Surrendering Bruiser: From Holidays with Bigfoot

• Kendall Francois: The Killer on Fulton Avenue
• Dislocation of Expectations

Thomm Quackenbush

From Holidays with Bigfoot

To the rhythm of the road, Emily tapped the steering wheel. "I'm glad the daughter had nothing to do with it."

We listened to this audiobook straight through on the seven-hour drive to Virginia. Emily had heard every twist and clue I had in this mystery. The daughter had everything to do with the caper, and I told Emily as much. How could she be so wrong?

This precipitated an argument. We restated with increasing emphasis evidence that proved how right we were, neither of us budging. The daughter was funny and sweet, but she was also deceptive. I liked her, but she was a con artist. All her charms were suspect because nothing she said could be trusted. She had everything to do with getting her father arrested for her crimes. The story didn't work if she reformed and abandoned him to righteousness before his final grift. To Emily, it was character assassination to see it otherwise. To her, the story didn't work if there was not one morally clean character to root for in the end. If no one was reliable, what was the point of the story?

It is wrong to call anything done for business a "road trip." A road trip has the exacting specification of not being for something. One can have a destination in mind, but the journey there is meant to be forgiving and loose, tinged Cheetos orange and road marker green.

On her weekend off, her animal shelter charged Emily with this mission. Months ago, a blissfully married couple adopted a pit bull named Bruiser. They had crossed four state lines after seeing his picture on the SPCA's website. They loved him without reservation, promising to make him a cherished member of their family.

The couple got divorced. Between the wedded bliss and the murderous intent, they had moved from Minnesota to Virginia. The wife and possessor of Bruiser had remained in Virginia. According to her, her ex had abandoned the dog to returned to Minnesota. As they had signed an agreement that they would surrender Bruiser to the animal shelter in the case of abandonment, someone would have to make the drive to Virginia.

I had told Emily that I would miss her this weekend and to take pictures. She had made it clear someone would have to go with her on this supposed "road trip" if someone wanted to remain in her good graces. She called this an all-expenses-paid weekend getaway. I doubted that she believed this. Who vacations in Fredericksburg?

I agreed to her terms in general if she would accept that this was not a road trip or a getaway. This was a rescue mission.

"Do we have a picture of Bruiser?" I asked on the drive to the shelter.

"Do you think she is going to swap out another pit bull?" she asked, teasing me.

"This is my first surrender. How would I know? She is making us drive through several states to pick up the dog she is surrendering. This doesn't speak well of her character."

"I know Bruiser," said Emily. "I know what he looks like. And it is a good thing she called us. She could have gotten rid of Bruiser and we wouldn't know. This is the responsible choice."

"Wait, the contract is a suggestion? It isn't a legal document?"

"Contracts are legal documents," Emily answered, avoiding the question.

We arrived moments after dawn to pick up the van, closer to a blue shipping container than a vehicle. The back of the van-everything behind the driver and passenger seats-held only a cage and twenty-pound bag of kibble.

When Emily drove us anywhere, she forbade me from being distracted. She chastised me for skimming emails while in traffic, saying I treated her like a chauffeur, after which I knew better than to do it again. Once, after a long day, I dozed in the passenger's seat. I was woken as she drove onto the rumble strips. She swore it was because she had started to drift off herself. She could have been underscoring her point: I was there to keep her company by being entertaining and fully conscious.

On long car trips as a passenger, I lose my humanity exit by exit. When I drive, I am in control and have something on which I can focus: not killing myself or other drivers. As a passenger, I am made useless and impatient, aside from finding radio stations and playing "I Spy." With Emily, I rarely drove anywhere far. She disliked my driving as much as she didn't want to be a passenger, so I let her do the distance driving to keep the peace.

The surrendering was not set until Sunday morning. This meant we had a hotel room in a strip mall boasting a Walmart and a Target side-by-side, a commercial coexistence rarely seen in nature.

During breakfast, the woman who was to surrender Bruiser called Emily. She had a flat tire, which needed mending before she could drive Bruiser to us.

Emily hung up. "She isn't going to let this be an easy mission."

"Did the ex pop her tire?"

"She didn't mention. Let's assume not," she said, "so this isn't harder than it has to be."

We settled into the lobby to await the woman's arrival. I tried to revive the book argument to have something to do, to distract her, but Emily's head wasn't in it.

The woman called again to announce that both Bruiser and her dog were missing from her house. The woman suspected that her ex-husband had taken both dogs because of course she did. This did not bother her much, daring us to call it improbable.

"Looks like I am going to have to open a can of whoop-ass," said Emily.

She dashed back to our room to change from a baby doll dress into her animal control uniform, khaki pants and a dark blue t-shirt. She put her long blonde curls into a looped bun, as she did before taekwondo competitions. She then called the police to inform them that crimes had ostensibly occurred.

Emily dialed the woman back to alert her that we were coming. She did not answer. "I am not leaving Virginia without this dog," was all Emily would say. Her blue eyes were set and cold. I was both excited and nervous to see her in this way, tense that I would get in her way.

Half an hour later, the woman answered her phone. Emily asserted that she was driving over to the woman's house, the police were on their way, and we would resolve this.

The woman told her there wasn't any reason to make such a fuss.

We hoped to arrive before the police to keep what little authority we had. What had been handing off a pit bull had become a bust.

The police were not there.

The woman was tan and slim, long dark hair, and a clean complexion obscured by artful makeup. In short, too young looking to have her teenage daughter a fluttering about, offering us drinks and asking if it was exciting living in New York City. (She refused to believe that any part of New York wasn't New York City.)

"If you don't get that dog back," the woman said, "he's gonna bring Bruiser to the ASCPA here. They kill pit bulls immediately."

I didn't appreciate her raising the stake this way. It was a weak plot twist from a hammy writer. She should have had us try to find Bruiser, only to discover that rescuing wasn't enough. We had to save his life.

"He's gonna get that dog put to sleep just to spite me if you can believe that."

How did this gel with the happy couple not a year ago who adopted Bruiser? I understood enmity in a breakup, but not dog murder by proxy. He had left no note, had not called her to convey this threat. She intuited his plan, channeled from the heavens and her expired marriage.

She dressed in form-fitting slacks and a thin green blouse. She told us that she hadn't been to church this Sunday, nor would one wear this there.

"Are you going to work later?" Emily asked.

"Why?"

"Oh, you're dressed well. I didn't know if this was intruding on your day." I tried to catch her eye, to silently confer that Emily was suspicious. Emily would not indulge this.

"No," the woman said. "I don't work Sundays. I just care about my appearance."

Emily was in a uniform, and her manner of dress could not be in question. The woman looked me over, in jeans and a t-shirt, clothing meant for helping a dog into a kennel, telling him he was a good boy, and driving back home. I did not meet her standards.

The woman asked if we wanted to see her garage, the floor speckled with blood. "My landlord shot up Bruiser full of buckshot."

It was minutes since the woman had added "Evil ex is going to have the dog murdered if you don't catch him." Now, she was burying the lede on "And he is bleeding to death." This woman had no sense of dramatic pacing. Would she next have told us that the president would die without the serum in a vial on Bruiser's collar?

"Today?" Emily asked.

She took a sip of her sweet tea, enjoying her Sunday morning. "Probably when I was getting my tire fixed. Is that a problem?"

"If he is full of buckshot and bleeding so much, yes, it is a problem." The veins in Emily's neck pulsed as her patience had about exhausted. Emily was a clever, resourceful, compassionate person who strove to do no harm in the world. There was no doubt she wanted to punch someone to make this problem go away. "We need to find Bruiser so we can get him treatment."

Lacking an instinct for self-preservation, I followed the trail of blood through the kitchen and living room to the second floor. How could any animal be alive with injuries this grievous?

"Oh, hi!" the daughter said from the second-floor hallway, smiling, holding a glass of tea. "Hey, do you want to hang out in my room while you wait? I have a lot of movies."

I did not want to go into the strange teen girl's room. I walked back to the kitchen with the girl following me.

"You should really see my room."

To change the subject, I asked, "Are you close with your stepfather?"

"Ex-stepfather," she said brightly. "He's okay."

"The sort of okay that steals dogs?"

She shrugged one shoulder. "I don't know. He did, though, so I guess he is, right?"

It would take a philosopher to sort that. "Are we going to have any trouble getting him into the back of the van, would you guess?"

"Bruiser?" she asked in case I meant her ex-stepfather. "Nah, he's a baby. He loves everyone."

"Including your landlord?"

"Oh, I don't think they saw each other before. Probably doesn't like him now, though." She sipped her tea, adding, "Because he got shot."

It would taint most relationships. "I'm going back outside to wait. I should be out there when the police come," I said, though there was no need for me on the front lawn. My sense that Emily didn't belong there either was increasing by the minute.

"Hey, are you sure you don't want to watch something in my room? The police don't come that fast."

I claimed I wasn't much for movies.

In the front yard, my absence hadn't been noticed. Emily was asking the woman why she hadn't called to have her pick Bruiser up from her house when she saw the popped tire.

"I didn't see a reason to bother you," she said. "I wasn't gonna be long."

"I wish you had bothered us."

"I didn't think someone would break in, shoot Bruiser, then my ex would steal him."

Even she, hearing this strung together, seemed skeptical. She turned to me, in the garage, with my camera. "Why are you taking pictures of my floor? You a cop?"

"No," I said, not holstering my camera. "It's evidence. Why would your landlord shoot your dog today?"

She sucked her teeth as though this couldn't be less of a concern. "Bruiser's a big guy. He probably got scared."

"Wait, why was your landlord in your house and armed?" asked Emily.

"He likes his guns, and he does own the property," she said, which didn't answer our questions but sufficed enough for the woman. I doubted the laws of Virginia were so different that landlords could discharge weapons in the homes of their renters.

I scuffed one of the spots with my shoe. It didn't smear. "Emily, that isn't right."

"Are you a blood spatter expert?"

"No, but the blood shouldn't be dry, should it?"

"Maybe it dries faster on cement?" She looked to the woman, then to me. "The blood goes all the way upstairs?"

"As far as I got, yeah."

"Did the landlord shoot both dogs?" Emily asked.

"Oh no. it was only Bruiser," answered the woman without hesitation.

"But how can you be sure? All you have is a trail of blood and two missing dogs," I noted. If I suspected one of my dogs was shot, to say nothing of both, I would have panicked.

"No," she replied. "Just Bruiser. If it had been the other dog, she'd be dead already."

I could not parse this logic, but it brought me back to the blood trail. Unless it was a synchronized dash, there was only one trail. If that one had been Bruiser, I couldn't swear. Where did the blood trail end up? Under a bed, maybe. Why else would a wounded animal run upstairs to escape an assailant?

"I would prefer if you didn't go into my house," the woman said, too late.

I shot a glance at the daughter, who smiled, putting a finger to her lips. Our little secret.

We drank tea, watching the empty road. "Where would your dad have taken the dog?" I asked the girl, needing to say something.

"He's not my dad."

I considered her guileless, sunburnt face, barely out of being a child. "Your ex-stepfather, then? If you had to guess?"

She knitted her brow, smirking. "If I knew that, wouldn't we have told you so you could go get the dog?"

I kicked my foot over the cut grass. "Would you?"

She tittered. "Obviously! We just want Bruiser safe." She bit her bottom lip. "Are you animal control, too?"

"No, but Emily isn't, either."

This made her frown, an unexpected answer. "But you are seizing the dog?"

This phrasing seemed important to have clear. "No, your mother is surrendering Bruiser to Emily. We aren't seizing him."

Her warmth toward me waned palpably. "Why are you here?"

"Backup?" I guessed.

"But you have no power, right? You are just her boyfriend."

This teenager was turning on me. I asked if the landlord made a habit of entering their house without permission.

The woman answered that this was the first time he had done so, that maybe he thought there was a burglar since her ex had broken in.

"So, he grabbed a gun and went into your house rather than calling the police?" I looked at the houses around us. "Does he live in one of those?"

Emily told me that the mystery novel had gone to my head and that I should stop interrogating the victims of the crime. I could not get the timeline settled. If the landlord thought the husband was a burglar, why was the dog shot? Wouldn't he have shot the ex? And, if the dog was shot before being dognapped, to what was the landlord responding? She said her ex had taken Bruiser after the shooting. Too many felonies were occurring concurrently in her house. If I came home with blood on my floor during a messy divorce, the police would be there well before an SPCA worker from another state.

The woman turned to speak to her daughter. I said to Emily, "She's very pretty."

Emily looked with a touch of reproach that I would comment on another woman's appearance.

"No, look at that outfit. Is that what you wear to surrender a dog?"

"No," she admitted.

"That makeup took some effort. What would you be doing if you dressed that way?"

Emily considered this. "A date?"

"Or seeing your ex."

Emily heard a car, leaping from her chair and jogging to the sidewalk. When it was only a neighbor, she set to pacing, calling her boss to relay our lack of progress. Talking made Emily feel that there was some purpose to waiting, some outlet for her anxiety. If the woman and her daughter were not watching, Emily would have practiced her taekwondo forms. It could have only helped their cooperation for them to see her front snap kick.

Emily tried to call the ex-husband, but he would not pick up. She left messages explaining that she had called the police and that it would be in his best interest to get the dog to us. The dog could die if we didn't get him back to New York for proper treatment. The ethical thing to do was not murder a dog for petty vengeance against his ex-wife.

A police officer arrived after three hours, all swagger and starched uniform.

"You one who called us?" His mustache twitched in obvious contempt.

The woman swung a lazy hand to show Emily. "That's your girl."

He sucked in his cheeks, regarding her with heavy-lidded distaste. "You think I ain't got better things to do today than help you find a dog?"

Emily responded by showing him the surrender form. "They signed this. Someone shot the dog, discharging a firearm in a residential home. Someone else, she says her ex, stole both the dog she was going to surrender and another dog. Those are crimes, aren't they? Breaking and entering, animal abuse, theft?"

"Well, it's cute you think that New York form means anything here, missy," he chuckled. "We do things a little differently here in Virginia. The police don't need to be called for domestic spats."

The police were often called exactly for "domestic spats." These spiraled into "murder-suicide" more often than anyone wanted.

"I have a contract and the surrender form," Emily said, trying to be more legalistic to counter his dismissiveness. "This is a legal document, which both parties agreed to when they adopted the dog. I am empowered to seize-"

"You ain't got authority here." He exaggerated his southern drawl, looking to be more policemanly for the Northerners. "Dog's the man's property. Ain't hers. He can do what he wants, up to and including shootin' him full of buckshot."

The police officer wasn't entirely wrong. Pets are considered personal property, more like a car than a kid. The couple had adopted Bruiser together, which did not make him the exclusive property of the ex-husband. I'm not sure that the officer accepted that women could own property, though.

Worse, he was right that, despite the signed contract and surrender form, Emily didn't have authority. The ASPCA of Virginia should have been involved. But it was a Sunday and they were closed.

"But what about her dog?" I pointed at the woman, who had ceased to pay any attention. She was speaking to her daughter about something that amused them both, but I could not hear what it was. "That's her property and the ex stole it. That's theft. And there is still the fact that she said he broke in. That makes it burglary, doesn't it?"

"You got a form?" he asked me, as though having heard nothing.

"I'm just accompanying, though I have pictures of the blood if that's helpful." I angled my digital camera screen his way. He would not flick his eyes toward it.

He jerked his thumb at Emily. "You here keeping her safe?"

"She's a black belt. I write fantasy novels. I'm not keeping anyone safe."

He huffed at my plain unmanliness.

"You have to do something, officer," said Emily.

He stepped well into her personal space. She did not move or flinch. I had seen her, without effort, take down men who had fifty pounds of muscle on this police officer.

"All I got's your word against his."

"You don't have his word," Emily reminded him, seething just beneath her uniform, "because you won't try to find a man who reportedly broke into his ex-wife's house and stole a bleeding dog. And it is not my word. It's hers."

The woman looked up from her conversation. "What?"

"You said your ex stole the dogs," I reminded her.

"Oh, right." She sat up straight. "Yes, he did."

The police officer inched close enough to Emily that he was breathing her air, pleased to be making her uncomfortable. "So, you don't know that for a fact, do you? You've got the word of this woman."

"Can we file a police report?" I asked, in part to distract him from Emily. He backed off her and walked over to me.

"Are they your dogs?"

"No, of course not." Until Bruiser was surrendered, I did not see how we had any legal right to him, no matter the paperwork.

"You can't file a report for property you don't own, for a crime you were not a part of. You get that, boy?"

I pointed at the woman. "So, you'll take her report?"

He snorted. "Ain't her dog. Now, y'all should just go home. This doesn't concern you."

"One dog is hers," said Emily. "And her house was broken into."

He refused to consider a report. The woman did not seem to mind either way.

"I expect you won't have me come here again," he said to the woman, getting back in his car.

That "again" struck me. Had he been here before? Or was he only frustrated by what he perceived as a waste of his time? Were we playing a part in a "domestic squabble," as he put it, or was the drama all real with at least one dog's life in the balance?

The pall of our helplessness lasted barely five minutes. The woman without prompting realized that her ex-husband was at a party, information that would have been good to have ten minutes prior and would have been great to have three hours ago.

The daughter asked her mother if she could drive with us, but the mother told her to stay at the house.

We followed her to a house in the middle of a suburb, though set back in a copse.

Before we got out of the van, I asked, "Do we have the authority to get Bruiser vet treatment, when we get him?"

Emily considered this. "We have the credit card. We won't let him die."

"But we shouldn't transport a gunshot animal without stabilizing him. I know a little first aid. I'm sure if we stopped by a drug store, we could improvise something?"

"Don't joke."

I was not aware I was joking.

"Let's get Bruiser first. I can't think about hypotheticals."

The husband's van was in the driveway, though he was not. We peered into the van and saw dog food, which was incriminating enough to continue.

Why would he be at a backyard barbecue if he had a dog dying of a gunshot wound? Was Bruiser back there? Were we yards away from an animal in need, our quarry?

"Emily, should we be here?"

"We have to get the dog, Thomm. The husband has him."

I waited a moment before asking, "Are we sure? Do we know that? That Bruiser is still alive?"

"He's alive." I knew better than to pursue this. Bruiser was alive because he had to be alive. Otherwise, Emily had failed, and the death would be on her conscience. Bruiser was alive or this was all useless, she was useless.

"What do we do?" I wanted to rush past the part of this trip where we were uninvited and very unwanted on somebody else's property. I didn't care to find myself full of buckshot. I heard men in the distance, not enough to constitute a party but enough for Yankee target practice.

Emily hesitated, looking into the van or at her reflection in its window. "We leave a note and we go home as the cop said," she answered, already pulling paper from a notebook.

"We aren't going to confront him?" I asked, but with trepidation. I had no love for the idea, but I wanted to know if it might happen.

"Yes, you are!" said the woman.

"No," said Emily. "We are not. We don't have the authority. The cop did, and he wanted nothing to do with this. We are going home." She placed the note under his windshield wiper.

"You can't leave," the woman shouted. "He shot the dog. You don't know what else he's liable to do!"

Emily paused at the van door. "You said your landlord shot Bruiser."

The woman raised an eyebrow. "I said I thought he did. Now, maybe it was my ex. I can't be sure."

"So, your ex might have been in your house, with a gun, that he used to shoot a dog, and you called us instead of the police?"

"Don't know what happened," she answered simply. "Whoever shot the dog wasn't there when we got home, so why would I call the police? My ex said he would take the dog to hurt me because he knew I was going to give him up to you."

Uneasy about Bruiser's chances of survival, Emily and I started back to New York. An hour into our retreat, the ex-husband called Emily. Her voice began stern and quickly melted.

The husband admitted to kidnapping the dogs, Bruiser and his sister. He said he had done so because his ex called, saying she was going to kill Bruiser to hurt him. She lied about his having abandoned Bruiser a month ago. When he moved back to Minnesota, it was to make enough money to afford an apartment where he could keep his dog. Aside from some heroic breaking and entering, Emily decided he seemed like the good guy, which made us a tool of the villain.

"Ask him why Bruiser was shot," I urged Emily before she hung up, as I needed closure. "And if he popped her tire."

She repeated the first question only. I heard the confused buzz of his reply, her face twisting. She said goodbye.

"Well?" I prompted.

"He said Bruiser wasn't shot. Neither of the dogs were. They're fine. They're happy. They're going to live in Minnesota with a man who cares about them. I'm glad the ex-husband had nothing to do with it."

"But Bruiser wasn't injured?"

"Yes."

I thumped the dashboard. "Then why was there blood? Someone or something was bleeding. And why was it dry? Was it blood?"

"I don't know," said Emily, my questions annoying her. "It wasn't Bruiser, he said."

"What makes him more trustworthy than his ex? He did break in and steal dogs."

"Because she was going to let Bruiser get euthanized!" she said. "He saved the dogs."

"According to him, he saved the dog," I replied, the argument familiar.

"He was devastated and apologetic. You didn't hear him."

That was enough for her, but not for me. "Why do you trust him?"

She tapped the steering wheel, turning onto the interstate, quiet in finding the answer. "Because we can't do anything else for Bruiser but trust he is okay."