The Last of the Winnebagos

Apache was beginning to fill up with rush hour overflow and a whole fleet of tankers. The overflow obviously spent all their time driving divideds—nobody bothered to signal that they were changing lanes. Nobody even gave an indication that they knew what a lane was. Going around the curve from Tempe and onto Van Buren they were all over the road. I moved over into the tanker lane. My lifeline didn’t have the vet’s name on it. They were just getting started in those days, and there was a lot of nervousness about invasion of privacy. Nothing went online without the person’s permission, especially not medical and bank records, and the lifelines were little more than puff bios: family, occupation, hobbies, pets. The only things on the lifeline besides Aberfan’s name were the date of his death and my address at the time, but that was probably enough. There were only two vets in town. The vet hadn’t written Katie’s name down on Aberfan’s record. He had handed her driver’s license back to her without even looking at it, but Katie had told her name to the vet’s assistant. He might have written it down. There was no way I could find out. I couldn’t ask for the vet’s lifeline because the Society had access to the lifelines. They’d get to him before I could. I could maybe have the paper get the vet’s records for me, but I’d have to tell Ramirez what was going on, and the phone was probably tapped, too. And if I showed up at the paper, Ramirez would confiscate the car. I couldn’t go there.

Wherever the hell I was going, I was driving too fast to get there. When the tanker ahead of me slowed down to ninety, I practically climbed up his back bumper. I had gone past the place where the jackal had been hit without ever seeing it. Even without the traffic, there probably hadn’t been anything to see. What the Society hadn’t taken care of, the overflow probably had, and anyway, there hadn’t been any evidence to begin with. If there had been, if the cameras had seen the car that hit it, they wouldn’t have come after me. And Katie.

The Society couldn’t charge her with Aberfan’s death—killing an animal hadn’t been a crime back then—but if they found out about Aberfan they would charge her with the jackal’s death, and it wouldn’t matter if a hundred witnesses, a hundred highway cameras had seen her on Indian School Road. It wouldn’t matter if the print-fix on her car was clean. She had killed one of the last dogs, hadn’t she? They would crucify her.

I should never have left Katie. “Don’t tell them anything,” I had told her, but she had never been afraid of admitting guilt. When the receptionist had asked her what had happened, she had said, “I hit him,” just like that, no attempt to make excuses, to run off, to lay the blame on someone else.

I had run off to try to stop the Society from finding out that Katie had hit Aberfan, and meanwhile the Society was probably back at Katie’s, asking her how she’d happened to know me in Colorado, asking her how Aberfan died.

I was wrong about the Society. They weren’t at Katie’s house. They were at mine, standing on the porch, waiting for me to let them in.

“You’re a hard man to track down,” Hunter said.

The uniform grinned. “Where you been?”

“Sorry,” I said, fishing my keys out of my pocket. “I thought you were all done with me. I’ve already told you everything I know about the incident.”

Hunter stepped back just far enough for me to get the screen door open and the key in the lock. “Officer Segura and I just need to ask you a couple more questions.”

“Where’d you go this afternoon?” Segura asked.

“I went to see an old friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“Come on, come on,” Hunter said. “Let the guy get in his own front door before you start badgering him with a lot of questions.”

I opened the door. “Did the cameras get a picture of the tanker that hit the jackal?” I asked.

“Tanker?” Segura said.

“I told you,” I said, “I figure it had to be a tanker. The jackal was lying in the tanker lane.” I led the way into the living room, depositing my keys on the computer and switching the phone to exclusion while I talked. The last thing I needed was Ramirez bursting in with, “What’s going on? Are you in trouble?”

“It was probably a renegade that hit it, which would explain why he didn’t stop.” I gestured at them to sit down.

Hunter did. Segura started for the couch and then stopped, staring at the photos on the wall above it. “Jesus, will you look at all the dogs!” he said. “Did you take all these pictures?”

“I took some of them. That one in the middle is Misha.”

“The last dog, right?”

“Yes,” I said.