"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Chuy said, getting up from the table. "Ingot. Hey. Off."
She didn't get off. I twisted around and she dropped down and came around in front of me and barked up at me, and then lunged around behind me again, going for the backpack, and I backed up into the counter.
"Ingot!" Hank said. "Down!"
She went down, on her belly, the way she'd been taught, but she didn't stop barking. She lay flat on the linoleum with her chin almost on the floor and her blue eye and her brown eye fixed on me, and she barked, and barked, and every bark came out of her like she was being squeezed. Bert woke up in the recliner and said, "What the hell?"
"Mail's here," Chuy said, but nobody laughed.
I got the backpack off and tried to hang it on the hook, and the second I turned my back to hang it she was up and on it. She got the bottom strap in her teeth, the loose end of it, and she pulled. The hook was just a coat hook screwed into the wall, and the backpack came off it, and then she had it, she was dragging it across the floor by the strap, backing up with her legs braced and her head down, growling around the nylon, and I went after it.
"No!" I said. "Ingot, no! Give it!" I grabbed the top handle and pulled, and she pulled, and for a few seconds we had a tug-of-war across the kitchen floor of Station 4, a sixty-pound Dalmatian and an eleven-year-old boy, with the firemen standing around us. I heard the seam at the top of the strap start to rip, a sound like a zipper going the wrong way, and I thought of my father at the Kmart taking the backpack down off its peg, and I screamed at her. I don't know what I screamed. Something I'd heard my father say about the Broncos.