Impossible Things by Connie Willis Read Free Book Online

to my calculations, she was seventeen when you lived there.”
    Sixteen.
    “Are you the owner of the dog?” the vet had asked her, his face slackening into pity when he saw how young she was.
    “No.” she said. “I’m the one who hit him.”
    “My God,” he said. “How old are you?”
    “Sixteen,” she said, and her face was wide open. “I just got my license.”
    “Aren’t you even going to tell me what she has to do with this Winnebago thing?” Ramirez said.
    “I moved down here to get away from the snow,” I said, and cut out without saying good-bye.
    The lifeline was still rolling silently forward. Hacker at Hewlett-Packard. Fired in 2008, probably during the unionization. Divorced. Two kids. She had moved to Arizona five years after I did. Management programmer for Toshiba. Arizona driver’s license.
    I went back to the developer and looked at the picture of Mrs. Ambler. I had said dogs never came through. That wasn’t true. Taco wasn’t in the blurry snapshots Mrs. Ambler had been so anxious to show me, in the stories she had been so anxious to tell. But she was in this picture, reflected in the pain and love and loss on Mrs. Ambler’s face. I could see her plain as day, perched on the arm of the driver’s seat, barking impatiently when the light turned green.
    I put a new cartridge in the eisenstadt and went out to see Katie.
    •    •    •
    I had to take Van Buren—it was almost four o’clock, and the rush hour would have started on the divideds—but the jackal was gone anyway. The Society is efficient. Like Hitler and his Nazis.
    “Why don’t you have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked. The question could have been based on the assumption that anyone who would fill his living room with photographs of dogs must have had one of his own, but it wasn’t. He had known about Aberfan, which meant he’d had access to my lifeline, which meant all kinds of things. My lifeline was privacy coded, so I had to be notified before anybody could get access, except, it appeared, the Society. A reporter I knew at the paper, Dolores Chiwere, had tried to do a story awhile back claiming that the Society had an illegal link to the lifeline banks, but she hadn’t been able to come up with enough evidence to convince her editor. I wondered if this counted.
    The lifeline would have told them about Aberfan but not about how he died. Killing a dog wasn’t a crime in those days, and I hadn’t pressed charges against Katie for reckless driving or even called the police.
    “I think you should,” the vet’s assistant had said. “There are less than a hundred dogs left. People can’t just go around killing them.”
    “My God, man, it was snowing and slick,” the vet had said angrily, “and she’s just a kid.”
    “She’s old enough to have a license,” I said, looking at Katie. She was fumbling in her purse for her driver’s license. “She’s old enough to have been on the roads.”
    Katie found her license and gave it to me. It was so new it was still shiny. Katherine Powell. She had turned sixteen two weeks ago.
    “This won’t bring him back,” the vet had said, and taken the license out of my hand and given it back to her. “You go on home now.”
    “I need her name for the records,” the vet’s assistant had said.
    She had stepped forward. “Katie Powell,” she had said.
    “We’ll do the paperwork later,” the vet had said firmly.
    They never did do the paperwork, though. The next week the third wave hit, and I suppose there hadn’t seemed any point.
    I slowed down at the zoo entrance and looked up into the parking lot as I went past. The Amblers were doing a booming business. There were at least five cars and twice as many kids clustered around the Winnebago.
    “Where the hell are you?” Ramirez said. “And where the hell are your pictures? I talked the
Republic
into a trade, but they insisted on scoop rights. I need your stills now!”
    “I’ll send them in