Part 2
“Kaya,” he said again, and she raised her head an inch off the ground before it sank back.
He brought his hand up to stroke her face, and she flinched so hard the chain rang against the oak: eye squeezed shut, ears flat, her whole body pulling away from him. Somebody had taught her that a raised hand came down.
“No. No, girl. Not me.” He lowered his hand and laid it flat on her shoulder instead, where she could feel it without having to see it coming. Under his palm she was shivering in hard, uneven waves. The pup wormed in against her belly under the rain shell.
He had bolt cutters in the truck. He’d bought them a month before deployment to take a rusted lock off his landlord’s gate and never unloaded them. Five minutes down, five back, if he didn’t break an ankle.
“I’m going to the truck,” he told her, because Eli had always talked to her like a person and she’d always listened like one. “I’m coming back. You stay with that baby.”
He went down the logging track faster than was smart, sliding in the ruts, catching himself on pine trunks. He had the toolbox open and the cutters in his hand when headlights came around the sawmill curve, swung wide, and pulled onto the shoulder at an angle that blocked the cable gate. It was a Chevy half-ton with one fender a different color from the rest.
The man who got out was big through the chest and gut, in a canvas coat and a feed-store cap. He left his door open and the dome light on. He had a tire iron in his right hand, carried loose, like he’d picked it up without deciding to.
“Help you?” It came out slurred at the edges. “That’s my lease back there.”
“There’s a dog chained up in your lease.”
The man looked at the bolt cutters and then at Ben’s face, sorting out what kind of problem this was. “Wade Pruitt,” he said, as if the name settled it. “And those are my dogs, bought and papered. I got a fella coming Saturday for the pup. Four hundred cash, because his mama’s a genuine war hero. You walk off with him, that’s theft.”
“And the mother?”
Pruitt shrugged. “She’s used up. I was fixing to deal with her.”
He said it the way a man talks about a mower that won’t start.
“Move your truck,” Ben said.
“Or what?”
Pruitt came at him in the headlights with the tire iron up and back, a long, drunk, telegraphed swing. Ben didn’t retreat. He stepped inside the arc, caught the wrist before it came down, turned it over, and let Pruitt’s own weight carry him face-first into the gravel. The tire iron went skittering under the Chevy. Ben put a knee in the middle of the man’s back and held it while Pruitt swore into the mud.
He got one bar of signal standing on the shoulder. He gave the dispatcher the mile marker, the name, the tire iron, and the dog. Twenty-five minutes, she said, maybe more in this weather. There was a ratchet strap in Pruitt’s truck bed. Ben used it to bind the man’s wrists to his own trailer hitch, tight enough to hold and loose enough not to hurt him, then took the keys off the seat and threw them into the Silverado.
“You can’t leave me out here,” Pruitt yelled.
“Deputies are coming. Talk to them.”
It was a choice he knew he might have to explain to someone with a badge. He made it anyway and went back up the hill.
The padlock took two bites of the cutters. When the chain fell away, the raw band on her neck looked worse than it had by flashlight. He slid his arms under her and lifted, and her lightness frightened him more than anything else that night. She’d been seventy pounds of muscle once. She’d taken Eli down in a training yard at Little Creek and stood on his chest while the whole kennel laughed. Now she weighed about as much as a sack of feed.
The pup followed at his heels the whole way down, falling and getting up, never more than a step behind.
A Sussex County cruiser was nosed in behind Pruitt’s Chevy, its light bar washing the rain red and blue. The deputy was a woman in her fifties with a flashlight in one hand and the other near her belt. She looked at the man strapped to his own hitch, then at Ben coming out of the pines with a starving dog in his arms and a puppy trailing him.
“You tie him up like that?”
“He swung a tire iron at me. It’s under his truck.”
“Uh-huh.” Deputy Haskins turned her light onto the dog, and her whole face changed. “Jesus. Okay. Where you taking her?”
“The emergency hospital in Colonial Heights.”
“Go. Both of them are evidence now, so they stay at that clinic under our hold until animal services says otherwise. You don’t take them home. Understood?” She wrote his plate on her palm. “I’ll be by for a statement.”
The emergency clinic off I-95 was all white light and floor wax. They took Kaya through the double doors on a gurney, and Ben sat in the waiting room in wet jeans with the pup wrapped in a towel on his lap. Somewhere after two in the morning the little dog quit shivering and fell asleep, one front paw hooked over Ben’s thumb as if to keep him from leaving.
The veterinarian came out a little before five. Dr. Okafor was tall and tired, with blood on one sleeve of her scrub top.
“She’s alive, and I think she’s going to stay that way,” she said, sitting down across from him. “Three cracked ribs, badly dehydrated, and the wounds on her side and neck are infected. She’ll be with us a while.” She hesitated. “She’s also older than anyone should be breeding. She’s had at least two litters, and the last one wasn’t long ago.”
Ben looked down at the pup. “That fits.”
“Her microchip is registered to a Carol Sutton. Farmville.” Dr. Okafor watched his face. “You know her.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want us to call?”
“No,” Ben said. “I’ll do it.”
When she’d gone back through the doors, he sat with the pup’s weight on his legs and put the pieces in order. Kaya had pulled one rotation with Eli before a rocket attack on their outpost left her unable to work around loud noise. The Air Force let Eli adopt her, and when he deployed again she went to his parents’ farm to wait for him. Then she just stayed. Ben had known all of that. He had signed the card that came with the flowers.
He took out his phone and scrolled to Carol’s name. He hadn’t called her since the funeral. The last entries in the log were hers, from fifteen months ago: two missed calls on a Tuesday night, eleven minutes apart, and a voicemail he had never opened. He remembered seeing it come in. He’d been in the team room packing out, and he’d told himself he’d call her back once he was settled. Then he’d let the little red dot become part of the screen.
He held the phone to his ear and pressed play. “Ben, it’s Carol.” Her voice was thin and fast, the voice of someone standing in a kitchen and holding herself together. “I’m sorry to bother you. It’s about Kaya. I can’t manage her anymore and I don’t know what to do, and you’re the only one Eli said would know. Please call me back…”
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