The Call of the Woof Read online

  At least I’m saving some bucks by staying here for a day or two.

  I went out into the spacious living room and crossed it to the hallway leading to my home away from home, the guest suite the Blacks had originally set up for their daughter, to give her some additional privacy in her teens. She was away at college now.

  I’d known it was there—the hallway had been pointed out when I’d been here last year for training sessions—but I’d never been in it. I threw open the door and stopped cold.

  It was palatial. A big sunken living room stretched out in front of me, with an oversized sliding glass door that looked out on the property’s large lanai and a backyard full of lush foliage. Across from me was a closed door, the bedroom I assumed.

  I glanced down at the dogs who’d followed me. “Pretty impressive, isn’t it?”

  Felix seemed blasé, which made sense since he lived with this bounty regularly. Buddy looked up at me and gave a small wag of his tail.

  “Aw, all you two care about is where the treats are stashed.”

  The word treats got Felix’s attention. He turned his jowly face in my direction and woofed softly.

  Felix was a man of few words.

  Once we were settled into our new abode, I called Will. When I’d filled him in on my change of plans and the reason behind it, he was silent for a few seconds.

  “Maybe it’s not such a great idea to get too involved with this guy,” he finally said, “if robbing pawn shops is what he does for a living.”

  I looked around me as I lounged on the leather sofa in my own separate living room. “He’s making a pretty fine living at it, if his house is any indicator. Hey,” I sat up, “why did you say he robbed a pawn shop?”

  “I was looking up the report as you were talking.”

  Of course you were, I thought but didn’t say out loud. Will was sometimes an officer of the law first and human being second. But then again, to be fair, it was the middle of a weekday morning and I’d called him at his office, at the Collins County Sheriff’s Department. I couldn’t really blame him for being in sheriff mode.

  I scanned the well-appointed room again. “Will, you should see his house. There’s no way he’s a petty thief.”

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “He owns a construction company,” I said. “Plus I think he gets military disability now.”

  “Which doesn’t pay extremely well.”

  “His company’s one of the biggest builders in the state, although I don’t think he’s been actively involved in running it since he got back from Afghanistan. Does he have a police record?” I knew darn well Will already had that info in front of him.

  “He was active duty in his youth. Who knows what went down on military bases or overseas. But his civilian records show two DUIs in his late twenties and a couple of drunk and disorderlies. Since then, only a few speeding tickets. On country roads, on his motorcycle.”

  “Yeah, he said one time that bikers love to take the curves as fast as they dare.”

  Will grunted softly. “My guess is he’s a bad boy who figured out by his thirties how to stay on the right side of the law.”

  The words until now hung unsaid in the air.

  I stroked the soft leather of the sofa. He’s a bad boy who made good. Again, I kept that thought to myself.

  “That happens a lot,” Will continued. “Borderline criminal types who grow up just enough to learn how not to get caught.”

  I bristled. “Jake Black served two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s hardly a, quote, ‘borderline criminal type.’”

  A pregnant pause. “Marcia, why do you always assume that because you like someone, they must be law-abiding?”

  “Will,” I said in my best snark voice, “why do you always assume that most people are not law-abiding?”

  The sound in my ear of him blowing out air. I felt an echo of the tingle I get whenever he blows actual air into my ear while whispering little endearments. I decided to cut him some slack.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s natural for people to assume others are law-abiding, until there is obvious evidence to the contrary.” Then the snarky part of me added, “Unless you’re law enforcement.”

  A beat of silence. I could see him in my mind’s eye, shaking his head.

  “Jake may have gotten into some trouble when he was young,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean he isn’t basically a good guy.”

  Another sigh in my ear. “Promise me you’ll stay out of this. Please remember that you’re just the dog-sitter.”

  I rolled my eyes, even though Will couldn’t see me. “Okay, I’m just the dog-sitter.”

  “Gotta go. Love you.”

  After the briefest of hesitations, I said, “Love you too.”

  I still choked a little on the words, which had nothing to do with Will and everything to do with why I was in counseling.

  I disconnected and sank back into the buttery soft sofa.

  What now?

  A huge yawn suggested a nap was in order.

  Midday naps were unheard of in my life. Normally I had two dogs in training at any given time, one close to done and one in the early stages, and I worked at least some part of almost every day.

  But today had started particularly early. And I had nothing better to do, unless I wanted to check out what was on daytime TV.

  A nap sounded much more desirable.

  Will lay next to me on the sofa, trying to seduce me, but some dog kept barking in the distance.

  Will blew in my ear, kissed my cheek, lowered his lips to my neck. I arched my body in his direction, making it easier for him to reach the sweet spot where neck and shoulder connect. A delicious shiver ran through me.

  The dog barked again and Will froze. “Can’t you make him be quiet.”

  I bristled, offended. It wasn’t my fault that some dog was barking.

  Will evaporated and I was enveloped in tan leather.

  I fought my way to full consciousness and noted that leather made you sweaty if you slept on it. Good to know for future reference when I was as rich as the Blacks.

  The dog was still barking.

  I struggled to a sitting position. Buddy sat beside the sofa, worry in his eyes.

  The barking dog had to be Felix and he was going ballistic.

  I stumbled out of the guest suite, Buddy close on my heels, and followed the sound toward the back of the house.

  Felix stood by the double sliding doors of the main living room, his nose pushed through the sheer curtains. He quivered all over, barking in short staccato bursts totally unlike his normal reserved woofs.

  I was a bit shocked. I intentionally trained the natural territorialism out of my dogs, since they have to deal with strangers and even other dogs all the time in public.

  But maybe Felix was feeling the need to defend the fortress in the absence of his master.

  I came up beside him. “It’s okay, boy,” I said in a soft, reassuring voice.

  He let out one more sharp bark, while staring at the freestanding garage. I held my hand up, palm outward, in a signal I teach all my dogs. It means stop what you’re doing and wait for further guidance.

  A short debate with myself. Take the dogs or not?

  Fool, of course you shouldn’t go investigate by yourself.

  I opened the slider wide and gestured to Felix. He took off across the lawn. Buddy and I followed in his wake.

  At first, the garage looked undisturbed, until I rounded the corner to the far side.

  The window on that side, which had been intact earlier, now bore a big roundish hole in the middle, surrounded by jagged shards of glass. It was also open by about an inch. Had I missed that earlier?

  I went back to the house and retrieved the key to the garage.

  I unlocked the side door and found the switch for the overhead light. “Sit, boys.”

  Buddy obeyed but Felix was running in circles, sniffing the cement floor.

  This dog
needed some refresher training. I stepped over to him. “Felix!” I held my hand out, palm down—the signal that he was on duty and needed to pay attention.

  He gave me a mournful look, then touched his nose to my palm.

  “Good boy.” Then I pointed to Buddy over near the door. “Sit.”

  Felix trotted over and sat down.

  I made a circuit of the inside of the garage. There was no sign of an object—baseball, rock or whatever—that could have caused the hole in the window.

  Everything seemed the same as it was before, but my gut was not happy. I made two more circuits of the space, looking for anything out of order. I wondered if my gut was just feeling at odds after being jerked awake from a nap.

  I went outside, searching for a branch or something that might have blown against the window and broken it. Again, nothing.

  With a shrug, I locked the side door of the garage. I headed back to the house, but noises from the street out front had me veering off toward the driveway.

  I came to a halt. Crapola!

  Felix started barking furiously. I lunged for his collar.

  A plain beige sedan and two green and white sheriff’s department cars were now parked in front of the property, one of the cruisers positioned across the end of the driveway. A phalanx of deputies and a couple of guys in plain clothes were marching toward us.

  A man’s voice yelled from beyond the cars, “Hey, what’s going on here? You’re blocking our driveway.”

  Relief washed through me as Felix tugged against my hand. I let him go. I too had recognized Jake Black’s voice, coming from the passenger window of the white pickup that had just pulled up beside the police cars.

  Chapter Three

  Jake had a hand on Felix’s head, listing subtly in the dog’s direction. Jake was a big guy, but Felix was a big dog. His face and body were all Bulldog but his legs were longer, probably from some distant Labrador, or maybe a Weimaraner, in his family tree. He came up to Jake’s knee and had been trained to brace himself to take some of his master’s weight.

  Most likely only Janey and I knew that Jake was using the dog to maintain his balance, which would have been a lot easier if the dog was wearing his specialized service vest with its stabilizer bar for Jake to grab.

  I considered going inside to find the vest, but Jake’s body language had me worried.

  His broad face was as red as I’d ever seen it. I was afraid he was about to have one of the “meltdowns” he’d told me about but I’d never witnessed. Anger control problems are common for people with traumatic brain injury.

  The worry in Janey’s pale blue eyes said she had the same concern. Shoving shoulder-length blonde hair, frizzy from the humidity, behind her ears, she placed a restraining hand on her husband’s arm.

  Jake shrugged her off. Not a good sign.

  He snarled in the face of a dark-haired detective in an ill-fitting business suit. “I don’t care how many pieces of paper you got from some judge. How dare you come in here like a bunch of storm troopers…” He spluttered to a stop as Janey once again tugged on the arm that wasn’t using Felix for support.

  He whirled on her—an even worse sign—and teetered dangerously on one foot.

  Felix quickly shifted position and braced himself by spreading his legs. Once Jake seemed more stable on his feet, Felix leaned gently against his leg.

  The maneuver, a type of deep pressure therapy, was meant to reduce anxiety, but it did little for Jake’s anger.

  The firm look in Janey’s eyes did have an effect though. Jake froze, then took a deep breath.

  “Come on inside,” she said softly. “Let Detective Wright and his men do their jobs.”

  He patted her hand, just as the detective gestured to two deputies that they should head for the garage.

  Jake pulled loose from his wife and followed as fast as he could, Felix keeping pace beside him. Detective Wright took off after him.

  I followed in their wake, trying to decide whether I should report on the broken window in front of the officers or wait.

  At the double-wide garage door, the detective gestured toward the big padlock and hasp on one side. “Unlock it.”

  Obviously reluctant, Jake produced a ring of keys and removed the padlock, then unlocked a lock in the middle of the roll-up door. A thunking sound as the metal bars inside released.

  One of the deputies grabbed the bottom of the door and shoved it up, exposing the Blacks’ three motorcycles and the spotlessly clean workshop area.

  A deputy began snapping pictures. “Bring in the trailer,” Detective Wright said to another one.

  Janey had caught up with us, huffing a little from the extra weight middle age had bestowed upon her. Her peaches-and-cream complexion paled to ghost white at the detective’s words.

  “Wha’?” Jake said, a bit slower to catch on to what was about to happen.

  “We’re impounding the bikes.” Detective Wright waved impatiently at one of the deputies in the driveway.

  Jake’s fists clenched. I could hear his teeth grinding from three feet away.

  Both Janey and I jumped forward and grabbed his arms. Slugging a cop would not improve the situation.

  Meanwhile, the detective was walking away, acting as if he hadn’t been about to get flattened by a six-two, two-hundred-forty-pound combat vet. He crouched down beside one of the bikes, the black one. Then he gestured to the deputy with the camera and pointed to the side of the bike.

  Jake moved forward, dragging us with him.

  My eyes followed the detective’s pointing finger to the rounded side of the gas tank, and a ragged long scratch in the black paint.

  Jake’s mouth fell open. “No!” he yelled.

  I gestured toward the broken window. “Maybe whatever broke the window hit it.”

  Everybody’s gaze turned to me, then to the window.

  “When did that happen?” Janey said, a touch of wonder in her voice that some rock would dare to penetrate her husband’s sanctum.

  “Just before you all got here,” I said. “I checked the outside of the garage earlier and that window was fine. Then Felix started barking and I came out and checked again and…”

  The detective was glaring at me. “And you are?”

  I gulped a little. “Marcia Banks, dog- and house-sitter.” I told him what little more I knew, including about the guy getting into a white pickup, who might or might not have been hanging around the garage when I arrived.

  He was a stony-faced audience but he did let me finish. And he did check the scratches around the lock on the side door, even had the deputy take pictures of them.

  All this gave Jake time to calm down. That is until they began to load two of the motorcycles into the large trailer they’d backed into the driveway.

  Again Janey and I grabbed his arms. “Let them take them,” she hissed in his ear. “We’ve got no choice.”

  He let us hold him back while they loaded Janey’s red three-wheeled bike—she said it was called a trike. I realized that indeed we were only holding him with his permission when he suddenly shook us loose like we were an old shirt he was shedding. “Wait!” He stepped forward.

  Felix was beside him in a flash.

  I indulged in a moment of maternal pride. That’s my boy, doing his job!

  Jake was pointing to the black leather bag on the side of his black bike, which was halfway up the ramp. “That’s not my saddlebag.”

  The detective held up a hand and the two deputies who’d been rolling the bike up the ramp between them stopped.

  Jake walked around the ramp to the other side, Felix practically glued to his jeans leg. “This one too. They’re not my bags.”

  The detective stepped forward and made a show of examining the bag on our side. Then he snapped on blue latex gloves, like those the deputies handling the bike were wearing. He leaned forward, tentatively touched the end of what looked like scrape marks in the leather.

  He held his finger up close to his fac
e, rubbed it and his thumb together. A few grains of sand caught the sunlight as they drifted to the pavement.

  He gestured to a third deputy. “Put a bag around all that.” He pointed to the saddlebag. “We need to analyze the sand.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I could see some tawny grains embedded in the leather.

  “That’s not my bag,” Jake said emphatically. “Janey get the photo from the living room.”

  I knew which one he meant. I’d noticed three photos earlier, front and center on the mantel. Their wedding picture had caught my eye first, with Janey standing tall and proud, forty pounds lighter and drop-dead gorgeous. On the right of it was their daughter, Andrea, smiling and holding a high-school diploma, and on the left, Jake, fifteen years younger and grinning like a kid on Christmas as he stood next to a shiny black bike.

  This bike in front of us.

  Janey took off at a trot for the house. She was well padded, but she could move pretty fast when motivated.

  Buddy and I should have followed. This really wasn’t my business. But I didn’t move.

  Curiosity killed the cat. My mother’s voice in my head.

  She had a point. My curiosity…okay, my nosiness, had gotten me into trouble more than once. I figured that if I were that proverbial cat, I had about four of my nine lives left.

  Janey returned with the photo.

  Jake grabbed it and stuck it under the detective’s nose, then threatened to take out said nose by jabbing at the picture with a large index finger. “There! Those are my bags.”

  I craned to see but couldn’t make out more than a blur of black and tan, and the younger Jake’s big grin. My throat closed. Life hadn’t treated him all that well since then.

  The detective looked at the picture and then at Jake. “Side bags can be changed.”

  Then he broke Jake’s heart and endangered his own life by confiscating the photo.

  Chapter Four

  Jake let Janey and me haul him back away from the detective. He was grinding his teeth, but his chest was heaving, as if he were fighting back sobs.