Kill All The Dogs by Rick Berry

Author:Rick Berry [Berry, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Nathan has a day off, but he’s still working, taking the opportunity to implement a plan that’s been forming in his head for a while. It’s brought him about an hour north, to Bedford. Of all places, is the phrase in Nathan’s head, but that’s crass. It had to be somewhere.

He’s in a cafe, on the corner of the high street. It’s L-shaped, the cafe, so from where Nathan is sitting in the crook, he can see all the way along one pedestrianised street to his left, and all the way along another to his right. It feels like a mirror image, except the images don’t quite correspond, the people move in different ways to how they should. On the door of the cafe is a sign that reads No Buggies, No WIFI, No Dogs.

Nathan arrived half an hour early, anxious to get things started, even though he couldn’t do that until they arrived. When the people he’s waiting for finally enter the cafe, they spot him straight away, the way people easily spot others who don’t belong. He hadn’t wanted to wear his suit, but smart casual wasn’t a look Nathan could pull off, and he had to make sure these people knew he was a serious proposition.

“You must be Nathan,” one of them says. “I’m Lia, and this is Penny.”

Nathan stands up and offers to buy coffees. Lia and Penny look like they were expecting a few more words of greeting first, but Nathan’s gone already, at the counter, trying to remember what Lia and Penny had asked for.

He composes himself on the way back to the table. “Thanks for coming to meet me,” he says, “I know I didn’t give you much information in my messages.”

“We’re intrigued,” Penny says. “We love a good mystery.”

“And we’re meeting in public so, you know, you can’t murder us,” Lia adds.

Lia’s face is completely blank, and Nathan feels he has to say something reassuring in reply. But Penny is laughing, so he assumes Lia is joking. This might be difficult, he thinks.

Nathan gets out his phone. “I’m here because you posted something online about an article Julia Perera wrote a while ago, Lia. Do you remember?” He shows them the screen.

lia_tandy

>PublicHealthMatters I know people will slam this but my wife and I were both bitten by the same dog in separate incidents running in our local park recently. Something must be done.

09:30 | Likes 429 | Shares 209

“Vaguely, yes,” Lia says.

“She was telling that story everywhere for months,” Penny says.

“Is it true?” Nathan asks. The two of them look at him sharply. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cast aspersions. I just meant I was hoping you could take me through what happened.”

Lia begins talking, becoming very animated as soon as she starts. Her black hair is in a bob and it bounces around while she talks. Penny has the same style, in blonde, but it remains absolutely still even as she nods along.

“I’d only recently started training for a 10k,” Lia says.

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