Harley was abandoned to the streets. No one but the boy loves this mixed-breed canine, which appears to be half golden retriever and half mystery mutt.
Crispin was not abandoned. He escaped.
And he is hunted.
Three years earlier …
Crispin, only nine years old, is two days on the run, having fled a scene of intolerable horror on a night in late September. He has no one to whom he can turn. Those who should be trustworthy have already proven to be evil and to be intent on his destruction.
Of the eleven dollars in his possession when he escaped, he now has only four. He has spent the rest on food and drink purchased from vendors with street-corner carts.
The previous night, he slept in a nest of shrubbery in Statler Park, too exhausted to be fully wakened even by the occasional sirens of passing police cars or, near dawn, by the racket of sanitation workers emptying park trash cans into their truck.
On Monday he spends a couple of the daylight hours visiting the library. The stacks are a maze in which he can hide.
He is too much in the grip of fear and grief to be able to read. Now and then he pages through big glossy travel books, studying the photos, but he has no way of getting to those far, safe places. The children’s picture books that once amused him no longer seem at all funny.
For a while he walks along the banks of the river, watching a few fishermen. The water is gray under a blue sky, and the men seem gray, too, sad and listless. The fish are not biting.
Most of the day he wanders alleyways where he thinks he is less likely to encounter those who are surely looking for him. Behind a restaurant, a kitchen worker asks why he isn’t in school. No good lie occurs to him, and he runs from her.
The day is mild, as were the previous day and night, but suddenly it grows cool and then cooler in the late afternoon. He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt, and the gooseflesh on his bare arms may or may not be caused by the chilly air.
In a vacant lot between a drugstore and a marshal-arts dojo, a Goodwill Industries collection bin overflows with used clothing and other items. Rummaging among those donations, Crispin finds a gray wool sweater that fits him.
He takes also a dark-blue knitted toboggan cap. He pulls it low over his forehead, over the tops of his ears.
Perhaps a nine-year-old boy alone will only call attention to himself by such an effort at disguise. He suspects that the simple cap is, on him, flamboyant. He feels clownish. But he does not strip it off and toss it away.
He has walked so many alleys and serviceways, has darted across so many avenues into so many shadowed backstreets, that he has become not merely lost but also disoriented. The walls of buildings appear to tilt toward or away from him at precarious angles. The cobblestone pavement under his feet resembles large reptilian scales, as though he is walking on the armored back of a sleeping dragon.
The city, always large, seems to have become an entire world, as immense as it is hostile.
With the disorientation comes a quiet desperation that compels Crispin at times to run when he knows full well that no one is in immediate pursuit of him.
Shortly before dusk, in a wide alleyway that serves ancient brick warehouses with stained-concrete loading docks, he encounters the dog. Golden, it approaches along the east side of the passage, in a slant of light from the declining sun.
The dog stops before Crispin, gazing up at him, head cocked. In the last bright light of day, the animal’s eyes are as golden as its coat, pupils small and irises glowing.
The boy senses no threat. He holds out one hand, and the dog nuzzles it for a moment.
When the dog walks past, the boy hesitates but shuffles after him. Unlike his follower, the animal seems to know where he is going, and why.
Cracked concrete steps lead up to a loading dock. The big bay roll-downs are shut, but a man-size door proves to be unlocked and ever-so-slightly ajar.
The dog nudges the door open. With a swish of his white tail, he disappears inside.
Crossing the threshold into darkness, Crispin withdraws a small LED flashlight from a pocket of his jeans. The flash was once in his nightstand drawer. He took it when he fled his home in the first minutes after midnight.
As sharp as a stropped razor, the white beam cuts through the gloom, revealing a long-abandoned, windowless space large enough to serve as a hangar for jet airliners. High overhead are storage lofts and catwalks.
Everything is shrouded in gray dust. Rust as layered as pastry dough flakes and peels from metal surfaces.
Scattered across the concrete floor are rat bones and the shells of dead beetles. Old playing cards spotted with mold. Here a one-eyed jack, there a queen of hearts and a king of clubs, and there four sixes laid out side by side. Cigarette butts. Broken beer bottles.
The flashlight finds a spider crawling on a low-hanging loop of cable, projecting its enlarged shadow on a wall, where it creeps like a creature in one of those old movies about insects made enormous by atomic radiation.
Without need of the flashlight, the dog finds his way around the sprays of glass. In such an odorous place, most dogs would weave from smell to smell, their noses to the floor. But this one carries his head high, alert.
At the north end of the great room are three doors leading to three offices, each with a window looking out upon the warehouse. Two doors are closed, the other ajar.
Beyond the gap between the third door and the jamb, an amber light pulses.
Crispin halts, but the dog does not. After a hesitation, the boy follows the animal into the illumined chamber.
Between two groups of fat candles—three to his left, three to his right—a man in his late twenties sits with his back against a wall, his legs straight out in front of him.
His glassy blue eyes stare but do not see. His mouth hangs open, but he has used all the words that he was born to speak.
Beside one trio of candles lies a sooty spoon. Next to the spoon is a plastic packet from which spills a white powder. In his lap lies a hypodermic syringe emptied of its contents.
The right sleeve of his checkered shirt is rolled up past the crook of his elbow, where blood earlier trickled from a puncture. Evidently he had some difficulty finding the vein.
Crispin is not afraid in the presence of a dead man. He has recently witnessed much worse than this.
With a keen intention more human than canine, the dog goes to a backpack lying beyond the candles, takes one of its straps between his teeth, and drags it away from the corpse.
The boy supposes that the bag must contain dog treats. On his knees, searching the various compartments, however, he finds no evidence that the dead man ever provided for the animal.
A quick scan of the dust-covered floor and the few paw prints suggests that the dog has never been here before, that he was led here by scent, not by experience. Yet …
Among the greasy, mostly worthless possessions of the deceased, Crispin discovers two stuffsacks full of currency rolled into tight bundles and held together by rubber bands. There are wads of five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills.
The money is most likely stolen or otherwise dirty. But no one, not even the police, will be likely to discover from whom the dead man has swiped this fortune or by what illegal activity he might have earned it.
Taking money from the body of a homeless loner surely can’t be theft. The man has no need of it anymore.
Nevertheless, the boy hesitates.
After