All that was made worse at the funeral when she got a look at the man in the box. Her father had turned into a museum display, preserved and plasticky, waxy like a McIntosh apple. Dead eyes and too much blush and his mouth forcibly arranged in a slight smile that wasn’t his smile at all. A portrait the artist got wrong.

As she lies there across Whitey, she feels it here, too—the sense of lifelessness, that something vital has vacated the animal. A spirit, a ghost, a soul: gone.

Hands try to pull her away, but she won’t—can’t—leave him behind. She wants to curl up and lie in the blood and hold the dog tight until she starves and leaves behind her own Atlanta-shaped mannequin. Voices—Holger, maybe—call her name, but she doesn’t listen and doesn’t care about what they have to say, because all that’s good in this world has failed her. The police are corrupt. They can’t protect her. They can’t protect an innocent dog. She doesn’t know why Whitey bit Petry—did Petry egg the dog on? Slap him? Kick him? Or did Whitey just know to sink his teeth into the flesh of an evil man?

It doesn’t matter because it happened, and now Whitey is dead.

She bends down and presses her face against his face and kisses his muzzle.

She hears it—her own heartbeat, thump, thump, thump—but then she thinks, that’s not her heartbeat, not at all, it’s not even a heartbeat. It’s a tail. Thudding dully against the floor.

Whitey’s tail.

Wagging. Weak. Barely there. But wagging.

She says, “He’s alive,” certain that her own words are a lie, that this is just a false flag and one last moment of life before Whitey wanders off to the eternal fields of his happy hunting grounds—but the tail thumps again. And his tongue snakes out over his jowls and lies there like a tired slug.

This time she doesn’t just say it but screams it, letting the world know that her dog is alive.

The siren wails. The single blue light atop the old Crown Vic spins. Holger floors it.

Atlanta sits in the back, Whitey’s head cradled in her lap. His eyes are glassy and unfocused. His breathing, fast and shallow, like he can’t get enough air. One paw twitching. The cratered hole in his skull isn’t bleeding anymore—just a few black rivulets of drying blood stark against his white fur. She feels his neck, his ribs; his pulse is there, but only barely. The tail no longer wags.

It’s then the dog’s body seizes, stiffening in her hands. Whitey’s eyes roll back into his head and he takes one big gulp of air—holding it, holding it, no more breath, frame tight and legs sticking out like broomsticks—