Northern Lights

He'd suffer and he'd sweat his way into an obsession.
    And he'd get the girl, lose the girl, get the girl, lose the girl. A merrygo-round of pain and pleasure.
    The girl was the key.
    Was Meg? As Patrick Galloway's only child, wasn't she the living symbol of him? If not the key, another link?
    "How long are you going to circle before you land?"
    "What?"
    "Looks like a holding pattern to me." Meg angled her head, and he realized the lights were back on for intermission between the features.
    "Sorry. zoned out."
    "I'll say. You didn't get close to your share of the popcorn." She rolled up the bag, left it on the seat. "Let's get some air before the second feature."
    They had to take it in the open doorway, like most of the movie crowd. The clouds that had rolled in had burst open sometime during Kim Novak's transformation. The rain Meg had scented gushed out of the sky, pummelled the ground.
    "We'll have some flooding," Meg said, frowned through the clouds of smoke from those brave and drenched souls who stood just outside with cigarettes cupped in umbrellaed palms. "And black ice on the roads when the temperature drops a little more."
    "If you want to get home now, I'll take you. I'll need to come back, keep an eye on this."
    "No, I'll stay for the second feature, see how it goes. Just as easy turn to snow again."
    "Let me check on a couple of things. I'll meet you back inside."
    "There's a cop for you, ever vigilant." She saw his face change, rolled her eyes. "Not a complaint, Burke. Jesus. I'm not going to whine and go pouty if I end up watching a movie by myself. And I can get myself home if I need to. I can even handle the rest of tonight's planned entertainment on my own if you're not around to service me. I have fresh batteries. You look at me and see her, it's going to piss me off."
    He started to say he hadn't, but she was already walking away. And it would've been a lie anyway. Conditioned response, he thought, and tried to roll the weight of it off his shoulders.
    Still carrying it, he picked Peter, Hopp, Bing, The Professor, out of the crowd.
    He spent intermission, and a little beyond it, coordinating and confirming procedure for flooding.
    By the time he rejoined Meg, Grace Kelly was trying to convince Jimmy Stewart to pay more attention to her than the people in the apartment he could see from his rear window.
    He took Meg's hand, linked fingers. "Knee jerk," he murmured in her ear. "Sorry."
    "Leave off the knee and you've got it right." But she turned her head, brushed her lips over his. "Watch the movie this time."
    He did or tried to. But just as Raymond Burr caught Grace Kelly snooping around his apartment, the door banged open behind them.
    Light ran in behind Otto, causing most of the audience to boo and shout at him to close the damn door. He came in fast and wet, ignoring the curses as he zeroed in on Nate.
    Nate was already up and moving toward him.
    "You need to come outside, chief."
    For the second time that day, Nate went out in his shirtsleeves, this time to the sizzle of sleet on pavement and the icy sting of it on his skin.
    He saw the body immediately and, dragging the hair out of his face, moved through the wet to the curb.
    He thought at first it was Rock or Bull, and his heart went thick in his throat. But the dog that lay in blood and freezing rain was older than Meg's, with more white in his coloring.
    The knife that had been used to slash his throat lay buried in his chest.
    He heard someone scream from behind him. "Get them back inside," he ordered Otto. "Control the situation."
    "I know this dog, Nate. It's Joe and Lara's old dog, Yukon. Harmless. Barely got a tooth left in his head."
    "Get these people back inside. Either you or Peter bring me out something to cover him up with."
    Peter came on the run moments after Otto went in. "Jacob gave me his slicker. God, chief, it's Yukon. It's Steven's dog, Yukon. This isn't right. This just isn't right."
    "Do you recognize the knife? Look at the handle, Peter."
    "I don't know. There's a lot of blood, and . . . I don't know."
    But Nate knew. His gut told him it was going to be a buck knife. It was going to be Bing's missing buck knife. "We're going to take this dog down to the clinic. You're going to help me load him in the back of my car. But you're going to go over and get the camera first so we can record this scene."
    "He's dead."
    "That's right, he's dead. We're going to examine him at the clinic, after we record the scene here.