Red Dog Read Online Free Page B

where I found Anci sitting on an air-conditioning vent with a zoology book propped on her bare knees.
    She said, “Eun Hee wants me to stay and visit.”
    â€œLew does, too.”
    â€œThere’s a fox out here, man. An actual fox.”
    â€œWe got foxes at home.”
    â€œThose are stand-off foxes, though. Snooty foxes. This one, you can pet.”
    Eun Hee came into the room with a tray of sandwiches and cookies and a couple of those bottled orange sodas that seem to follow Anci around. I don’t know how she does it. It’s like she phones ahead.
    Eun Hee said, “He was caught in a trap. Someone found him and freed him and called the county. The county called Lew.”
    I turned to Anci.
    â€œI thought you were going to keep me from getting eaten by a dog.”
    â€œThat was before I knew there were foxes involved.”
    That was fair enough and I said so. Secretly, I was happy she’d decided to stay on her own and save us the argument. I hung around long enough to eat a sandwich and a couple ofcookies. I even saw the fox, which wasn’t much more than a kit, in a pen behind the house.
    â€œI already named him Dave,” Anci said. “So don’t bother.”
    â€œDave’s a fine name for a fox,” I said.
    â€œAgree in full.”
    I kissed my daughter. I said good-bye to Lew and Eun Hee and Dave, and pretty soon I was on the bridge back into Illinois.
    E AST ALONG 146 IS THE IRON FURNACE AND JUST PAST THAT is Union City, not far from where I figured the Cleaveses’ little farmstead was situated. It’s mostly fields of soy or corn out that way, and a coal mine or two, though these days the coal works are as often as not abandoned. By the time I arrived at Loves Corner and the Classic Country Showroom, it was nearly seven o’clock—still daylight, but now with dusk’s purple threads showing themselves above the low foothills somewhere far away to the west.
    It was Sunday, and the place was closed. I parked in the dirt lot and climbed down from Lew’s truck. I folded the leather gloves and tranqs into my back pocket and retrieved the rod and noose from the bed of the truck and walked up. Some grackle birds burst from the high grass at the edge of the lot and squawked at me a little before fluttering off into purpling sky. I told them where they could put their squawks. I was on important business and had sixty-five honest dollars to earn. I walked up to the club to pick a lock.
    They were good ones, Reach’s locks—commercialGrade 2 with the cylindrical levers that made them a pain in the ass to crack. When I finally popped the door I found the inside of the club empty and quiet. There wasn’t anything more threatening to the Classic Country than one of those fancy El Toro mechanical bulls looming in a corner and an elevated dance platform I managed to trip over in the dark. I searched the rest of the place. There were tables and stools and a small stage with spotlights for the band and lots of TV screens for sports-watching and such. There didn’t seem to be a dog anywhere. The floors smelled of cleaner, and the bathrooms were fully stocked and their counters slick, so I figured I’d missed the janitor by no more than a half hour. In the back was a fry kitchen and a walk-in cooler for beers and burger patties and that sort of thing. If Reach kept a business office somewhere, it wasn’t on-site.
    Well, then, I thought, maybe it was in his house, which was up a path a ways behind the club. This was one of these underground builds that were a fad for a few seconds in the energy-anxious days of the mid-seventies, and in the failing light I almost missed it: a bit of window and siding squeezing itself from under a grass-covered hummock as though the landscape was devouring it, but slowly, because it almost couldn’t bear the taste. There was some tall grass and the crook of a solitary oak. There was a bit of