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shoulders trying to lend her whatever he could.
    "He got into a fight with Charlie and Charlie broke his jaw.   The ambulance took both the boys away but I think that one, with the hand, is probably dead."
    "Goddamn."   He couldn't say anything more.   The back of his neck was wet and icy with sweat.   He was aware of feeling a certain amount of both horror and pride.   Thinking about the dog and going, good for you, boy.   Vin had no idea what that said about himself.   Maybe he just hated everybody younger than him.
    "The blind guy had a fractured skull, they said.   He was having a seizure when they took him out."
    Vin had known there was something foreboding about those guys, about the situation brewing, but he'd never imagined anything like this.
    She actually came into his arms then, and he held her, trying not to show how startled he was. He tightened his grip as she wept.   She struggled to get the words out.   "They took the seeing eye dog away to the pound.   He was so calm afterwards, just sitting there, his tail flicking a little.   Three big dog catchers came up on him with these poles with wire at the end and lassoed him around the throat.   He was crying and whining, and the three of them practically strangled him and threw him into the back of their truck."
    Pricks like that, they always had to move in threes.   "The pound is only nine or ten blocks from here, down over from Ocean Boulevard."
    She looked at him, the tears streaming on her cheeks, and he felt, for a second, very young again.   "I know it's stupid but I want to help him," she said.   "It wasn't the dog's fault.   It shouldn't be killed.   Do you think we should go there?"
    "The cops are going to want to talk to you again."
    "I already told them everything twice."
    "They'll ask again with something like this."
    Two kids dead, an old man possibly dying, but when it came down to it, he only cared about the girl's smile and the dog.   Perhaps because he felt that, somehow, they were the only innocents here.   Even the blind guy had been calling down his own trouble, drinking with the jocks and taking as much shit from them as he did.   Hadn't he felt the charged possibility of violence from the start, the way Vin had?
    "I'll go see what I can do," he told her.
    She grinned at him, and the world seemed to be filled with a little extra potential once more.   We all need a private mission to perform, a reason to take the next step.   Easing his hand up, he touched the side of her face.   She leaned in for a second and stirred against his him, and he almost kissed her forehead but didn't, and then the cops called her back over and she went.
    Okay, Vin thought, let's go to the pound.
    It was over on a cul-de-sac down by the beach, near the crumbling boardwalk and condemned pier.   Vin started moving faster, until he was jogging again.   When he was a kid his parents used to take him down here to go swimming.   They'd build sand castles and his father would make sounds like the seagulls, his voice echoing among the dunes.   You couldn't do anything in these waters anymore.    Too much sewage and factory waste.
    Soon he was flat out sprinting.   It took five minutes and he wasn't even winded by the time he turned the corner into the cul-de-sac.   Not too bad for an old man.   He checked his watch and stopped short.
    Jesus, it was almost 4:30am.
    But the lights were on in the pound, and a cruiser was parked in the street out front.   No sign of the three dog catchers.   Vin walked up to the front glass doors, tried them and found them unlocked.   He stepped inside.
    A cop stood there talking with a pregnant woman who'd obviously been roused from bed.   Is that how they handled things like this?   Nobody had to sign any papers, they just woke up whoever was in charge and they put the animal to sleep right then?   Vin didn't even know how they did it.   Gas?   A lethal shot?   Furnace?
    Dogs whined in the back room.