Part 2
Leah lowered the paddle before she meant to. The plastic edge knocked against her knee.
There was no account she could empty, no credit card she could use, no one she could reach in the next few seconds who would lend her nearly three thousand dollars. She looked at Dempsey, searching his face for some procedure she hadn’t understood.
He glanced around the room.
“Fifty-five hundred is the bid.”
Voss folded his arms.
On the platform, Ranger struck at the muzzle with one paw. A handler jerked the pole sideways to keep him from tangling himself, and the dog spun toward the pressure.
Leah saw a fenced compound somewhere far from the water. She saw men keeping their distance, delivering food without touching him, waiting for the day he stopped being useful even there.
Dempsey lifted the hammer.
“Any advance?”
She pushed the paddle into her jacket pocket.
“Fifty-five hundred, once.”
The barrier was only a cord between two posts. Leah bent beneath it and stepped through before she could persuade herself to stay where she was.
“Miss. Stop.”
A security guard left the wall.
She went around the corner of the auction table, her folder slipping from beneath her arm. It hit the floor behind her. She kept moving.
One of Ranger’s handlers saw her first.
“Out of the marked area!” he shouted.
Yellow tape on the concrete marked the dog’s working clearance. Leah crossed it.
The second man reached for the stun device at his belt while his partner dragged backward on the pole. Ranger caught Leah’s movement. His whole body gathered, then drove toward her, snapping the restraints taut.
The guard was still coming. Someone overturned a chair.
Leah stopped about six feet from the dog.
Up close, she could see dried skin at the edge of his damaged ear. She could see the white showing beside his eyes. Her own breath had become useless little sips, and she forced herself to take one full lungful.
Her father had never shouted frantically at Ranger. Even when his voice carried across a beach, it had a settled, unmistakable rhythm.
Leah planted both feet.
“Ranger!”
His ears moved.
She brought her chin up and used the voice she had copied as a child when she was trying to make her father laugh.
“Stand down. Chief Drew Mercer.”
The handler with the stun device had already lifted his arm.
Ranger went still.
The sudden absence of pulling nearly toppled the other man. He took two stumbling steps forward, fighting to keep the pole from striking the dog’s neck.
Leah didn’t move.
Behind the platform, a shepherd stopped barking. Another answered once and fell quiet. The noise died unevenly along the rows of pens until the warehouse held only the handlers’ breathing and the small electrical click of the heater near the loading door.
The guard stopped with one hand extended toward Leah’s shoulder.
Dempsey lowered the hammer without setting it down.
Ranger’s eyes stayed on her face. His nostrils widened. She had chosen the jacket that morning from the sealed garment bag where her mother kept a few of her father’s things. She hadn’t washed it. The collar still carried a trace of the soap he used, buried beneath the smell of stored denim.
The dog lifted his nose toward it.
Leah’s knees wanted to bend. She held herself upright, afraid that any hurried movement might break whatever had reached him.
Ranger eased his hindquarters onto the platform.
He sat squarely, front paws placed together, looking up at her the way he used to look at her father while waiting for the next instruction.
Then he whined.
It was a thin, rising sound. Leah pressed her lips together, but tears ran down into the corners of her mouth.
The handler lowered the stun device.
Dempsey set the hammer on the table. He studied Leah, then turned to the service record in front of him. When he spoke again, he left the microphone resting on its stand.
“What’s your name?”
“Leah Mercer.”
He looked back at the page.
She couldn’t quite get enough air for the rest. She swallowed and tried again.
“Andrew Mercer was my dad. Ranger was his partner.”
A man in the front row took off his glasses.
Dempsey drew the transfer record out from beneath the health report. Leah watched him find her father’s name among the sections that hadn’t been blacked out. His thumb stopped on the page.
“Chief Mercer,” he said. “Naval special warfare.”
Ranger gave another small whine. Leah turned back to him immediately, and his ears tipped toward her.
Voss moved away from the column.
“Are we finishing this sale?” he asked.
Nobody answered him.
He came closer, looking first at Dempsey and then at Leah.
“My offer is still fifty-five hundred. Whatever this is, it doesn’t change the bid.”
Leah wiped her cheeks with the heels of her hands.
“You’re sending him overseas.”
“He’d be guarding a controlled site. That’s the work he’s suited for.”
“He stayed with my father after everyone else was gone.”
“And now he bites the people assigned to feed and handle him.” Voss gestured toward the platform. “You heard the report. A familiar voice gets his attention for a minute, and suddenly you think he belongs in an apartment?”
Leah stepped between him and the dog without thinking.
“He’s a veteran.”
Voss gave Dempsey an impatient look.
“I came here to purchase security animals, not argue terminology.”
Leah’s hands curled inside the long sleeves. She had more to say, but the words crowded together and wouldn’t come out in any useful order.
Behind her, the dog remained seated.
At the rear of the warehouse, chair legs grated across the concrete.
A broad man in a weathered canvas coat stood near the last row. He had been sitting so quietly that Leah hadn’t noticed him. Gray stubble covered his jaw, and a pale scar ran from his temple toward one eyebrow.
Several buyers turned before he had taken three steps.
One shifted his knees out of the aisle. Another pulled his chair inward, making room.
Leah recognized the name somebody murmured: Bennett Cole.
He owned Veydran, a private extraction firm whose teams went into places where other companies wouldn’t send their people. Before that, he had spent twenty years in naval special warfare.
Voss straightened.
Cole passed him without a glance.
At the barrier, he stopped beside Leah, close enough that she could see an old white mark across one knuckle. He looked at Ranger for several seconds. The dog followed the movement of his face but did not rise.
Cole drew a breath through his nose.
“I was on the quick-reaction aircraft that went for your father…”
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