Putting him down might be a mercy but everything inside her rebelled at the thought. She set her jaw. If the dog didn’t die, she would get it—she glanced down the dog’s body and discovered that not only was he male, but he hadn’t been neutered—she would get him some help.
Once she made the decision, she moved fast. She dug through the canvas bags of camping supplies in her trunk until she located the ground tarp. Refolding the plastic into a smaller size that the dog could still fit on, she left enough room to grasp the edges. Then she laid the tarp on the ground beside the animal.
The next ten minutes felt like enduring a two-year tour of duty. The dog’s suffering was a gravity well that held her anchored to its wretchedness. The wind blasted the bare skin of her arms and face with tiny stinging grains of the scorching pale sand. The sand had crusted the raw edges of the dog’s wounds, until she moved him and the wounds reopened. They bled brilliant, glistening crimson that trickled through the pale ivory-gold of the crusted sand. Normally the two colors looked lovely together.
She talked to the dog, random words of encouragement, and she exercised her extensive vocabulary of swear words as she strained her leg and back muscles along with her telekinesis. At last, she managed to shift him onto the tarp and then into the back seat.
During the worst of it, the dog opened his eyes and looked at her. The intelligence and the bright pain in his eyes were twin spears that shoved into her heart. When she finally slid into the driver’s seat again, she had to clean off her hands and wipe at her own wet eyes before she could see enough to start the engine.
The dog didn’t die.
Less than two minutes later a county patrol car swooped up behind her, lights flashing.
She pulled onto the shoulder and parked, rolled down her window, moved her Ray-Bans to the top of her head and watched as a gray-haired man in a short-sleeved, tan uniform walked up to her car. His bladed, smiling face was lined with good humor and friendliness. He braced a hand on her door.
“Lady, that’s some well-maintained engine you’ve got under this hood,” he said. “I tagged you at one twenty-five.”
She handed him her New York driver’s license and registration. The license photo was of a lean, fit forty-year-old woman, with straight ash-blonde, shoulder-length hair, green eyes, spare features and a somewhat crooked nose. She had broken it once in Kandahar. He glanced from the license to her, verifying her identity.
She said, “As you can see, I’m not from around here, and I’ve got a badly injured dog in the back seat. Can you direct me to the nearest animal hospital or vet—or better yet, could you show me and write the ticket afterward?”
The man’s quick, dark gaze shot to the back seat. She watched his expression change. “That your animal?”
She shook her head. “Found him by the road a few miles back.”
He glanced at her dirt-and blood-smeared T-shirt and cargo pants. “You got him in the car all by yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you manage that?”
The skin around her mouth tightened. “Adrenaline, I guess.”
His grave gaze met hers. “Might be kindest if I put him down.”
His hand had moved to rest on his firearm. Something inside her went cold and still as she tracked the movement out of the corner of her eye. Her hands clenched on the steering wheel. In retrospect, storing her gun in the trunk of her car had been a stupid thing to do.
“Might be,” she said. She kept her tone soft and even. Nonaggressive. “I had that thought myself. But it wouldn’t be fair. He’s endured a lot to get this far. And even though he was awake, he didn’t bite me when I got him in the car. I’m going to give him a fighting chance. Don’t tell me there’s no vet for a hundred miles.”
A decision wavered between them, invisible like a heat wave rising off the pavement. She moved her left hand to her thigh and clenched it into a fist as she tracked his resting on his gun.
The trooper tucked her license and registration into his shirt pocket and straightened. “There’s a vet nearby. Follow me.”
That was how Claudia and the dog got a police escort into Nirvana, Nevada, population 1,611.
The town was located in the foothills of a small mountain range, its streets laid out in a simple north/south, east/west grid system. She followed close behind the sheriff’s patrol car. He sped through the quiet neighborhood streets and pulled to a stop in front of a ranch-style house that had a screened-in front porch that faced west. A dusty Dodge Ram pickup was parked in the driveway.
She placed the sheriff in the latter half of his fifties, but he was a fit man who could move fast enough if the situation warranted it. Even as she parked behind him, he was out of his patrol car and striding toward her BMW.
She set her sunglasses on top of her head again and slid out of the car to join him. They considered the grim mess in the back seat.