Greg knocked on the door. From one of the apartments somewhere in the building, a cartoon was playing so loud you could hear every bang, blam, and blip.

I strained my ears trying to hear a sound from inside Alex and Carla’s apartment, but all I could hear was a squeaky voice saying ‘you can’t catch me,’ followed by zonk, bink, bop.

Then I knocked harder than Greg because if I had to listen to any more of that god-awful cartoon, I was going to scream until I cried.

“HANG ON!” A male voice shouted from the other side of the door. Shortly after that, we heard a lock turn, and the door opened a crack.

“Oh, hey, Greg,” a voice said. The way we were standing and the way he opened the door, Alex hadn’t seen Dan and me. He opened the door more and half stepped out with one leg, the other arm and leg still inside seemed to be holding something back. A dog, maybe?

As soon as he saw me, he said, “OH!” his eyes wide, a look of terror on his face.

“Well,” he said without anyone saying anything to him, “I guess you’d better come inside so we can talk.”

It was a dog he was trying to keep inside. A big dog. Black and very furry. It started to sniff us as soon as we walked inside.

The apartment was hot and stuffy, and since we live in Texas, it was also very humid. There was furniture stuffed inside so tight we all barely fit inside the front door.

There were boxes stacked from floor to ceiling everywhere, all around the furniture, and the smell, well, let’s just say, it smelled like dog piss and shit.

Alex looked at each of us in turn. I was starting to feel claustrophobic. We were all standing so close together that we were touching.

“Well,” Alex said. “I guess we’d better talk about Carla.