The Dogfather

always afraid that even comparatively safe bones like frozen raw knucklebones will break or splinter and that what’s intended to be a dog’s treat will result in intestinal surgery and a stay in a critical care unit.
    I stooped down near Rowdy and was about to ask him what the hell was going on when I finally noticed Joey Cortiniglia. And the gore. Joey’s caveman body was stretched out lengthwise just under the silver Suburban, feet toward the front of the big car. He lay on his back with his right arm visible—and visibly limp. Death hadn’t softened the prognathous thrust of his jaw. He’d been shot in the head. I have a strong stomach. I’ve whelped puppies, cleaned deep wounds, and mopped up reeking canine messes of every sort—liquid, semiformed, and solid. Enough said, except that I found myself sitting on the blacktop feeling not only queasy but disoriented, as if the dogs and I were trapped in a surrealist painting entitled Gangland Slaying with Woman and Malamutes. For a moment, I imagined that the bones Rowdy and Kimi were chewing had come from human legs.
    The next thing I knew, Enzio Guarini was talking to me. He informed me that I wasn’t here. “You tie up the dogs like that?”
    “Of course not. And I don’t give them bones. Malamutes—”
    Guarini interrupted. In a gentle voice that commanded obedience, he said very slowly, “Take them and go home. This didn’t happen.”
    By now, Favuzza was on the scene, Zap and the limo had returned, and two more men had appeared, gigantic twins so gargantuan and so identical that I had to wonder whether I was hallucinating double. As I followed orders by undoing the hard knots in the leather leads, unhitching the dogs, and putting them in their crates in the car, Guarini’s men went about the gruesome task of encasing Joey’s body in heavy green trash bags and loading it into the Suburban. The bodyguards, as always, remained silent. Zap, Favuzza, and the monstrous twins didn’t exactly whistle while they worked, but they did talk, and although I avoided the area between my Bronco and the Suburban, snatches of conversation reached me. Favuzza made his adenoidal snorting noise. “Blackie wouldn’t’ve hurt a dog. Somebody else would’ve shot them. And giving them bones is Blackie all over.” He then asked Zap a question I didn’t hear, and Zap replied that he’d looked everywhere. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the twins raise Joey’s body. After that, they seemed to concentrate on searching the Suburban. I heard one of them report to Guarini: “Nothing.”
    “Blackie must’ve been running low on cash,” Favuzza said.
    “Don’t take nothing for granted,” Guarini said. “You get me a name. You got that? Could’ve been Blackie. Could’ve been someone else. This is a message to me, and I want to know who the fuck sent it. Get me that name.”
    When I’d finally transferred both dogs to my Bronco, I did exactly what Guarini had ordered. I got into my car and drove home. When I got there, instead of going next door to ring Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy’s bell, I led Rowdy and Kimi directly to our own house. Once inside, I thought about calling Kevin. I didn’t do it. In one respect, I did, however, disobey Enzio Guarini: I remembered what had happened; I did not forget the sight of Joey Cortiniglia’s body. I told myself that my mind, at least, was free.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    Sex and death. About a hundred and thirty-three days before Joey Cortiniglia took a fatal bullet in the brain, Rowdy had reveled in the delusion that he’d died and gone to heaven, which is to say that he’d been bred to CH Jazzland’s Embraceable You. Emma, as she was called, had flown from the state of Washington for the carefully planned tryst. In case you are unfamiliar with the reproductive rites of the Exalted Order of the Purebred Pooch, I should mention that creating new lives from Rowdy and Emma had undoubtedly involved more forethought than had gone into eradicating life from Joey Cortiniglia. Here in dogs, the breeder of a litter is the owner of the bitch—a technical term, not a slur, and certainly not a derogation of Emma, who even before finishing her championship had gone Reserve Winners Bitch—technical term, see?—at the Alaskan Malamute National Specialty, an honor roughly translatable from dogspeak to Standard English as Next to the Top Female Who Hasn’t Finished Her Championship as Judged at the Annual Ritual Gathering of Persons