Loose the Dogs

by P. D. Workman

  “You made it. You ready to serve that warrant?”

  “You bet.”

  The captain picked up a folded piece of paper from his desk and held it out to him. “There you go. You mind if I tag along?”

  Frank was surprised. “No, not at all,” he said.

  “Great. Let’s go.”

  There wasn’t much conversation in the car. Frank wanted to ask his boss all kinds of questions—how he had managed to get the warrant, why he was now so eager to go over there himself. Frank had to just be glad he had been offered the privilege of serving the warrant himself.

  The pound wasn’t yet open, but there were people there, so Frank and Errol banged on the doors until someone came to see what the problem was.

  “Police. We have a warrant,” Frank said, holding it up.

  The young woman looked at him in shock. “A warrant? For what?”

  Frank continued to hold the warrant up. It said what it was for if she bothered to read it.

  “For records of where the Johnsons’ dogs were transferred to,” Frank said flatly.

  She looked at him like she didn’t understand English. “The Johnson dogs?” she repeated.

  “That’s right. Let us in, please.”

  She stepped away from the door, letting them pass, but her face was blank, shocked. Frank looked around and led the way to the office, where he assumed the files were kept. There was a bank of file cabinets along one wall of the cramped space. Frank was surprised to see Anya standing in front of an open drawer. When she heard them approaching, she turned around, closing the drawer behind her.

  “Frank!” she said with surprise.

  The employee who had let them in the door stood behind them.

  “Anya? What are you doing in here?”

  “Burton had asked me to get out a file for him,” Anya said calmly, displaying a file.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” the woman said.

  “Could you leave us alone here?” the Captain said to the two of them. “Once you show us where the specific files we need are?”

  The woman looked measuringly at Anya and then approached the file drawers herself. She pulled open one and started thumbing through them. She frowned, backed up her search, thumbed through some more files, and went back and forth several times. She paused, scowling to herself, and looked again in puzzlement as if the file she was looking for might just have magically shown up.

  “Something wrong?” Frank asked.

  “I can’t seem to find…” she trailed off.

  Frank and Anya’s eyes met. She turned back around and without a word, started searching through the drawers for another file. It obviously wasn’t there. She turned and looked at Frank, panic in her eyes.

  “Look for another one,” Frank suggested to both women.

  They looked at him, at each other, and turned back to the filing system and each started to look for another file. Both came up empty. Frank looked at Errol.

  “Where are the files?” Frank demanded.

  “Well, they should be right here.”

  “They’re missing,” Anya told Frank. “All the files I have found so far… they’re missing.”

  “Show me,” Frank said.

  Anya motioned him over and she explained which files she was looking for and where they should be. Errol wandered over to the desk and looked over the papers there. Eventually, everyone turned back to him, looking for leadership. Errol shook his head grimly.

  “Who has access to these files?”

  “Anyone who works here. Anyone could just wander in,” the woman said, looking at Anya sideways.

  “Assemble the employees in another room. I want to talk to them. We’ll seal this room.”

  The woman nodded and went to gather the other employees together. Frank looked sideways at Anya.

  “Do you have any idea…?”

  “Burton,” Anya said, shaking her head. “Burton is the one who was responsible for the records and for sending those dogs out.”

  Frank nodded. “Is he here?”

  “I haven’t seen him yet today.”

  Mary mused over the incident in the park as she did laundry and the kids ate lunch. She didn’t like the turn of events. She was going to have to keep a close eye on Shep over the next little while. Make sure he didn’t get the chance to repeat the savaging of the birds. It was instinct. She understood that. He was an animal, and he didn’t understand she didn’t want him to kill the birds. But she knew it must be possible to train the behavior out of him. After all, shepherds wouldn’t allow an undisciplined dog to kill their sheep. Hunters wouldn’t accept a dog who killed their targets. How many times had she heard a retriever described as bringing back the hunters’ dead birds without ever breaking the fowl’s skin? A working dog would never be allowed to kill.

  She’d have to give the shelter a call and see who they knew that would help her to train the dog better.

  When she put all the littles down for quiet time, Mary decided to log onto the internet and see what information she could find there about training dogs to herd small animals without harming them.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “IF THAT DOG IS biting, you cannot keep it,” Margot insisted to her son.

  Scott shook his head. “He’s my dog,” he growled with a sullen, stubborn look that only a teenager could have managed. He swept too-long, black bangs away from his eyes. “Thomas hasn’t hurt anyone. People just need to leave him alone.”

  “He’s not safe, Scott. He could turn on you! You don’t know.”

  “I do know. It’s just because other people bug him or get too close to him. He’s never snapped at me.”

  “He’s being way too aggressive. I can’t get close to him without him growling and snarling at me. He’s nipped or snapped at a couple of people now. We’re really lucky he hasn’t injured anyone. We’d be in serious trouble and he would have to be put down.”

  “I don’t want to give him away,” Scott protested. “Why should I have to when he hasn’t hurt anyone? He’s my dog.”

  “But you’re living in my house and you’re a minor, so I’m responsible for whatever that dog does. And I don’t want to be responsible for him injuring someone. You hear about dog attacks in the news all the time. Just think about the story of that baby. It was killed by a dog the owners thought was safe. They weren’t watching for the warning signs. But you have to. When you see a dog is being nasty like this, you have to do something about it.”

  “So why don’t I take him for, like, training? Why do I have to get rid of it?”

  “I don’t trust him, Scott. It doesn’t matter how much training he has; I just don’t trust him.”

  “You didn’t want me to get a Rottweiler in the first place. This is just your prejudice against the breed.”

  “No, it’s not. I know Rottweilers can be nice dogs. I’m sure pit bulls can be too. But they can also be unpredictable, especially around children, and they are big enough and strong enough to do real damage. If he was a Chihuahua, I wouldn’t be nearly as worried about it, because even if it attacks, you’re strong enough to defend yourself against it. But a big dog like Thomas? You just can’t, Scott. If he went for your throat, it would be too late to do anything for you.”

  Scott rolled his eyes, shaking his head and crossing his arms over his chest. “So I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m the one who would be held legally responsible, so I am the one who has to make the choice. And I say he goes.”

  “So that’s it. You know if you take him back to the pound and tell them he’s too aggressive, they’ll put him down.”

  “You’re probably right,” Margot allowed.

  “So can I at least find another home for him myself? Someone who will look after him and not put him down?”

  Margot frowned. She thought about it, trying to ignore Scott’s belligerent expression. He fully expected her to tell him no. And he was ready to fight over it.


  “On two conditions. It has to be someone who has experience with training big dogs, and you have to tell them he has been aggressive.”

  Scott opened his mouth to argue; then thinking further on it, he shrugged. “Fine,” he agreed. “But I’m keeping him until I find someone.”

  “No. You can keep him for no more than a week. You will need to find someone in that time or he goes to the pound.”

  “That’s not fair!” Scott shouted. “That’s not enough time to find someone. Not when you’re putting all these conditions on me. Could you find him a new home in a week? That’s crazy!”

  He was probably right. Even giving away a cat for free took more than a week. But she was terrified that Thomas was going to attack her or Scott, or someone else and she wanted him out of her house.

  “Okay, two weeks,” she agreed. “But he has to be kenneled or on a leash at all times. You can’t have him out and just playing around. He has to be under control all the time. And if he growls or snaps at you, he’s not allowed out of the kennel until we find a new owner.”

  “That’s not fair! A dog needs exercise—”

  “It won’t kill him to be in a kennel for a couple of weeks. He has room to walk around in there. But I don’t want him out. You can’t let him run loose, or take him to the park to play Frisbee. He has to be controlled.”

  “Fine. Now I know you just want to kill him. You don’t care about him at all. Or about me and how it would make me feel!”

  “I do care about you. And I care about all living creatures. I’d be much happier to have him go to a trainer who can rehabilitate him. But I don’t want to take the chance he is going to hurt anyone. I’d rather he was put down than he hurt you.”

  “It’s not going to happen. He’s not vicious. He just doesn’t like people in his space. Dogs are territorial.”

  “Yes, they are. And the kennel is his territory. I don’t want him out of there unless he is on a leash. And you keep him on a short leash. Don’t take any chances. Just think about how you would feel if you saw him hurt someone. Think about the nightmares you would have. You don’t want that.”

  Burton wasn’t at the shelter. Nor did he get there. The employees all looked baffled and couldn’t fathom where the files could have disappeared to. Frank did a quick canvass of the building, looking for any files that were obviously out of place, checking garbages and anywhere else they might have been stashed. He came up empty. Calls to Burton’s home were not bringing any results.

  “He’s run,” Errol speculated. “He heard what was going down and he took off. He’s in the wind.”

  Frank shrugged. “Maybe,” he agreed. “Mind if I go over there to check things out?”

  Captain Errol shook his head. “We’ll send some uni’s over. They can check it out just as easily as you could.”

  The news from the uniformed officers was not good. The super had let the officers into the apartment when there was no answer, and they had discovered Burton’s body along with a brief note scrawled on the back of a utility bill.

  He told me the dogs were harmless.

  “Suicide?” Frank asked in disbelief. “This is not good news.”

  “No,” Errol agreed. “There were ashes from a fire in the fireplace. Doesn’t take a forensics expert to tell it was papers rather than wood. Nothing salvageable.”

  Frank nodded, swallowing. “But the employees… They’ll remember where the dogs were sent. That’s all we need to know.”

  Errol shrugged his shoulders.

  “There are a lot of places the dogs could have gone, and there are a lot of dogs being trafficked back and forth. It’s going to be hard to pin down which dogs were the Johnson dogs without the identification numbers and finding exactly which shelter each of the dogs went to.”

  And he was right. The employees, when asked, remembered only the most general information. The Rottweiler had gone to Florida, for instance. Where in Florida? There were a hundred shelters he could have gone to. Replicate the problem for each of the dogs… with the records gone, it was going to be hard even to prove the dogs they had tracked down so far were the Johnson dogs.

  Joel was a good worker, and Casey was delighted with the sense of freedom he brought to her. And of course, everyone loved him and wanted to stop to talk to him and pat him while he was working. Casey took it good-naturedly, putting up with the interruptions and questions and trying to use the opportunity to educate people about blindness and guide dogs. Joel was good about strangers but did sometimes get distracted from his job, or get startled when someone approached him. A couple of times Casey jumped when Joel barked or yipped because a child or passerby had reached out to pat him unexpectedly. She would soothe Joel, and he’d get back on track again.

  What struck her as odd was how active he was at night. She supposed being descended from wolves, dogs must have some nocturnal genes, but she had never heard from her friends that their dogs were so active at night. He worked so hard all day; she would have thought he would be too tired to be up at night. But Casey often awoke to strange noises or sudden crashes as Joel roamed the apartment and got into things.

  When she talked to Marilyn about it, Marilyn’s voice was puzzled.

  “No, he shouldn’t be doing that. You should kennel him at night so he’ll be quiet and won’t get into things, and so he has enough energy to work during the day. I’ve never heard of a guide dog behaving that way before.”

  “Huh.” Casey shrugged. “I guess he’s just a night owl. I’ll try kenneling him and see if he’ll stay quiet then.”

  But that didn’t go over well. He howled when he was caged and wanted to be out. She tried putting a blanket over the kennel, but it didn’t help. He just chewed it to bits and still howled and pranced around the cage like he was looking for a way out. The neighbors were complaining, and the landlord said that even though Joel was a guide dog, if he didn’t shut up, the man would have to evict Casey.

  So she eventually gave up and went back to letting him roam at night.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “SO YOU’RE SCOTT?” THE man asked.

  Scott nodded and put his hand out to shake like a grown up. The man hesitated for a minute and then put out his hand and shook Scott’s firmly. He was a small, slight man, with a shaved head and tattoos. He had a five o’clock shadow, and it was still morning. He looked tough and angry.

  “I’m Miles,” he said.

  “Great. So, you’re interested in my dog?”

  Miles shrugged. “Why don’t you tell me about him? He’s a Rottweiler?”

  “Yeah. What do you want to know?”

  “How long have you had him?”

  Scott looked down. “Just for a few weeks. Not long. I got him from the pound. But my mom doesn’t like rotties.”

  “Why’d she let you get him, then?”

  “I don’t know. I guess she didn’t think about it. But she doesn’t like having him around.”

  “What’s he like? What’s his personality?”

  “He’s… a bit aggressive. I think he just needs some training.”

  The man looked Scott over thoughtfully. “What do you not want to tell me?”

  Scott stared down at the asphalt. He kicked at a rock. “You probably don’t want Thomas,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “He growls a lot. He’s snapped at or nipped a couple of people. Mom says he’s too aggressive to keep. But I can’t take him back to the pound; they would just destroy him.”

  “You’re right. Pound doesn’t like aggressive dogs. And they don’t have time to train them. They have too many animals to worry about one dog that doesn’t quite have the personality they want.”

  Scott nodded miserably. “But I want to find him another home. So he doesn’t have to be put down.”

  “Your mom is right too. You don’t want a dog like that in your family.”

  Scott felt his eyes burning. His dog might be aggressive, but Scott loved him anyway, and the thought
of having to put him down made him feel sick.

  “But an aggressive dog can be okay in other places,” Miles said. “If you want a guard dog, you want a dog that’s territorial and shows his teeth if a stranger gets too close. You don’t want him in a family, but in a place like that…”

  Scott searched Miles’ face. “Is that why you want him? Are you looking for a guard dog? Because he’d be a really good guard dog.”

  “Yeah? So can I meet him?”

  Scott nodded. “Yeah, sure,” he agreed. “Come on; I’ll take you to the house.”

  Miles walked with him back to the house and Scott took him into the backyard to the kennel. Thomas ran up to the chain link of the kennel alertly. When he saw Miles, he started to growl. He lowered his ears and bared his teeth in an ugly snarl, moving right up against the fence. Miles stepped toward him, and Thomas started to bark loudly, jumping up against the fence and snarling, trying to reach him. Miles ran his hand down the links of the fence to tease him, and Thomas went wild. He barked hysterically, frothing at the mouth.

  “Stop it,” Scott begged. “Just leave him alone. If my mom hears him barking like that…”

  Miles laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “This isn’t the kind of dog you want in a family. But I can use him. Whether I train him for somebody else or keep him myself, he’s got the kind of temperament I need for a guard dog. Would you go into a yard with a dog like that in it? A dog that wasn’t yours?”

  Scott shook his head, looking at the dog with new eyes. He’d never seen Thomas as angry and excited. He had always been careful not to upset the dog. But Thomas looked like a dog from hell. There was a wild, crazy gleam in his eye. Scott would never take him out of the kennel looking like that. For the first time, he could see what his mother was talking about when she said he was dangerous. He was scary. Scott swallowed.