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“You brought rats home from Juneau and fed them to your snake,” I say slowly, my face surely a mask of dumbfounded shock. “Okay, there are a few issues with this, Ivan. First of all, what you caught are wild rats. They’re not the same as a feeder rat your friend in Florida buys at the pet store. Wild rats do this—” I point to the snake in the container. “Secondly, bringing rats here is a big problem. They are highly invasive. You could get into a lot of trouble if people found out you did that.”
The Anchorage area has so far avoided the kind of rodent problems that some of the islands and cities like Juneau can’t seem to shake, and they’ve done it through stringent laws and vigilant measures. To have a rat-free port is unheard of, and yet Anchorage has worked hard to maintain it.
The twenty-two-year-old blanches. “Really?”
Cory warned me this guy is far from the smartest person I’ll ever meet. “How many did you catch?”
“Three.”
“And where are the ones you didn’t try to feed to Benny? Tell me you didn’t let them go?”
“Uh … I didn’t let them go?” he says slowly, unconvincingly.
Hopefully, a fox catches them. And they’re both male. “Okay, Benny is going to need surgery.” I haven’t operated on a snake in years, but this is fairly straightforward. “Luckily, I have some time in my schedule today.” Otherwise known as my lunch break. “But I don’t think I’ll be able to save his eye.”
“Really?” He stares at his injured pet as he processes it. “So … I’m gonna have a one-eyed snake?” A slow grin stretches across his face. It vanishes when he sees that my stony expression isn’t breaking. “How much is this gonna cost me?”
“If you wait in the lobby, Cory will give you an estimate in a few minutes, but Ivan? A whole lot of frozen mice.”
A curse slips from Ivan as he exits the exam room.
* * *
“If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be getting the family discount. You deserve to pay every penny of this, dumbass.” Cory delivers the insult to her future brother-in-law with a grin, saying to Ivan what I desperately want to.
“Yeah, I guess I do.” He grimaces, his fingers twirling the shaggy hair at his nape. “Just fix him for me. Please.”
I offer a sympathetic smile because the idiot genuinely didn’t mean any harm. “I’ll do what I can on my end, but you need to go home and disinfect everything. Especially his habitat. Wild rats carry diseases.” Behind me, the bell on the clinic’s door chimes as another customer walks in. “We’ll give you a call when he’s ready to be picked up.”
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
I’m still wearing the smile when I turn to greet the person who has come in.
It falls off at the sight of Tyler holding open the door for Ivan, who grunts his thanks.
With a curious look at the sullen guy’s back, Tyler wanders into the clinic. He’s off duty today, in a faded black concert T-shirt that hugs his body in all the right places without being tight, blue jeans, and a New York Yankees ball cap pulled low over his brow. He probably rolled out of bed and threw on the first thing he pulled from his dresser. How do men like him make such a casual outfit look so good? He didn’t even bother to shave this morning, his stubble a fine dusting over his cut jaw.
Keys dangle from his fingers. I steal a glance behind him, to the lot, expecting to see the shiny new truck he won at the Iditarod. But instead, it’s the forest green pickup that was buried under snow in his driveway the day I basically accused him of animal abuse.
“So, this is your clinic.”
“It is.”
“And that little cabin over there, where your truck is parked, is that where you live?”
“Yup.”
“I like it.” He pauses to scan the various certificates on the wall—my undergrad, my veterinarian license, and the one that proves I’m a board-certified surgeon. He stalls on that last one a moment before shifting to the wall of photos. He frowns at my picture.
“The police station was kind enough to send over Marie’s mugshot the last time she was arrested,” Cory calls out.
“She does have a habit of trespassing,” he throws back without missing a beat.
I shoot Cory a glare, but she’s not paying attention to me, her vivid blue eyes locked on Tyler’s backside. “What are you doing here?”
“Just in the neighborhood. Thought I’d see how your dad is doing.”
Was he really? We’re west of Wasilla, and there’s nothing to draw Tyler out this way unless he’s driving to Trapper’s Crossing, which has even less of a draw. “He’s fine. Back home, in a cast. Pestering my mother.”
