The night was warm, the way nights in the Inland Empire are in September, when the heat of the day stays in the ground and has nowhere to go. There was no moon. To the north, toward the mountains, a pale orange glow hung over the cities, but out here it was completely dark, and the freeway was a distant hiss behind the crickets.

At two-fifty Dana cut the headlights and the engine and let the van roll the last fifty yards down the dirt road. She stopped under a eucalyptus where the road ended at a fence and the dark under the tree was thicker than the rest. On the other side of the fence was Curtis Haney's property in Bloomington, south of the freeway and fifteen minutes from Rialto, where the lots get bigger and the fences higher and nobody asks what the neighbor keeps in his barn.

She had driven past three nights in a row and knew where she would go in. She had bought the bolt cutters that same afternoon and taped red plastic over the flashlight so the light wouldn't show from the house.

For a while she sat in the dark cab and let her eyes adjust before she got out. The air smelled of dry grass and dog, and under that something stale that didn't belong. The fence gave with a small click for each link she cut. She counted the cuts to have something to count, and at thirteen she could fold back a flap and crawl through.

The kennels stood in a row along the back of the barn, ten of them, chain-link and sheet metal, with a dog in each. They woke up one by one as she came. The first one threw himself at the fence without a sound, just weight and claws, and then the others started, and after that it wasn't quiet anymore. She walked down the row with the red light, which lit one patch at a time, and looked through the chain-link at eyes that threw the light back. They were big, wide dogs with heads like anvils and scars on their faces, and every one of them wanted to get at her. She couldn't take them. She had known that before she came. You don't let a dog like that out of a van onto a lawn in Rialto.

In the last kennel a female lay flat on the concrete and didn't bark.

Dana put the light on her. The dog didn't raise her head, only her eyes. Dana had seen that look before, at the shelter, in dogs that had stopped waiting for anything to get better.

The padlock took two tries with the bolt cutters. When she lifted the dog, there was no resistance at all. She was lighter than she looked.

Then the light over the barn's back door came on, and another one in the house. A man's voice shouted something. She ran back down the row with the dogs roaring on both sides, pushed out through the gap in the fence, and felt something warm running down her forearm, and only in the van did she see that it was the dog's blood and not her own. She drove without headlights all the way to the paved road, her face close to the windshield, with nothing but the stars and the orange glow to steer by. It had taken eleven minutes. She had gotten one dog out.

At three-forty she parked in front of the house in Rialto, crooked, with two wheels up on the curb, and carried the dog in through the kitchen. The light was on over Rudy Ybarra's porch. It usually wasn't.

---

The dog had been lying with her nose against the floor drain ever since. When Dana opened the bathroom door a little after six, the dog didn't raise her head, but her eyes followed Dana from the doorway to the sink and back.

She sat down on the floor with her back against the tub and waited. The tile was cool, the only cool thing in the house. It smelled of chlorhexidine and old blood, and the towel she had put under the dog had gone sour. After a while the dog let the air out through her nose, a long breath that made her whiskers tremble, and Dana knew she was allowed to touch her.

The dog was barely two, brindled brown and black, with a chest so narrow her ribs showed in the white light from the ceiling. The wounds were where they usually were. Around the neck and on the front legs there were old scars, shiny and hairless, and on top of them new, deep punctures that had started to weep. The left ear was torn at the edge. Someone had tried to sew it together with fishing line and given up halfway.

Dana cleaned the wounds one at a time with gauze and lukewarm water from a bowl. She worked with her left hand and kept her right resting lightly on the dog's shoulder, so the dog knew where she was the whole time. The shelter had taught her that, and it was about the only thing she took with her from there: an animal in pain wants to know where your hands are. When she got to the neck, the dog pulled her lip back over her teeth, without growling, mostly to show she could. Dana waited until the lip came down and kept going.

"I know," she said quietly. "I know."

She hadn't given her a name. At the shelter she had stopped naming them in her third year, after a shepherd she'd called Moose, who was on the list one Thursday.

She had rented the house for two years. She owned a bed, an armchair from a flea market, and more dog crates than chairs. The van, which she had bought used after her first year at the shelter, had no back seats anymore, only strapped-down crates and a rubber mat you could hose off. She had driven dogs in it to rescues all over Southern California and once all the way up to Oregon. In the refrigerator there were three eggs, half a jar of peanut butter, and a brown paper bag of medication that wasn't hers. Yesenia had given her the bag in the spring and said she didn't want to know what it was for.

Her phone was on the sink. She wiped her hands on her jeans and unlocked it with her thumb.

The post was at the top of the neighborhood group, posted at five forty-five. *Somebody in a white van broke into a reputable breeder's place in Bloomington last night and stole a breeding female. Police have been contacted. Keep an eye out and SHARE!!* Under the text was a still from a security camera: gray static, a fence, and at the very edge a pale blur that could have been any car. Forty-two people had already reacted. Someone had written *Horrible, what kind of people are out there*, and someone else had written that they'd seen a white van on Cedar in Rialto several times.

Reputable breeder. Dana read the words again and felt them burn somewhere behind her eyes. She turned off the screen and laid the phone face down. Then she took the needle and thread out of the plastic box under the sink.

---

By eight-thirty the kitchen was already hot. Dana stood at the counter with a cup of coffee she hadn't touched and looked out the kitchen window, over the fence into Rudy Ybarra's yard.

His dog was where he always was, chained to a pipe driven into the dry lawn, with six feet of chain and no shade until afternoon. He was a big yellowish mix with a head too big for his body, and in the mornings he watched the shade from the house without being able to reach it. The water bowl lay upside down a foot and a half beyond the end of the chain. The dog was panting with his tongue out, and the tongue was almost gray.

She put the cup down. The fence between the yards was low chicken wire that Rudy had never fixed. She stepped over it where it sagged the most and picked up the bowl. She filled it from Rudy's own garden hose by the side of the house and set it in front of the dog. He drank so hard the water splashed. She bent down, pulled the pipe out of the ground with both hands, moved it ten feet into the shade of the garage, and stamped it down with her heel.

The screen door banged open before she had straightened up.

Rudy Ybarra came out on the steps in shorts and a tank top that had once been white, with a beer can in his hand, though it wasn't even nine. He was wide in the belly and thin in the legs, and he had lived next door for the two years Dana had rented her place. She had talked to him twice, both times about the dog.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"He didn't have any water."

"This is none of your business."

She hit him.

It was a straight right with all her weight behind it from the hip, and it caught him high on the cheekbone and snapped his head to the side. He dropped the beer. His legs gave out, and he sat down hard on the step and slid off it into the grass, one hand up in front of his face as if she were going to hit him again. The beer ran out and fizzed in the dry grass.

Her knuckles ached all the way up to her wrist. She opened and closed her hand a couple of times to make sure it wasn't broken.

The dog had stopped drinking and stood barking, head down, water running from his mouth. Across the street someone had pulled back a curtain, and two houses down a woman in a bathrobe stood in her driveway with the newspaper in her hand, watching.

Rudy had made it up onto his knees. He held his hand to his cheek and looked at the blood in his palm, then at her.

"You're fucking crazy," he said, and his voice was thick. "I've seen you. I saw you come home last night. I know what you got in that van."

Dana didn't answer. She checked that the pipe was solid in the shade and that the bowl was where the dog could reach it, and she stepped back over the chicken wire the way she had come. In the kitchen she ran her hand under the cold water until her fingers went numb. From the bathroom came a whine, long and thin, and she went in and sat down on the floor again without drying her hands.

---

The pickup came the first time a little after one. First she heard it, a heavy V8 at low revs. When she got to the living room window it was rolling past at a crawl, black and jacked up on oversized tires, with tinted windows. At the van it slowed even more, and then it went on to the corner and turned out of sight.

She knew it. It was in the background of half of Curtis Haney's ads, behind the puppies he held up to the camera by the scruff. She had started keeping tabs on him in June, when a rescue in Yucaipa took in a male that had been found in a ditch in Bloomington with bite wounds no dog gets from playing, and with a chip registered to an address that didn't exist. She had saved the ads, and she had written dates, times, and license plates in a notebook in the glove compartment, neatly, line by line.

Five minutes later the sound came back from the other direction. The baseball bat was in the corner behind the front door, where it had stood since she moved in. She picked it up in passing, the way you pick up your keys, and walked down the driveway to stand in the middle of the street in the sun, right in the way. The pickup came around the corner and had to stand on the brakes ten feet in front of her, and nothing showed behind the tinted windshield.

She walked up and hit the hood with her whole body behind the swing. The metal gave with a dull sound, and when she lifted the bat there was a dent the size of a dinner plate. The engine raced, but the truck stayed where it was, as if whoever was behind the wheel hadn't made up his mind. She took a step to the side and hit the left headlight. The glass went in a single burst and rained down on the asphalt. The pickup backed up with its tires screaming, swung around in the street with two wheels up on Rudy's lawn, and took off toward Randall, faster than it had come.

Dana stood there on the asphalt, which burned through the soles of her shoes, with the bat hanging from her hand. Broken glass glittered around her feet. He wouldn't call the police. A man with a yard full of scarred dogs and a barn out in Bloomington doesn't call the police because somebody dented his truck, and she knew it, and he knew it. Now he also knew which house it was, but he had known that already, or he wouldn't have driven by.

Next door Rudy sat on his steps with a bag of frozen peas against his cheek, and by the steps stood a man she didn't know, with a phone in his hand. Rudy looked at her and looked away. His dog lay in the shade by the garage with his head between his paws.

---

The man who knocked around three was the same man who had been standing by Rudy's steps. He had parked a gray Kia at the curb behind the van. In the passenger seat sat a teenage girl with headphones on and her feet up on the dashboard.

He had a dried egg stain on the front of his shirt, rolled-up sleeves, and a phone in his hand that he held a little out in front of him, as if it were part of the introduction. He smelled of coffee and fried food. He stood with his weight on his heels and his belly a little forward, like a dog that has never had to run from anything, and his hands were soft, with a pen callus on the middle finger and nothing else. Before he said a word, Dana saw that he had already looked at the van, at the license plate, at the house, and at her, in that order, and that he'd done some math.

"Dana Burkhart?"

"Who's asking?"

"Brian Tuttle. I'm a journalist. I'm writing about Curtis Haney."

"I don't know anybody by that name."

"But you know where he lives."

She didn't answer. Behind her, in the bathroom, the dog started whining again, loud and steady, the way she had every time a man walked by on the sidewalk that morning. Dana saw him hear it. He tilted his head a little and wasn't polite anymore, only interested.

"I think we want the same thing," he said.

"You want a picture."

He raised the phone, turned halfway around, and took a picture of the van.

"Give me the phone."

"This is a public street."

She knocked the phone out of his hand. It bounced off the step and landed in the gravel beside it, and she slammed the door before he could bend down for it.

Through the glass in the door she watched him pick up the phone and wipe it on his pants leg before he looked at the screen. He didn't look angry. He looked pleased, like a man who had gotten a different answer than he expected and liked it better.

She went into the bathroom and sat with the dog until the whining stopped. When she came out again he was on his way to the car. The girl had taken off her headphones and was watching him through the window, and Dana thought that anyone who brought a kid along on a job like this had already decided what the kid was worth.

---

Yesenia's text came at four-thirty, while she was dividing a can of chicken broth into small portions on a plate.

*Bruno's back.*

Dana put the can down. Bruno was a black Lab mix with one gray eye. She had gotten him off the list in April, a day before he would have gone, by calling four different rescues until one of them gave in. She had driven him herself to a family in Redlands, in the van, and the family had a yard and two kids and a dad who said he had always wanted a Lab.

*How*, she wrote.

*Dropped off Friday. Theyre moving. On the list till Tuesday.*

Tuesday. Dana knew exactly what that meant, because for four years she had been one of the people in the room on Tuesdays, with Yesenia beside her. She also knew how quiet the hallway got afterward, when the other dogs understood something without understanding what.

*Cant you move him*, she wrote.

*Mott says theres no room.*

She read the name, and before she had decided anything, that morning's coffee mug had smashed against the refrigerator door, and the cold coffee was running down into the gap between the fridge and the floor. The shelter director's name was Gary Mott, and he had fired her a year ago after she grabbed a man by the collar at the front desk, a man who had surrendered a twelve-year-old dog because the dog didn't go with the family's new couch anymore. Mott had said it wasn't the first time, and he had been right.

She picked up the pieces with her hands and threw them in the trash. Finally she wrote:

*You know what to do.*

It was a while before the answer came.

*I know what to do. Thats why Im still here and youre not.*

Dana stood with the phone in her hand and felt the anger rise, this time at Yesenia, who had stood in the same room for six years and never said no. She started typing a reply and deleted it. Before she could start over, a picture came through. It showed the coffee maker in the break room, the same brown machine that had been there when Dana started, and taped to it a note in her own handwriting: *DOESN'T WORK. HAS NEVER WORKED. WILL NEVER WORK.*

*Nobodys had the guts to take it down*, Yesenia wrote.

Dana laughed out loud, alone in the kitchen. She remembered the day she wrote it, after twenty-four hours of parvo in the whole cat ward, and how Yesenia had found her in the break room and read the note and laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor.

*Call the rescue in Yucaipa*, she wrote. *Ask for Deb. Tell her I said hi.*

*Ok*, Yesenia wrote, and then nothing more.

Dana took the plate of broth into the bathroom and sat down on the floor. The dog smelled it for a long time without touching it. So Dana dipped two fingers in the broth and held them out, and after a while the tongue came, dry and warm, and licked them clean. She dipped them again. It took half an hour to get the whole plate into her that way, and when it was empty the dog laid her head on Dana's knee. Dana stayed where she was until her leg went to sleep, and a while after that.

---

At five-thirty she was in the van on the freeway heading north, toward the pass. It was stupid to drive it, but it was the only car she had.

The shelter sat where Fontana ended and the mountains began, by the Devore exit, a low beige concrete building with a fence around it and a parking lot that was empty on Sundays. She had driven there five days a week for four years. She parked outside the gate, where there was no camera, and walked along the fence around to the back, where the kennels stood in long rows under a roof of corrugated plastic.

The dogs heard her before she got there. It was a different sound from Haney's, thinner, with no hate in it: forty dogs who all thought somebody had come for them in particular. She knew the sound all the way down in her stomach.

"Bruno," she said, not loud.

He was in the third row, fourth run from the end. She saw him when he stood up: the black coat, the gray eye, the tail that started going before he was sure. He came up to the fence and pushed his nose against it, and she slipped her fingers through the chain-link and let him lick them. He had lost weight. Someone had taken the collar she had bought him in April.

She couldn't take him. The gate to the kennels had a keypad and cameras on both corners, and she was the first person they would call. The van was already in a neighborhood group. She had cut open one fence that night and couldn't do it twice in one day.

Behind him, at the end of the building, was the small window with frosted glass. She tried not to think about the room on the other side. She remembered where the table stood, and what kind of blanket they put on it, and that she had always talked to the dogs the whole way, low, about nothing in particular, so they wouldn't hear how quiet it was.

Dana stood at the fence until the sun went down behind the mountains and Bruno lay down on the concrete with his nose against her fingers. Then she pulled her hand back and left. He got up and followed her along the fence as far as it went and stopped at the corner. She didn't turn around.

---

When it got dark she didn't turn on the living room light. She sat in the armchair by the window with the dog on a blanket at her feet, the first time the dog had followed her out of the bathroom, and looked out at the street, where the streetlights had come on. The street was still warm from the day, and the air that came in through the window screen smelled of dry grass and charcoal from a yard farther down. From Rudy's house came a baseball game on the radio. He had gone inside sometime during the afternoon and hadn't come out again.

A man came walking down the sidewalk from the direction of the tracks. He was older, maybe sixty, in work pants and a faded shirt, and he had a dog on a leash. Dana looked at the dog first; she always did. She was a pit bull mix, old and gray in the muzzle, with a hip that moved a little unevenly, and she was well fed without being fat. She kept a few steps behind the man with the leash slack between them, and when the man stopped, the dog stopped too, without a word from him. The leash was just for show.

The man stopped at every mailbox. He took something out of his back pocket and slipped it in, and went on to the next one. At her box he stayed a little longer than at the others and looked at the van, at the wheels still crooked against the curb. Then he slipped a flyer into hers too and moved on. The dog sniffed the post while she waited.

The dog at her feet had raised her head, without whining, and was watching the old dog through the window with her ears forward, even the torn one. Dana put a hand on her back and felt that she wasn't shaking.

She liked the man before she knew anything about him. A man who walked slowly because his dog's hip hurt couldn't be all bad.

When they were out of sight she went out to the mailbox. The flyer was yellow and printed on thin paper, and she read it in the light from the streetlight. *WE BUY CARS – CASH – WE PICK UP*, and under that a phone number. The back was blank.

A yard that bought cars for cash had cars to sell, and whoever paid cash didn't ask what anybody wanted a car for. She stood by the mailbox for a while with the flyer in her hand, looking at the van, which she'd had for four years and which was now in a picture in a neighborhood group, in a picture on a journalist's phone, and in Rudy Ybarra's head.

Back in the kitchen she opened the drawer under the counter, the one where she still kept her old key card from the shelter, with the picture from when her hair was long. She laid the flyer on top of it and pushed the drawer shut with her hip.