Bloodlines

gentrified farms shone like penlight beams in an endless cavern. It seemed to take hours to reach that bright strip °f fast-food joints. Except maybe in the eyes of the CEO of McDonald’s, arches have never shone more golden than they did that night.
    I’d eaten an entire Emma’s pizza, minus a few bits of crust; when I slowed down and peered at the McDonald’s on my right, I wasn’t trying to decide between a Quarter Pounder and a fish sandwich. Rather, I was looking for a street number. The McDonald’s had none but its next-door neighbor, Cap Heaven—truck caps| what else?—was number 670. Rinehart was 688. His place must also be on the right, not far ahead.
    But I didn’t need a street number. I’d passed the place on my way to and from Bill Coakley’s. Its signs were so big and obvious that I almost missed them. Both were fastened to the same two tall, thick posts at the edge of Boston Road. The top sign read:
     
    RINEHART MOTOR MART
    Quality Pre-Owned Cars and Trucks
    Sales, Service, Parts
     
    The sign beneath had slightly smaller lettering:
     
    Rinehart Auto Body
    Expert Collision Repairs
    Refinishing Specialists
    Down Draft Spray Oven—
    Modern Baking Facilities
     
    Baking facilities? Don’t ask me. Cars aren’t my specialty. Dogs are. But even after I realized that spraying and baking must have something to do with repainting automobiles, that bottom line felt sinister, especially the word oven. The situation made me vaguely sick. I’d found a dealer in used cars. A body shop. That word ate at me, too. Body. I kept rereading the sign, as if repeated exposure would somehow make everything fall into place, but the words became increasingly absurd and ludicrous. Collision. Parts. And Pre-Owned. My God, I thought, when you read between the lines, it’s not about used and smashed-up cars at all. It’s about secondhand dogs. Parts and service.
    After a minute or two, I came to my senses, looked beyond the sign, and realized that Rinehart Motor Mart was exactly what it claimed to be: an auto body shop and used-car lot, and a big one at that. The sign by the road was like a goal post at the end of a football field so jammed with late-model cars, vans, and pickups that I almost expected college kids to pile out for the postgame party. But the white numbers chalked on the windshields spoiled the effect. A big orange sticker on a Bronco much newer than mine advertised it as a special of the week. Another special was a long black limo that even I was able to identify as a Cadillac. In the brilliant, theft-deterring floodlights, I also picked out a few of the cozy house-on-wheels vans I always envy when I see them in the parking lots at dog shows: a Ford Aerostar, a Plymouth Voyager, and a luxurious Toyota some-thing-or-other that looked showroom new and big enough to sleep six or eight malamutes, one lean woman, and her ardent vet in perfect comfort and near privacy.
    I’d pulled to the side of the road. Now I got out and stared, and the anomaly hit me again: I wasn’t here to gather daydream material about the perfect dog-show van, which I could, in any case, customize in my sleep with no help from Joe Rinehart. I was here because I’d found Rinehart’s name and this address in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s list of Class B animal dealers in Massachusetts. This address? Beyond the car lot was an ugly brick two-story flat-roofed building that obviously housed the auto body shop and the car-lot busies office, but I was too far away to see whether there was a number on the door. But this had to be the right address. The name Rinehart ? Not far beyond Cap Haven, definitely number 670? After this was a Pizza Hut. Anything beyond the Pizza Hut would certainly have a number higher than 688.
    I could have clambered over the metal barrier and grossed the car lot to check out the building, but the floodlights deterred me. I didn’t intend to steal a car, even the enviable Toyota van, and I didn’t intend to be mistaken for a car thief, either. I looked around and spotted a service road that ran between the car lot and the Pizza Hut. I returned to the Bronco, pulled ahead and turned down the service road, a roughly paved drive that took me past the auto body shop and beyond the reach of the fast-food and car-lot floodlights. Once I again, the low beam of my headlights was too faint to penetrate the darkness. I switched to high beam and made out a scrubby, rutted field ahead, a few rusted oil