The Fool's Run

like a rat for a couple of minutes.”
    At the door, she rang the bell and blew hard on the dog whistle. There was no response. She dipped into the bag for the bar, and I covered her with my body while she cracked the door. We stepped into a dark-paneled entry hall; the kitchen was to the left, the living room straight ahead. Hanging on the entry wall was an eye-popping Egon Schiele drawing of two women, nude except for calf-length silk stockings, making love. It was worth a good fraction of the house’s value. I began to understand LuEllen’s misgivings. That drawing belonged in a museum, or a millionaire’s bedroom, not in a suburban house in Virginia.
    LuEllen launched herself into the house, literally running, ripping open the front hall closet, pivoting, going into the kitchen, pulling open the cabinets one after another.
    The Doberman pinscher caught her on her knees halfway down the kitchen. He came around the corner from the dining room—black and brown and rippling with muscle, running like a leopard.
    I was looking at the Schiele drawing when I heard the dog’s toenails on the kitchen floor, and LuEllen screamed “No” and I turned, and the dog was coming. He must not have seen me behind LuEllen, because he leaped toward her snarling, and she half stood, her hands in front of her. I took two steps toward them, and as he hit her upper arms and she started to go down, I kicked him in the throat. LuEllen’s arm pulled out of his mouth as he tumbled over and down, then he scrabbled his legs under him, recovering, and I took another step and he was almost on his way again, and I kicked him in the head and he went down again.
    He was still alive and still trying, and I kicked him again in the ribs without doing much damage except to roll him over, and then LuEllen pushed by me, lifting the crowbar over her head and bringing it down like a baseball bat. The dog rolled his head, and the bar bounced off; she flailed at him again, and this time connected squarely. Blood spattered across the floor, and the dog’s legs started to run in a death kick, and she hit him again, and again, and I grabbed her and pulled her off.
    “Let go,” she said. “I’m okay.” She dropped the bar and began flinging open the doors of the kitchen cabinets and raced into the dining room and looked down the stairs, and then went out through the garage door.
    The phone was still ringing in the background. I hunted it down and pulled it off the hook, and rehung it. In the sudden silence I could hear the dog’s bubbling breath as he died.
    “Get that fuckin’ dog and stuff it in the hall closet,” LuEllen snarled as she came back in the house.
    I went back to the kitchen and dragged the dog by its collar into the hallway, and pushed it into the closet. “What happened with the whistle?”
    “Some dogs are trained to ignore them. In fact, they go on alert when they hear one. I don’t think there’s an alarm, by the way. The dog was it.” She was examining her upper arm, and there was blood on her shirt. “There’s no entry alarm. There’s no motion or sound detectors I can see. I thought maybe they had a direct-call alarm, but I couldn’t see anything on the phone lines. I cut them anyway. Let’s get this done in a hurry.”
    “How bad are you?”
    “He got me, but it doesn’t look too bad.”
    “Let me see.” I pulled the neck of her shirt down over her shoulder, and found four gashes, each an inch long, ragged and deep. They were bleeding profusely.
    “Hurts like hell,” she said. “I have to find a different shirt and something to soak up this blood.”
    We went down the hall, and she suddenly stopped and said, “Whoa.” The living room had been done by the Marquis de Sade. Scarlet flocked wallpaper set off a two-inch-deep wool pile carpet as black as India ink. The furniture included a walnut-colored baby grand piano and an inky-blue overstuffed living room suite of velvet. A candelabra mounting six black candles sat on the piano. The room smelled of incense and marijuana, and something else, something from the locker room or the bedroom. Sweat. Human juices. Something.
    On the walls, at eye level, were groupings of small, high-quality art photographs and engravings, all expensively framed, all pornographic.
    “I don’t believe these things,” LuEllen said, as she examined one of the engravings.
    “Everybody needs a hobby,” I muttered, looking around. “Let’s find that fucking