Praying for Sleep

anyway.
    Heck on the other hand had to make sure the training remained fun. Smart dogs like Emil get bored easily and Heck was forced to devise ways to keep the scenting interesting but feasible. Knowing when to stop for the day, figuring out when Emil was frustrated or horny or in a bad mood—those were his tasks. He had to pick scent articles that were challenging but not impossible (a scrap of leather was too easy; Bic pens and Jill’s trashy romance novels too hard).
    Heck, who at the time had a full-time trooper job and a wife who ate up much of his time, would rise at 4:00 a.m. to train his hound—a hardship for him but not for Emil, who woke immediately and joyously, knowing he was on his way to the fields. Oh, Trenton Heck worked. He knew the old tracking adage: “If you’re not handling the dog right, it’s your fault. If the dog’s not tracking right, it’s your fault.”
    But Emil did track right. He had a remarkable nose—one of the few, in his vet’s estimation, that were two or three million times more sensitive than a human nose. He learned fast and the hound so exploited his nature that Heck, whose marriage was rocky and whose job was going nowhere, occasionally felt bad watching this astonishing dog and lamented that he himself had no consuming skill or drive to match Emil’s.
    After six months of training, Emil could follow a mile-and-a-half trail in record time, shaming the German shepherds that were the troop’s unofficial trackers. By age two Emil had his American Kennel Club TD classification and a month later Heck took him up to Ontario, where he was awarded his Tracking Dog Excellent certification by pursuing a stranger over a thousand-yard trail that was five hours old, never hesitating on the turns or the cross-tracks meant to confuse the hound. After the TDE rating Emil more or less joined Haversham’s troop, to which Heck was assigned, though the state technically had no budget for dogs. The troop did, however, spring for membership (dog and man) in the National Police Bloodhound Association, which two years ago gave Emil the famed Cleopatra Award for finding a lost boy who’d fallen into the Marsden River and been swept downstream in a heavy current, after which he’d wandered deep into a state park. The trail, through water, marsh, cornfields and forest, was 158 hours old—a record for the state.
    Heck had taken to reading a lot about bloodhounds and believed that Emil was the descendant (spiritual, there being no true lineage) of the greatest of all tracking bloodhounds, Nick Carter, who was run by Captain Volney Mullikin down in Kentucky at the turn of the century, a dog credited with more than 650 finds resulting in criminal convictions.
    Emil himself had put a fair number of people behind bars. Much tracking work involves trailing suspects from crime scenes or linking weapons or loot to defendants. Emil, because of his AKC papers and his solid history of tracking, was a permitted “witness,” though he appeared on the stand through his spokesman, one Trenton Heck. Most of the dog’s assignments, however, involved locating escapees like Michael Hrubek.
    Tonight in fact it was the anticipated triumph in tracking down the psycho and earning Heck his reward that preoccupied him as they pushed through the brush. He should have had his mind on what he was doing though for he didn’t see the spring trap until Emil stepped right onto it.
    “No!” he cried, jerking back hard on the line, pulling the hound off balance. “Oh, no! What’d I do?” But Emil had already fallen sideways onto the large Ottawa Manufacturing trap. He yelped in pain.
    “Oh, Jesus, Emil . . .” Heck dropped to his knees over the animal, thinking about splints and the emergency vet clinics, frighteningly aware that he had no bandages or tourniquets to staunch the flow of blood from a severed vein or artery. As he reached for his dog, however, his trooper instincts took over and he realized that the trap might be a diversion.
    He’s waiting for me—it’s a trick!
    Heck flicked rain from his eyes, lifting the Walther, and spun about, wondering from which direction the madman would come charging at him. He paused momentarily, debated and when he heard nothing turned back to Emil. He’d have to risk an attack; he wasn’t going to leave the dog unattended. Holstering the gun he reached for Emil, Heck’s hands shaking and his heart only now beginning to pulse quickly in the aftermath of the