by Neil Plakcy
I shuddered. Rick had occasionally referred to Rochester as “the death dog,” because he had a knack for finding dead bodies, or clues in the solution of who killed them. I didn’t want to believe that he’d moved on to initiating the deaths of people who petted him.
I chatted with Edith for a few minutes and promised to bring Rochester for another visit soon. Lili went out to take some photographs around River Bend, our townhome community, and I went up to the office. Rochester followed me, and once I was in my chair, he slumped down at my feet.
I opened the desk drawer and pulled out the laptop I had inherited, along with Rochester, from my late next-door-neighbor Caroline Kelly. It was close to four years old, at least, and didn’t have as much power as my desktop computer, but I kept my hacking tools on it. I didn’t have any plans to break in anywhere I didn’t belong, but I did want to keep my software updated.
The online hacker support group I had joined would have called that a red flag – simply thinking about hacking was enough to trigger an alert. But I was trying to channel my impulses to snoop in protected places—recognizing that I’d always have those urges, and that if I tried to ignore them completely I’d only get myself in trouble.
Hackers are an elusive bunch, and the sites where people uploaded new and improved tools were always changing, so I had to keep up. As it was, several of the sites I’d bookmarked had been shut down, and I spent an hour following coded messages and encrypted links before I could find where my tribe was hiding.
I read blogs and posts about updated port sniffers and password-breaking programs, and downloaded a couple of programs. While I waited for the last of them to come through, I remembered our conversation with Rick and Tamsen the night before, that an ex-con with a long record had been arrested for the break-ins at Crossing Estates.
There but for the grace of God go I, I thought. I had been incredibly lucky in my online forays. I had only made one major mistake, and I had paid for that. But I had done many other things, almost all with good intentions, and hadn’t been caught.
I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, that if I got too cocky I could end up in trouble again. And this time I had so much more to lose. Lili knew about the laptop, and my struggles to keep from hacking, but what if I got caught again? Would she see my actions as a betrayal of her trust, and be terribly hurt? Would she stand by me, or would she dump me the way Mary had?
I had to be strong enough to resist temptation. But just updating my tools wasn’t illegal – or at least that’s what I told myself.
Rochester sat up and sniffed me, and when my download finished I shut down the laptop and lowered myself to the floor to rub his belly.
Rochester was a constant reminder of what was important in my life. His love and devotion had helped me climb out of the despair I had felt after I left prison, and I was determined to do everything I could to take good care of him.
I checked his nail and dabbed more antibiotic cream on it, and when he dozed off I Googled as many sites as I could find about what might have happened and how I could help him heal. One site scared me – a vet blogged about a dog whose owner had ignored an infection, which had then spread to the dog’s vital organs, eventually causing its death. That was not going to happen to Rochester.
3 – Nail Bed
Monday morning after breakfast I kissed Lili goodbye and bundled Rochester into the car. The vet’s office was on the other side of Stewart’s Crossing and we drove through downtown to get there, beneath illuminated snowflakes hanging from light stanchions along Main Street. Storefronts were decorated with multi-colored lights, and Santa and his sleigh rested on the lawn in front of the hardware store, each reindeer wearing a tool belt.
I parked in the vet’s lot and took Rochester for a quick pee before going inside. He was still limping, but that didn’t stop his enthusiasm for sniffing every possible smell. The vet had put up a new sign out front, with room for custom messages, and that morning it read “Live Nude Dogs. Free Lap Dances.”
I was surprised to see Rick’s truck in the parking lot. I hoped that Rascal hadn’t gotten sick or hurt himself running around the house with Rochester. I didn’t see Rick or his dog in the waiting room, though it was crowded with people and pets. A yappy Yorkie in one corner kept up a barking and snarling match with a persnickety Pekingese. There were cats in crates and dogs big and small on leashes, mostly sitting beside their owners.
I walked up to the receptionist’s desk with Rochester by my side. She was a young Indian woman I’d never seen before, with red dot in the middle of her forehead. Maybe it was the influence of the spy movie I’d seen a while before, but I couldn’t help seeing that dot as the target from a laser rifle.
“We have a small emergency,” I said to her. “Can Dr. Horz squeeze in a quick look at Rochester’s toenail? I’m afraid it’s infected.”
“Dr. Horz is running behind,” she said. “We’ve had some trouble this morning. But things should start moving again soon and I can squeeze you in.”
The tag on her blouse read “Sahima.” I signed in with my name, Rochester’s, and my phone number, and took Rochester to a chair by her window. He slumped by my feet and watched with interest the parade of pets. He tried to make friends with an elegant Lhasa Apso beside us, but she kept her queenly distance from the hoi polloi.
A big sign beside the receptionist’s desk announced that the clinic would be closed for two weeks over Christmas, and that all pets who had been left for boarding had to be picked up by 6 PM Monday, December 22. At the bottom was the name and address of another office that would be open during the holidays.
A twenty-something guy with bristly short hair and arms covered in tattoos stepped out of the door to the examining area. He called the Yorkie and his dad, a huge bald guy in a Harley Davidson T-shirt and as they went in, Rick came out, alone, to another cascade of barking from the Peke.
Rick walked toward me, but stopped at the receptionist’s desk. While he waited for Sahima to get off the phone, I asked, “Nothing wrong with Rascal, is there?”
He shook his head. “Business visit,” he said.
“Really? What happened? Someone got bit?”
Sahima ended her call as Rick pulled on his sheepskin-lined leather jacket. “Tell Dr. Horz I’ll call her later today,” he said.
“Rick--” I began.
He held up his hand. “Lousy day. I’ll talk to you later.”
He didn’t stop to pet Rochester on his way out the door, which was unusual for him. Even when he’d been mad at me in the past, he’d always made time for my dog.
I figured he wasn’t mad, just busy. The Peke went in next and calm fell over the room. I turned to the receptionist. “What happened?” I asked.
She leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “There are drugs missing from Dr. Horz’s cabinet.” I could tell from her eagerness this was the most exciting thing that had happened in her life for a while.
“What kind of drugs? Like a junkie would steal?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not pain meds. We keep those double-locked. And not the Euthasol, either, for putting dogs to sleep. That’s locked up, too.”
I was intrigued. “Then what?”
She almost whispered, “Potassium.”
“Really? What do you use that for?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just the receptionist. But I figure it must be something important because Dr. Horz got into a real state. This morning, after she discovered that there were five of these little vials missing, she pulled each of us into an examining room. It was crazy. We had dogs and cats all over the place, and she was freaking out over this stuff.”
Her phone rang and I sat back down with Rochester. I sent a couple of texts and checked my email, and the waiting room began to clear. After an hour, Rochester was getting restless, and I was glad when the tattooed guy appeared and called, “Here with Rochester?”
My big golden boy boun
ded up at the sound of his name, and I had to hold tight to his leash to keep him from tackling the guy.
“I’m Felix,” he said. “Follow me, please.” He had the mumbling and flat vowels of a real Philly accent—my favorite example was the way the city’s football team had become the Fluffyah Iggles.
As we walked down the antiseptic corridor, I asked, “Where’s Elysia?” Rochester liked our regular vet tech.
“She went to take care of her sick mom. I usually take care of the dogs and cats we got staying with us, but the doc asked me to fill in out front until Elysia gets back.”
We stopped at the digital scale in the hallway, and Rochester, usually so reluctant to step onto it, followed Felix’s instructions easily. “Eighty-five point two,” he said, then led us into an exam room. Rochester circled twice and then flopped down on the floor. Felix picked up a clipboard with a series of questions printed on it and asked, murdering the r’s in the statement, “What’s the reason faw yaw visit today?”
I told him about the toenail, and he sat down on the floor with Rochester and very gently examined his paw. “He probably tore this when he was playing,” he said to me. “Goldens are such big happy dogs.”
“We had a dog come over Saturday night and they played a lot,” I said. “Could it have been then?”
“Nah, maw like a few days before that,” Felix said. “These infections, they don’t come up overnight. But yeah, he probably screwed with it Saturday night.”
As I heard him speak, I wondered why I didn’t say things like “Satiday,” when I’d grown up so close to Philadelphia. Was it a socio-economic thing? Because I’d had excellent teachers? Because my parents were first-generation Americans who had impressed on me the importance of speaking clearly? I remembered Lili’s comment about how fortunate she and I had been to have the backgrounds we did.
Felix labored over the clipboard, gripping his pen like it was a spear ready to stab at the paper. When I was a grad student at Columbia I had done some student teaching in city schools, and I remembered seeing kids hold their pens that way, as if they were determined to beat the words into submission.
Dr. Horz’s office was gradually becoming computerized, but she and her vet techs still wrote out case notes by hand, and Felix looked relieved when he put down the pen and took Rochester’s temperature and a fecal sample. I was pleased to see that my dog had taken a liking to him and let him do whatever he needed without complaint. Not that he was a fussy puppy, but who wants to let a stranger mess around with your butt?
Felix went back to the clipboard and his face darkened. He chewed on the end of his pen. “Can I give you a hand with anything?” I asked. “I’ve taught writing in the past.”
“My writing sucks,” Felix said. “I can never make the words say what I want.”
He shifted the clipboard so I could see it. Under “History” he had written “owner founded redness and swelling on golden retriever’s right hind paw yesterday PM,” and I pointed out that it should be “found” rather than “founded.” I corrected a couple of other mistakes I recognized as second-language ones, including a lot of missing articles.
Then we talked through the notes he wanted to make. He knew all the right terms, but his writing was very rough. “Let me guess, your first language isn’t English, is it?”
He shook his head. “Spanish. I was born in Puerto Rico. Didn’t move to Philly until I was ten, and they dumped me right into regular English classes.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that in my students,” I said.
He was relieved when we finished everything. “Thanks faw yaw help,” he said. “Dr. Horz will come see you.”
He left us in the examining room with all the diagrams of canine intestinal disorders. “Ingestion of foreign substances is the number one reason for emergency veterinary visits,” the first poster read.
Yeah, I’d been through that routine a few times.
I sat on the floor with Rochester and stroked the smooth hair on the back of his head. “You’ll be all better soon, puppy.” I leaned down to kiss his head. “I promise.”
I had plenty of time to read about inflammatory bowel disease, coronavirus, and canine minute virus, which involved diarrhea, difficulty breathing and anorexia. At least Rochester didn’t have any of those.
We had to wait quite a while for Dr. Horz. She was a small, slim woman with a great bedside manner. “Sorry, I’ve been run off my feet this morning.” She had a smear I hoped wasn’t dog poop on her white coat, and several strands of her graying hair had come loose.
“I heard,” I said. “Some potassium was stolen?”
She looked at me. “I guess Rick Stemper was right. When he was here earlier he said you and Rochester are often nosing around in his cases.” She smiled. “I’m impressed that you already know what happened.”
“I wouldn’t call it nosing around in his cases,” I said. “Rochester has… some skills. I just follow along.”
She picked up the clipboard, then sat on the floor beside the dog. “How’s my handsome friend?” she asked, as she looked at the notes Felix had written.
“He’s been great, except for this little problem,” I said.
She looked up at me. “Felix’s writing has improved dramatically here. These notes are pretty good. Did you help him, by chance?”
I shrugged. “Was that wrong?”
“Not at all. He’s a smart guy, but he’s had some bad luck in life. I’m hoping he can turn things around. One area he’s got to improve is his writing skills. When he’s working back in the kennel for me, all he has to do is check on the animals and record data. But if he wants to be a vet tech, he has to be able to write notes.”
“They have remedial courses at the community college he could take,” I said. “I have a friend who teaches over there, and she says that almost three-quarters of the incoming students need help with writing.”
“I’ve been trying to convince him,” she said. “He wants to go into a vet tech program at a college in Jenkintown, but they won’t accept him until he improves his skills. I can’t blame him for not wanting to spend three semesters and a thousand dollars to get where high school should have gotten him.”
She wrote a couple of notes at the bottom of the form, then looked up at me. “Standard treatment for a bacterial nail bed infection is an oral antibiotic, with antimicrobial foot soaks and a topical ointment. I’ll have Felix bring in the prescriptions for you.”
She reached down and chucked Rochester under his chin. “You ought to be less rambunctious, mister. You must be at almost three by now.” She looked up at me. “I know you don’t have his exact birthdate, but he first came to us almost two years ago, and my records say that based on his teeth, we estimated that he was about a year old.”
“Was there anything I could have done to prevent this?” I asked.
Dr. Horz shook her head. “You take great care of this dog. I can see that you trim his nails regularly. He just got one caught. Sorry to be so abrupt, but I have a whole raft of animals waiting for care. And I need to reevaluate my security procedures, and talk to my staff. It’s going to be a long day.” She shook her head. “And I thought Friday was bad.”
Though I knew she needed to go, I couldn’t resist asking. “What happened Friday?”
“A teenaged girl came in after I’d sent the staff home, as I was about to close. She insisted her dog was deathly ill and I had to look at him right away.” She smiled. “You know how teenagers are. So I took him back into the examining room, and she texted furiously on her phone all the time I was examining him. Then she had to go the bathroom. There was nothing wrong with that dog and I had to wait in the room with him until she got back.”
“Teenagers,” I said. “I see the same kind of thing in the classes I teach.” I hesitated. “Do you think she could have been the one who took the potassium?”
She cocked her head and for a second I recognized Rochester in her. “What would a teenager want with potassium?”
I shrugged. “For a chemistry class?”
“The science labs at Pennsbury High are well-funded,” she said. “I know, because I’ve been over there to visit. And as far as I know they don’t experiment with potassium.”
“Just a thought,” I said.
“It’s more likely that one of my staff either misplaced the missing vials, or that our record-keeping needs to improve and we used the last supply without noticing it. But I still thought I ought to notify the police, in case we find anything else is gone.”
I thanked her for looking at Rochester, and a few minutes later Felix came back with a bottle of pills, a tube of ointment, and a bottle with a dropper built into the cap. “This stuff here is organic iodine. You don’t gotta worry about it -- it's safe, non-toxic, antifungal, antibacterial, and anti-yeast.”
“Do I put it on his nail?”
He shook his head. “Here’s what you do. You got some kind a pot, right? You fill it with water, add a couple a drops then swish it around until looks like iced tea.” He laughed. “You don’t drink it. You dunk Rochester’s paw in faw like two to five minutes.”
He sat down on the floor beside Rochester and opened the dog’s jaws. He dropped one of the pills into his mouth and then shut it and tilted the dog’s head back. He massaged Rochester’s throat as he spoke. “If he don’t like having his foot in the water, you can give him a rawhide to chew.”
I expected Rochester to spit the pill out on the tile floor as soon as Felix let go of him, but instead the dog smiled and licked Felix’s hand.
“You’re good with him,” I said, as Felix stood and then put everything into a bag for me. “He can be finicky sometimes.”
“He’s a pussycat,” Felix said. “I’ve worked with way worse dogs than him. I was with this program when I was in prison--”
He stopped, and I could tell he’d said more than he wanted to.
“I was inside for a year in California,” I said. “Finished my two-year probation a couple of months ago.”
