Once a Mutt (Trace 5) Read Online Free PDF

toilet.
    Then he took the plastic wastepaper basket from the bathroom and under the tub faucet ran an inch of water into the bottom. When he was satisfied it didn’t leak, he brought it back and stood it on the floor next to his bed.
    He looked at it and it made him more miserable than before. It was like being back in the army, sleeping in a barracks, with a butt can filled with wet sand hanging from a nail. A community ashtray.
    He was forty years old and here he was, lying in a motel room, using a water-filled garbage can as an ashtray. Why not crystal? Waterford. Baccarat. It was all Chico’s fault. She had reduced him to this by her parsimony.
    He got up and in the Formica-topped desk in the corner of the room found a postcard that showed a picture of the motel in hideous Technicolor. The dogwood trees had been in bloom when the picture was taken and it looked bright and cheerful. Trace knew he had missed the dogwood season by three months. All he was going to have was July sweat and exhaust from trucks passing the motel on the Post Road.
    He addressed the card to Chico and in the space for a message wrote: “Dear Chico. You will never soar. You will always only walk. Trace.”
    He looked at his message approvingly. Already he felt better. Striking back was always good for depression. If I’m not near the one I hate, I hate the one I’m near. Was that a song?
    He read the message again, aloud this time. Its words seemed nasty and trivial to him.
    Good, he thought. That’s what he wanted to be, nasty and trivial.
    Inside his wallet, he found a corroded old twenty-cent stamp that he had taken from a Time magazine renewal notice and put it on the postcard. Then he left his room to walk over to the motel’s lobby to find a mailbox. He hoped the mailbox was inside the cocktail lounge.
    He wanted a drink with ice.

4
     
    A heavy iron gate closed with a chain and a padlock separated the Paddington home from the rest of the world. Trace thought it was probably to protect the world from the maniacal packs of curs that roamed the grounds day and night.
    He parked his car alongside the high stone wall next to the gates, but heard no dogs barking, and when he looked through the gates, he saw no dogs anywhere in the sloping lawns that led up to the house.
    He saw no people either, and he looked around for a bell or buzzer. Finally he found a button almost buried in the cement that anchored the gate into the stone walls. He pressed the button for a long time but could not hear it ringing anywhere and still saw no one at the house, which was set back fifty yards from the gate behind a roadway wide enough for two cars.
    He kept pressing the button. Finally he stopped and shouted, “Hey. Is there anybody alive in there?”
    There was still no answer, so he tried the button again and then shouted some more.
    Maybe he could go over the wall. Sure. And Mrs. Paddington could pick just that moment to let her hundred starving Dobermans out for a walk. No, thank you. Maybe an air drop. Maybe he could get a helicopter to set him down on the Paddington roof.
    He leaned on the button again and then shouted again. Maybe he should have telephoned first.
    The garage was open and Trace saw two cars parked inside: one was gray; the other, a foreign station wagon, was red.
    Then he saw a man coming out of the garage and walking slowly down the driveway. He was wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans and he was fastening his belt as he came toward the gate. Trace would never have called the expression on his face one of unalloyed joy. On the other hand, he might not have called the thing on the front of the man’s head a face either. The skin was red and the jaw jutted forward. His brow sloped back into a hairline that had probably receded from embarrassment because his hair was black and knotty. While his face was sharp-featured, nothing seemed to go with anything else, and if people wound up looking like their pets, this man kept vultures. In a