This Dog for Hire

eighty-sixing me.
    He’d probably just rent a car and drive over me a few dozen times, just to make sure I didn’t bother him again.
    Growing up is murder. I’m glad I never tried it.
    I decided to go to bed and figure it out in the morning, when I’d be seven or eight hours more mature.
    But when I got upstairs and was taking off my snow boots, Dashiell began to pace and whine, going over to the window, pushing his nose against the shutters so that they rattled, then coming back to me and catching my eye.
    I shut off the light, went over to the window, and, leaving the shutters closed, opened the slats so that I could see out. My bedroom window faced the main house, and as I looked across the deserted white garden, for just a moment I saw a flash of light.
    It could have been from a car passing on Tenth Street, the headlights momentarily lighting up the dark house. Except that this light didn’t flash across the house, appearing first in one room and then almost instantly the next, moving left to right from where I was, the way the one-way traffic did on Tenth Street. This light was only in the kitchen, nowhere else. It was an intense beam. The kind of light a flashlight makes.
    I looked down at Dashiell and saw that his hackles were up, so I relaced my Timberlands and, keeping the lights off and not bothering with a coat, left the cottage and headed for the Siegal house to see what was going on.
    I had only planned on taking Dashiell. Magritte was sleeping on my bed, and I had no reason to disturb him, hut as usual he had ideas of his own. I felt him brush by me on the stairs, and he was first out the door, turning back toward us with his eyes afire, then play-bowing to Dashiell to start a game.
    But Dashiell wasn’t having any. His mind was elsewhere.
    I followed him across the winter yard, the elongated shadow of the big oak flat on the snow in front of us, then crawling up the bricks of Norma and Sheldon’s house.
    There was light on the third floor now. I saw it swing across the back bedroom Norma used as a study.
    I unlocked the back door as quietly as I could, pulled it open, and left it slightly ajar, going first, while I had the chance, toward the front of the house to find out where someone had gotten in. I signaled Dash to stay by me, but he kept looking toward the stairs. Still, he obeyed, and Magritte trotted alongside, stopping here and there to sniff the strange territory.
    It didn’t take a detective to see what had happened. One of the front ground-floor windows had been broken. But this time someone had used a glass cutter and a suction cup, silently cutting a circle near the lock rather than noisily smashing the whole window. Someone had planned this, had cased the house and returned with the necessary tools to do the job.
    My heart picked up its pace, knees high, arms pumping. If a heart could sweat, mine was sweating. I had thought I’d find another homeless person, some hapless creature just trying to find shelter from the cold. A homeless person with a glass cutter?
    Had Big Foot’s cab followed close enough to my own to see approximately where I had disappeared after getting out of my cab? Not knowing the Village, Peter Cole wouldn’t be likely to guess the secret of what lay beyond the wrought-iron gate. He would naturally assume I lived in the main house. Or had he tried the gate? Was that why I’d had trouble with the lock?
    I decided to go back to the cottage and call the precinct. I didn’t think it was a great idea to take chances when my gun was in its show box in the closet rather than tucked into my waist and there were a hunch of lovely policemen just across the street wailing for a little excitement to enter their lives.
    I gestured to the dogs and headed for the open back door. But when I stepped out the door, Dashiell was nowhere in sight. He must have misunderstood; whenever we had come in the past, he had gotten to search the whole house. And this time, his efforts would actually pay off. Apparently he was oil his way upstairs; when I stepped out onto the small porch, there I was alone with Magritte.
    I turned to go back and call him. After all, Peter’s choice of weapons was pretty eclectic. This time around he might have a gun. But before I got the chance to take a step, the breath was squeezed out of me, a powerful arm around my throat, choking me, taking me off balance, and dragging me backward. I could smell the foulness of stale cigar smoke on his breath and