The Last of the Winnebagos Read online

  Wherever the hell I was going, I was driving too fast to get there. When the tanker ahead of me slowed down to ninety, I practically climbed up his back bumper. I had gone past the place where the jackal had been hit without ever seeing it. Even without the traffic, there probably hadn’t been anything to see. What the Society hadn’t taken care of, the overflow probably had, and anyway, there hadn’t been any evidence to begin with. If there had been, if the cameras had seen the car that hit it, they wouldn’t have come after me. And Katie.

  The Society couldn’t charge her with Aberfan’s death—killing an animal hadn’t been a crime back then—but if they found out about Aberfan they would charge her with the jackal’s death, and it wouldn’t matter if a hundred witnesses, a hundred highway cameras had seen her on Indian School Road. It wouldn’t matter if the print-fix on her car was clean. She had killed one of the last dogs, hadn’t she? They would crucify her.

  I should never have left Katie. “Don’t tell them anything,” I had told her, but she had never been afraid of admitting guilt. When the receptionist had asked her what had happened, she had said, “I hit him,” just like that, no attempt to make excuses, to run off, to lay the blame on someone else.

  I had run off to try to stop the Society from finding out that Katie had hit Aberfan, and meanwhile the Society was probably back at Katie’s, asking her how she’d happened to know me in Colorado, asking her how Aberfan died.

  I was wrong about the Society. They weren’t at Katie’s house. They were at mine, standing on the porch, waiting for me to let them in.

  “You’re a hard man to track down,” Hunter said.

  The uniform grinned. “Where you been?”

  “Sorry,” I said, fishing my keys out of my pocket. “I thought you were all done with me. I’ve already told you everything I know about the incident.”

  Hunter stepped back just far enough for me to get the screen door open and the key in the lock. “Officer Segura and I just need to ask you a couple more questions.”

  “Where’d you go this afternoon?” Segura asked.

  “I went to see an old friend of mine.”

  “Who?”

  “Come on, come on,” Hunter said. “Let the guy get in his own front door before you start badgering him with a lot of questions.”

  I opened the door. “Did the cameras get a picture of the tanker that hit the jackal?” I asked.

  “Tanker?” Segura said.

  “I told you,” I said, “I figure it had to be a tanker. The jackal was lying in the tanker lane.” I led the way into the living room, depositing my keys on the computer and switching the phone to exclusion while I talked. The last thing I needed was Ramirez bursting in with, “What’s going on? Are you in trouble?”

  “It was probably a renegade that hit it, which would explain why he didn’t stop.” I gestured at them to sit down.

  Hunter did. Segura started for the couch and then stopped, staring at the photos on the wall above it. “Jesus, will you look at all the dogs!” he said. “Did you take all these pictures?”

  “I took some of them. That one in the middle is Misha.”

  “The last dog, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No kidding. The very last one.” No kidding. She was being kept in isolation at the Society’s research facility in St. Louis when I saw her. I had talked them into letting me shoot her, but it had to be from outside the quarantine area. The picture had an unfocused look that came from shooting it through a wire mesh—reinforced window in the door, but I wouldn’t have done any better if they’d let me inside. Misha was past having any expression to photograph. She hadn’t eaten in a week at that point. She lay with her head on her paws, staring at the door, the whole time I was there.

  “You wouldn’t consider selling this picture to the Society, would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  He nodded understandingly. “I guess people were pretty upset when she died.”

  Pretty upset. They had turned on anyone who had anything to do with it—the puppy mill owners, the scientists who hadn’t come up with a vaccine, Misha’s vet— and a lot of others who hadn’t. And they had handed over their civil rights to a bunch of jackals who were able to grab them because everybody felt so guilty. Pretty upset.

  “What’s this one?” Segura asked. He had already moved on to the picture next to it. “It’s General Patton’s bull terrier Willie.” They fed and cleaned up after Misha with those robot arms they used to use in the nuclear plants. Her owner, a tired-looking woman, was allowed to watch her through the wire-mesh window but had to stay off to the side because Misha flung herself barking against the door whenever she saw her.

  “You should make them let you in,” I had told her. “It’s cruel to keep her locked up like that. You should make them let you take her back home.”

  “And let her get the newparvo?” she said. There was nobody left for Misha to get the newparvo from, but I didn’t say that. I set the right readings on the camera, trying not to lean into Misha’s line of vision. “You know what killed them, don’t you?” she said. “The ozone layer. All those holes. The radiation got in and caused it.”

  It was the communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren’t guilty at all.

  “This one here looks kind of like a jackal,” Segura said. He was looking at a picture I had taken of a German shepherd after Aberfan died. “Dogs were a lot like jackals, weren’t they?”

  “No,” I said, and sat down on the shelf in front of the developer’s screen, across from Hunter. “I already told you everything I know about the jackal. I saw it lying in the road, and I called you.”

  “You said when you saw the jackal it was in the far right lane,” Hunter said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you were in the far left lane?”

  “I was in the far left lane.”

  They were going to take me over my story, point by point, and when I couldn’t remember what I’d said before, they were going to say, “Are you sure that’s what you saw, Mr. McCombe? Are you sure you didn’t see the jackal get hit? Katherine Powell hit it, didn’t she?” “You told us this morning you stopped, but the jackal was already dead. Is that right?” Hunter asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Segura looked up. Hunter touched his hand casually to his pocket and then brought it back to his knee, turning on the taper.

  “I didn’t stop for about a mile. Then I backed up and looked at it, but it was dead. There was blood coming out of its mouth.”

  Hunter didn’t say anything. He kept his hands on his knees and waited—an old journalist’s trick, if you wait long enough, they’ll say something they didn’t intend to, just to fill the silence.

  ’The jackal’s body was at a peculiar angle,” I said, right on cue. “The way it was lying, it didn’t look like a jackal. I thought it was a dog.” I waited till the silence got uncomfortable again. “It brought back a lot of terrible memories,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking. I just wanted to get away from it. After a few minutes I realized I should have called the Society, and I stopped at the 7-Eleven.”

  I waited again, till Segura began to shoot uncomfortable glances at Hunter, and then started in again. “I thought I’d be okay, that I could go ahead and work, but after I got to my first shoot, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, so I came home.” Candor. Openness. If the Amblers can do it, so can you. “I guess I was still in shock or something. I didn’t even call my boss and have her get somebody to cover the governor’s conference. All I could think about was—” I stopped and rubbed my hand across my face. “I needed to talk to somebody. I had the paper look up an old friend of mine, Katherine Powell.” I stopped, I hoped this time for good. I had admitted lying to them and confessed to two crimes: leaving the scene of the accident and using press access to get a lifeline for personal use, and maybe that would be enough to satisfy them. I didn’t wan
t to say anything about going out to see Katie. They would know she would have told me about their visit and decide this confession was an attempt to get her off, and maybe they’d been watching the house and knew it anyway, and this was all wasted effort.

  The silence dragged on. Hunter’s hands tapped his knees twice and then subsided. The story didn’t explain why I’d picked Katie, who I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, who I knew in Colorado, to go see, but maybe, maybe they wouldn’t make the connection.

  “This Katherine Powell,” Hunter said, “you knew her in Colorado, is that right?”

  “We lived in the same little town.” We waited.

  “Isn’t that when your dog died?” Segura said suddenly. Hunter shot him a glance of pure rage, and I thought, it isn’t a taper he’s got in that shirt pocket. It’s the vet’s records, and Katie’s name is on them.

  “Yes,” I said. “He died in September of eighty-nine.”

  Segura opened his mouth.

  “In the third wave?” Hunter asked before he could say anything.

  “No,” I said. “He was hit by a car.” They both looked genuinely shocked. The Amblers could have taken lessons from them.

  “Who hit it?” Segura asked, and Hunter leaned forward, his hand moving reflexively toward his pocket.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It was a hit and run. Whoever it was just left him lying there in the road. That’s why when I saw the jackal, it … that was how I met Katherine Powell. She stopped and helped me. She helped me get him into her car, and we took him to the vet’s, but it was too late.”

  Hunter’s public face was pretty indestructible, but Segura’s wasn’t. He looked surprised and enlightened and disappointed all at once.

  “That’s why I wanted to see her,” I said unnecessarily.

  “Your dog was hit on what day?” Hunter asked.

  “September thirtieth.”

  “What was the vet’s name?”

  He hadn’t changed his way of asking the questions, but he no longer cared what the answers were. He had thought he’d found a connection, a cover-up, but here we were, a couple of dog lovers, a couple of good Samaritans, and his theory had collapsed. He was done with the interview, he was just finishing up, and all I had to do was be careful not to relax too soon.

  I frowned. “I don’t remember his name. Cooper, I think.”

  “What kind of car did you say hit your dog?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking, not a jeep. Make it something besides a jeep. “I didn’t see him get hit. The vet said it was something big, a pickup maybe. Or a Winnebago.”

  And I knew who had hit the jackal. It had all been right there in front of me—the old man using up their forty-gallon water supply to wash the bumper, the lies about their coming in from Globe—only I had been too intent on keeping them from finding out about Katie, on getting the picture of Aberfan, to see it. It was like the damned parvo. When you had it licked in one place, it broke out somewhere else.

  “Were there any identifying tire tracks?” Hunter said.

  “What?” I said. “No. It was snowing that day.” It had to show in my face, and he hadn’t missed anything yet. I passed my hand over my eyes. “I’m sorry. These questions are bringing it all back.”

  “Sorry,” Hunter said.

  “Can’t we get this stuff from the police report?” Segura asked.

  “There wasn’t a police report,” I said. “It wasn’t a crime to kill a dog when Aberfan died.”

  It was the right thing to say. The look of shock on their faces was the real thing this time, and they looked at each other in disbelief instead of at me. They asked a few more questions and then stood up to leave. I walked them to the door.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. McCombe,” Hunter said. “We appreciate what a difficult experience this has been for you.”

  I shut the screen door between us. The Amblers would have been going too fast, trying to beat the cameras because they weren’t even supposed to be on Van Buren. It was almost rush hour, and they were in the tanker lane, and they hadn’t even seen the jackal till they hit it, and then it was too late. They had to know the penalty for hitting an animal was jail and confiscation of the vehicle, and there wasn’t anybody else on the road.

  “Oh, one more question,” Hunter said from halfway down the walk. “You said you went to your first assignment this morning. What was it?”

  Candid. Open. “It was out at the old zoo. A sideshow kind of thing.”

  I watched them all the way out to their car and down the street. Then I latched the screen, pulled the inside door shut, and locked it, too. It had been right there in front of me-the ferret sniffing the wheel, the bumper, Jake anxiously watching the road. I had thought he was looking cusomers, but he wasn’t. He was expecting to see the Society drive up. “He’s not interested in that,” he had said when Mrs. Ambler said she had been telling me about Taco. He had listened to our whole conversation, standing under the back window with his guilty bucket, ready to come back in and cut her off if she said too much, and I hadn’t tumbled to any of it. I had been so intent on Aberfan I hadn’t even seen it when I looked right through the lens at it. And what kind of an excuse was that? Katie hadn’t even tried to use it, and she was learning to drive.

  I went and got the Nikon and pulled the film out of it. It was too late to do anything about the eisenstadt pictures or the vidcam footage, but I didn’t think there was anything in them. Jake had already washed the bumper by the time I’d taken those pictures.

  I fed the longshot film into the developer. “Positives, one two three order, fifteen seconds,” I said, and waited for the image to come on the screen.

  I wondered who had been driving. Jake, probably. “He never liked Taco,” she had said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. “I didn’t want to buy the Winnebago.”

  They would both lose their licenses, no matter who was driving, and the Society would confiscate the Winnebago. They would probably not send two octogenarian specimens of Americana like the Amblers to prison. They wouldn’t have to. The trial would take six months, and Texas already had legislation in committee.

  The first picture came up. A light-setting shot of an ocotillo.

  Even if they got off, even if they didn’t end up taking away the Winnebago for unauthorized use of a tanker lane or failure to purchase a sales tax permit, the Amblers had six months left at the outside. Utah was all ready to pass a full-divided bill, and Arizona would be next. In spite of the road crews’ stew-slowed pace, Phoenix would be all-divided by the time the investigation was over, and they’d be completely boxed in. Permanent residents of the zoo. Like the coyote.

  A shot of the zoo sign, half-hidden in the cactus. A close-up of the Amblers’ balloon-trailing sign. The Winnebago in the parking lot.

  “Hold,” I said. “Crop.” I indicated the areas with my finger. “Enlarge to full screen.”

  The longshot takes great pictures, sharp contrast, excellent detail. The developer only had a five hundred thousand-pixel screen, but the dark smear on the bumper was easy to see, and the developed picture would be much clearer. You’d be able to see every splatter, every grayish-yellow hair. The Society’s computers would probably be able to type the blood from it.

  “Continue,” I said, and the next picture came on the screen. Artsy shot of the Winnebago and the zoo entrance. Jake washing the bumper. Red-handed.

  Maybe Hunter had bought my story, but he didn’t have any other suspects, and how long would it be before he decided to ask Katie a few more questions? If he thought it was the Amblers, he’d leave her alone.

  The Japanese family clustered around the waste-disposal tank. Closeup of the decals on the side. Interiors—Mrs. Ambler in the gallery, the upright-coffin shower stall, Mrs. Ambler making coffee.

  No wonder she had looked that way in the eisenstadt shot, her face full of memory and grief and loss. Maybe in the instant before they hit it, it had looked like a dog to h
er, too.

  All I had to do was tell Hunter about the Amblers, and Katie was off the hook. It should be easy. I had done it before.

  “Stop,” I said to a shot of the salt-and-pepper collection. The black and white scottie dogs had painted, red-plaid bows and red tongues. “Expose,” I said. “One through twenty-four.”

  The screen went to question marks and started beeping. I should have known better. The developer could handle a lot of orders, but asking it to expose perfectly good film went against its whole memory, and I didn’t have time to give it the step-by-steps that would convince it I meant what I said.

  “Eject,” I said. The scotties blinked out. The developer spat out the film, rerolled into its protective case.

  The doorbell rang. I switched on the overhead and pulled the film out to full length and held it directly under the light. I had told Hunter an RV hit Aberfan, and he had said on the way out, almost an afterthought, “That first shoot you went to, what was it?” And after he left, what had he done, gone out to check on the sideshow kind of thing, gotten Mrs. Ambler to spill her guts? There hadn’t been time to do that and get back.

  He must have called Ramirez. I was glad I had locked the door.

  I turned off the overhead. I rerolled the film, fed it back into the developer, and gave it a direction it could handle. “Permanganate bath, full strength, one through twenty-four. Remove one hundred percent emulsion. No notify.”

  The screen went dark. It would take the developer at least fifteen minutes to run the film through the bleach bath, and the Society’s computers could probably enhance a picture out of two crystals of silver and thin air, but at least the detail wouldn’t be there. I unlocked the door.