Cornered in Conard County

by Rachel Lee

  He glanced at his watch and saw that he still had plenty of time to grab a bite at Maude’s Diner and get to the station. “Sure. It might help Flash feel a little more at home.”

  She smiled then, a faint smile, but it reached her eyes as she accepted the leash. “These dogs are practically people to you,” she remarked.

  He had turned and now looked over his shoulder. “Nah. They’re nicer than a lot of people.”

  That made her laugh quietly, and the sound followed him as he went to turn off his vehicle and get Dasher. He liked her, he realized. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. Oh, hell, he didn’t need the trouble.

  But he brought Dasher inside anyway and left him with Dory while he returned to the back of his car. Two bowls, a large padded bed, several tennis balls, chew toys and forty pounds of dry dog food later, he was sitting at her rickety kitchen table, watching her search her fridge for a soft drink to give him.

  “So it’s true computer types drink a lot of soda?” he asked casually.

  “As long as it has caffeine. I can do a good job with a pot of coffee, as well. Orange, cola or lime?”

  “Orange,” he decided. “Cheetos?”

  “Now that’s a stereotype too far,” she said with humor as she passed him the bottle of soda. Evidently it didn’t come with a glass in her world. “Although,” she said as she slid into the one other chair, “I did have a friend in college who loved to eat them sometimes, but she didn’t like the grit on her keyboard. So she ate them with chopsticks.”

  The image drew a hearty laugh from him, and her smile deepened.

  She spoke again. “Thanks for bringing all the doggy stuff. You never said, but how much do I owe you? You’re giving me a well-trained guard dog that you must have spent a lot of time on.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m kinda thinking of Flash as an extension of my oath to serve and protect. He’s a gift, Dory, if that won’t offend you.”

  Her eyes widened. “But, Cadell...”

  “No buts. You can be my advertising around town, how’s that?”

  Both dogs, trailing their leads, were sniffing their way around the house, checking out everything. Dory watched them for several minutes, the faint smile still on her face. After a bit she said, “I’ve never received a better gift.”

  “I hope you’ll never need his finer skills.”

  “Me, too.”

  Silence fell. He glanced at his watch and saw he had a little longer. Somehow it didn’t feel right to just walk out.

  Then Dory surprised him by asking, “What else do you teach the dogs to do? There must be a lot involved in police work.”

  “Apart from what we taught Flash to do? Plenty. A dog has a wonderful nose, hundreds of times more sensitive than ours. It can follow scents that are weeks old, and even those that are high in the air. That’s an extremely useful tool in searching, particularly search and rescue.”

  “Do you do a lot of search and rescue?”

  “Around here? In the mountains, quite enough. Hikers, mainly. Then there are elderly people who sometimes ramble and forget where they are. Earlier this summer we had to hunt for an autistic girl. She’d wandered off, become frightened and hid in a culvert out of sight.”

  “Her parents must have been terrified. My word, she must have been terrified!”

  He smiled. “She didn’t trust us, but she trusted the dog.”

  He watched her smile again. For a woman who had come here to escape a possible threat, and who, according to Betty, suffered from a lot of nightmares, she smiled easily. Props to her, he thought.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “it’s possible to train the dogs to hunt only for specific scents, too. Like explosives. Or drugs. Or cadavers.”

  Her smile faded. “Dead tissue?”

  “We train them to distinguish human tissue from animal tissue, and their success rate is about ninety-five percent. They can find buried bodies a century old. And they can smell them down to at least fifteen feet, and some say up to thirty.”

  Her eyes had grown wider. “So they don’t get confused?”

  “No.” But he didn’t want to get into the details. Some things just didn’t need to be talked about.

  She looked down, then lifted her head and drank from her own bottle of orange soda. “How do they learn all this stuff? I mean, isn’t it hard to teach them?”

  “A little patience and they pick it up pretty quickly. They’re remarkable, and they’re eager to please.” Dasher came over and laid his head on Cadell’s thigh. “I think he’s ready to go to work.”

  Dory popped to her feet immediately. “I’m sorry, I’ve been holding you up.”

  “Actually, no. I allowed some extra time.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper. “Feeding directions and all that. If you have any questions, call me. And if you don’t mind, I’ll drop by every day or so to see how you two are getting on.”

  Holding the paper, she looked at him. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Cadell.”

  He chuckled. “Tell me that again when you have fur all over the place. He doesn’t shed a lot, but he’s going to shed. See you tomorrow afternoon.”

  He headed for the door with Dasher and heard Dory behind him telling Flash to stay. The dog needed to learn his new home. He figured Dory was going to make it easy on him.

  As he climbed into his vehicle with Dasher in the cage behind him, he realized something. Betty unintentionally had painted Dory unfairly. She might not be prepared to trust people and allow them within her circle; she might be scared to death of her brother’s imminent release from prison; she might be haunted by terrible nightmares.

  But Dory had grit. Real inner strength.

  He liked her. He respected her. And he needed to watch his step, because he sure as hell didn’t ever want to make another woman miserable.

  * * *

  DORY AND FLASH regarded each other in the kitchen. She’d removed his leash, but he sat there staring up at her as if he were pleading.

  She tapped the piece of paper Cadell had given her. “It says here you don’t get supper for another two hours.”

  Flash lowered his head a bit.

  Feeling like the wicked witch, Dory scanned the paper again. “But you can have your dental chew. What the heck is that?”

  She looked at the heap of supplies in one corner of her kitchen, then rose to look through it. She discovered a plastic bag behind the huge bag of food. In it was a nubby nylon or plastic bone of some kind. Unzipping the bag, she pulled it out and turned to hold it out to Flash. “Is this what you want?”

  He stared at it and licked his lips.

  There could be a minor problem with a dog so well trained, she thought. Was he just going to sit there like a statue or let her know what he wanted? “Take it, Flash,” she said finally in desperation.

  He apparently understood that. In one leap he reached the bone and took it from her hand with amazing delicacy before settling down to gnaw on it.

  “Well, cool,” she said. “We have communication!”

  Flash barely glanced at her. Almost grinning, she sat down at the table to read the directions from Cadell more carefully. From the other room she heard her email dinging, but she ignored it. Flash was more important.

  She nearly giggled when she read what Cadell had typed at the top of the page: The care and feeding of your personal K-9. She wondered if he gave that to all his trainees.

  Flash looked up at her, forgetting his bone for a few seconds as he wagged his tail at her. He seemed so happy right now, it was impossible not to feel the same.

  * * *

  LATER, AFTER SHE had caught up on email and reopened her participation in the project, she felt a nose gently prod her thigh. A glance at the clock told her i
t was after eleven...and she hadn’t walked Flash since he arrived.

  She put her conference on hold, explaining she needed to walk her dog. Hoping she didn’t get the slew of jokes she half expected, she found Flash’s leash. The dog gave one joyful bark, then stood perfectly still while she hooked it to his collar.

  That was when it struck her how late it was. Ordinarily she worked well into the night, but before she hadn’t been afraid of anything. Now she was afraid. Her brother might already be out of prison. They’d given her the exact date, but she’d run the letter through the shredder as soon as the shock had passed. She wanted nothing with his name on it.

  So today. Maybe tomorrow, but most probably today. Betty knew for sure because Dory had told her, but it was too late to call and verify it.

  Point was...she was suddenly frightened of the night and its secrets, a fear she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  She looked at Flash and saw him watching her, not a muscle twitching. He must have felt her abrupt burst of dread.

  “I shouldn’t be silly about this,” she said aloud, not entirely believing herself. “I have you, after all.”

  The slightest wag of Flash’s tail. God, the dog seemed to be reading her like an open book. Could he do that?

  “I promised to take good care of you. I’m sorry I didn’t walk you sooner, but do you think you could manage with just a short trip to the backyard?”

  He looked agreeable, but he probably didn’t understand a word of her prattle. God, she had grown so completely unnerved for no good reason. George, even if he wanted to find her, couldn’t have located her yet. She hadn’t even needed to leave a forwarding address, because she paid all her bills online and the rest was junk. She’d established no real connections here yet except the broadband and that didn’t have her full name on it. She was truly off the grid as far as the world was concerned.

  She would be very hard to find, she assured herself as she began to walk toward the back door. “Flash, heel,” she said quietly, and he walked right beside her.

  Besides, she had a guard dog. Flash would make George’s life hell. So she was safe, yeah?

  She just wished she could believe it.

  The night beyond the door felt pregnant with threat. But it was the same backyard that had been there when she rented the place. With a locked six-foot wooden privacy fence around it. She’d know if anybody tried to get past that.

  And there was Flash, of course. Oddly, however, as impressed as she was by the dog, she didn’t know if she was prepared to put her life in his paws.

  God, she was losing it. Stiffening her back, she pulled the door open and let herself out with the dog. Should she unleash him?

  But Flash seemed to be reading the situation well. As soon as they reached grass near a shrub, he did his business, then turned around to face the house again. He sensed she wanted to get back behind locked doors.

  Tonight she was in no mood to disagree, or to even try to reason through her probably unreasonable fear. Just get back inside and give Flash a treat. Tomorrow in the daylight she could give him a longer walk, even work with him.

  But not tonight. She felt as if evil lurked out there, and she didn’t want to find out if she was right.

  * * *

  GEORGE NEEDED MONEY to travel. Everything else was on hold until he had more than the pittance he’d received at his release late that afternoon, fourteen hours earlier than he’d expected. But then, he’d been a model prisoner, and he noticed they’d dated the paperwork for the next morning.

  But he didn’t have enough money to travel on or eat while he figured out exactly how he was going to deal with Dory. The bus ticket they’d given him was nonrefundable, meant only to take him back to the place where he’d originally lived—a small suburb of Saint Louis.

  He’d been given the address of a halfway house, so he went there, arriving late at night, and resigned himself to spending some time figuring out how to get his hands on some money quickly. He sure as hell didn’t intend to work any of the low-paying menial jobs they probably would point him to. He had bigger things to hunt.

  Even though it was late, with his release papers he got inside the door. They showed him to a bedroom and didn’t seem particularly worried that he asked to use a computer. The residents had one in a public room downstairs. Help himself.

  So he did. He was too keyed up to just go to sleep. He’d dozed on the bus anyway. The only thing about this that shocked him was his surprising discomfort at not being surrounded by walls when he’d walked from the bus to this place. Not having his every movement watched or directed.

  He’d never imagined the world could feel so big, and he suspected that once tomorrow began and life resumed out there, it was going to overwhelm him with chaos. He wasn’t used to chaos anymore. The order of his days had become deeply embedded over twenty-five years.

  But so had sitting at a computer and hunting for information about his sister. She had vanished from the town where she had grown up. She was reputed to be a partner in a graphics business that had no address other than a web URL and email. The godparents who had raised her were dead.

  He needed to know more about her than this, but he suspected if he called people around here in their old hometown he’d meet a brick wall. Well, unless he could somehow convince them he was someone else. Not likely. He feared too many local people might remember him. Maybe not young people, but the older ones who had probably devoured all the lurid details in the newspaper and on the evening news.

  With that thought in mind, he headed upstairs to his room, where his bed was ready to be made. His own room. It had been a while. Not big, but bigger than a cell, without a cell mate.

  For a little while the space bothered him, but then he settled down. Room was a good thing. If he thought back very hard to his early days in the slammer, he remembered how claustrophobic he had felt. No more of that.

  Now there was infinite freedom.

  He needed to remember how to enjoy it. To use it.

  Chapter Four

  Dan Casey dropped by Cadell’s place in the morning. Dan had recently married a woman with a young daughter and was now expecting an addition to the family. Fellow deputies, he and Cadell had built a good friendship.

  “So,” said Dan, pausing near the ostrich pen. The birds had been let out into the larger corral but didn’t seem interested in taking advantage of the space. They regarded Dan with the same glare they gave Cadell. Dan shook his head.

  “So?” Cadell asked.

  “Krys wants to come out and see the birds,” Dan remarked, referring to his five-year-old stepdaughter.

  “Krys would be snack-sized for those demons,” Cadell said with a wink. “Bring her anytime I’m home.”

  “And then there’s the puppy she wants.”

  “Ah. Come on in, if you have time. Is she thinking young puppy? The vet has plenty for adoption.”

  “I know.” Dan shrugged. “She likes the police dogs.”

  A chuckle escaped Cadell. “You’re in for it. And I don’t mean from the dog.”

  “I didn’t figure.”

  They walked into the house together. The morning’s coffee had just finished brewing, so Cadell poured a couple of cups and they settled at his trestle table, left over from the days when hired hands ate with the family.

  Cadell asked, “So what’s happening with Krys and what does her mother think?”

  “Well, that’s the other question. Vicki has mixed feelings. She thinks a dog would teach Krys some responsibility but that in the end the two of us would be taking care of most of it. The idea of a puppy is irresistible, but every time Vicki mentions it, Krys gets a very mulish look and says she wants a police dog.”

  Cadell nodded slowly. “Her birth father was a cop, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah,
and Vicki’s wondering how much that has to do with this. It’s hard to tell, but maybe Krys has some lingering fears because of her father’s death.”

  Cadell pondered that as he sipped his first cup of coffee for the day. A lot more would probably follow. “Well, I can give her a well-trained dog that would protect her and obey her. But you or Vicki are going to have to keep the training fresh or you’ll wind up with just another dog. Which might be okay.”

  Dan sighed and rapped his fingers on the table. “The problem is, Krys isn’t being very clear about exactly what she means by a police dog. Does she just want to know it’s a police dog? Does she want it to be able to do certain things? One thing for sure, I am not giving that child a dog that will attack on command.”

  Cadell had to laugh. “I wouldn’t dream of it. A kid that young? One temper tantrum...”

  “Exactly.” Dan grinned. “I don’t think she’d tell the dog to hold us at bay, but by the time she’s a teen that could change.”

  Both men laughed then.

  Cadell spoke as his laughter faded. “I can make sure the dog recognizes certain people as friends, no problem. And I can train it to protect her without an attack command.” He paused and lifted one brow. “You do understand that if the dog perceives a threat to her, he will attack without a command?”

  Dan frowned. “Depends on what kind of threat. I mean, the mailman holding out an envelope...”

  Cadell shook his head. “No, more like a stranger takes her by her arm or hand. Or tries to get her in a car. Come on, Dan, you’ve worked with these dogs before. You must have some idea of how well they can discriminate.”

  “Most of the ones I’ve worked with haven’t been that finely tuned. I didn’t know if they could be. So, okay. I’ll leave it to you.”

  Cadell hesitated. “Wait a sec. I have an idea. I just gave a guard dog to a new friend in town.”

  “Dory Lake? I heard about her from Betty, I think it was.” Dan was suddenly all cop. “What’s the problem?”