Her name was Dessa. She was seventeen and a senior at North Charleston High School and she was one of the four teenagers Toomer had hired with the money the board didn't know about. She had been working since the sixteenth of the month, out on Leeds Avenue at the warehouse, scrubbing runs and carrying bowls and hosing down the concrete and holding dogs for the vets, five days a week after school and all day Saturday, and Toomer had not had a single complaint about her, which was not something Toomer could say about the other three. She was tall and quiet and wore her hair pulled back tight under a blue bandana, and she worked like somebody was timing her. She clocked in at the warehouse and clocked out at the warehouse. Toomer had seen her in the main building maybe twice.
It was Friday. Friday was payday. The checks were in a shoebox on Toomer's desk.
Dessa Gadsden came in out of the white October afternoon in her school clothes, a maroon North Charleston High sweatshirt and jeans, with a bus transfer still in one hand, and on her back, hanging by one strap off her right shoulder, she was carrying a pink backpack. It was a child's backpack, bright pink nylon gone soft and faded at the seams, with something written across the front flap in puffy white paint, and a plastic keychain hanging from the zipper, a little cartoon pony with purple hair. It looked ridiculous on her. It looked like something she had grabbed on her way out the door because her own was gone, and that was exactly what it was, though Toomer did not know it yet.
Dessa said, "Afternoon, Mrs. Toomer, I'm just here to get my—"
That was as far as she got.
Toomer had been around dogs for thirty years. She had seen dogs reunited with people they had not seen in a year and lose every bit of sense they were born with. She had never in her life seen what Sunny did then, and she would spend a lot of the next three days trying to describe it to people and not getting it right.
He did not bark. That was the first thing. He went up off the floor in absolute silence, all four feet at once, as though the floor had been electrified, and Cassius, who had the slip lead looped loose over two fingers because there had never been any need to hold it tighter, felt it burn through his hand and gone. The dog hit the linoleum and his nails skidded and scrabbled and caught. Adelaide Prioleau said, "Oh," and stepped back and her husband caught her elbow. And Sunny crossed the lobby in three strides and went for the girl.
Not for the girl. For the backpack.
Dessa Gadsden had time to throw up one arm and say "Hey—" and then he had the strap in his mouth, the loose strap that hung down by her hip, and he set his feet and pulled, hard, with his whole body, his head down and his shoulders working, the way a dog pulls a rope in a tug game, except there was nothing playful in it. The backpack came off her shoulder. She grabbed at it and he jerked it away and she let go, and he spun with it, the bag swinging from his jaws and slapping against his chest, and he ran.