Alicia took Tony back to Triboro when she went back for a day with the kids. The docs would not let Pardee go until he’d been observed operating normally for forty-eight hours. I drove back over to Southport. I decided to stay at the beach house as long as Pardee was still stuck in the hospital, even though Alicia said she’d be back down in a day or so. That evening, Sergeant McMichaels stopped by the house again. He had a rustic-looking individual with him. I thought he’d come for his bottle of radioactive water, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. He introduced the other man as a local fisherman, who had some news for me.
“Think mebbe I got your dogs,” the man said. “One German shepherd, one black wolf-lookin’ one?”
My heart jumped. “Where?”
“My place,” he said. “On the river. They wandered in yesterday mornin’, I called the sergeant here. He’d had word out, you was lookin’.”
“Are they hurt?”
The man shuffled his feet and looked warily at McMichaels. “You can tell him,” the sergeant said.
“The black one? He’s done lost him a back leg. Looks like somebody shot it off. Got him a hurt eye, too. Bad hurt, I reckon. The other one’s okay, but she won’t eat nothin’ and she keeps makin’ teeth at me.”
That would be Frick, I thought. “Let’s go,” I said. Frack’s lost a leg? The thought of that almost made me wish it wasn’t them. Almost.
The man turned out to be an inshore fisherman. He ran a one-man-band operation and plied his trade in the Cape Fear estuary for the Wilmington restaurant markets. His riverside place was in a small community of riverbank places whose yards were cluttered with boat gear, junked cars, wobbly-looking piers and boats, and weathered mobile homes. He took us out back to a makeshift dog kennel, where I heard a familiar bark.
Hallelujah. It was them. Frick was thin and a bit tattered, but she perked right up the moment she saw me coming across the backyard. I heard a couple of other cars pulling up out front but concentrated on greeting Frick and then examining Frack. I could tell immediately that his right eye was a total loss. His left rear leg was gone from the elbow down. The fisherman had put some kind of horrible goo on it that stank of fish, but I didn’t see any swelling or other signs of infection. He couldn’t stand up, but he was very glad to see me, and his tail worked just fine. I sat down in the pen between them and just talked to them, trying to keep a dry eye and not really succeeding as I watched Frack try to get closer to me. It was such a relief to see them alive, battered as they were.
“Y’all gonna put that one down?” the fisherman asked. McMichaels studied his shoes, as if already knowing the answer to that one.
“Hell, no,” I said. “He’s going to be like me-retired.”
“Well,” Sergeant McMichaels said, “there’s one more thing. Lots of folks in town appreciated what you did. We talked about what happened to the shepherds. So, well, over there.”
I looked through the pen wire to see a dozen or so locals standing by the corner of the fisherman’s trailer. I recognized some faces from the Southport diner.
“Seems that some of the folks in town wanted to do something, pay you back,” McMichaels said, pointing to my dogs with his chin. “Your partners here getting hurt and all. We got together. We have something for you. Some one, actually.”
He signaled to the small crowd by the trailer, and a man came around the corner with a very large sable shepherd on a leash. No one spoke as he walked over to where I was sitting in the pen. Frick got up and stared, but the big dog ignored her and simply sat down and looked at me through the wire. I don’t think I’d ever seen a shepherd with as much gravitas as this one. She turned out to be a female. Calm, amber eyes, erect ears, broad chest, and an aura of complete superiority.
“This here,” the man said, “is Kitty. She’s yours, you want her. Folks here were trying to think of some way of repaying you. I bred her, but she’s yours, if you can use her.”
“Kitty.”
The man smiled. “My wife’s idea of a joke, before we knew how big she was gonna get. Should Carol ever get herself into trouble, she wanted to be able to say, ‘Here, Kitty, Kitty,’ and have a big-ass ol’ German shepherd come around the corner. The bigger she got, the funnier that got. What do you think?”
I got up, patted my two pals on the head, and went out to meet Kitty. I sat down on the ground in front of her, and she examined me gravely. I let her smell my hands and the big bandage on my right forearm. Frick gave a jealous woof. Frack, on the other hand, put his head down between his paws. I think he knew that his replacement was on deck. I realized I’d have to work on that.
Kitty stood up, walked around me once, and went to the pen to touch noses with Frick, who wagged her tail, before coming back to me. She sat down again.
“Shake on it, Kitty,” the man said.
Damned if she didn’t put out a big old paw. The people over by the trailer started to applaud.
And me?
Well.