Rowan walked into the offices of Titanium Corp. “Hey, somebody called me in?”
“Hey, Rowan,” Geir said. “Do you have any experience with dogs?”
“Outside of owning some?” he asked.
“K9 units, military dog training, that sort of thing.”
“Some,” he said. “I was a handler for a year, and that was the year before the accident,” he said. “That was one of my biggest regrets. The fact that I didn’t have enough time with the dog.”
“Understood,” he said. “What dog was it?”
“Hershey,” he said. “But he had some big fancy formal name, Herod Guildford III, or some such thing,” he said with a smile. “I just called him Hershey. The problem in my case was trying to separate that owner bond,” he said. “Handlers obviously get attached, but getting too attached is frowned upon.”
“Right, because the dogs can move from handler to handler, depending on the training they’re set up for, right?”
“Exactly.”
“How’s the rehab going?”
“It’s going,” he said. And he slowly straightened out his leg, bringing it back in again. The muscles stiffened so easily these days. He had to remember to always do his stretches or else they seized up. “It’s kind of weird missing a foot. The missing kidney I don’t notice. The rib I do. The muscle I do but not as much as the foot.”
“Right,” Badger said, walking in behind him. “It’s funny how we can adjust to losing a whole limb, but losing half a foot or half a hand just feels wrong.”
“And a couple ribs. Plus I’ve got a mess of screws and plates and who knows what else in my body.” He shrugged. “Like all of us, the fact is, we are Patchwork Kids brought back to life.”
“I like that,” Geir said, laughing. “More like clockwork kids though.”
“Yeah, steampunk before it became cool,” Rowan said, cracking a grin.
“What was the name of that dog again?” Geir asked Rowan.
“Which one?”
“The one you used to work with?”
“Hershey,” he said.
Geir looked to Badger, who sat down with a thump, and reached for a short stack of files that were on the desk and sorted through them.
“What would you do to get that dog back?” Geir asked him.
“That would mean going back into an active military K9 unit,” he said, “and that’s not happening. No matter how much dreaming I do.”
“Got a point there,” Badger said as he flipped open the first folder, closed it; flipped open the second one, closed it; reached for the third one in front of him, hoping, and looked at Geir and gave him a nod. Badger handed the file to Geir.
“What’s this all about?” Rowan asked.
“I don’t know if you know about a bunch of the guys who have done private missions for us,” he said. “They’ve been looking into the fate of some of the War Dogs supposedly retired but gone missing.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Rowan said, his tone harsh. “These dogs deserve every bit of retirement they have coming.”
“We agree,” Geir said. “What we do have is a dog here. It was supposed to be sent to California. And it was. It arrived, landed, and was signed off. However, when the military heard of the weather event there, they made a follow-up check to see that everything was still okay, but they found no sign of the people or the dog. Apparently one of the big fires in California had ripped through the place, and everybody was separated. That had been close to a month or six weeks ago. The family in question lost members, not to mention several other furry members of the family that were scattered or died, and, even if the dog can be found again, at this point, they don’t want it back.”
“Wow,” he said. “I understand, but that’s harsh.”
“It is, but they also lost their home and had to move to Illinois, I think,” he said, checking the file. “The husband is now a single father of two kids because he lost his wife to that fire.”
“Well, I guess, given the circumstances, maybe it is understandable,” he said, “but it’s still pretty rough on the dog.”
“They’d only had the dog a few weeks, and, according to the first welfare check, everything was fine, but then, when the fire blasted through the area shortly thereafter, the dog took off, and nobody has seen it since.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It is,” they said.
“What’s the dog’s name?” Rowan asked, stretching back in the big old office chair.
“Harold Guildford II,” Badger said, looking over at him.
He slammed forward, his feet hitting the floor hard and his fist coming down on the desk. “Hershey?”
Both men nodded. “Yeah, Hershey,” Geir said.
Rowan snatched up the file. “I’m taking this one.”
“We thought you might,” Badger said with a grin.
This concludes Book 9 of The K9 Files: Greyson.
Read about Rowan: The K9 Files, Book 10