Bad dog, p.1
Bad Dog, page 1
For the Glorious House of Sinanju DestroyerBooks.com
With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2006 by Worldwide
First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2023 by Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN: 9781035999866
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 Warren Murphy
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
www.headofzeus.com
Contents
Dedication
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Authors
An Invitation from the Publisher
Chapter 1
Johnson Jonas accepted a titanium driver and eyeballed the shaft, then addressed the tee, took his stance and scrutinized the length of the fairway a yard at a time. He examined the sand traps and the trickle of a creek that lurked in the rough, and studied the green for blemishes. Not a blade of grass was out of place.
Jonas allowed his face to feel the speed of the breeze. The wind was from the northeast, gentle. Not that he enjoyed the breeze—it was a factor working against him. He judged it was not much of a factor so long as he timed his strokes carefully during the frequent doldrums.
Johnson Jonas rehearsed his swing on an imaginary ball, mentally walking himself through perfect posture and controlled movement He made a practice swing, judged it to be satisfactory, then addressed his actual ball.
It was a custom-made ball. The per-ball price was exorbitant by some standards, but Johnson Jonas wouldn’t sacrifice even one iota of performance to substandard equipment.
He knew perfectly well that the most expensive golf clubs and golf balls wouldn’t make a good golfer out of a poor golfer. But he also knew that a less-than-perfect club would hit with imperfect precision. He knew that a golf ball without precise balance could drift off course, and even a fraction of deviance could grow to a big slice over a hundred yards. He refused to allow shoddy equipment to affect his playing. Jonas was a man who liked to control his environment. By equipping himself with only the best tools—be they clubs, balls, lawyers, market analysts or wives—he increased his likelihood of success in life. Life, to Jonas, meant business, and all the accoutrements that made a man successful in business.
Only once in a great while did he take the time to be by himself long enough to relax. He relaxed on the golf course—but there was no reason not to make the most effective use of his time even then. So he used his relaxation time to sharpen his skills. Since business was conducted on the golf course frequently, one must be good enough to win—or good enough to take a dive without looking as if you were losing deliberately.
Something smelled bad, forcing Jonas to step away from the ball. He wrinkled his nose at the sky and traced the direction of the smell. It was surprising that he smelled anything at all. The Connecticut Heights Country Club went to great lengths to keep out anything foul-smelling.
Good God. Droppings, right on the green.
“Phone,” he demanded.
His phone landed in his hand.
“Wayne.”
The phone dialed Wayne Baum, director of the club.
“Good morning, Mr. Jonas.”
“Not so good. You’ve got droppings on the greens.”
“Animal droppings?” Baum asked.
“I certainly hope they’re not human.”
Jonas thrust away the phone and waited impatiently for the arrival of the groundskeeping staff. Jeremy Doleenz arrived on the scene in minutes and didn’t get out a “good morning” before he was directed to the offending droppings.
“Deer, I imagine,” Doleenz concluded after cocooning the mess in several layers of plastic wrap and tucking it away, then spritzing the sod with odor neutralizer. “Can’t keep them out, what with the public land and all.”
Groundskeeper Doleenz went away.
“Phone!” Jonas snapped.
Nothing.
“Phone,” he said in a more reasonable tone of voice.
The phone emerged. Jonas irritably told it to call the office. Then he controlled his voice and told it again. It complied.
“Give me Avino,” he said to whatever human or machine answered.
“Paul Avino.”
“I want this problem with the country club to go away.”
“Which problem, sir?”
“The public-lands problem. We’ve got animals shitting all over the place because we can’t put up a fence because we’ve got a few acres of public land in the middle of the rough on the fourteenth hole. What are you going to do about it?”
“Retain a lawyer who specializes in property law?” Avino suggested. “My expertise is corporate finance.”
“Whatever. Just get it handled. While you’re at it, what’s with the field trippers? There must be a hundred old grandmas and grandpas on my golf course this morning. They’re not even members, but we had to let them come and see our course.”
“I don’t know anything about it, sir.”
“Connecticut Heights Convalescence Home, they call it.”
“Oh. My mother is there. It’s for the elderly and infirm. I guess this is their monthly outing.”
“I see,” Jonas snarled. “And is your mother a member of the Connecticut Heights Country Club?”
“No, sir.”
“Then why is she here?”
“Another concession to public-use lands, I imagine.”
“More reason to take care of the public-use-lands problem, I think you’ll agree.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jonas flipped off the phone and pushed it away. “Take it,” Jonas snapped needlessly.
“Yes, sir.”
Jonas was startled by the sound of a human voice. “Who’re you?”
“Your caddy, sir.”
Jonas cocked his head and slit his eyes. “You are a stinking liar.”
“No, sir, I’m really your caddy.”
“That is my caddy!” Jonas thrust his hand at the Caddy-Droid X9000. It was as big as a lawn tractor and steered itself around the course using a global positioning system, a digital map of the course geography and proximity sensors to keep it from hitting a human or landscape feature. Slots in the droid were powered by small pneumatic fingers to accept and deliver various items such as golf clubs, balls, cell phone, beverages and cigars. Every bit of it was voice-activated.
“It’s not working properly, sir. Remember, I was sent along this morning to attend to it?”
Jonas now recalled all of this. He had been particularly annoyed that the C-Droid was creating trouble again. For a quarter million bucks, the thing should be perfect. But it dropped items, especially cell phones. Sometimes commercial air traffic messed up its guidance and it wandered into the sand.
“Fine. Whatever. Keep your mouth shut.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I said, keep your mouth shut.”
The human caddy—actually, he was just a mobile mechanic—nodded.
Finally, after what seemed like hours of delay, Jonas prepared to hit the ball. He pulled back on the wood—and froze at the apex of the swing when something growled at him from the rough.
“Oh, now what?” He spotted something looking at him from the low vegetation.
It was a dog.
“Oh, that’s beautiful. We don’t have deer, we have a damn stray roaming around the place.”
Another head appeared in the rough. And another.
“It’s a pack,” Jonas said.
The pack growled. They trotted out of the rough and formed a tight circle around Johnson Jonas. Powerful-looking creatures, with dense white and brown and black coats. They had brilliant dark brown eyes, and Jonas thought he could actually see the muscles flex around their jaws. Whatever breed they were, they were all the same. Even the markings looked similar, as if they came from the same lineage. They were sniffing the air around Johnson Jonas, and low growls rumbled deep in their chests.
“One of those show-dog kennels left its damn gate open and the inventory got out,” he announced. He didn’t feel
“Phone!”
Nothing happened.
“Phone,” he said, trying to modulate for the speech-recognition system.
The phone emerged from its storage cell on the Caddy-Droid X9000 and extended to Jonas on aluminum fingers. Jonas would have to reach over the dogs to take it.
“You!” Jonas snapped. “Call for help.”
The scared-looking human driver wasn’t as stupid as he looked. He slithered out of the driver’s seat of the Caddie-Droid and onto the roof, a protective canopy of hard plastic, then reached down to take the cell phone. He opened it and poked the buttons, then held it up to Jonas, shaking his head wildly.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
The driver shook his head and pointed at the phone. “You a goddamn mime?”
“You told me not to speak, sir.”
“What are you talking about? Don’t answer that. Just call for help.”
“The phone won’t work.”
“’Course not. It’s my phone. I don’t want other people using it. Hold it up.”
The driver held out the phone and Jonas shouted, “Phone Wayne!” The phone remained lifeless. “Phone Wayne. Wayne. Wayne! Wayne.”
The dogs were distracted by the strange modulation of his voice as he tried to communicate with the phone, but their distraction didn’t last and they were growling again.
“Toss it to me,” Jonas said.
The driver gave it a neat, underhand toss and the cell phone sailed three feet over the tips of Jonas’s fingers.
“Idiot! Miserable fucking idiot! You don’t know how to throw a damn cell phone?” Jonas helplessly watched it bounce on the green a few feet away, still open and awaiting his orders.
The shouting agitated the dogs. The growls became snarling and barking.
“Okay, it’s all okay,” Jonas said, calming his voice and lowering his hands, but the dogs couldn’t be appeased. They tightened the circle, then lunged at his legs. Two of the brutes got a good, strong grip and crushed the flesh of his ankles. Their jaws were more powerful than they even looked.
Jonas collapsed. He kicked, but then the other dogs clamped down on his feet. Another animal set its jaws into Jonas’s neck. A pair of mutts ripped through his trousers and tore into the flesh of his upper thigh.
Jonas made a horrid sound, a suffering, dying-animal sound.
The display on his phone came to life, but no one saw the message that said “Dialing Mom.” It rang and someone picked up on the other end.
“Hello, dear. Johnson? Are you there?”
Only the dogs heard old Mrs. Jonas on the phone, and they didn’t care.
Johnson Jonas himself was going through catastrophic shutdown of bodily functions. His eyes fixed oh the empty sky and his breath came out in a long, ugly rattle.
The Caddie-Droid seemed to think that meant something and handed the corpse a sandwedge.
The human caddy was already gone, legs pumping him up and down the rolling hillocks alongside the green. He felt as if he were riding a roller coaster. He craned his neck over his shoulder, expecting to see the dogs closing in on him, but they weren’t there.
He should have been looking where he was going. He ran into a hillock and tripped on his face. His nose gushed blood and he did a pushup that brought him back to his feet and running again. He was sure the delay gave the dogs time to catch up to him, but he didn’t dare look back again. He had to get to the safety of the golf center.
When he topped the next rise, he saw that the golf center was not a safe place to be after all.
There were more dogs. Many more dogs, sturdy white and brown and black beasts—and they were slaughtering the visitors from the Connecticut Heights Convalescence Home. Picnickers, day-trippers, as well as serious golfers, were being attacked everywhere the caddy looked.
A group of bridge players was being torn to pieces on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth they had spread under a big, leafy tree. Their pitcher of lemonade spilled and mixed with their flowing blood.
A trio of severe women with the look of just-retired schoolmarms had been laid out on the first tee, and two of them were having their flesh torn open. Wayne Baum, the club director, was making a valiant attempt at running away, but he was brought down by a pair of animals that growled at him, nuzzled him, then tore into his soft tissues savagely.
Somewhere deep inside his mind the caddy noticed that some were being slaughtered while others were ignored. There seemed to be some deliberation to the selection. But he didn’t really think of this until later on. Right now all he was worried about was saving his own skin.
It wasn’t as if there was anyone he could help here. There were more dogs than there were people. He wasn’t about to start trying to drive them off. The caddy looked for a way out. The first tee, the patio cocktail bar and the landscaped grounds were all turned to killing fields. For a moment he entertained the idea of making a mad dash through the slaughter and getting inside the building, then he saw more dogs on the inside. Behind the glass of the French doors were frantic movements of human beings being slaughtered in the formal lounge.
The caddy could only go back the way he had come—across the course. Back he went, running fast, veering away from the pack of dogs that had attacked Mr. Jonas. He couldn’t avoid them, though, and they came into view and closed in on the caddy. Effortlessly, they loped along with him.
With their alert faces and perked ears, they didn’t look like savage animals. If the caddy met one of them on the street he might have tried to make friends with it. They actually looked like sociable creatures. They encircled him, and when he ran faster, they simply trotted along. One of them came close and gave him a big sniff. The caddy didn’t know what to do. Should he push the thing away, or let it do what it wanted? The animal came in front of him and put on the brakes. The caddy got the message and stopped running. The dog held him there with threatening snarls.
The other dogs closed in and sniffed at him. It wasn’t a hungry sniff, just an attentive sniff, as if the caddy had been rolling around in something interesting. For the first time, the driver noticed the leather collars around the necks of all the dogs. The collars all matched and were affixed with irregular shapes, black or metallic. Why in the world, the caddy wondered briefly, would a pack of strays all wear the same, expensive-looking collars?
Then, an even more surprising thing happened.
The dogs stopped sniffing the caddy and trotted away without giving him a backward glance.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he didn’t see a need for karate lessons.
“Are you satisfied with the man you are now?” the dojo owner asked.
“Sure,” Remo said. “Why not?”
Dojo owner, Xavier Force, arched his eyebrows and made a sad sort of a smile. “I’ll tell you why not, Remo. You’re a mess. You’re out of shape, your posture is poor and your skin is sallow. You do not demonstrate self-confidence, my friend. I can help you gain back your confidence—and reclaim your manhood.”
“In karate class?”
“Yes. What you need to understand is that karate is much more than just fighting skills. Karate is a way of looking at the world. It’s a way of living. It will give you back the spark that is missing from your life. Don’t you want that?”
Remo scratched his chin. “I feel okay the way I am.”
“I got news for you,” X. Force said. “You’re not okay. You’re tepid. You’re passive, buddy.”
Remo said, “No, I’m not, really. In my company, you have to be aggressive to be the biggest order-taker in the East Coast district. They call me Ram-Rod Remo.”
“To your face. But what do they call you behind your back?” X. Force asked.
Remo shifted in his seat across the dojo owner’s desk. “Well, once, one of the other regional guys said I was spineless.”
“Yes?” X. Force nodded.
“I broke his legs.”
“Oh, really?”
Remo shifted again, as if making an embarrassing confession. “Yeah. Really.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I didn’t mean to. I got a little carried away.”
“With what? A sledgehammer?”
“No. Just my hands.”
The dojo owner made an unpleasant sound, like air leaking out of the tight, spitty orifice of a rubber balloon.
“You don’t believe me?” Remo asked.
