Dog Bites Man Read Online Free PDF

reviewed in his mind the horrid scene he had just fled. Who the hell were the three men in black suits, one of them noticeably drunk? Gangsters, most likely, though their appearance would have seemed more natural on Tirana's streets than New York's. The fact that they were armed did not surprise him; he came, after all, from a country where at least half the population was said to have weapons. Nor, as an abstract proposition, did murdering Wambli disturb him. Like most Albanians, he did not have any particular use for dogs; they were an extraneous expense in a poverty-ridden country. But as a very concrete matter, he now pondered how he would break the news to Sue about her beloved pet.
    Making sure he was not being followed, he made his way home as he planned a strategy. By the time he had come to the steps of the town house he had decided to join Sue in bed (she would be waiting), have a more than usually passionate romp and tell her about Wambli's demise in the morning.
    .    .    .
    The night's adventure had taken a greater emotional toll than Genc had realized. Once he slid under the Porthault sheets in Sue's bed, and was toyed with and embraced by his half-awake mistress, he realized that he simply was not up for the sexual frolic that was part of his plan. She petulantly turned away after muttering crossly that perhaps he needed a dose of Viagra.
    Genc quickly went to sleep. Sue, on the other hand, now fully awake and angry, pitched about for most of the night. By dawn shehad reviewed the whole course of her life, which had not always involved a king-size bed in an elegant Manhattan home, with a de Kooning
Woman
on the opposite wall to stare at. ("I'll never sleep alone again," her husband had boasted after he had successfully bid for it at a Christie's auction.)
    Sue had been born as Marie Bravearrow on the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian reservation in southwestern South Dakota, beginning her life in an honest-to-goodness tepee, later upgraded to a secondhand house trailer when her father landed a construction job in Rapid City.
    Sue had gone to the reservation school, where she was both admired and envied for her good looks and made fun of for her insistence that she would someday break loose from the reservation. To that end, she had entered and won the annual beauty pageant to select Miss Sioux Nation (long enough ago that it was "Miss" and not "Ms."), and then had been chosen as Miss Native America in the contest in Santa Fe. With long, deep-black hair and mysterious, almost Asian features, she was a striking beauty.
    After a year of appearances at Indian-run casinos around the country, avoiding the crude propositions and furtive gropings made to or at her, she chose to use the prize scholarship money that went with her title to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York ("as far from the Platte River as I can get," she explained at the time). And by now she had a new name: no longer Marie Bravearrow, she was Sue Nation. The play on words amused her, though there was almost no one to whom she had explained it.
    By then the dirt-poor days were over. (Drinking in Genc's half-covered body, she realized that he, too, had escaped deprivation; maybe her affection for him was more than just physical.)
    FIT had been only the beginning of the escape. She had shownreal talent, especially for fabric design. By the time she graduated, she was being sought by the city's garment and textile manufacturers, her striking looks not hindering her job search. Brandberg Industries had made the best offer and she went to work for its Amy Reed division.
    At first she had been little noticed as the junior member of the design staff, responsible for dreaming up fabrics for Amy Reed's midline clothes for career women—outfits that made their wearers look businesslike without resembling transgendered replicas of their male colleagues.
    As the clothes became more and more popular, Sue Nation was featured in