Praying for Sleep

my pants there.”
    Fennel pointed to a sign propped in another window. Closed First Two Weeks of November. Happy huntin’.
    “He’s telling everybody he’s going away? Don’t this fellow know about burglaries?”
    “He’s got himself a watch-bear.”
    Heck studied the creature with admiration. “That’d be the first thing I’d steal.”
    Then they found the door that Hrubek had kicked in. The men entered cautiously, covering each other. They found the traces of the madman’s shopping spree but it was clear he was no longer here. They reholstered their guns and returned outside. Fennel told the Boy to call Haversham and tell him where they were and that Hrubek did in fact seem to be making for Boston.
    They were about to continue up the highway when the Boy called, “Hold up a minute, Charlie. There’s something here you ought to see.”
    Heck and Fennel ordered the dogs to sit and then walked around to the back of the building to where the young man was standing, hand on his own pistol. “Look there.” He was pointing inside a work shed. There was blood on the ground just inside the doorway.
    “Jesus.” Out came the Walther again. The safety clicked off.
    Heck eased into the shed. The place was chockablock with a thousand odds and ends: hoses, boxes, animal skulls, bones, broken furniture, rusted tools, auto parts.
    “Check it out. Over there. We got a ’coon bit the big one.”
    Fennel shone his light on the limp corpse of a raccoon.
    “Think he’d do that? Why?”
    “Goddamn,” Heck whispered in dismay. He was looking not at the body of the animal, however, but at a narrow beam in the ceiling from which dangled some spring animal traps, toothless but big—the sort that would easily snap the neck of a fox or badger or raccoon.
    Or the leg of a dog.
    The reason for Heck’s dismay wasn’t the traps themselves but rather the three empty pegs where, presumably, three other traps had hung until not long ago. Several large bloody bootprints were directly below the pegs.
    Heck asked, “Your girls heel?”
    “Not when they’re on track. Emil?”
    “He’s slow to, if the scent’s fresh. We’ll have to tie the lines back and keep ’em next to us. Hell, if he takes to the grass we’ll just about have to crawl on our bellies. Hrubek’ll be in Boston by the time we get to the county line.”
    They walked back to the highway and shortened the lines as Heck instructed. He left his pickup at the truck stop with the third deputy, who remained there in case Hrubek wandered back this way. The Boy accompanied Heck and Fennel in his squad car, the headlights dark, just the amber flashers on. The dogs caught a whiff of the scent and started east once more.
    “Down the middle of the friggin’ road.” Fennel laughed nervously. “This boy is nuts, that’s for damn sure.”
    But Heck didn’t respond. The giddy excitement of earlier in the evening was gone. The night had turned coarse. Their quarry was no longer a big silly fellow, and Trenton Heck felt the same chill he remembered when, four years ago, outside of a neon-lit 7-Eleven, he’d glanced at what he thought was a branch moving in the breeze and saw instead a sphere of muzzle flash and felt a ripping jolt in his leg, as the asphalt leapt up to meet his forehead.
    “You think he’d set traps for dogs ?” Fennel muttered. “Nobody’d do that. Nobody’d hurt a dog.”
    Heck reached down and held up his hound’s right ear, in which was a smooth hole the exact size of a .30-’06 slug. Fennel whistled out his disgust at humankind, and Trenton Heck called, “Find, Emil, find!”
     
    Lis stood in the greenhouse, taping bold X’s over the glass that she could remember being glazed into place twenty-five years ago, her mother standing in the construction site, arms crossed, her austere eye on the contractors. Often she frowned because she believed that people wouldn’t cheat you if it was obvious that you suspected they were capable of it.
    Taping windows as she went, Lis moved slowly around the large room, which was filled with hybrid tea roses in all shades, and grandiflora blushes dotted with the blood-red John Armstrongs, and High Noon yellow climbers twining around an antique trellis. She had large-cluster floribunda Iceberg whites and Fashion corals. A thousand flowers, ten thousand petals.
    She preferred the striking shades, the stark colors, especially in the most fragile of flowers.
    Recalling the thousands of hours she’d spent