The Dogfather

cheese, the training held Frey’s rapt attention, too. I now realize that the dapper Guarini with his ebony walking stick, his noisy clicker, his adorable puppy, and his massive bodyguards must have been memorable. Had anyone—the police, for instance—sought witnesses to testify to Guarini’s presence, the task would’ve been easy. At the time, ignoring the occasional shopper who lingered to admire Frey, I concentrated on nodding approval to Guarini as he doled out clicks and treats.
    I’d said that the training session would be short. It was. Perhaps ten minutes elapsed from the moment I left Loaves and Fishes to the moment I announced that Frey had had enough. How long had it taken me to buy the beef and cheese? Ten minutes? I’d had to wait at the deli counter, and there’d been people ahead of me in the checkout line. Adding on the time it had taken to walk from the cars to the front of the mall, the total time since I’d left Joey Cortiniglia with my dogs was, say, twenty-five or thirty minutes. For the record, let me note that not once had I peered around the corner of the building to check on Rowdy and Kimi. I’d been busy. Besides, Joey Cortiniglia wasn’t big on brains, but he was brawny enough to hang on to two malamutes. Let me also mention that I hadn’t glimpsed the limo or Al Favuzza since we’d left them. Finally, the only people I saw who looked like mobsters were my own companions.
    So, maybe thirty minutes after I’d left Rowdy and Kimi with Joey, when the training session was over, Guarini, Frey, the bodyguards, and I rounded the corner of the mall at the liquor store. “Now,” I was saying, “if Frey is about to jump on you or someone else, you tell him, ‘Frey, sit,’ and when he does, click and... WHERE THE HELL ARE MY DOGS?”
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    Even before I’d finished shouting, the bodyguards had formed a human barricade around Guarini. They sensed danger; their response was correct. My own first— and, I should note, incorrect—response was anger at Joey. My second was guilt. Rowdy and Kimi were the better half of myself. Why had I entrusted them to a Neanderthal, even a Neanderthal who worked for Enzio Guarini?
    Joey Cortiniglia was nowhere in sight. My Bronco and the silver Suburban were where we’d left them, facing away from us, my Bronco on the right, the Texas Cadillac on the left. The limo, which had been parked between the cars, was gone, as it was supposed to be; Guarini had told Zap to cruise around. Al Favuzza, who’d been assigned to foot patrol, was nowhere to be seen. Believe me, I looked, not for Favuzza, of course, but for my dogs. Joey, the big dope, must’ve decided to take them for a walk. He’d probably decided to let them make friends with some miniature canine fiend that they were now disemboweling. Damn it! Joey knew that my car was unlocked. If anything had happened, he should’ve put the dogs in the car.
    Maybe he had. I pounded across the blacktop. The bodyguards made no effort to stop me. They were, after all, Guarini’s guards and not mine. Guarini could’ve called out a warning to me. He didn’t. I might not have heeded it, anyway. I made directly for the Bronco and was running so fast when I reached it that I slammed my open palms against the rear window while simultaneously peering in at the dogs’ empty crates. If Rowdy had been loose in the car, he’d have put himself where, in his opinion, he naturally belonged in life as well as in vehicles: in the driver’s seat. But the entire damned car was filled with the absence of dogs.
    Listening for the distant, dreaded roar of a dog fight, I was startled when a low-pitched grinding noise drew my gaze to the passenger-side front bumper. Sticking out from under the car was a softly wagging malamute tail. I traced it to the rest of Kimi’s body. The grinding emanated from her jaws and from Rowdy’s. Kimi’s tail, the one I’d spotted first, was executing a lackadaisical wave instead of a vigorous thump because she was concentrating most of her energy on gnawing the hunk of bone she held between her forepaws. Still safely attached to her collar, her leather leash had been looped around a thick section of the undercarriage and snapped to her collar. Rowdy was identically hitched to the other side of the car. He, too, was occupied in chewing a large, fresh-looking bone. My dogs live a deprived life; they almost never get bones. Malamutes have tremendously powerful jaws. I’m