Page 2 of Protected By Razor

I nod. I kneel down and hold out the back of my hand for Bruno to sniff. Bruno sniffs and he licks my knuckles once and then lowers his head against my palm like he’s been waiting his whole life for someone to touch him gently.

I want to cry. I don’t.

“Can I have a look at him?” I ask.

“I just need antibiotics,” Mike says. “That’s all.”

“Right. I’ll need to examine him first, though. Standard.” I keep my voice easy. I keep my hands on the dog.

Dr. Patel is with another client. I am technically qualified to do the examination. I’m also technically qualified to know what I’m looking at.

I run my hands over Bruno. He lets me. He trembles when I get near the fresh wound and I murmur reassurances at him and keep going because I need to see it, all of it, and because Mike is watching me and I don’t want to give him anything to react to yet.

The tear along Bruno’s flank is about six inches. It’s now even more obvious how it’s been crudely stitched. What I didn’t see from across the room is that it’s one of four. Three older, healed raised. One fresh. All roughly parallel. All on the same side.

Dogs don’t fight each other and come away with four parallel wounds on the same flank in different stages of healing.

I stand up.

“How long have you had Bruno, Mike?”

“Since he was a puppy. Why?”

“These injuries are consistent with a specific kind of trauma.”

Mike’s expression doesn’t move. “He gets into scrapes.”

“These aren’t scrapes. These are??—”

“You giving me the antibiotics or not?”

I look at him. I look at Bruno. Bruno is leaning against my leg with his eyes half shut, and I have never in my life been this furious and this frightened at the same time.

“I need to flag this with my supervisor,” I say. “Standard procedure when injuries are inconsistent with the history. It’ll take five minutes.”

Mike moves fast.

He doesn’t touch me. He just snaps his fingers at the dog and yanks the lead, and Bruno is up and moving before I can get between them. Mike is halfway to the door when I call after him.

“Mike. Mike, please??—”

“Stay out of my fucking business.”

The door bangs shut.

I stand there for a long second, my heart hammering, my hands shaking.

Then I walk into the back office and I write down everything. The man’s name. The car he got into — I saw the plate through the window, six digits of it anyway. The description of the dog. The pattern of the injuries. I write it all down and I log it into the system and I mark it for Dr. Patel to review, and then I go into the bathroom and lock the door and put my hands flat against the tile and breathe until my chest stops feeling like a fist.

Dr. Patel finds me ten minutes later when I come out. She reads the notes. She looks at me over her glasses, and her face is very still, in that way it gets when she’s angry on someone else’s behalf.

“You did this exactly right,” she says. “I’ll call the county. It’ll probably come to nothing. You know how these things go.”

“I know.”

“If that man comes back here, I don’t want you alone with him. Okay?”

“Okay.”