he launched himself out the window.

By the time I got off the floor, he was at the edge of the overhang, crouched on his back end, his front legs dancing at the edge as he worked himself up to jump off the roof.

“No!” I yelled, wasting my breath, knowing he wouldn’t listen. “Wait for me.”

Finding a way to get out the window myself was more difficult than getting Robo out. The sling hampered every effort. Pulling it off and throwing it on the floor, I dragged my desk chair to the window, coughing now, as more and more smoke filled the room.

After dropping the gun out, I followed it, wiggling through the opening head first. The drop sent waves of pain through my shoulder and collarbone. Fighting a swirling dizziness that I was afraid meant I would pass out, I sat still, sucking in great gulps of clean air, then watched helplessly as Robo stopped playing at it, lowered his front end over the side as far as he could, and let gravity take over.

By the time I crawled to the edge, there was no sign of him. I said a small prayer of gratitude that his trailing leash hadn’t caught on the roof and then another asking for help in reaching the ground safely myself. I tried to find a way to hang from the edge and drop down, but was afraid my one good arm wouldn’t hold my weight.

The shingles beneath me began to tremble. Cracks and groans of wood splitting and tearing away from the house filled the air. The prospect of falling to the ground amidst old wood, roofing, and nails gave me courage.

I tucked the gun into the waistband of my jeans, lay down along the edge, then eased my weight over the side, hanging by my left arm and leg. When my full weight hit my hand and arm alone, I could only hold on for a split second, then dropped to the ground. This time the jolt did cause me to lose consciousness — for seconds only I hoped. When I came to, the pain in my arm and shoulder had gone from storm to hurricane. I bit my lip and waited for the worst to pass.

I was alone there, huddled against the foundation wall. The blackness around me felt empty. Crawling to my feet finally, I straightened, then took hold of the waistband of my jeans with my right hand to stabilize that shoulder. The acute pain from the fall had subsided a little, and things didn’t seem too much worse than they had been. Pulling the gun back out, I moved off into the darkness, wondering how to find Robo without giving myself away.

Shifting orange light from the flames gave familiar shapes a strange and sinister look. At first, the only sounds in the night were from my dying house. I didn’t want to hear gunshots as Robo was gunned down the same way Sophie had been, but why was I hearing nothing? Robo had seemed crazed to get to the killer. Was he really hunting Erich in the darkness, or had he just run into the night to get away from the noise and fire?

I moved around the house in the shadows step by step, stopping to listen intently every few feet. In the front yard, the first hint of sound reached me. Another step and another. Was that Robo’s growl vibrating through the night? Two more steps, three. The sound was clearer now, rising and falling in menacing waves. One careful step at a time, I moved toward the sound until I could see them in the flickering light.

Erich Kohler lay on his belly in my front garden, his arms thrown out in front of him, his head turned to one side. Robo pinned him there, his front feet on Erich’s back, his bared teeth inches from Erich’s face. I almost felt sorry for the pretty boy. Almost.

Erich didn’t move as I walked closer. The way his eyes were screwed shut told me he wasn’t unconscious from injury or fear. He was hiding from the sight of the enraged dog.

“So,” I said. “We meet again, Erich. This time you seem to be at a disadvantage.”

“Get him off me! Get him off me!”

There was hysteria in his voice. If he panicked and started flailing, Robo might do something that would cause a lot of trouble later on. Erich’s state of mind was of absolutely no concern to me, but I didn’t want some bureaucrat trying to have Robo declared vicious for his canine version of serving and protecting.

Erich was lying across the shotgun that had blasted a hole through the double glass of my kitchen door. Grabbing the stock, I pulled it out from under him. He started to move, but froze and whimpered as Robo snapped the air millimeters from his cheek. I backed away until shadows hid me, then pushed the shotgun down under some ornamental bushes.

Much as touching him repelled me, I went back again and searched Erich carefully, reaching around Robo, pushing under Erich’s body. The knife was in a leather sheath on his belt. As I pulled it away and threw it into the night, I wondered if a lab would be able to find traces of Jack’s blood on it — or mine.

“Where’s the pistol?” I demanded.

“I did not bring a pistol. Get him off me. Just get him off me!”

“If you don’t tell me where the pistol is, he can stand on you till he takes root. Now where is it?”

He was barely coherent, his accent much thicker than it had been at Joyce’s the day before.

“I do not know. He came at me out of the night. From behind. From behind me, he came. I dropped the guns when I fell. I do not know where the pistol is. Get him off me. I cannot breathe. Get him off.”

Scuffing my feet around in the groundcover of the garden, first I came across an empty backpack, damp and reeking of gasoline. Then I found the handgun. I fumbled around until I found the safety, flicked it on, and tucked the automatic into my waistband.

Having relieved Erich of what I fervently hoped was his entire arsenal, I took hold of the end of the leash that was still trailing from Robo’s collar.

“I’m going to pull him off you now,” I said. “I don’t know what he’ll do when I pull on the leash, so don’t move. If you move at all and the dog doesn’t rip your face off, I’ll shoot you. Understand?”

“Yes,” he said faintly. “Get him off me. I will not move. Get him off me!”

From as far away as possible, keeping my own weapon pointed at Erich, I gave a little tug on the leash to see how Robo would react. To my surprise, he stepped off Erich and came to me without hesitation. Maybe he was relieved to have me finally doing my share.

“You’re the best boy anyone ever had,” I whispered to Robo, rubbing him behind the ears.

Raising and hardening my voice, I said, “You can sit up now, but you’d better do it slowly, or I’ll let him at you again.”

Erich opened his eyes but didn’t move. At first what I was seeing seemed to be an effect of the flames leaping and twisting behind him, then it hit me, and I drew in a sharp breath. The dark brown eyes of yesterday were gone. Instead, Erich stared at me with the same disturbing colorless eyes I’d seen in our first encounter.

My contact lens theory had been close, but backwards, I realized. He didn’t use contact lenses to change the color of ordinary eyes. He used contact lenses to disguise extraordinary eyes. My amazement changed to caution. There was calculation in those eyes as they shifted from my face, to the gun, to Robo.

“You might get away in the dark before I could shoot you, but you won’t outrun the dog,” I said, “and if you try to take off, I’ll let him go.”

He sat up then, moving as carefully as I could want. “I should have killed you the first time I saw you.”

“You didn’t have the guts to kill me that day. You were as much afraid of the dog then as you are now. What I don’t understand is why you ever came after me later. You had to know I didn’t see enough to identify you. No matter what anyone said, you and I both knew I didn’t see anything that would let me recognize you.”

“You described my eyes. If my wife heard what you said, she would wonder. Better she never heard.”

“Maybe so, but I also said over and over again that what I thought I saw couldn’t be real, that it was only because I was scared out of my mind. No one thought my description was real, not even me. I’ve thought about it a lot. You know what I think?” He didn’t look particularly interested in what I thought, but I told him anyway. “I think you enjoyed killing Jack. And you were happy to have an excuse to do it again.”

As I spoke the words, I realized their truth. “You despicable son of a bitch,” I hissed. “That’s why you didn’t just stab me in the parking lot. You wanted to get me in that van so you could take your time. I should have left the dog on you till the cops get here. Even after you had to let me go that night, you knew I was no threat to you. You didn’t try again for days because you weren’t in any hurry. It wasn’t until you saw me in your own house, staring at you like an idiot, that all of a sudden you were in a big rush to kill me.”

“You saw something then. You were not sure yet or you would have started telling things to my wife, but you saw something. I saw it in your face.”

“No, you didn’t. I didn’t recognize you. You still would have been safe if you’d just left me alone. I stared at you because I was shocked that Joyce married a boy less than half her age. That’s all it was.”

“I am not a boy. I take very good care of her.”

“Do you? Was sleeping with Jack Sheffield part of your good care? I bet Joyce wouldn’t think so.”

Fury contorted his face, and his accent thickened. “He got me drunk. I am not a homosexual. He got me drunk, and then he tried to blackmail me.”

“No one who saw you that night thought you were drunk. They said you had a few drinks and it loosened you up. Whatever you are, Joyce already knows it. She calls you beautiful. Not handsome,
beautiful
.”

He glared at me, hate radiating from the colorless eyes. I had both Robo’s leash and the gun in my left hand. If Robo pulled at all, he’d pull the gun with him.

Not wanting Erich to know that my right arm was all but useless, I backed up, never taking my eyes off him, and pushed the handhold loop of Robo’s leash over the top of a fence post.

Moving closer to Erich again, I said, “It’s a leather leash and only an inch wide. If you run and he lunges, he’ll break it.”

He didn’t believe me. He sat up straighter, and it occurred to me that running wasn’t his only option.

I tried to rekindle his fear. “The dogs know who you are and what you did, you know. When I was leaving your house, Sophie started circling over your scent in the driveway, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand. I thought she was excited over the scent of Joyce’s dogs.”

“Dogs.” He spit on the ground. “Dogs, dogs, dogs. Big ugly dogs. I told her I wanted to marry her, but she would have to get rid of the dogs. So we married in Europe and came here and there they are in kennels. That has to be enough, she says. She will not get rid of them. I was good to her and she gave me nothing.”

Nothing except easy and legal entry into a country others die to get to any way they can, I thought. Nothing except a life of leisure and luxury he was willing to kill to keep. I didn’t waste my breath pointing that out to him.

What I said was, “So Jack wanted you to get Joyce to let him campaign her dog nationally, and you couldn’t do it.”

He spit out a stream of German that sounded vicious even though I couldn’t understand a word, then finally switched back to English. “He thought I could make her do what he wanted, let him fly all over the country with the dog. He wouldn’t listen! She would never do what I say, and he would have ruined everything.”

In the distance I could hear sirens now, louder and louder as they sped closer. I saw his muscles tense, his weight shift slightly. “I
will
shoot you if you get up, you know,” I told him. “If you think I won’t, think again. You blew away any inhibitions I had when you shot Sophie.”

“I’m glad I killed your dog. It screamed and fell down, and I shot it again.”

He started to lunge at me then. He really did. That’s the only reason I shot him just as the first sheriff’s deputies roared onto the scene.

“Put the gun down, lady!
Put it down!”

The first deputies to arrive were strangers, uniformed strangers with their own guns drawn, hard faces, and edgy body language. I put first my revolver and then Erich’s automatic on the ground and stepped away from them, holding my hands out in front of me.

“I’m Dianne Brennan, and I’m the one who called 911. That’s Erich Kohler,” I said, pointing. “He firebombed my house and tried to kill me.”

The deputies treated Erich and me as equally suspect, one concentrating on each of us. Erich demanded attention, called me a liar, made excuses, pointed out that he was unarmed and wounded. He had merely come to my house intending to talk to me he said, and I had set a vicious dog on him and shot him.

The wailing sirens of more emergency vehicles grew steadily louder. The first fire truck turned into the driveway then rolled right into the front garden and parked there. In minutes a powerful jet of water hit the flames. Too late, I thought with aching regret. The firemen might keep the fire from destroying any more of the trees around the house, but the house was already beyond saving.

An ambulance arrived in the next wave. The paramedics barely gave me a glance before directing all their attention to Erich. At least once they started working on him, he shut up.

The deputy keeping watch on me listened impassively when I told him about the rest of Erich’s arsenal — the shotgun and knife out in the darkness where I’d thrown them.

“It all started with Jack Sheffield’s murder this summer,” I said. “Lieutenant Forrester knows all about it.”

“So you’re the one,” muttered the deputy.

What exactly did he mean by that? Before I could ask, a familiar face showed up. The handsome, familiar face of Deputy Horton, who had been kind on that other awful day when I found Jack Sheffield’s body. He exchanged a few words with my stone-faced custodian then turned to me.