He was lying limp in my arms.
“Shit,” I said as I stood up, letting the dog flop to the ground.
I was happy to see that the damn thing was still breathing, though.
It wouldn’t do to have killed the thing in such a public way.
No matter if the dog was attacking a woman or not, there would still be those people out there who thought that it was animal cruelty.
Boone, who’d come out of seemingly nowhere, quickly picked the dog’s head up and wrapped his muzzle in some tape.
He was picking him up and carting him off moments later, right to the back of his truck that had a cage in it for some reason.
He deposited the dog and shut the gate, turning back to me with a look of horror on his face.
“You didn’t kill the dog, did you?”
I looked toward a woman who’d been standing off to the side with a latte in her hand.
“If he didn’t, Boone will euthanize it when he gets to the?—”
Someone’s shocked cry interrupted Hopps’s explanation. “That dog was only misunderstood!”
I ignored the conversation and walked toward where Constance was sitting on a chair outside of Hopps.
She was shaking, her face was pale, but she looked otherwise okay.
“You okay?” I asked as I stalked toward her.
She nodded, eyes wide and terrified. “I wore boots.”
She showed me her boots.
“Good,” I said. “Why are you dressed like that? Hiking?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I stopped to get Wendy some donuts since we were already late. I figured…why not? And then that dog came out of nowhere!”
“That’s the missing dog from the teen boy who hung himself.”
I looked sideways to where Hopps had come to stand beside us. But it wasn’t Hopps that’d spoken, but Thumper, the prospect that’d been eating breakfast before he headed on shift with another club brother, Koen.
Koen owned a construction business in town, and Thumper had been working with him since Koen’s work had exploded.
“What?” I asked. “How do you know?”
Thumper pulled out his phone and swiped a few times.
He showed me a photo. “My mom’s friends with this kid’s mom. That dog.” He pointed toward the back of Boone’s truck. “Is the same one. Been missing for four days.”
“Great.” I scrubbed at my face, then dropped down to my haunches and said, “Lose the boot. Let’s make sure that your foot is good.”
She took the boot off just as Wendy came out the door and headed straight for her mother.
At least, I thought she was headed toward her mother.
She got close but had veered toward me instead at the last second.
She threw her arms around my neck and squeezed. “My donuts are on the ground.”
