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He had to check in with his ICE boss, Tony Pellicano, at nine. Then he wanted to spend some time driving around the Columbia Heights neighborhood. There were kids from gangs other than the 18th Street crowd who might be able to tell him something more about the storm that was threatening to break over D.C.
A half hour later, after a shower and a bowl of shredded wheat—the banana he’d planned to slice on top had been rotten—Ben was out the door. He loved living in Georgetown, loved the feel of it, the brick and the trees and the sunshine that made it feel so alive, even though most of the row houses had been built more than a century before.
But Georgetown had opted out of having the Metro come through—bringing in the riffraff—so he needed a car to get around. He’d been drunk when he’d left the Hare & Hound last night, so he’d left his car parked on the street near the pub and walked home with his nameless paramour. Which meant he needed to walk back this morning to pick it up.
He found himself gaining ground on a stray dog striding along the brick sidewalk in front of him. The heavily muscled black-and-tan rottweiler was wearing a spiked collar, from which a piece of heavy chain dangled. The dog sniffed a Japanese cherry tree, lifted his leg, then marched on down the sidewalk as though he owned it.
The dog’s head turned sharply, and Ben followed the beast’s gaze to a bunch of uniformed schoolgirls, laughing and chattering as they made their way down the opposite side of the street.
Ben felt his neck hairs prickle when the rottweiler started across the road toward the girls, disappearing between two parked SUVs.
Ben picked up his pace, afraid the stray might attack the girls, several of whom had begun skipping, seeming to flee the dog. Making themselves prey.
The dog shot out from between the parked cars at exactly the same moment as a Toyota SUV found a break in the morning traffic and barreled past. The driver hit his brakes and laid ten feet of rubber before he slammed into the rottweiler, sending it flying.
The girls screamed.
The dog howled in anguish.
Ben stared in disbelief as the driver glanced back over his shoulder, then laid more rubber as he snaked through traffic to escape the scene.
As Ben approached the rottweiler the injured beast bared its sharp teeth and growled ferociously. The bones in one of the dog’s hind legs were sticking through its flesh. The beast tried to rise, then yelped in pain and fell back to the ground. There was no way to get near the animal without getting mauled.
“I’m calling 911!” one of the schoolgirls cried as she began searching through her backpack.
Another girl pointed to a brick building across the street and said, “There’s an emergency vet right there on the corner.” She focused her teary eyes on Ben and said, “Won’t you please take him there, sir? Please?”
Ben glanced at the vet’s office across the street, thinking the vet would have some idea how to subdue the dog so he could be moved and treated.
Then the decision was taken out of his hands. One of the schoolgirls bent down and reached out a hand to the growling, slavering beast. Jaws snapping, the animal charged at her.
Ben had no choice but to intervene.
4
“Pregnant? How could she be pregnant?” Annagreit Schuster wasn’t often surprised, but the news that her Maine Coon cat, Penelope, was expecting a happy event—was, in fact, in labor—came as a complete shock. Penelope never left the confines of Anna’s small, upstairs apartment in a renovated Georgetown brownstone, except to lie in the sun on the second-floor balcony. How could she have gotten pregnant?
Anna eyed the ten-pound, tabby-and-white-striped cat lying on the emergency vet’s metal examining table. Then she turned her gaze to the twelve-year-old boy standing beside her, his head hung low. “Henry?” she said. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”
“When I first started cat-sitting for you, before I knew better, I left the front door open and Penelope ran out. I found her before you got home, so I didn’t see any reason to tell you.” He looked up at her with guilt-ridden mud-brown eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Anna.”
Anna brushed her hand soothingly across the boy’s tight black curls from crown to nape. Henry’s widowed mother was a surgical nurse, and she was often gone when Henry got home from school. Since Anna lived across the hall, she’d offered him a job cat-sitting, mostly to keep him from ending up home alone. She’d never seen him looking so forlorn.
“It’s all right, Henry. At least Penelope doesn’t have a tumor.” Which was what Anna had thought when she’d seen Penelope acting so strangely this morning and felt the cat’s lumpy belly under the thick hair that grew on her stomach.
“If you take Penelope home and make her comfortable in a box in the closet, or any quiet place in the house, she should be able to deliver on her own,” the vet said.
“Are you sure?” Anna asked anxiously. She knew virtually nothing about birthing babies, human or feline.
“She’s going to be more relaxed in familiar surroundings. If you have any concerns at all, give me a call.”
Penelope raised her head from the examining table, looked plaintively at Anna and called out to her with the chirping trill distinctive to Maine Coon cats, which didn’t meow like other cats.
“Does it hurt?” Henry asked. “For her to have babies, I mean.”
Anna looked to the emergency vet, but before he could answer, the examining room door flew open.
“Doc, I need some help here!”
Anna barely had time to register the blood soaking the white T-shirt of the man who’d burst in, and the enormous size of the injured rottweiler in his muscular arms, before Penelope gave a chirp that was more of a shriek and bounded to her feet. Her pregnant body arched, bushy tail held high. Her pretty cat face scrunched into something resembling an alien beast, mouth wide and wicked teeth bared at this sudden threat.
“Get your damned cat off the table, lady!” the man snapped. “So I can lay this dog down.” The man’s leather coat was wrapped over the animal’s hindquarters. As he leaned forward, the coat slid off the dog onto the examining table like a black snake and then dropped onto the floor.
Penelope hissed menacingly.
The dog growled back through his teeth, which Anna saw with horror were still clamped hard into human flesh. The man’s forearm was streaming blood from numerous canine tooth puncture wounds where the dog had hold of him.
She grabbed for Penelope, who raked her hand with bared claws. Anna cried out in pain and astonishment, “Penelope!” She stared at the four distinct lines of blood Penelope’s claws had torn in her skin. Penelope had scratched her when she was a kitten, but never once in the five years since.
“Come on, lady,” the intruder commanded. “Move the damned cat!”
Anna was more cautious this time, but calling Penelope’s name had made the cat aware of her, and Penelope allowed herself to be lifted into Anna’s arms.
As soon as Penelope was off the metal table, the man bent over it and laid the dog there. Even then, the dog held on. Anna didn’t want to look at the injured animal, but she couldn’t help noticing the naked bone protruding through a bloody tear in one of its hind legs.
She noticed Henry was also staring with wide, horrified eyes at the dog’s blood and bone. “Come on, Henry,” she said gently. “We need to get Penelope home so she can have her babies in peace and quiet.”
She shot an admonishing look at the man, but his attention was focused on the dog, whose teeth were still deeply embedded in his arm.
Anna would have liked to stay and help, but she felt Penelope’s belly ripple and realized she’d better get her cat back to the comfortable traveling cage in her car and drive the few blocks home before kittens started arriving.
“Henry,” she repeated. “Let’s go.”
“I want to see how the vet gets the dog to let go of the guy’s arm,” Henry said, his eyes riveted on the scene in front of him.
So do I, Anna thought. But what she said as she backed her way out of the emergency room door was, “Come on, Henry. We need to get Penelope home. And you need to get to school.”
Reluctantly, the boy turned and hurried after her.
5
Anna couldn’t believe she was back at the emergency room—this time, one for humans. One of the deep scratches on her hand had been seeping all day. She thought it might need a stitch or two. And she needed a tetanus shot.
After she’d left the vet’s office with Penelope, she’d called her office and asked the secretary to reschedule her morning patients. Anna was one of four doctors, two men and two women, practicing together in a high-rise in downtown D.C., where they did psychological counseling.
She hadn’t wanted to leave Penelope alone to deliver her first litter. The four adorable kittens arrived safe and sound, and in time for Anna to make her afternoon appointments.
She came directly home after her last session of the day because she knew Henry would be on her doorstep the instant he got home from school. She wanted to be there when he arrived, to make sure Penelope didn’t take umbrage and claw him if he reached out to pet the kittens.
By the time Henry’s mother came home, it was dark out. Anna fixed herself something to eat and watched Grey’s Anatomy, debating whether to have her injury treated, worried that she might get stuck in an emergency room half the night.
But she knew it was better to deal with problems head-on than to let them slide. So at 10:37 p.m. she’d headed out to a twenty-four-hour urgent care facility not far from the emergency vet’s office.
She looked through the glass door of the clinic to see if there were a lot of people ahead of her and counted a mother with two young boys, a father with a babe in arms, an elderly couple, a young couple with a toddler—and the stranger who’d been bitten earlier in the day by his rottweiler.
He’d changed out of the bloody white T-shirt and khaki pants he’d been wearing. He was dressed now in a short-sleeved gray T-shirt and jeans. The well-worn black leather jacket that had fallen on the examining table this morning had been replaced by a well-worn brown leather bomber jacket, which lay tossed over a nearby orange plastic chair. He had on comfortable-looking brown loafers but no socks, even though the early October evening was chilly.
He was engrossed in a paperback. Not a good sign. How long was the wait, anyway?
Anna wasn’t sure whether to say hello to him on her way to the reception desk. He hadn’t exactly exuded charm earlier in the day. He sat slumped in his chair. The David Baldacci novel he was reading suggested he didn’t want to be bothered by anyone.
He glanced up at her as she passed by. As she opened her mouth to greet him, he frowned and returned his gaze to his book.
Anna would have felt insulted at being dismissed so absolutely, except she knew exactly how he must be feeling. Her day hadn’t exactly been a bowl of cherries, either.
Many of Anna’s patients were MPD cops, District firemen and U.S. government employees who came to see her because of stress that affected their job performance and personal lives. This afternoon, she’d seen a new patient, a young fireman who’d recently responded to a violent car crash in which a little boy—the same age and with the same hair color as his own son—had been torn limb from limb by the crushing force of metal when the child restraint straps held his body snug in his car seat.
Now the fireman had trouble driving in the car with his son without his throat swelling closed and his breathing becoming erratic. He had nightmares and had wakened his wife crying. Which made him afraid to go to sleep. He was suffering from sleep deprivation and not functioning well on the job.
Anna had known she was dealing with a classic case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, more commonly called PTSD. She’d been able to give her patient suggestions for how to deal with his condition, but the sad truth was that PTSD was insidious. Even years later, some small, insignificant thing could trigger a physiological and psychological response to the original traumatizing incident.
When Anna checked in with the urgent care receptionist, she learned she might be waiting a long time.
And she didn’t have a book.
She took the empty seat farthest from the mother and two rambunctious boys, across from the stranger. Which meant she either had to stare at him or at her feet.
She didn’t remember him being so good-looking. She knew he was tall, because she was 5’10” and he’d looked down at her in the vet’s office. She knew he was strong, because he’d come in carrying a hundred-pound dog. But she hadn’t focused on his face. She found it fascinating.
His cheeks were hollowed and stubbled with dark beard, and the cheekbones looked as though they’d been carved from stone by a loving sculptor. His lips were bowed. They looked soft in comparison to the hard muscle and sinew she saw in the rest of his body. He had black hair, expensively cut. She didn’t know how she knew that, but it wasn’t a stretch, considering the price of real estate in Georgetown.
He looked up at her as though he’d been aware of her intense perusal and glared.
Anna knew she was supposed to be intimidated into lowering her gaze. But she wasn’t. And she didn’t.
“How did you get your dog to let go of your arm?” she asked.
“It wasn’t my dog.”
He returned to his book, as though that was the end of that.
Anna’s brow furrowed. “Not your dog? I don’t understand.”
With obvious irritation, he raised his eyes—an icy blue, like glacier water—to her and said, “I saw the dog get hit by a car. The driver didn’t stop.”
She waited for further explanation, but when it didn’t come she said, “Oh, I see.”
“You see what?”
“The dog bit you, even though you were trying to help, because it was hurt and you were a stranger. That was a very kind thing to do.”
“I didn’t have much choice,” he said curtly. “The dog was about to snap at a kid.” He made a point of turning the page in his book and started reading again.
She saw the white gauze bandage on his arm was stained with blood. “Henry would never forgive me if I didn’t ask.”
He looked up, clearly annoyed. “Who’s Henry?” Then he said, “Oh, yeah. Your kid.”
She smiled and said, “Henry isn’t mine any more than the dog was yours.”
At his questioning look she said, “Henry lives across the hall. He takes care of Penelope—my cat—in the afternoons.”
He made a “get to it” sign by rotating his hand.
“How did you get the dog to let go of your arm?”
“The vet injected him with a drug that put him to sleep. He was going to have to do it anyway to treat his wounds.”
“Oh.”
“Is there anything else you’d like to know? So I can read in peace?”
“Is the dog all right?” she asked.
“He was when I left.”
“You must live nearby.”
“Close enough.”
“I live a block south and two blocks east. I walked here. Wish I’d worn a coat.” Anna pulled her three-quarter-length gray wool sweater more tightly around her. “It was colder out than I thought it would be.”
Anna wished she hadn’t volunteered the information about where she lived. Especially since the stranger didn’t seem at all interested.
Which was when Anna realized that she was.
When was the last time she’d been on a date? Three months ago, at least. And why was that? She had reasonable office hours, and Penelope could easily be left for the evening. Anna had even been asked out a couple of times. She simply hadn’t been intrigued enough by any of those men to say yes.
She was intrigued now. And being completely ignored.
She looked for a wedding band and didn’t see one. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved with someone. Except, he was so surly, she was sure he would have used that excuse to be rid of her if he could have.
She wanted to know more. She wanted to know him.
“I just thought of something,” she said. “Do you have to get rabies shots?”
“Someone who knew the owner must have seen or heard what happened, because the owner showed up at the vet’s,” the stranger replied. “The dog had been vaccinated.”
“That was lucky.”
