#SaturdayScenes: Blood Track, Chapter 1 -

Ahead of its July 28 release (pre-order now), I will preview Blood Track for my readers as part of my ongoing #SaturdayScenes initiative. Make sure you join my Reader’s Club to get the other free stories I offer to my subscribers, and to get further notifications regarding the release of Blood Track and future stories!

Chapter 1

Shady tugs on my leash, and we turn left at Hollywood and Vine. Thankfully, the crowds part before us. Why wouldn’t they? So long as they can get a snap or shoot a cellphone video of me on the job, with Bridget Suarez and her camera crew not far behind me, everybody wins. Who knows? Five minutes ago you were another tourist, but now you might get your fifteen milliseconds of fame on 60 Minutes.

The crowd thickens up ahead. Some folks not getting with the program don’t move aside. Oh, look. They’re reaching out to me with pens and autograph books. Maybe I should stop and sign a few. Take a few selfies while I’m at it.

“Gib Laut!” I shout.

Shady barks. Behind me, Tahoe joins her. As intended, the crowd shrinks aside. Cassandra catches up with me.

“Can you believe this?” I say.

“You told them you didn’t want cops in front.”

I shake my head in restrained disgust. Yeah, that’s the way it should work. Dog leads the way. No people in front, trampling the trail. Of course, here I have the Hollywood multitudes doing it.

It’s almost enough to make me forget why I got on a plane with Cassandra, Shady and Tahoe to come to Los Angeles. Oh, yeah, that mom that tweeted me. Or did she reach out on Facebook? I can’t recall. Maybe both. My agent said I had to respond. I had to do it.

Do what? Come to Los Angeles, where Mom’s boy has gone missing among the homeless population. That boy also happens to be a strung-out, honorably discharged—by the thinnest margin—Army sergeant. Why wouldn’t I respond? Why wouldn’t I jump in with both feet—oops, in the figurative sense, of course—and lend a hand in finding her boy?

For all my inner whining, when I look down at Shady, she’s showing she still has a track—the one we got from a discarded junkie kit, with enough traces of blood for her to latch on and stay on-lock.

“Clear the way, folks,” a police officer yells behind us.

Between that and the barking, the sea of humanity parts, and we cross to the other side. Cassandra drops back, and one of Bridget’s camera men, the guy holding a pole with a DSLR looking contraption hanging inches from the ground, catches up with me. For a moment I float out of my skin and imagine what cool footage he’s grabbing. My boots and Shady trace a path among the stars, literally, because, yeah, would you believe our luck? Our track has brought us to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And what else would I do here, except promote my own fame? Cameras rolling and all. Action.

The whole thing turns my stomach. It sparks a heat that rises up in my chest, grabs at my throat, and sits at the back of my eyes. A kid willing to die for his country, tossed aside, lost, and all I can think about is how I look? How this will play on TV? How I will come across in the midst of this cool action sequence? Have I become that? Really?

Shady’s more urgent tug at my leash brings me back to my purpose here. She’s not confused. She’s locked in and pressing ahead. I best get with it myself.

I allow her to set the pace. In a trot, we cross a major street. We speed up, enough to make me huff some. Then she slows. She zigzags toward the curb, then back toward the store fronts, then to a trashcan. She freezes there.

A needle lies in plain view. Shady’s nose quivers inches from it. I keep her leash taut and look back.

One of the LAPD officers steps up, evidence bag in hand. He picks it up while a buddy of his starts disassembling the top of the trashcan, see what other goodies he can pull out of there. He clicks on a flashlight and aims it in there. Sure enough, seconds later his gloved hand pulls out a nasty looking syringe.

“Oh wow,” I hear Bridget says. “She found it.”

I shake my head. Our agreement had her hanging back, not asking questions or providing on-the-fly blow-by-blow commentary. My terms, and she accepted them.

“So is this it?” she adds. “Or do we still have a trail?”

I face her with every intention of letting her have it, but a camera hangs not a foot away from her shoulder, aimed right at me.

I force a grimacing smile. “Yeah, maybe.”

By now a crowd has pretty much wrapped tight and thick around us. It takes me but a few seconds to feel their body heat. Their hushed murmuring intensifies. I start getting that uneasy, trapped feeling. It’s been a while since I’ve felt it. Dan and I talked about it. Could I handle this big city? The sheer noise and crowding of it? I handled New York once, was my feeble response. Then again, I had that one rather public meltdown at a small town rodeo.

I take a deep breath, and I smell all of it. The wet, rotten trash. The choking diesel from a bus that rumbles by. The incense from a shop that sells a weed of a different kind, for medicinal purposes, of course. The body odor of folks who don’t believe in bathing every day, mixing in with Bridget’s over-the-top bouquet of flowers perfume.

My attempt at a dry breath nearly makes me gag.

Someone squeezes my left arm. I turn to see Cassandra there.

“Let’s press?” she says.

I look down. Shady’s looking up at me. So is Tahoe. Their eyes implore me to hold it together. Don’t unravel on us now, they seem to say. Stick with the mission.

Shady turns her nose down the street and away from the trashcan whose contents and usefulness the officers have by now depleted.

“Revier,” I say, my voice sounding dry and raspy.

As if to give me a chance to ease into the chase again, Shady pulls ahead at a steady, easy pace. Head down, she renews her search, with the intent demeanor of a still solid track.

Behind me I hear Bridget almost squeal, “It’s still on. Keep it rolling.”

I block it all out. I once heard that good pitchers go into a trance during critical moments of a game. They enter this tunnel where all they see is home plate, the strike zone, and the catcher’s mitt behind it. That’s what Dan told me once, anyway, while trying to make a baseball fan out of me.

I drop into that tunnel now. Me and my dog, and the leash between us. That’s all I see. That’s all I can see if I hope to keep myself whole and see this thing through.

I stay in that tunnel. It keeps sliding down the sidewalk, until it curves left, onto an alley. I lose it there in the memory of someone I found in a similar place a world away. Shady pulls me ahead, much like Shadow did in that other alley where I found Joe Brenner. This time I won’t find him bleeding out. I know that. But I’m still there, running to him, dropping down to strap on belts around his mangled legs. I saved him, they say. I saved him. Hang on to that.

Now I’m in that tunnel. I spin and tumble in it, until Shady pulls me out of it and past a large trash bin. More rotted trash assails me. My stomach turns, and I swallow hard to keep myself from a meltdown.

Shady keeps pulling me. In a tight line she leads me to another bin. Is he in there? Will I get to smell death again? When we reach it, she sniffs along the entire length of the bin, down low, and makes a sharp turn around the corner.

At first glance, I see nothing but strewn cardboard boxes. Then I see his foot, jutting out, and realize I’m staring at a makeshift shelter. His protruding wrist comes into view next, harder to notice because in color his skin matches the cardboard. I notice something else on that wrist. At first it looks like dirt, but I should know it well: that familiar tattoo. Caterpillar and butterfly. Transformation, Joe Brenner said when anyone asked him about it. From crawling to soaring.

My heart thumps for three hard beats. Is it him under that pile of cardboard? Joe? Joe Brenner?

Somehow I have the presence of mind to command Shady. “Af.”

She lays down. I wish I could, too.

The rest goes in a blur. The officers come up and toss the cardboard aside. A radio call goes out, requesting medical assistance. The Army boy stirs and moans. Not Joe Brenner. Same tattoo, but not Joe. This guy sports two whole legs. He’ll take up the whole length of that gurney they’ll roll in soon.

Bridget and her crew keep her distance, but they get some killer footage. Cassandra squeezes my upper arm again and says something. Together we back away.

Bridget stands next to me. She can’t help herself. She starts asking questions. When I don’t answer, she gets on her cell. Next thing I know, she’s got the guy’s mom on the phone. Would I like to talk to her?

I want to say no, but I’m too slow on the draw. More killer footage follows of me talking to Mom. They put her on speaker so the feathered boom mike can pick up both sides of the conversation. Which isn’t much of one, and which I can’t recall much of. A lot of gratitude flows one way, and confused, awkward modesty stumbles in the opposite direction.

I do know how it ends, because Bridget will amp this part in her coverage. I’ll get to see it over and over again. It even goes viral for a few days.

“I’m so glad it was you that found him,” the guy’s mom says. “Because you understand what he’s going through.”

“I’m glad, too, ma’am.”

“And now Rick gets a second chance. He can rebuild his life, you know. Like you have. Maybe he’ll see his potential this time, now that you’ve helped pull him out.”

I don’t know what to say about that. I don’t know that I can believe Rick will pull himself out. A second chance for more pain and ending under another pile of cardboard somewhere else seems as likely a possibility—if not the most probable outcome. I don’t tell her that. I don’t tell her that I know it first hand, because, like she said, I should know. I do know what it’s like to oscillate from a state of sanity and normalcy to the one that burns inside you like hell itself.

Like right now, when I couldn’t tell her or anyone else which side of that ledger I stand on.