by Mark Nolan
“I was in the Marine Corps Infantry, and then I volunteered to be an IED detector dog handler.”
“I wish a dog like that could have found the roadside bomb that got my leg.”
The man slowly bent over and pulled up the cuff of his left pant leg, exposing an artificial plastic-and-metal prosthesis from the knee down.
“Be glad you lived through it, some of my friends didn’t.”
“I do try to be thankful but I’ve had post-traumatic stress ever since,” the man said, and he drank down the other small bottle of liquor.
“I had a slight touch of PTSD for a while too. There is help available. You don’t have to suffer through it alone. This too shall pass, but that’s easy for me to say since I didn’t lose a leg.”
“I’ve found that liquor helps the most. I drink all the time just to stay numb. Got any more alcohol in that backpack?”
“No, fresh out. Are you drinking all day on an empty stomach? That will kill you pretty quick.”
“Nothing lives long, only the mountains and the rivers. Soon we all return to our Earth Mother.”
Jake looked at the man’s long, straight black hair, then at the shape of his face and how he had no beard.
“Are you Native American?”
“Yes I’m one of the Zuni People, from New Mexico. The words I spoke are from a death song.”
“Don’t sing it yet. Listen, do you want a part time job? All it pays is three meals a day and a place to sleep, but you’ll be safe and you won’t have to fight people every day just to live.”
Jake looked at the way the man was favoring his right hand. It was obvious he’d been injured recently.
The man saw the look, rubbed his sore wrist and said, “Three hots and a cot? What do I have to do? Don’t mess with me.”
Jake held his jacket open to remind the man of the pistol in its holster. “If I wanted to mess with you I could have done it already. All you have to do is help serve dinner at a soup kitchen, listen to a sermon and then wash dishes afterward. I’m warning you, though. If you were to harm anyone there, I would find you and cause you a thousand times more pain and regret. Fair enough?”
“Yes fair enough, I’ve already had enough pain and regret in life. I just want to live in peace.”
“I know the feeling,” Jake said, and he handed the man one of the throwaway phones, along with Father O’Leary’s business card.
“Call that guy. Tell him that a man with a golden dog gave you this number and said to call the Padre. He’ll know it was me. Ask if you can work at the soup kitchen. Call him before you pawn that phone and drink any more alcohol. Is that a deal?”
The man finally smiled. “Deal,” he said.
Jake handed him some twenty dollar bills. “Get some food before you drink any more booze.”
“Thank you brother. It’s been a while since I had a meal. I’ve been thinking about cheap cheeseburgers all day long.”
Jake didn’t shake the man’s injured hand. He just gave a command to Cody and began walking down the alley. Jake looked over his shoulder and said, “This is your chance. Don’t blow it.”
The man stared at Jake and then at the phone in his hand. He nodded, took a deep breath and exerted all of the willpower he could muster as his stomach growled and his thirst beckoned. He started tapping in the phone number to call O’Leary.
It was late, and well after church hours, but Father O’Leary answered on the second ring.
As soon as they were talking, the man started walking toward a nearby mini mart store to buy some cheap alcohol, and a questionable burger that was sitting under a heat lamp. He’d kept his word to the strange man with the scary dog. He’d called O’Leary before doing anything else. Now he was going to buy some food along with his liquor.
Jake and Cody went down several more alleys. This situation was looking okay. They were getting closer to the dog park that Jake had in mind as a hiding place. Nobody had recognized them so far.
As they reached the end of another alley and were crossing the street, a car drove up out of an underground parking area and turned toward them. The car’s headlights shone right on the pair as they were in the middle of the crosswalk.
The car stopped, and two men got out. “That’s him,” one of the men said. “He’s the wanted guy we saw on TV. We can get the reward money.”
Jake heard what was said, and he saw that the man had a pistol in his hand.
“Run Cody, run now,” Jake said, and the two of them took off sprinting toward the corner of a building to the right.
The man with the pistol yelled, “Stop or I’ll shoot. This is a citizen’s arrest.”
When the runners didn’t stop, the man illegally fired off several rounds in their direction. His unskilled shots hit a parked car, a family’s living room window that shattered on impact, and… Cody.
Cody cried out in pain as he fell and skidded on the sidewalk. Jake went temporarily insane. He roared in anger like a wild animal, drew his pistol and began firing.
When the two men heard the furious battle cry and saw the pistol, they panicked and took off running. Jake was barely able to control his rage. He fired rounds into the man’s car engine over and over again, destroying it beyond repair.
Jake yelled and cursed as he fired his pistol, “You shot an American war dog. You shot a Sergeant in the Marine Corps. You’d better run for your lives, you traitors. If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you!”
He could have easily shot both attackers, and it would have been justifiable self-defense, but his concern for Cody and his strict training overrode his anger. Jake returned his pistol to its holster and then carefully picked up Cody in his arms, holding the dog’s wounded area tightly against his chest to try to slow down any flow of blood.
“I think it’s only a flesh wound, but don’t you die on me Cody, that’s an order,” Jake said.
Jake began to run, carrying his injured brother. Thoughts of previous battles flashed through Jake’s mind. The memories of similar horrific events were painful, but they also helped him to know what he had to do to save his friend. And he would save him, or die trying.
Cody growled in pain from the wound and from being held tightly and jostled as his Alpha ran down the street. Jake’s quick look at Cody’s injury had indicated that he’d only been winged along his shoulder with a skin-deep flesh wound and that the bullet had not entered his body. He kept up a pep talk as he ran, his leg muscles starting to burn with the exertion.
“You’re going to be okay Cody. Just hang on and I’ll get you fixed up quick. Stay with me now. Just keep on breathing in and out. You can do it. Hold tight, we’re almost there.”
Chapter 88
Sarah Chance was alone in her veterinary clinic, working late and finishing up some paperwork. As she worked, she received a text message on her phone from Madison, her receptionist employee.
OMG is this that guy you said you bumped into at the TV station?
The text had a link to an online news story by a reporter named Dick Arnold. The story was about a madman who had shot at Katherine Anderson, the former prosecutor and now head of the Literacy for the World campaign. Sarah gasped when she saw the suspect’s photo with a caption that said, “Wanted Fugitive: Jacob Wolfe, photojournalist.”
“That’s him, the guy who bumped into me,” Sarah said.
Sarah felt a chill go down her spine. Maybe he had been stalking her. What were the odds that he would be going out the door of the building at the exact same moment she was going in?
The man was accused of assaulting a pregnant woman and her unborn child, shooting the woman’s belly with a paintball gun. What kind of sick person would do such a thing? Other photos showed him at the Moscone Center manning a television camera, with a weird grin on his face. He’d also been at a crime scene hugging a sexy blonde woman in a bikini, with a police tape between them. The news story by Dick Arnold made Jake look guilty as hell.
There was a sound bite from Mayor B
urgess. He faced the news cameras with his blow-dried hair, brightly whitened teeth, and obvious face lift. A man in his fifties trying to look thirty and not succeeding. Mayor Burgess said the police would hunt down this man with every resource available. He promised swift justice, but viewers were aware that many mayors before him had promised a lot of other things and hadn’t followed through on any of them. Why would this politician be any different?
Sarah had become friends with SFPD Sergeant Beth Cushman when the police inspector had brought her cat to the clinic. She looked up Beth’s number in her client list and made the phone call on her mobile phone. The call went to voicemail, and Sarah left a message.
“Hello Officer Cushman, this is Doctor Sarah Chance at the pet clinic. I just saw the news about this Jake Wolfe person and I wanted to tell you that he physically bumped into me recently and talked to me. I don’t know if that’s helpful but I thought you should know.”
Sarah ended the call and got up and walked through her clinic, making sure all of the doors and windows were locked up tight. She opened her purse and checked her small .380 pistol. It might not be a very big pistol but if she fired it at close range it could make a serious hole in an assailant. She had it loaded with hollow-point rounds. Every time she held the pistol she remembered the rhyming advice that her instructor had repeated.
“Two in the chest and one in the head; makes the enemy dead-dead-dead.”
Now all she had to do was go outside all alone and walk in the dark and fog to her car that was parked three blocks away. Hopefully, the stalker wasn’t hiding out there, watching and waiting. No problem, this kind of thing builds character, right? It merely required bravery, good luck, and nerves of steel. What could go wrong?
Jake had never run a mile while carrying a large dog in his arms before, but there was a first time for everything. His leg muscles were on fire when he finally made it to the dog park. This was where he’d planned to hide for the night, but now that Cody was wounded the plan had changed.
Cody needed medical care, and he needed it now. Jake believed that Cody was going to be okay, but he would not rest for one second until he was absolutely sure. He was overprotective of dogs, and if anybody tried to stop him from saving Cody’s life, he would take swift and violent action.
He wanted to call a taxi or go to a 24-hour veterinary hospital but he was a wanted fugitive, and he had to improvise. As soon as he and Cody were hidden behind some bushes in the park, Jake studied the Veterinary clinic across the street. It appeared to be closed. Only the front light was on. The inside rooms were dark. This was what he’d been hoping for.
“Time to fracture a few laws for the good of my dog,” Jake said.
Jake carried Cody across the street and went around the side of the clinic to the back. The sliding glass door was a welcome sight. Those were usually pretty easy to open. If anyone asked Jake how he knew which doors were easy to open, he would just say he had no comment. The truth was, in his youth he might have bent a law now and then with his group of rebellious friends. There was a picnic table next to the door, and Jake gently set down Cody on the tabletop.
“Cody stay, don’t move.”
Cody looked at Jake with pain in his eyes, but he trusted his Alpha with his life and he obeyed. Jake looked inside the glass door at the track it slid on and was glad to see there was no wooden dowel laying there to prevent just such a break-in as he was about to perform. There didn’t appear to be any burglar alarm sensors attached to the door either. Hopefully, there wasn’t a hidden sensor on the back of the handle, on the inside, out of view.
Jake got a firm grip on the handle of the sliding door and began to move it up and down, working on the lock in hopes of loosening it. If all else failed, he could try pushing in and up on the door to lift it off its track. But that could also cause it to fall over, and it might shatter, making an enormous noise. He could try to prevent that by pushing against the bottom of the door with his foot when it came loose, but it was a risky maneuver.
The efforts at moving the handle up and down started to have an effect, and Jake could feel the latch loosening. A slight gap appeared between the door and the frame. He took out his KA-BAR knife, slid the blade into the gap and worked it against the latch. After a few moments, the latch clicked and came free. Jake slid the door open, picked up Cody and carried him inside, then slid the door closed behind him by pushing his elbow against the handle.
He used his arm to bump up a light switch to the on position, and found himself in a dog grooming area. There was a door at the other end of the room. He walked to the other door, and as he went through it, he used his elbow to turn off the light in the grooming area and then turn on the light in the hallway. Several doors in the hall stood open, and Jake went through one into a treatment room with a patient table. He turned off the hallway light and turned on the light in the treatment room, then set Cody down on a table top designed for medical procedures.
“Okay Cody, I’m going to fix up that wound. This is going to hurt, but I’ll find some Novocain and give you a shot.”
Cody stayed still, and he made a brave sound in his throat. Jake opened cabinets and found a supply of cotton balls and latex gloves. He pressed some cotton balls against the top of the alcohol dispenser and used them to clean Cody’s wound. Cody grunted in pain, but he didn’t bark when the stinging alcohol came into contact with his injured skin. The medicine cabinet had some Novocain on the shelf and Jake loaded up a syringe and gently injected Cody with the painkiller in several places to act as a local anesthetic.
“It’s a good thing they taught me how to do this stuff when I was a dog handler,” Jake said.
While the medicine was taking effect, Jake put on surgical gloves. Once Cody’s skin was numb around the wound, Jake gently probed it with a clean scalpel to look for the bullet. He was relieved to see that it was only a flesh wound, just as he’d thought. The bullet had barely grazed Cody. It had torn open his skin like a knife blade as it passed by but had not lodged inside his body or caused serious trauma.
Jake let out one of the biggest sighs of relief in his entire life. He just couldn’t lose another dog. He tried to hide his feelings from Cody, but for a moment he felt like he might vomit. He took some deep breaths and pressed his face against Cody’s face until the feeling passed. Cody licked Jake’s cheek and huffed at him.
Jake put some VetClot hemostatic powder onto Cody’s cut, and that quickly stopped the bleeding. He then hooked up an IV drip with a bag of lactated Ringer's solution. That would get some intravenous fluid into Cody and help him overcome his blood loss.
Now it was time to close the wound. Jake used a sterile needle and suture material to begin sewing up Cody’s skin and creating stitches. It was slow going with such a long cut, and the stitches weren’t very neat and tidy. But Jake was in a hurry, and the battlefield sutures would heal just fine. Cody’s fur would hide the long scar.
Sarah jogged the three blocks to her car. Her left hand held her purse and her right-hand was inside of it, holding the pistol. She quickly got into her car and locked the doors. Her clinic was on a street corner, directly across from the dog park. But she always parked her car a few blocks down the side street instead of in front. That way she left those front parking spaces open for potential customers.
It had been stressful to run three blocks in the dark, but at least she’d avoided going near the darkened dog park with all of its bushes and shadows. Once she started the car’s engine, she felt relieved. However a moment later she thought she might have seen a light go on and off inside her clinic. She sat there in her car and wondered if she’d imagined it. She then caught another flash of light in one of the back windows. That was impossible. She’d made sure to turn off all of the lights a few minutes ago as she was closing up the clinic. She released her car’s parking brake and drove with her headlights off, then slowly pulled her car up next to the clinic and parked.
Her brain said it was a mistake to go inside and
investigate, but her heart said nobody was going to mess with her life’s work and get away with it. After all of her long hours, the lawsuit, the collection agencies and everything else… a burglary was just the last straw. Sarah turned off her car engine, quietly got out of her car and clipped the SOB “small-of-the-back” holster inside the back waistband of her pants. She kept the pistol in her right hand, and in her other hand she held her purse with her keys and phone inside. Walking slowly and approaching the back sliding glass door, Sarah looked inside and saw that the other door across the grooming room was open just a crack. Even though she was sure she had closed it all the way when she’d left. The hallway light didn’t appear to be on any longer, but now there seemed to be another source of light coming from nearby.
Sarah gently pushed on the sliding door handle, and the door slowly slid open. Now she was sure someone had broken in. She’d locked that door and checked it twice. She went inside and closed the door, then crossed the room and opened the other door. She leaned her head out into the hallway and quickly pulled it back.
There was a light coming from one of the treatment rooms down the hall. The door was closed, but the bright light came through the narrow vertical window above the doorknob. The smart thing to do would be to go back outside, get in her car and lock the doors, and then call the police. But Sarah was angry at this intruder for daring to break into her clinic. She wanted to shoot the jerk.
Her temper flared, and her anger overrode her fear. She left her purse on the counter but took out her phone and put it in her pocket. She then held her pistol out in front of her as she crept quietly down the hallway. When she got to the door with the light in the window, she took a quick peek inside. There was a man in the room with his head turned away from her to his right. He was doing something to a Labrador retriever dog that was lying on the treatment table. The dog had blood on its fur and appeared to be in pain. What terrible things might the man be doing? She had no idea, but she was outraged and was going to put a stop to it right now.
