Spring Tide (5 page)

It had become a more and more common refrain of his in the last year that he “should look her up.” He had wanted to thank her and let her know she did some good. “Wouldn’t she be surprised,” he had said, “that I became a cop? A worthless little shit like me.”

Deuce came up and let his head rest heavily on her thigh. She put a hand on him and turned from the photo, but the image remained in her mind.

Next time, Hot Stuff!
Those two young police officers with their brash grins had had no idea there would be no next time for Joe Molina.

Stef leaned over and pressed herself against the dog’s body, closing her eyes and whispering close to his ear. “You miss him too, don’t you, boy?”

“A woman walks into a vet’s office,” Niko started, appearing in the doorway of Jackie’s office.

She put down her pen and swiveled her desk chair to face him where he stood with his face full of anticipation, feet firmly planted, knees flexed, both hands out in front of him like a basketball player waiting for a pass. A skinny basketball player. A stunted, skinny basketball player wearing a long-sleeved plaid shirt unbuttoned over a plain white T-shirt. Okay, Jackie thought, he looks nothing like a basketball player. He looks like a goofy kid about to tell a joke he expects will make her fall out of her chair.

Once he had her full attention, he began again. “A woman walks into a vet’s office. She sits down next to a man with a dog at his feet. ‘Does your dog bite?’ she asks. ‘No,’ he says. A few minutes later the dog bites her leg. ‘I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite!’ the woman complains. ‘He doesn’t,’ the man says. ‘That’s not my dog.’”

Niko, her receptionist and assistant, fancied himself the
Henny Youngman of the veterinary world, though Jackie doubted
he knew who Henny Youngman was. Jackie herself only knew because he was one of Granny’s all-time favorite entertainers. Niko took every old joke he could find and transformed it into a veterinary setting, even going so far as to mangle Youngman’s signature line into, “Take my dog…please!”  It was a peculiar type of humor from a twenty-year-old male, but he kept her customers entertained. The old women especially liked it. Every once in a while, even Jackie had to admit, he came up with a hit. This time, the joke was so well-worn that she mouthed the punch line along with him.

His face fell. “You know it.”

She stood and put a hand on his shoulder. “Everybody knows it. It’s like this one.” She faced him, commanding his attention. “A guy walks into a bar. ‘Ouch!’ he says.”

Niko burst out laughing, slapped his thigh, and stumbled down the hallway. She followed him to the reception area, at the moment empty of customers. Bud the parakeet perched on a wooden dowel in his cage, singing quietly to himself.

“Have you looked in on Max lately?” she asked.

Niko fell into his chair at the reception desk. “He’s starting to wake up. I checked on him a minute ago.” He opened a Styrofoam box and picked up a huge, luscious looking hamburger and took a bite so big his face filled out when he closed his mouth around it. A trail of juice ran down his chin.

“Where’d you get that?” she demanded. “Did you go out? Did you get me one?”

He shook his head, unable to speak, and rapidly chewed until he could say, “I didn’t go out.” He swallowed, then wiped his chin with a napkin. “Mrs. Peterson brought this in a half hour ago.”

While Jackie stared at him, uncomprehending, he took another bite even more juicy than the last, so much so he had to hold the burger over its box so it wouldn’t drip all over the
counter.

“You mean to tell me Mrs. Peterson, our old Mrs. Peterson with the walker, brought you lunch? Why would she do that? I’m the one who operated on Max. What gives?”

“She didn’t bring it for me. She brought it for Max. She felt sorry for him, having the operation.”

“But Max can’t eat something like that today. He may not be able to eat anything at all until tomorrow.”

“I know that, but what was I gonna do? She said, ‘This is Max’s favorite meal, a double cheeseburger with the works. You give it to him when he wakes up.’  And I said, ‘Okay, Mrs. Peterson, I’ll do that. Don’t you worry. He’ll love it.’”

Jackie stood speechless, watching him eat. He shrugged.

“You could have at least cut it in half and shared it. When you’re done with that, give Spooky her bath. Mike’s coming in to get her this afternoon.”

Niko winced. “She’ll skin me alive.”

Jackie shrugged in imitation of Niko’s recent gesture, then went back toward her office just as the phone rang.

“You should take this,” Niko called from the front. “Mrs. Chen.”

Jackie slid into her desk chair and took the call. “Hello, Mrs. Chen, how are you?”

Mrs. Chen was frantic. Her dog, Mr. Wiggles, was listless and vomiting. She was afraid he was dying.

Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Chen arrived, her wide face constricted into a field of worry, and Jackie took her and her dog into an examining room.

Mr. Wiggles, an adorable white bulldog with one black ear, had an elevated temperature and appeared weak and wobbly. That he wasn’t his usual perky self was evident.

“It was that horrible Anthony Agnolotti that did this,” Mrs. Chen said. “He’s poisoned Mr. Wiggles, I know it.”

Anthony Agnolotti was Mrs. Chen’s neighbor and the owner of three exquisite Abyssinian cats: Huey, Dewey and Louie. Although Agnolotti wasn’t a dog guy, Jackie couldn’t imagine him doing anything so evil as poisoning someone’s pet. “Why do you think that?” she asked.

“Because Mr. Wiggles digs under the fence. He’s warned me before to keep him out of his yard because of the cats. I try, but it’s not easy. Besides, Mr. Wiggles wouldn’t hurt those cats. And they’re not afraid of him. They parade along the top of the fence, taunting him.” Mrs. Chen frowned. “They’re temptresses, those cats.”

Jackie decided to sidestep the issue of Anthony Agnolotti’s cats. “When did the symptoms begin?”

“Sometime last night. This morning I saw he’d thrown up. Then he threw up again about eight o’clock. After that, he just curled up in his bed and didn’t move.”

“Any chance he could have eaten something unusual? Some medicine left lying about? Do you have any new houseplants?”

Mrs. Chen shook her head thoughtfully.

“What have you been feeding him?”

“Just dog food.” She looked strangely defiant, her eyebrows arched and her chin tilted up, as if someone had accused her of an impropriety.

Jackie was used to this routine. “Good. That’s the best thing, but a little treat now and then won’t hurt, as long as he doesn’t get anything dangerous, like chocolate.”

“Oh, no! I would never give him chocolate. That can kill a dog, I know.”

Jackie nodded, laying a hand on the sad-looking Mr. Wiggles. “He’s such a sweet little guy. What’s his favorite food?”

Mrs. Chen brightened. “He loves tacos! Whenever we have them, we give him one of his own, but no hot sauce. He gobbles them up like...” She stopped suddenly, looking contrite as she realized she’d given herself away.

“Did you have tacos last night?” Jackie asked.

“No.” She was past holding back now. “But I did give him a cookie. They were so good. Mr. Wiggles loved it, didn’t you, Mr. Wiggles?” She took his face between her hands and kissed his nose.

“What kind of cookies?” Jackie asked.

“No chocolate. Just regular sugar cookies with macadamia nuts.”

Jackie drew in a sharp breath. “Macadamia nuts are toxic to dogs.”

“They are?” Mrs. Chen’s eyes widened.

“Yes. How many nuts would you say he had?”

“I don’t know.” Mrs. Chen looked alarmed. “One cookie’s worth.”

Jackie told Mrs. Chen she’d keep Mr. Wiggles for observation for the rest of the day, to make sure he didn’t show any signs of nervous system disorders.

“Don’t worry,” Jackie said. “He’ll be fine. It just has to work itself out of his system.”

Mrs. Chen went away in tears, understandably distraught that she, not her neighbor, had been the agent of harm to her dog.

“Let’s find you a quiet spot to rest,” Jackie said to Mr. Wiggles,
tucking his compact body under her arm. “It’s that cute little mug of yours, isn’t it? Who could resist giving you a treat?”

By three o’clock, Mr. Wiggles was much livelier, running around the back room playing with a ball. His temperature had returned to normal. Jackie gave him a little food, which he kept down.

“I’m going to take Mr. Wiggles home,” she told Niko around four. “We can lock up a little early today.”

“Do you have plans?” he asked.

“Nothing special. Maybe I’ll take the kayak out. You can leave whenever you’re done.”

“Thanks. But before you go, there’s something super important I have to tell you.”

About to leave the room, Jackie stopped and faced Niko. “Oh? What?”

“A dog wearing a cowboy hat, spurs and chaps limps into a vet’s office with his leg wrapped in bandages. He sidles up to the counter and says, ‘I’m lookin’ for the man that shot my paw.’”

Remembering the woman and golden retriever from a few days earlier, Jackie headed to Duggan Creek after taking Mr. Wiggles home, this time by herself, paddling down the center of the waterway under a late afternoon sun. She didn’t expect to see the woman again, but had been thinking about her, wondering who she was.

As she approached the spot she’d first seen the dog, she could hear a steady banging, like someone hammering on wood. She stopped paddling and listened. The noise was coming from some distance back from the creek. She paddled over to the edge and stepped out of the kayak into shallow water. She pulled her boat up on shore, then scrambled up the bank and emerged in what was clearly a cow pasture, evidenced by a heavy pattern of hoofprints in dried mud. There were no cows in sight, just a field of straw-colored grass with a barbed wire fence marking a boundary to the north. Beyond that, a couple of horses grazed in the neighboring field.

She walked to the top of the rise toward the hammering noise. As the view opened up and the noise got louder, she saw something she would never have anticipated: a houseboat. She stopped walking and stared. Definitely a houseboat. It was a rectangular white box with pale blue trim, a flat, railed-in viewing deck up top and two torpedo-shaped pontoons underneath. It had a flat deck that extended a couple feet on either side of the main cabin and several feet fore and aft, altogether about forty feet long. The fore deck was covered with a permanent metal awning and had two folding chairs on it. The boat looked old, beat up, in need of a good paint job and probably a lot more. It sat atop heavy wooden blocks, the pontoons clearing the ground by several inches. There was no one in sight.

The hammering stopped.

Overcoming her surprise, Jackie started moving again, walking toward the vessel as the buzz of a power tool ensued. As she neared the boat, she noticed there was a road nearby, a small country lane, and an unpaved driveway leading right up to the boat like any driveway to any house. Parked in the driveway was a silver and black motorcycle.

As she cleared the bow, the power tool went silent, but she could now see the source of the noise. A woman stood next to a pair of sawhorses, positioning a sheet of wood paneling across them. It was the same woman, Jackie realized, that she and Gail had seen the other day: Miss Tall, Dark and Delicious. She wore olive green shorts and a black tank top. Her smooth, muscular arms were bare, biceps flexing as she put the panel into position. Her wavy brown hair fell across the side of her face, obscuring her eyes from view. A circular saw lay on the ground beside her feet, an orange extension cord connecting it to some unseen power source behind the boat.

Jackie was about to say hello when the golden retriever burst out from behind the woman, barking. The dog rushed at her, but stopped six feet away, standing between Jackie and his owner. Startled, Jackie stumbled backward just as something whizzed past her head. She reeled, tripped over her own feet and fell to the ground, butt first.

The dog barked again, but didn’t appear menacing. In fact, a couple of whimpers interspersed between barks told Jackie he wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Deuce!” the woman called sharply. “Sit!”