Sheila

Mother Nature was in a giving mood today. Sunny. Mid-seventies. Just breezy enough to mess up your hair. If you weren’t outside on a day like today, then you were stuck at work, stuck in jail, or dead. I sat on the cabin stoop, pondering nothing, when Butch came prancing across the dooryard to show off his prize. It was a small, black journal or diary. I took hold of it and yanked back and forth, side to side, his head followed suit and a whiny growl suggested that he had only wanted to show me his find, not give up possession of it.

“C’mon, give it boy.”

He released his hold grudgingly and gave an expectant look, tongue out, waiting for me to wing it across the way so that he could go fetch.

“Not this time, let’s see what you got here, okay?”

I tousled the scruff on his neck and let him know what a good boy he was. And he was—a very good boy. He opened his mouth wide and made an appreciative yawning sound in his throat. Butch was a hybrid: half wolf, half German Shepherd. I didn’t particularly care for that word—“hybrid”—made him sound like a furry little car. But if the shoe fits.

It was a neat, little black notebook—jeans back pocket size— and obviously well traveled if not a bit slobbery from its most recent use as a chew toy. I opened it and riffled through the pages. It was someone’s personal journal written in a neat, almost fussy longhand. I’m not really a nosy person but I felt compelled to read over it a bit, feeling only slightly guilty. As I read, I realized that Butch had really came across something. Sheila—the name conveniently written on the first page—had recorded a recent attempt at an act of vengeance. An outfit of not-very-nice drug dealers—and alleged practitioners of other unsavory practices—had provided her brother with fentanyl laced heroin and no, I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like a bad deal. They had sent him away to get his fix behind their digs; the dirty underbelly of a highway overpass. Her brother got his fix, died alone from it, and was left to lay like unwanted trash. The last entry is what jerked my chain though. It was dog eared and according to her words, written while life was leaking onto the ground. Some of that blood had made it onto the pages, causing them to stick. She had went in for revenge and exited with a gunshot wound, twenty thousand in cash, and piece of crap drug dealers on her tail. She reasoned that the $20,000 was dirty drug money and whosoever should find her, do something good with it. Those words had a bloody fingerprint over them, as if to emphasize this point.

“Where did you find this Butch?” He yarked once as if to tell me it was not my business and please return his volume, toot sweet. I stepped off the porch and waved the journal under his nose, “C’mon boy. Show me.” I started trotting in the direction he had came from. Butch could in no way resist a run through the woods, so he came trotting by, nipping at my ankles as he passed. The cabin was backed up to state forest and in a northerly direction, after a couple of miles of wood, you hit route 46. That’s the direction we went and had covered about a mile and a half when I saw Sheila. She was propped against a large pine, legs splayed out, and hands laying palms up on either side of her, like a once favorite doll that had been tossed aside and forgotten. Butch went to her side, whining and looking over his shoulder to me. I approached warily, calling out to her, but from the way she was propped against the tree, I wasn’t really expecting a response. Butch watched me—I felt that if he could have stood and put his paws on his hips to show annoyance at my lagging pace, he would have—I scanned the woods because I had a serious case of the “somebody’s watching me” creeps.

Her dark clothes were covered in blood from below the abdomen and she had a good size pistol gripped in her right hand. 9 mm Glock from the looks of it. A silver pen also lay nearby. She was movie star gorgeous. Long black hair, flawless dark skin, her lashes lay on her cheeks as if she had went for a stroll in the woods and decided this knotty pine was the perfect spot for a quick afternoon nap. I knelt down, keeping a couple of feet between her and I—I’d have to make a call to the authorities and I had no interest in being a “person of interest”. I wondered if she had been alive when Butch found her lying there. Maybe she had spoke to him. Maybe she had given him the journal purposefully. Maybe he had stayed close by her so that she wasn’t alone in her last moments. Maybe…hopefully.

A gunshot broke the quiet, Butch yelped and flinched hard. Then he ran a few quick steps as if to flee and instead fell over with a dull “wumph” onto the mat of pine needles surrounding the tree. “Butch!” I yelled and dropped to my knees next to him, putting my hands in his fur, blood already leaking onto his side. I looked in the direction of the shot just as another rang out. This one I felt breeze by my face and I saw a skinny figure walking calmly towards us from the direction of the road, gun in hand and pointed in our direction. Anger furrowed my brow and clenched my jaw tight, without thinking, I dropped and rolled toward the body of the girl. I grabbed the gun from her hand and prayed that it was hot. I pulled up and fired at the figure, he popped one off simultaneously. Jinx. He missed again. I did not. I saw him jerk and drop to one knee with a grunt, then pause before pushing himself back to standing by pushing the barrel of his gun into the ground. His other hand pressed against his hip. He changed his mind and direction, running/hobbling back toward the road.

“You shot my dog sunofabitch! Where in the hell do you think you’re going!”

I took a pot shot, zinged a tree very close to him. Then took another for good measure, no luck.

My instinct was to chase, then I looked to my best friend on the ground.

“Go on and run! I’ll see you soon and that’s a promise!” I was known to keep my promises.

I scooped him up and ran back toward my cabin, knowing that Butch was already gone. Tears filled my eyes, heavy and unbidden. He was an old dog and when I look at it from outside my grief, I know that the wolf in him was glad to have gone down like a…wolf, rather than hobbling about in stiff, arthritic agony and running into furniture because his eyes were white with cataracts.

I wrapped Butch in his favorite fleece blanket and gently laid him in “his” spot on the couch. Tomorrow I would go to the shed, build him a sturdy box and bury him in front of the tree line. I would sit the porch and depending on the time of day, sip coffee or bourbon (most likely the latter), I’d look to his resting place and we would talk. Tomorrow I would start grieving for my friend. Tonight though, I had business to attend to.

On my way to the city, I stopped in at the place where I had first met Butch, when he was just a pup. An animal hospital in town that also functions as a shelter. The vet oversees the shelter, and she is a cherished friend of mine and Butch. She's one of the good ones and she is also twenty thousand dollars in the black as of today. I know that she’ll put it right back towards those animals. She’s the reason many neglected, abused and abandoned pets have found loving families to become a part of.

“Thank you Mike. I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything and don’t thank me, Barb. Thank Sheila.”

“Who is Sheila if you don’t mind me asking Mike?”

“A person that I wish I could’ve known better.”

So I drove. On the way I made a stop at a payphone to place an anonymous call to the police, ensuring that Sheila’s body was taken care of and her family notified. And Sheila, I will make sure your little black book gets back to your loved ones, but right now I need it, because you pointed me to where these lowlifes holed up. You had been very detailed and looking back it almost seems that some part of you knew how things would play out. Or your heart knew. Now I knew something too, where they were…and it was my turn to reap some retribution. I wasn’t a big fan of the city, but I was looking forward to this visit.

It was about an hour drive into the city and seemed very strange without Butch riding shotgun— I was already missing my friend badly.

The city lit up on the horizon; it was almost dark and I was almost there. Taking the exit and several turns deeper in, I found the building. From the exterior it looked derelict but for a chain link fence topped with razor wire surrounding the property, extreme for an abandoned building. I saw the overpass brooding behind. I casually passed by and drove the block looking for an inconspicuous spot to park the rig. I didn’t mind walking a bit, it was a nice night. I stayed to the shadows, skirting around until I came to the back of the fence. There I found a thick, movers blanket already lain over the wire. Sheila had done her homework. Traffic noisily whooshed by above and behind me. I climbed and dropped to the other side.

. The backyard was a sty, filled with empty booze bottles, butts, needles, tires and an ages old pair of Fruit of the Looms. Bonus. I watched my step approaching the back door. Everything was boarded up tight but there was bass thumping loud enough to rattle the windows and light peeping from behind the plywood used to cover those windows. The security door on the back entrance had recently been jimmied, the guilty pry bar lay nearby. Now who could have done that?

I stripped down to the raw, folded my clothes in a neat pile and laid them on top of a rusty 55 gallon drum near the door. Then I shifted. I can make the change happen very quickly and I do need the moon, just not the full glowing face of it. A slim, lunatic grin of crescent will do, or a gibbous moon, as was shining brightly overhead tonight. Also, bullets don’t feel good but it does take silver to really mess me up. Why? Good question, I’m just a big hairy bundle of unexplainable. You see, I’m a bit of a hybrid myself and Butch is not only my best friend, he’s my brother. Sheila and I had a thing in common; no one screws with our family. These clowns were about to meet my other half, up close and personal. That part of me that is all rage, sharp claws and large pointy teeth. Get ready little piggies, because I’m about to blow your house down. For Butch and for Sheila.