The Dogfather

CHAPTER 1
     
    My affiliation with organized crime began a few years ago when I accidentally did a favor for a godfather named Enzio Guarini. Ignoring the serendipity of my assistance, Guarini decided that he owed me one. I disagreed, but wasn’t stupid enough to say so. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I like it here. My house is modest, but enjoys the tremendous advantage of being above ground. A difference of opinion with Enzio Guarini might’ve meant an involuntary change of residence. I didn’t fancy downward mobility.
    Speaking of fancy, that’s what Guarini and I had in common: the Dog Fancy, together with associated nuttiness on the subject of all dogs everywhere and outright lunacy when it came to our own. Our differences? Where to begin? With age, sex, and money. The elderly male Guarini presided over an empire of legitimate enterprises that included a pasta factory, a construction business, a trucking company, and a wholesale liquor distributorship. He was, however, reported to profit from criminal activities such as loan sharking, drug trafficking, gambling, prostitution, and money laundering. I, in contrast, am a mid-thirties female exclusively engaged in the ultralegitimate, if somewhat less than lucrative, fields of professional dog writing and dog training. My idea of money laundering is accidentally leaving a one-dollar bill in the pocket of my jeans when I throw them in the wash. For what it’s worth, I must add that Guarini was reputed to have killed so many people that even the FBI had lost count; he was universally regarded as a man of extreme violence. In contrast, the thousands of victims of my own murderous binges have consisted of insects that threatened the health and comfort of my dogs. If you ask people about me, what you’re going to hear is, Holly Winter? Oh, she wouldn't hurt a flea. Whether Guarini’s reputation and mine are deserved, you’ll have to judge for yourself.
    To backtrack.
    One evening in mid-April, the dogs and I were harmlessly wending our way home from a walk to Harvard Square, home being the three-story barn-red house at the corner of Appleton and Concord, and the dogs being exemplary specimens of the breed of breeds, fire of the tundra, strength of strengths, light of the Polar night, and light of the life of Holly Winter, the justifiably legendary Wild Dog of the North, the noble and glorious Alaskan malamute.
    You did ask whether I had any pets, didn’t you? Three, as it happens, a cat named Tracker and two dogs, Alaskan malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, about whom I could go on, as I often have and certainly will and, moreover, would do so right now at tremendous length and in excruciating detail except that I’ve got a story to tell. To resume, we were unexpectedly interrupted in our harmless wending of our unobjectionable way homeward up Concord Avenue by the appearance of a somewhat old-fashioned black limousine that snuck up on us, slunk along beside us, and thus stalked us in what struck me as catlike fashion for a few yards before it crept ahead and came to an ominous halt at the curb. Its tinted windows gave it an aura of inscrutability, and the almost inaudible sound of its engine was the distinctive, growling purr of a cat who’s about to sink his teeth into the flesh at the base of your thumb. Whether Rowdy and Kimi shared my sense of feline threat I can’t say. When it came to cats, they were more threat than threatened, and in any case, they not only considered themselves the toughest guys on our block, but honestly were.
    The passenger-side front door of the limo flew open to disgorge a man so vertically and horizontally gigantic that he almost blocked the sidewalk ahead of us. His mountainous proportions alone would’ve startled me. As to his features, you know that anthropological debate about whether modern homo sapiens is part Neanderthal? A glance at this guy’s brow ridge and prognathic jaw settled the question in my mind, although that wasn’t, of course, the question of immediate concern to me at the time, and for obvious reasons, I didn’t try to settle the academic one by asking the brute whether his immediate ancestors had worn loin cloths and fashioned primitive tools out of stone. The creature blocking our path had, I might mention, exceptionally pale skin and dark hair, and wore twenty-first-century men’s pants and a zippered jacket that looked as if it should’ve had a candlepin logo on the breast and the name of a bowling