Bloodlines

the exact spot I choose. Hardest part of teaching a dog to retrieve, right? Teaching yourself to throw the dumbbell. Dog training? People training. If the rawhide bone landed just beyond the dog’s reach, where he could see it and smell it? He’d stretch, bellow, and tear the ground to get it, and he might snap his chain.
    But I have dead aim. The malamute fell silent. How long had his alarm lasted? Ten seconds? A few more? I hoped that the dog barked like that every time a raccoon turned its back on him. I almost wished for the sound of a window opening in one of the bedrooms and the sound of Walter Simms’s voice hollering, “Christ, can’t you ever shut the fuck up!”
    But I heard nothing. Almost immediately, I headed toward the outline of the big ruined broiler farm, which turned out to house—if you can call it that—four more golden retrievers—three bitches and a dog—and five Norwegian elkhounds—four bitches and a dog. Males don’t actually produce puppies, right? Anyway, the nine dogs lived—if you call it that—on what my hand-filtered flashlight revealed as a small patch of mud and feces in a chicken-wire enclosure attached to the building. A ragged lean-to along one side of the wire offered more shelter than the malamute had. I caught a glimpse of an open sore on the head of one of the elkhounds, one of the goldens limped badly, and all the dogs were hideously thin, but this group was nonetheless in better shape than the first golden I’d seen.
    But maybe Walter Simms had something against motherhood. Jammed into a wire-floored rabbit hutch —honest to God, a rabbit hutch—at the corner of the building, I found a Norwegian elkhound bitch with a litter of three puppies. You know what an elkhound is? Well, if not, this isn’t the time to tell you in detail. Gorgeous breed, wonderful dogs, but for now, let’s just say that an elkhound would remind you of a half-size gray malamute, at least if you didn’t actually know anything about dogs. This elkhound bitch was jailed in a space that would have cramped a chihuahua. She had no room to stand up, and if she’d been able to rise, the wire floor would have cut into her pads. The pups actually seemed to be nursing, though, and both the bitch and her litter looked better fed than the other dogs I’d seen, which is to say that they weren’t skin draped on bare bone. If Simms liked her enough to feed her, I wondered, why confine her to this cage, with its pile of droppings underneath where they had fallen through the wire? Why feed this one? Then the explanation came to me, cruel and sick: She was fed while she nursed the puppies, then and only then, while she was preparing the merchandise for the clean fiberglass cages of Puppy Luv and the spotless concrete runs of Your Local Breeder. After all, customers see the puppies. But who sees a puppy mill brood bitch? Who even imagines her?
    The elkhound bitch watched me suspiciously, and when she began to growl, I moved on. Where the hell was Missy? The male malamute was chained in the open. The bitches, too? I’d first seen him as one of a series of dark lumps, the one that moved. Should I check out the others? Or try the two little sheds I hadn’t yet entered? The sheds had one advantage over the open ground: I could use my camera inside without the risk that Walter or Cheryl would make an early morning bathroom trip and catch sight of the flash. I wanted Missy, but I also wanted more evidence than I’d been able to get so far.
    I headed in the direction of the sheds, back toward the woods from which I’d emerged. The shack I’d already entered, the one that held the golden, was to my right. The other two were clustered together to my left. My progress toward them was maddeningly slow, mainly because the direct route led across what seemed to be Walter and Cheryl’s private dump. The handgun at my hip was loaded; I couldn’t afford to fall. The ground was littered with beer cans that no one had bothered to turn in and the spilled contents of what seemed like a few thousand torn plastic trash bags. To detour around the heap without tumbling into it, I simply had to use a flashlight. With my hand blocking most of the beam and my heart hammering, I picked my way along. Want a survey of the Simmses’ product preferences? Oreo cookies, Kraft macaroni and cheese, generic potato chips, and—I swear—Lysol air freshener. The family beer was Miller Lite. Cheryl used tampons with pink plastic