Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

heard her tick-ticking along the floor now, the leash dragging behind her.
    Then the bathroom door opened. Dash looked up at me and saw the panic in my eyes. I felt something move under my hand and pulled up on his collar, taking his toes off the ground, then immediately setting them—soundlessly— back onto the porcelain, telling him in the only way I could not to growl. Our lives depended on his silence.
    We stayed absolutely quiet while Joe peed, so quiet that I thought I could hear the drops of urine he shook off his penis hitting the water in the toilet. I tried hard to hold my breath, praying Dashiell wouldn’t choose now to sneeze, waiting for the sound of Joe’s zipper and the rush of water when he flushed. I heard the first sound, not the second, heard his shoes squeak as he turned and left, heard Sugar dancing around at the front door to go out, even though she’d just been walked. Fortunately, she seemed totally taken with the next project and had forgotten all about us.
    I waited after the door slammed to hear the tumbler turn over, then I waited some more, for Joe and Sugar to get down those rickety stairs and out onto the street. I took a deep breath—it felt like hours since I’d done that—and told Dashiell, “ Good boy. Okay.”
    I followed him out of the bathtub and stopped to flush the toilet. He’d left the seat up, too. What a guy. I looked around for Dashiell’s leash. It wasn’t where I’d left it. Joe had taken it, thinking it was Sugar’s. It took me a couple of minutes to find hers, hanging on a hook in the closet. He was neat, Mel. You had to give him that. I took one last look around the loft, felt sadness wash over me like the waves did when I was little and visited my aunt Ceil in Sea Gate, then let Dashiell out, locking Mel’s door behind me, not bothering to wipe the knob clean. I had no intention of making believe I hadn’t been here. I’d just have to add the issue of why I hadn’t called the precinct immediately to the rest of the uncomfortable questions I’d be asked one day soon.
    I had a lot on my mind, but I no longer wondered what I’d do if the cops didn’t locate Mel’s apartment pretty soon. I was pretty sure Sugar wouldn’t be coming back here so I no longer had to be concerned about running back to take care of her, or about taking a chance by taking her home with me. I was as sure as I could be that she was back with the people who were responsible for creating her in the first place and that when I tracked her down, to one of several addresses that were already in my pocket, I’d find out what was behind the murder of my client and the clumsy attempt on my own life.
    Before Joe had shown up, I was thinking that maybe I should call Agoudian, tell him I’d run into Mel a block from where he lived, and so I’d come back this way and stumbled across his apartment, sort of by accident. I could have made sure he found Mel’s place sooner rather than later. But now that the dog was taken care of, I thought about the other side of that call, explaining to him how I’d stumbled across Mel’s apartment after finding his rental box key loose in his jacket pocket, palming it and stealing it at the crime scene, how I’d taken the keys he’d kept stashed there and tried them out on Gansevoort Street on a hunch rather than turning them in. That would go over big.
    One way or another, the detectives would get here eventually. At least now I didn’t have to worry about them dropping Sugar off at the ASPCA. Walking home with Dashiell I thought about the dogs I’d seen there, dogs who were there because their owners had died and there was no relative willing or able to take them, old dogs, young dogs, all of them sad dogs. And in no time at all, if the right person didn’t come along, they were dead dogs. No one had volunteered to do anything about Sophie’s pets, no one besides Mel and myself.
    What would have happened to Blanche and Bianca had we not been around? Would they have ended up in the shelter, dogs who could change the course of a disabled person’s life?
    I was so worried about the animals, I was forgetting to watch my own back. I had no way of knowing if the message I’d been trying to send by talking on the phone in the garden had been overheard, and if it had, if I had fooled anyone. I didn’t know how long I’d be safe. Well, perhaps I did. It would be worse than foolish to assume that whoever had failed to silence me early this