When I was younger, Dennis ran stop signs in his scraped grey Astro van as he blew through my neighborhood. I could hear the rattling doors and the old pistons firing in the middle of the night. He’d been catching dogs in this part of town for the last three years, and everyone knew his methods were, well, more than a little questionable.

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Some said he tortured them and kept them in barrels in his garage. My friend Harris said his uncle saw Dennis wearing a necklace full of pale grey canines rattling around his neck at the fair. They said he was a problem, a public nuisance with a license to capture and God knows what else. I heard he wore night vision goggles and gargled with laughter when he lassoed Josh Fennigan’s cocker spaniel last summer. 

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My big brother Trey and his friends talked a lot about trying to catch the dogcatcher. I wasn’t sure if they were serious, and I think they knew that. Hurdling Cheetos into each other’s mouths from across the room, they’d plot into the night about their takedown strategy. 

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“For the last time, we don’t have enough bottle rockets to take out the tires.” My brother’s friend Brendan paced across the front of our bunk beds, biting his lip, his eyes shaking wildly in his head. “We need something else, something more—”

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“Blowy-uppy,” my brother said, staring down at his lap, flipping a crispy paper fortune teller in his fingers. His other friend Rob leaned back on a beanbag trying to pour Cheeto crumbs down his throat.

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“No! Jesus, look, we need to do something that scares the living shit out of him.” Brendan sighed and stopped pacing. His eyebrows bounced up. “What if we slashed his tires? He can’t drive the van if his tires are shredded, right?” 

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Trey stopped fiddling with the fortune teller. “You serious?” He had his real face on now. I could always tell because his voice got about a half-Octave higher. He had seen that face a handful of times, and it had always meant something big and stupid was about to happen. “You know we’re dealing with an insane person, right? We’re damaging his property. What if he pulls out a sawed off and blasts us?” 

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“That’s the beauty of it. He won’t have any idea who did it. My cousin’s friend is an ex-cop. He can get us one of those spiky strip things they use for high-speed chases.” 

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“Why don’t we just stab ‘em with a screwdriver?” Rob coughed from deep within the Cheetos bag. Trey and Brendan stopped what they were doing and stared at each other.

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And that’s how it happened. Three geniuses snuck out into the dead of night to end a tyrant’s reign, once and for all. 

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I tried to sneak into the bed of the truck as they sped off into the night. Trey put his hand on my chest, and told me to go inside. I could tell he was a little scared, but he hid his fear behind his best Danny Ocean impression. “We’re playing this one pretty close to the chest, Chrissy. If I’m not back by four, call the cops.” He flung his leg over the tailgate. The truck scooted out of the driveway and slid into the cool crip shadows. 

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I woke up at five in the morning, my alarm whining loudly on the nightstand. I slammed my hand on top to snooze it, and sat up in a heart pounding panic. Soft rays of morning shot through the blinds. I leapt from the bed onto the floor, looking for Trey on the top bunk. Empty. I ran down the hall and into the living room. My dad sat calmly reading the paper under a lamp in his blue leather chair, crunching cereal in his mouth and rubbing his feet together. 

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“Where’s Trey?” I wheezed, my hair sticking to my head. I thought I was going to puke.

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My dad stopped chewing. “He’s not in your room?” he grumbled quickly through a mouth full of cereal. His brow furrowed and he leaned up out of his chair, cereal sloshing in hand. 

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I walked across the living room and into the kitchen. Nothing. I ran through the dining room, pulling chairs aside before slamming my ankle into something hard on the ground. I stumbled over Trey, who was wrapped up in a blanket, his head sticking out from between the dining room table and the wall. I had kicked him in the face. He screamed, I screamed, my dad came huffing breathlessly around the corner. 

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After he got all cleaned up, we sat in the kitchen. It was summer, and my parents were off at work now. 

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“So, what the hell happened?” I asked, staring at Trey’s bruised cheek bone

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He paused for effect. 

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“We got him, Chrissy,” he said coolly, his fingers wrapped around a coffee mug. “He’ll never touch a dog in this town again. Not as long as the Screw Boys are  around.”

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“The Screw Boys” is what they called themselves from then on, having used a screwdriver—and a hammer it turns out—to pop holes in the dog-death mobile. Trey, Brendan and Rob bragged about their legendary mission for almost two weeks, recounting the tale at high school parties and locker rooms to any soft-eyed freshmen who would listen, myself included. 

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No one heard or saw Dennis for a while. We didn’t know where he lived, but we knew he wasn’t here. The streets behind our house stayed empty and screechless for a fortnight, having been Dennis-free for the first time in years. We bathed in the calm, quiet nights, kicking the soccer ball in my backyard, reading comic books on the couch. It was all so good.

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That was until our dog, Baker, went missing. 

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Baker was a twenty-four pound, fluffy brown Pomeranian who my mother loved very much. Three times a week, she would take him on long walks up and down the hills at the park near our house, singing Paul Abdul songs under her breath. Baker was her third child, a small bundle of delightfully angry apex energy. He humped our pillows, and barked relentlessly at dinner parties. 

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My mother came home from work one evening to find Baker’s collar on our front porch. He was nowhere to be found. We asked the neighbors in all directions. We put up posters, went on long, slow car rides yelling his name out over and over. My mother wept hard and loud into my dad’s shoulder. She would roam the streets for hours, her words echoing across parking lots and over fences, “Baker boy! Come home to mama, my baby!”

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We never saw Baker again. His bed, his toys and his leash—the few remaining things that we had left— we threw away after a few weeks. My mother couldn’t speak about it for months. A few times, I caught my dad standing out in the backyard silently staring out into the trees.

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Of course, we all thought the obvious. Trey and his friends hadn’t defeated Dennis, they had enraged him. That night at the bar, with the screwdriver, had brought out the demon in Dennis. The Screw Boys had awakened a bloodthirsty hunter, unleashing him into the night for revenge. 

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It’s been nearly a decade since everything happened. Sometimes, when I’m back home, lying still in my bed, I can hear the rattling metal van speeding past my parent’s house, howling into the night.