All Shots

fight. When the potential combatants are dogs, I do my best to defuse the situation. Now, I decided to make it explode. But I wanted Mellie out of the way. “Mellie, please go get Strike’s toys right now. And everything else.” As soon as she stepped toward the stairs that began near the front door and ran up to the second floor, before she’d even begun to ascend, I said to Grant, “Look, your buddy Calvin didn’t get a notice from the city of Cambridge about an impounded vehicle. He knew where she was. How? She told him. I hate to tell you, but they must’ve been more than friends. Grant, she didn’t just put you in the hospital and dump you. She made plans to get rid of you and start her life all over with everything you had. Your truck, your merchandise, your blue bitch. And your friend, too. Calvin.”
    “Not to mention my name and my credit,” Holly Winter said.
    “Who the hell are you?” Calvin demanded.
    “Holly Winter,” said Mellie from the staircase. “That’s everyone. Her and her and the girl.”
    I wanted Calvin’s attention back on Grant. And Grant’s on Calvin. I wanted their eyes locked, their hackles up, and their hearts filled with rage. “She was shot,” I told Calvin. “She was shot to death with a Smith and Wesson .22/.32 Kit Gun.”
    I got my explosion. Too enraged to settle for bullets, Calvin hurled himself at Grant and slammed into him so swiftly and so powerfully that Grant didn’t stand a chance of using his pistol. He might’ve done better with the knife he’d abandoned. But maybe not. What Calvin delivered was a full-body blow that must have knocked the wind out of Grant and that certainly knocked him to the floor. Calvin was on top of him as he crashed, and the weight of the two big men made a tremendous boom and shook the little house so hard that you’d have sworn that it had been hit by an earthquake.
    But Sammy was free. With his leash trailing after him, he fled toward—damn it!—the back of the house. Trust a mala-mute to head for the kitchen. Frozen in terror, Mellie was still on the staircase near the front door. In backing away from the fight, I’d ended up near the couch, the chairs, and the television, which is to say that I had access to the dining and kitchen area at the rear of the house; I could have found Sammy, snatched his leash, and escaped with him out the back door. But what about Mellie? To reach her, I’d need to go in exactly the opposite direction, that is, to the front of the house. If I stepped between the couch and the front window, I’d be near the stairs and the front door; if Mellie didn’t spontaneously join me in fleeing, I could grab her by the arm and haul her outside. Calvin was still on top of Grant, but Grant was kicking hard, and Calvin was beginning to look winded. I couldn’t see Calvin’s revolver, but Grant’s weapon lay on the carpet only five or six inches from his right hand. If shooting started, any of us could be hit in the crossfire. Sammy was still out of my range of vision, but he could come bounding back into the living room any second, and I’d have lost the chance to get him out of danger.
    The most likely victim was, however, Holly Winter, who had flattened herself against the wall beneath the staircase, only a few feet from the brawl. She was far better positioned than I was to rouse Mellie from her frozen state and take flight through the front door, but she was, if anything, even more paralyzed than Mellie. Her back was to the wall, and her eyes were dark pools of fear. If she’d kept her head, she could have bent down and seized Grant’s semiautomatic or at least stretched out a foot and slid it out his reach; she could have helped Mellie; or she could simply have bolted out the door. Instead, she directed all her energy toward squeezing herself against the wall. She looked, and probably felt, as if she were perched on a narrow rock shelf high on a mountain, with her back pressed against the illusory comfort of a cliff and with her feet only an inch or two from a thousand-foot drop to death.
    My only weapon was my dog-trainer’s voice. “Mellie, go upstairs!” To encourage her, I waved and pointed upward. Mellie looked bewildered, but to my relief, she finally awoke from her trance and began to climb the stairs. Would she have the sense to hide under a bed or take refuge in a closet? I didn’t know, but I simply couldn’t go after her. “Holly!” I said sharply. “Holly, get out! Go!