Blame It on the Dog Read online

  “You bet. Tell Kathie good-bye for me.” He paid and drove home. Trigger guarded the bag all the way.

  Cheese had congealed against the paper wrapping the kolache Kathie had thoughtfully cut into small pieces for Tigger. Gabe had to use his fingers to scrape them free before he could dump them into the dog’s bowl. The dog waited patiently and then ate them one at a time.

  He was still favoring the leg. “Oscar clipped you pretty good, eh? Let’s let the lovely Alyssa check you out.”

  Gabe sat down in front of his food and speed-dialed the vet. He set the phone on “Speaker” and propped it against the salt shaker.

  “Dr. Alyssa Carter’s Complete Animal Healthcare, Yvonne speaking. How may I serve you?”

  “Hi, Yvonne…”

  Tigger barked at the sound of Yvonne’s voice over the speaker.

  “Is that Tigger?” She cooed.

  “Who else? Knock it off, mutt. Is the doctor in?”

  “Yes, she is, Mr. Chance. Is Tigger sick?”

  “Maybe. He’s limping and I want her to take a look.”

  “Oh. Another injury. She won’t like that. Let me see.” Her voice trailed into silence. “She has an opening at 10:30. Can you come in then?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He ended the call and then took a bite of kolache. “Mm-mm-MMM! That’s incredible, Kathie Li. If Stan ever gets caught in the jelly squirter, you and your kolache-making hands are mine. A beautiful, brainy baker - you gotta love her, hairball.”

  When the last crumbs were gone, Gabe wiped the table and fetched the envelope his father had left for him. He was so stunned after Peabody read the provisions of Mother’s Will to him that he forgot all about the envelope.

  But now there was time and his subconscious could put it off no longer.

  He stared at the large brown envelope, weighing it in his hands. It felt empty. A gentle breeze could blow it to the floor.

  “A trifle big for whatever it’s got in it, doncha think?” he said to the dog.

  His name was written on one side in his father’s hand: “Gabriel Chance”. That was peculiar since dad never called him “Gabriel”. The really strange thing was on the other side. The envelope had been sealed with wax, just like in the middle ages, or whenever.

  “What’s with the wax seal, dogface? The only time I’ve ever seen these is in the movies and Dad wasn’t the dramatic type. Definitely weird.”

  Gabe looked at the little white dog with the electric shock hairdo. The dog was staring at his face. It wasn’t his usual head-to-the-side-RCA-dog look. His eyes were tight and squinty. He reminded Gabe of Clint Eastwood if Clint Eastwood had been a dog. “Don’t rush me! And stop trying to intimidate me, mutt. I’m the boss, here. Me man, you mutt.”

  Now, he got the RCA pose.

  “Of course I am curious.”

  The dog did Clint Eastwood, again.

  “Would you cut it out?”

  With a deep sigh he slid his finger beneath the flap and broke the seal. Inside was a single sheet of paper covered with more of his father’s writing.

  Dear Gabe,

  You are reading this so I guess we didn’t have time for one last conversation. That’s a shame. I know your mother is gone, too and that’s more than a shame.

  That makes you an orphan – an adult orphan. But you are still a man, son, and there is man’s work ahead of you.

  On the top shelf of my wardrobe you will find a Colt .45. It’s a great gun. It has saved my life more than once. Taped to the bottom of that shelf, in the back, is a key. It opens a safe deposit box, #1732 at the Texican Bank in downtown Austin. Go, without delay. What’s in it is very important and very valuable.

  I trust you, son.

  BC

  “Cryptic, don’t you think, dog? And ’BC’? Come on, Dad; don’t get all mushy on me. ‘BC’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The dog had nothing to offer. He was lying on the floor, eyes intent on his owner.

  “Maybe we’ll find out when we get to the bank – where al-l-l-l the secrets will be revealed.”

  The dog raised his head.

  “Yep, road trip, but don’t get too hopeful in the secret-revealing area. I just said that for dramatic effect. First we’ll let Dr. Alyssa take a look at your mangy carcass and see if you’re dying. Then we’ll persuade her to play hooky for the afternoon and join us. And then? Who knows dogface? There could be a romantic interlude in store for Mr. Chance.” He wiggled his eyebrows and walked to the car. The dog limped along behind.

  CHAPTER 5

  CCOMPLETE ANIMAL HEALTHCARE was an imposing three-story, once-upon-a-time home near downtown Brandt, not many blocks from Gabe’s mother’s house. But Alyssa Carter’s hospital was on the other side of Main Street, what Mother always referred to as “Silk Stocking Row”. He was almost 20 before he figured out she meant that was where the rich people lived in grand homes. The rich people obviously pre-dated him: most of the houses had either been converted to law offices or other businesses, or boarded up, or torn down entirely. A scant few were still residences, and fewer still were grand.

  He parked under a giant pecan tree in the parking lot. While he searched inside the huge trunk for the rarely used leash (rarely used because the dog didn’t go for it) the dog waited patiently. He never gave Gabe any grief about the leash when they went to see Dr. Carter. Man and dog proceeded up the steps to the front porch and passed its requisite porch swing.

  Gabe let them in and a freight train rumbled behind the door. It was a giant mastiff with a head bigger than Tigger’s body. A puddle of drool collected on the floor beneath its massive jaws. When the two dogs met, nose to nose, electricity crackled the air until, finally, the big dog laid his body down and cradled his head between his two front legs. Tigger dusted his feet on the vinyl-covered floor and limped to the front desk.

  The young woman behind the counter seemed oblivious to the little drama that had unfolded and resolved itself so neatly. “Name?” she asked without looking up.

  The vet tech was a new face Gabe had never seen. “Hi, where’s Yvonne?”

  Still looking down the woman said, “She’s not here. Name?”

  “Mine or his? Where’s Yvonne?”

  The woman looked up and up, then slowly down, and then up again. “That depends. Which of you are here to see the doctor?” Honey dripped from her tongue as she spoke. Her eyebrow was another matter. He could swear it was writing a book as she scanned his body. He didn’t think it was a children’s book, either.

  He coughed, “That would be–both of us.”

  Tigger yip-barked.

  The woman leaned over the counter and said, “So, what’s your name, boy? Master seems to have lost his tongue.”

  “Tigger. His name is Tigger. And this is Gabriel Chance the man who will be paying Tigger’s bill, so be nice to him, Cheris.” Dr. Alyssa Carter was a handsome woman an inch or so shorter than Gabe’s 6 feet. She was strongly built with close-cropped blonde hair. She looked as if she could wrestle a horse and win, which she had done on more than one occasion. Horses are not always cooperative when the vet comes around.

  “Come on back, Gabe. I want to check that leg.”

  Tigger turned to the mastiff and dismissed him with a snort. He waited for Gabe to lead him to the back.

  “Who’s the new girl?”

  “Cheris is my niece. She’s externing here for the next semester.”

  “A little forward, isn’t she?”

  “I told her you would be coming over with your Jack Russell. She was messing with your head.”

  “That she was, Alyssa. The apple doesn’t fall far from the gene pool,” he joked.

  A momentary flash of lightning lit her eyes and then vanished. “Her mother, not me. Cynthia was the practical joker. I was the jokee, which I never enjoyed.” The chuckle she tried was a brittle failure. “Enough of that: let’s take a look at the patient. Come, Tigger.” The dog came and she lifted him gently to stand in the
center of the examining table. He licked her arm, but only once.

  “You are such a gentleman.” She began mashing and poking and pulling and rotating his right leg. A quick turn of his head when she poked the muscle was his only response.

  “So what did you do to him this time? Throw him out of the car?”

  “Lighten up a little. It wasn’t me. A sheriff’s deputy kicked him. I wasn’t even in the neighborhood.”

  “Gabe, you have got to take better care of this dog. That,” she punched the air with her finger, “is what dog owners do. You can’t let him get shot. You can’t let him get kicked. You can’t let him run loose.”

  “Whoa, Nellie, I don’t ‘let’ him do anything. He does what he wants to do. I lock him in the house and find him at Sophie’s having breakfast. Do you know she cooks him an egg and some bacon every morning? And don’t get me started on the car! I leave him inside the house and five miles later he jumps over the front seat! Alyssa, I don’t let him do anything.”

  Skepticism was written all over her face. “Humpf. So why did a deputy kick him? And what was he doing around a deputy, anyway?”

  “Are you working this afternoon? I want you to go to Austin with me. I have a bank to stop by and then I’ll take you to a nice, expensive pizza place. I’ll tell you all about the deputy on the way.”

  She scrunched her mouth up and shook her head. “I shouldn’t. But, gee, expensive pizza. How can a girl turn that down, Mr. Heir?”

  “Heir in waiting is more like it. Peabody is doing his best to see that both my finances and my dignity are shredded. I think it will be another month before he gets around to dropping my stipend in the bank. Have you ever felt like a marionette?” he raised both arms at the shoulder, hands dangling, and head canted to one side.

  She bristled, nose suddenly pointing at the corner of the room, “Your mother attached the strings. Cornelius has no choice but to follow the will. He is a very professional attorney.”

  “Cornelius?” Gabe’s stomach rolled.

  “Cornelius. Peabody. He is a very good friend.”

  He didn’t know what to say. Besides Mother, no one said good things about Peabody. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it without saying anything.

  It was Dr. Carter who finally broke the silence. “So, is that your way of telling me I’m buying?”

  He forced a smile and sighed, “Hardly. I’ve been saving my pennies in spite of your ‘friend’. But I have to leave here by 3, can you make it?”

  He watched as she worked her way through her decision tree, weighing the options.

  Finally she said, “I guess so. I really shouldn’t – but Cheris should be able to handle things here. It will be good experience. If she runs into anything that’s non-routine she can call me. And there’s always Charlie.”

  “Charlie?” He didn’t have a clue who Charlie was.

  “‘Charlie’ is Dr. Charles Villareal. We trade call, sometimes. She’ll be in good hands.”

  Gabe nodded. “I’ll pick you up at 2:45, that’ll give me time to take the mutt home and lock him in the house.”

  This time her eyes were full of heat. “His name is ‘Tigger’, not ‘mutt’ or ‘dogface’, or anything else. And he is coming with us. I want to keep an eye on him. Besides, you need more bonding time with him.”

  It’s ‘bondage’, not ‘bonding’. And I’ve had quite enough of both.

  It may have been his imagination but it looked for a moment as if the dog’s perpetual smile got bigger and he could have sworn he almost chuckled. “Come on, Tigger, you mutt face, you: let’s go before you start laughing and rolling on the floor.”

  “And I want you to tell me more about the deputy who kicked him,” she called after him.

  He was already walking out the door, the dog trotting along behind, when he threw a desultory, “Yeah, maybe,” over his shoulder.

  Are you that hard up for female companionship, Chance?

  Leave me alone. She’s got nice legs and other parts. And she’s kinda cute.

  Yea, like a piranha.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE WINDING ROAD to Austin was still only two lanes when Gabe and Alyssa picked it up north of Brandt. The air inside the car had been strained since they left her office.

  She walked her fingers across the Ambassador’s spacious bench seat and rested her hand on his leg. “I guess I came on a little strong earlier. I apologize. Sometimes when I’m at the office, I get in high work mode and I find it hard to shift out of it. Maybe I can make it up to you.”

  “I have no doubt that you can, Dr. Carter,” he grinned.

  “He’s being a good dog back there,” she said.

  “Are you sure he’s still there? He’s never this quiet; or this content to keep his hairs out of my nose.”

  She looked over the seat. Tigger was curled on the floorboard, asleep. “He’s still there. Sound asleep.”

  “Well, don’t wake him. Maybe he’ll stay there.”

  “He’s a good boy, Gabe. He’ll be fine. Tell me more about it being hard to contain him.”

  “It’s not hard, Alyssa, it’s impossible. I can seal off the doggie door and lock him inside. Then I get in the car – and check it all around just to make sure – and there’s no dog. A mile later he pops over the seat and hogs the A/C.”

  “That’s unusual. Hmmm. I’d like to see that,” she said.

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t. It’s unnatural.”

  “I know about unnatural. We had a break-in the other night.”

  “A break in?” He saw her nod out of the corner of his eye.

  “They broke a window in the back that faces a vacant lot. It’s dark back there. The sheriff said that’s why they chose it as their entry point.”

  “You say it so calmly. It would tick me off.”

  “It made me angry, too. But anger wasn’t the main feeling. Mainly I had a revolting sense of having been violated. After I got past that, it wasn’t really a big deal. They broke a window to get in and busted a lock on my medicine cabinet. All they took were some needles, syringes, and drugs.”

  “Druggies? In sleepy, old Brandt?”

  “Just because Brandt’s a small town doesn’t mean it’s immune to people using drugs. The sheriff said I would be surprised at how much drug abuse there is in Plato County.”

  “I just never thought …” he started.

  “But they won’t get any thrills out of what they took. In fact, it could kill them.”

  That surprised him. “What’d they get?”

  “A couple of bags of saline, a vial of succinylcholine and a box of Somulethal. They must not have seen the valium or it would be gone, too.”

  “Sux – I’ve heard of it. We used it in the ER to paralyze the patient so we could get a tube down their airway.”

  “That’s what we use succinylcholine for, too. But we never refer to it as ‘sux’.”

  He overlooked the distaste in her voice. “What’s the other one, something-lethal? That sounds nasty.”

  “It’s the medication we use for euthanasia. It is a very potent barbiturate.”

  “Shades of deadly nightshade! So that’s how you guys put little Poopsie to sleep!”

  “Not so much dogs and cats as the large animals: horses, cows, pigs.”

  “Pigs?”

  “Yes, pigs. They get sick, break bones, get infections. It’s a humane method.”

  “Whoa. Those guys are in for a shock. Instead of getting high they’ll get dead.”

  “Probably not. It would take a very large dose to cause death in a human being. More than likely they would just go to sleep for a while.”

  “It won’t kill them?”

  “It’s dose related. It would take 10 or 15 cc’s to kill a 200 pound man, less for a delicate little flower like me. That’s probably 20 to 30 times the volume most addicts use of their drug of choice.”

  “So, you’re fine, your office is fine, and several horses will live to see the morning
light. Well, it’s certainly been a pleasure talking death with you, Dr. Carter.”

  “The feeling is mutual, Mr. Chance. I’ve told you my tale of woe, now it’s your turn.”

  Gabe wrinkled his brow. “I wish it were as benign as a break-in. My mother’s old friend, Sophie – have you met her?”

  “I believe I have.”

  He nodded. “Sophie has friends at a retirement place in the Teapots called Mountainview Villa.”

  “Never heard of it,” she said.

  “I hadn’t either. Anyway, a friend of hers, a man I met a few months ago, Harald Schmidt, died last week in his living room but nobody knew about it.”

  “Who is ‘nobody’?”

  “Nobody is nobody, as in ‘no body’. When she couldn’t reach Harald, she got worried and asked me to ride out to Mountainview with her to check on him.”

  “Why didn’t any one know he had passed on?”

  “I’m getting to that. When we got there the dog – who we had left at home, locked in the house, with the doggie door closed – couldn’t wait to get out of the car. Then he was scratching at Harald’s door and barking and whining, making a real nuisance of himself.”

  “Was he chasing something?”

  “Nope. I think he’s nuts, doctor.”

  Alyssa rolled her eyes, “I’m a vet, not a psychiatrist.”

  “Darn. I need a good psychiatrist.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I have a friend who just finished his psychiatric residency. He would be happy to see you. He’s a Freudian.”

  “Freud did dogs?” he said.

  Her smile was mischievous.

  “Oh, I get it. Very funny, Dr. Carter. The dog is nuts, not me.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Chance.”

  “As I was saying, the dog was carrying on at the door and he wouldn’t stop so I pushed him back with my foot…”

  Alyssa glared at him.

  “Gently. I pushed him back – gently. It didn’t stop him for a heartbeat. Bark, bark, bark, scratch, scratch, scratch. Sophie told me to unlock the door so I opened it and got a rush of death in my nose. I closed it fast, but not fast enough to keep the dog out and the stench in. I told Sophie to wait in the car and went to see what, or who, was dead. It was Harald. He was on the sofa in the living room and he’d been dead a while.”