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CHAPTER ONE
“Hold on, hold on, let me through.” Dex waded through the usual churn of wriggling bodies, lolling tongues, and wagging tails and finally achieved access to his own kitchen. The writhing canine mass followed right behind him, bumping his legs as he collected their food bowls from the raised holders he’d built and arrayed them on the counter.
Not one dog made a sound; they knew better than to get bossy or aggressive with him. But they wouldn’t let him out of their sight until they’d had their breakfast.
He pulled the dry-food canister forward and dropped a scoopful into each bowl, then opened the cupboard. “Chicken this morning, you think? Or beef?”
Five tongues flapped, loosing ropes of drool.
“Chicken it is.” He brought down four cans of chicken, opened them, dumped three into three bowls and split the fourth into the last two. Then he added bacon bits and some sliced egg.
From the morass of hungry dogs, one quiet noise rose up—a sound with just enough growl in it to be out of bounds. Dex looked over his shoulder at five suddenly quiet, still animals, all wearing expressions of untested innocence.
“Uh huh,” he said. “Watch yourselves, now.” He lifted two bowls and turned. All five dogs sat at once, at absolute attention.
Crossing to the big, four-hole holder, Dex dropped the first bowl into the hole marked ‘Charlie.’ The second went into the hole beside it, marked ‘Ripper.’ He went back for the other three bowls and took them to their places: ‘George,’ ‘Lennie,’ and ‘Lizzie.’
When little Lizzie’s bowl was in its place, in a shorter raised holder, Dex turned and faced his dogs: Charlie, a purebred Belgian Malinois. Ripper, a purebred Doberman. George, a pit bull, and his best bud Lennie, a wirehaired terrier of some sort. And finally, little Lizzie, a fragile-looking mini-floof who was probably mostly chihuahua under her big blonde ‘do.
He’d adopted four of them from kill shelters; each one had had their death day scheduled, and all of them had been deemed unadoptable, most of them for aggression issues. Ripper, in fact, had been an actual junkyard dog, confiscated by the city when he’d killed a homeless guy who’d jumped the fence, looking for some shelter on a snowy night.
Dex had had to lay out a pretty thick stack in bribes to get Ripper’s sentence commuted. But it was fucked to hell and gone to kill an animal for doing what he’d been trained to do.
Especially a dog who been ‘trained’ as brutally as Ripper had.
Charlie, probably the oldest of them, and definitely second only to Dex in their pecking order, was the only dog of the pack Dex had known from puppyhood. Charlie had killed a man, too, just as he’d been trained to do. But Charlie’s kill had made him a hero. To a dog who’d been trained to do a job—protect and defend—there was no difference between a homeless intruder and a terrorist. It was humans who made those judgment calls and then blamed, or celebrated, the dog.
Dex had trained Charlie to be a killer, and then, when his services as a bringer of death were no longer required, he’d trained him to be a pet.
Training all these other outcasts from polite society had been no real challenge.
“Charlie,” Dex said, and made the gesture they all recognized as Charlie’s. The Malinois stood and came to his bowl.
“Ripper.” Ripper got up and sidled in beside Charlie.
“George and Lennie.” Both dogs stood and approached. When they got to the holder, George nudged Lennie toward the correct bowl and then tucked into his own.
George and Lennie were the only two of his dogs that hadn’t been slated to be put down for reasons of aggression. Lennie had been snagged by animal control in terrible shape, horribly abused—including having his eyes cut out of his head. His wounds had been septic when he was picked up. The city’s animal control department was badly underfunded, and they couldn’t invest much in saving, much less rehabilitating, a dog in such dire straits.
But the local news had happened to do a story about the department’s funding problems, and the general problem of overcrowding across all Tulsa area shelters, and they’d highlighted Lennie—who’d been brought in only the day before but had already made a friend. A little wirehaired terrier who’d been hiding under his dog bed for days, shaking, until he encountered a suffering pittie three times his size.
Dex hadn’t thought twice before he called the shelter and adopted them both. Then he took Lennie to Kelsey Helm, a daughter of the Brazen Bulls MC and a veterinarian, and she’d saved him. Now George and Lennie were inseparable. George was Lennie’s eyes, and Lennie was George’s heart.
“Lizzie,” Dex said, and his little princess—with a rap sheet of attacks on the ankles, hands, or face of two mail carriers, three vet techs, and a nosy neighbor—pranced over to her own, smaller bowl.
All five tails wagged the same beat.
Dex didn’t have a family, but he had a pack.
~oOo~
With his dogs sorted for the morning, Dex made himself his usual breakfast of toast and coffee, showered, dressed in his Sinclair uniform, and checked the forecast on his phone. He sighed: the high temp wasn’t expected to top twenty degrees, and there was a winter storm watch for late afternoon.
He absolutely despised winter. Any day that he was trapped in a cage was an inferior day. Without the potential for ice later, he’d shove himself into his winter riding suit and ride despite the cold, but he had enough sense not to ride on ice. If only because wiping out would fuck up his bike.
So he slipped on his Sinclair coat, hooked his kutte over his arm, and took his truck keys off the peg by the garage door. His dogs stood behind him, waiting for their ritual. He turned, crouched, and gave them all their own goodbye.
As the overhead garage door rolled up, Dex looked out and saw his neighbor across the street, Mr. Clement, in his robe and slippers, struggling to reach his newspaper in the hedge it had been thrown into. Dex paused, ready to help, but the old man picked up a snow shovel that had been leaning against the house and dragged the paper out of the hedge.
