Ralph the Talking Dog

Mass media dubbed her The Heartless Killer. The crime spree of murders stretched almost a decade across five states in the Northeast United States, small states that could be traversed in a day.

Just as she had done today.

Now on a balcony in the dead of night slipping a sliding glass door open silently. She had been watching this old man for a couple of weeks now. He lived alone, and left the glass door on the balcony open.

She looked for elderly people that lived alone in the veterinarian database at work. The database served the greater Northeast from Boston to New York City.

If you took your pet to the vet then your name would end up on this searchable internal storage system. All the basics: name, age, address.

The Heartless Killer would find someone that looked like easy prey at work. And on her weekends she would stalk this person to gain intimate knowledge of their habits. It could take months to find a weakness that would allow her an opportunity to cut the heart from a victim’s chest.

Thus her name The Heartless Killer.

Cindy had also been dubbed a Cat Lady. Although physically healthy she could no longer have children. Unable to find love from humans, she found love with her cats, all 23 of them. Only these cats didn’t make her feel barren, as they were fixed themselves, instead they made her feel like a night huntress.

Cindy, The Heartless Killer, in the movies Cat Woman, slid the glass balcony door open. Deaf noises from the stealthy sleek stalker who meant to slaughter this poor old man, named Harold.

Harold’s dog had been hit by a car recently causing some brain damage. He’d refused to have the dog put to sleep. Alone in retirement, Harold wanted to stick it out with this dog until the end.

The Heartless Killer crouched next to the sleeping man. She injected him with a traceless sedative, then waited patiently for her next heart transplant patient to fall asleep forever.

She now had a couple of hours before dawn. She began the procedure for Harold’s heart removal. He bled out on the bed as she made the incision with the knife. She would spend all day here in the home of the victim. The police knew it as her modus operandi.

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Cindy went to the kitchen to get something to eat after extracting the heart from Harold.

She stood in the kitchen wearing a white apron. She even took the time to put on new gloves, a complete professional performing a routine surgery. No matter how many times she’d killed, it always made her hungry.

When she closed the refrigerator door, she could see a small pug dog sitting on the tile floor of the kitchen.

It looked up at her with bugged out eyes. Obviously, the dog from the car accident. It still had a bandaged wrapped around its head, then said, “are you an angel?”

“What?” The Heartless Killer had been a veterinarian for almost 20 years and she’d never heard a dog speak perfect English in all that time. The nearest thing she’d seen happened to be a poodle that could bark “I love you” and won $10,000 on a talent show.

“Are you an Angel? Harold’s been sick lately and I’m afraid he’s passed. I can feel it. You look like an angel here to collect his soul.” The pug dog said with wide innocent eyes.

“Yes, I’m an angel of death.” Cindy said in order to keep this discussion going for a while. She planned on being here all day. And this moment must be the moment she’d been searching for in her need to murder. She’d finally snapped. Lost her mind.

“And you are? I’m sorry. Only, even as an angel, I’ve never seen a dog that can talk.”

“My name’s Ralph. My abilities began after the car accident. I never told Harold. Didn’t want to give him a heart attack. How silly now. I should have said something to him before he died. I will always regret that . . .”

The Heartless Killer convinced the pug Ralph that she obeyed God’s will in her acts as an angel, and that with many cats in her life she would be unable to care for him. Her final words to Ralph, “never speak to anyone again.”

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A week had gone by since Cindy last committed murder. Something about killing Harold and talking to his dog all day unnerved her. Made her feel insane. So although the dog had never told her anything important, the fact that she believed the conversation had really happened became the sign from God that she searched for in her subconscious. She would never kill again.

She pressed the button on the coffee maker. In a couple of hours she needed to be at work. Only now she took the time to drink coffee and watch the morning news with her cats.

The television turned on:

“Breaking news. We are at the site of the last murder of The Heartless Killer.” The video showed the sliding glass door where Cindy had gained entry. “Only police say this time there’s a witness to the crime.”

“She told me she was an angel!” Cut to pug on the cable feed.

“Yes folks, that’s a talking dog, and he’s leading police to the serial killer.”

“That fucking snitch!” Cindy yelled at her television screen. She then threw her coffee mug almost hitting one of her cats sitting on the kitchen counter.

The end.