Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog by D. Roland Hess

Author:D. Roland Hess [Hess, D. Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hydrogen Publishing, LLC
Published: 2016-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

“What’s going on?” said Gwen. “Did she-”

“Yeah,” I said. “Both.” I was starting to think that at least the dog hadn’t peed, when it peed. “All three.”

“Great.”

Gwen started slowing down and pulling the car onto the shoulder of the highway.

“Um, can we afford to do this?” I said. “We need to be making time.”

“Just a second,” she said. She stopped the car, got out and walked around to the rear. The hatchback opened, she rummaged, and a moment later came around to the rear passenger door. She opened it.

“Come on!” she said, coaxing the terrified, car sick dog toward the door.

“Hey! You’re not going to throw her out here!” I said.

“Of course not,” said Gwen. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

I got out of the car too and saw that she had a large towel in her hands.

“Come here girl.”

The dog picked its way gingerly across the floor of the back of the car. When it was close enough, Gwen grabbed its collar. It only tried to get away for a moment. Gwen produced a wet wipe from somewhere and began cleaning the barf off the dog’s tiny chest. It struggled to break free the whole time. When she was done, she wrapped it in the towel, which seemed to calm it, and handed it to me.

“There,” she said. “Now we have a baby together, so don’t die. The kids would be devastated.”

I looked at the animal. It didn’t look terrified anymore so much as sad.

Gwen reached into the car and pulled out the thick rubber all-weather floor mat. She got a couple more wet wipes and a bottle of water from the hatch and quickly cleaned it.

“What?” she said. “I’m prepared.”

“I’ll say.”

I looked at the dog’s collar. It had an Allegheny County license tag as well as a name/phone number (Miss Mixter) and one of those “I’m Microchipped!” tags. If there was a humane society or something like it nearby, we could drop the dog there, and it would easily make its way back home.

I got back in the car, holding the bundled dog close to me, and fired up my phone. It turned out there was an animal shelter about twenty minutes up the road. I showed Gwen, who was putting her car back together.

It only sort of smelled like poop now.

And lemon wet wipes.

“Shouldn’t we hang onto her, for when Babd comes back?” she said.

“You want this dog in your car for the next hour?”

“Not really.”

“And Babd won’t have any problems finding us. At least, she doesn’t ever seem to.”

“I guess not,” said Gwen. “Okay. Shelter time.”

I called ahead, which was a good thing because they were about to close. The woman on the phone was super nice, especially when I told her that we’d found the dog by the highway (Not true!) and had seen it almost get hit twice (Not true! said the voice of Honest Abraham Lincoln in my head). But it had its tags, so she confirmed that they would contact the owners.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.