Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus Read Online Free Page B

She also sounded somehow off, like she was working harder to speak than she should have needed to.
    Joe hadn’t bitten her: I knew that. With the size of his jaws, if he’d been able to catch any part of her body, one of them would have died. Either the woman, from blood loss, or Joe, from lead poisoning. Whatever was wrong with her, it predated her encounter with my dog.
    “Whether he’s a good dog or a biting dog depends entirely on your relationship with me,” I said. “Joe follows instructions. Do you have any bullets left?”
    “Yes, but not so many,” said the woman. “I’ve been running out of bullets. Running out of pills, too. So I said, wait, I said, maybe there’s a somebody who could make both of those things better. So I asked some questions, and maybe used a few more bullets—definitely used a few knives—and found out where there was a somebody. I don’t want to hurt you. You seem like a nice lady, and like I said, I’ve been running out of bullets. You’re a nice lady with a really big dog. The dog is probably better than bullets in a lot of situations, huh? I bet when you have a dog that big, nobody messes with you.”
    “We’re getting off the topic, my unseen friend, and that topic is whether or not we’re both walking away from here under our own power,” I said. “You say you’re low on bullets. You say you don’t want to hurt me. Well, you’re on my land. If you’re not here to hurt me, what are you here for?”
    “I’m looking for someone.” The feeling that something was wrong came through even more strongly in her brief, blunt statement. It was like she’d been drawing strength from her run-on sentences, using them to keep herself together. I’d heard that sort of thing before, from exhausted interns who were sure they could solve the zombie apocalypse if they just gave up sleep and learned to live entirely on coffee and adrenaline.
    It always ended in a crash.
    “Who?”
    The tree rustled. “Will your doggy hurt me if I come down?”
    “Not unless you draw first. Joe? Heel.”
    Joe’s massive head swung around to me, and he leveled the most reproachful look I had ever received in my direction. He had the person, he seemed to say; they were right there . Why would I pull him away from someone, when he had them?
    “Heel,” I said again, and with a deep, long-suffering sigh, Joe turned and trotted over to sit down by my feet. He was still tense and alert, his body thrumming with the need to leap back into action. I placed my free hand atop his head, feeling the tension run upward through my fingers, until it filled my body the way that it was filling his.
    “All right,” I said. “You can come down now. You don’t threaten us, and we won’t threaten you.”
    There was no verbal answer from the tree. But the branches rustled, and something scraped against the trunk. And then, with no further fanfare, a woman dropped down to the ground in front of me.
    She was short, and for a moment, I thought she was just a kid. It would have gone with that voice of hers, half Disney princess, half prom queen. Then she straightened up, unbending her knees and lifting her head, and I knew that whoever she was, wherever she had come from, she was older than that—mid-thirties at the least, and maybe even a well preserved early forties. There were fine lines around her eyes, which were an unprepossessing shade of slate blue, and deeper lines around the corners of her mouth. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in weeks. It was bundled into a thick ponytail that was going to hurt like hell when she finally tried to wash and style it again. It looked like it was a dark reddish brown, but it was honestly hard to tell, with all the dirt.
    Her clothes fit her size: she could have raided the Juniors section at the local Target for them, if there had been a local Target. There were holes in the knees of her overalls, and her long-sleeved rainbow shirt was as dirty as the rest of