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I CONDUCT A QUICK search of the house and then call Jimmy, who’s still at the bar, and tell him what happened.

“You have any idea what they might have been looking for?” he asks. “Or what they might have taken?”

“Just my goddamn dog!” I yell into the phone, before he tells me he’s on his way.

All the rooms have been tossed, including the kitchen and the spare bedroom I’ve turned into an office.

My laptop is still on the desk, but its drawers have been pulled out, papers and files strewn across the carpet.

In my bedroom I see that the mattress is halfway off the bed frame.

More drawers on the floor in there, along with clothes from the closet.

I have no way of knowing if whoever did this was looking for something in particular, or if vandalizing the inside of my house was a scare tactic. It meant they know where I live, but absolutely nothing about who I am.

I check the places where I keep my other two handguns. Both are where I left them, one in a bedside table, one in a small bureau in the foyer.

I yell Rip’s name again and then whistle. It’s a shot in the dark, literally, as he never comes when I whistle. But then he never strays very far.

Nothing.

My house being tossed doesn’t frighten me, if that really was their intent. But not being able to find my dog, that’s different.

Rip isn’t under the bed, it was one of the first places I checked, sometimes he sneaks under there for a nap. He isn’t in any of the closets, or in the crawl space underneath the deck, or in the small tool shed in the backyard, whose door he can nose open if he gets the urge.

There have been times when I’ve accidentally left a door to the house open and he’s gotten out. But never once has he gone far, or not come when I called him.

The dog just wants to be where I am. He wanted to be with me even before I took him in.

So where is he now?

I walk out into the backyard and call his name again. All I hear are night sounds. The moon is still high in the sky, no cloud cover at all tonight, so there’s no need for me to throw on the floodlights. If he were back here, I’d see him.

But he’s not back here.

Was Harrington dumb enough and clumsy enough to send somebody here this soon after he walked out of Jimmy’s bar? Or has he done something even dumber than that and come here himself after I blew up the deal he thought he had on Eric Jacobson and Edmund McKenzie?

I plan to find that out eventually.

Just not now.

Now I just need to find Rip.

Jimmy has to be getting close. I walk around the outside of the house and out to the street.

“Rip!”

Yelling my head off now.

I’m probably waking up some of my neighbors. I don’t care.

My dog is either lost, or whoever came to my house tonight has taken him just as a way of violating me a little more.

Or that person has done something much worse.

I walk past our mom-and-pop neighborhood fish market tucked on a side street and up to Main Street and then back, a feeling of dread growing, rising up inside me, with every step.

I am walking back toward my house when I see Jimmy pulling up behind my car and getting out of his.

I see he has his own gun in his hand, as the lights over the garage come on automatically.

He starts toward the front door.

“Jimmy,” I say.

He sees me coming toward him and puts his gun away.

“Where’s Rip?” Jimmy says.

By now it is a well-known fact that he loves Rip as much as I do.

“I still can’t find him,” I say. “And believe me, I’ve looked all over.”

“We’ll find him,” Jimmy says.

“Where?” It comes out almost as a wail.

With everything that has happened, it would be too much if the dog is really gone.

Then I hear a bark in the distance.

The sound is coming from the direction of Abraham’s Path.

A few seconds later, there he is.

There’s an old line I’ve always loved, the one about how heaven, if you make it there, is every dog you ever loved running to greet you.

I don’t much like pondering the idea of heaven these days, and whether or not it even exists, for obvious enough reasons.

And me the product of a Jesuit education.

But for just this one night the sight of my own dog running for me at full speed, tail wagging like crazy, barking his head off now, will do.