Caesar the War Dog 4 by Stephen Dando-Collins

Author:Stephen Dando-Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

‘Come, César, we are going to visit with someone who can understand a dog like you,’ called Vargas. He traipsed over to the other side of the garage. When he reached Caesar, he let out a gasp. ‘What have you done?’

Caesar came to his feet.

‘You have pooped on the floor of El Loro’s garage!’

Caesar couldn’t help it. He had to relieve himself somewhere, and Vargas had kept him chained up in the garage.

‘You stupid, stupid dog!’ Vargas raged, staring at the mess.

Caesar couldn’t understand Spanish, but he understood perfectly well from Vargas’s tone that he was in trouble. Backing away, he dropped his eyes to the floor.

‘I thought you were well-trained,’ Vargas growled as he fetched a spade. ‘El Loro Verde would kill me if he found your poop right beside his Ferrari!’

Caesar watched him as Vargas scooped up the poop and dropped it in a rubbish bin.

‘Come, poopy dog,’ said Vargas. ‘Come earn your keep.’

He unhitched Caesar’s leash and led him from the garage via a side door. A black Volkswagen van stood waiting in the forecourt outside, its engine running. Vargas opened the rear doors and urged Caesar to jump inside. When the labrador hesitated, Vargas impatiently kicked him in the rump.

‘Get in, poopy dog!’ he yelled.

With a pained yelp, Caesar leapt into the van. Vargas let go of the leash and slammed the doors shut, then climbed into the cab beside the driver. The driver, an Árbol pistolero, had a pistol in his belt and a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun under his seat.

‘Go, go, go!’ Vargas urged.

As the van edged forward, the gate clattered to one side. From an unseen control room, an Árbol guard was keeping watch. The van nosed onto the road, and the boys playing soccer immediately stopped what they were doing and respectfully stood back.

One of the boys, no more than ten years old, called out, ‘Viva El Loro Verde!’

Vargas smiled and waved. ‘That kid José is eager to work for El Loro,’ he remarked to the driver. Vargas guessed that, before many years had passed, José would be running errands for Árbol on his first step to becoming one of their thousands of operatives. Another ten years from now, Vargas surmised, José would probably be killed in a shootout with rivals or the police, or spend the rest of his life serving time behind bars. There was a one-in-ten chance José would survive to make more money from crime than his hardworking labourer parents had seen in their lives.

The gate slid back to seal El Loro in his suburban fortress once more. That was the price he paid for his life of crime; he had become a prisoner in his own home.

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