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I straighten up from cleaning the tiny rabbit turds from one cage and wipe my brow. “Sure I can. Just not legally. That’s why I asked you to shut the door.”
“Sara.”
“Gunther.”
“How…what…why…”
I finish with that cage and look around for its occupant. Patches, a black and white rabbit, is nowhere to be seen, so I circle the space. “All good questions, Gunther. Now can you help me look for Patches? He’s black and white—there you are, Patches! No, no! Naughty!”
I find Patches getting romantic with one of the other females, Rhonda, and use a spray bottle of water I keep in here for this purpose to separate the two lovebirds.
“You can’t…you can’t just let them roam around…do you know how quickly rabbits reproduce?”
There’s an odd tone in Gunther’s voice. I turn to him with Patches under one arm and Rhonda under the other. His forehead is sweating.
“Yes, I know exactly how quickly they reproduce. That’s how we got Pushkin and Voltaire,” I reply matter-of-factly.
He removes his sunglasses, and it does something crazy to the otherwise intelligent part of my brain. “You look like that T.V. detective but way, way sexier.”
“This is a problem,” he says, ignoring my comment.
“I’ll say it is. I was going to have my friend cover my shift on rabbit duty, but you took my phone, remember?”
Gunther’s neck sinews may pop out of his throat. I swallow hard, preparing for him to shout at me like my uncle sometimes does.
But he doesn’t do that.
Instead, he looks around the room, silently panicking.
“Right. As soon as we’re finished, get them all back in their cages so I can do a proper headcount.”
“Why?” I ask. “Are you going to rat me out to the chemical testing company? I won’t let them go back there. I rescued them from there, okay? Please don’t send them back there!”
Sudden understanding softens his face. He looks at me as if I should know the reason. He steps closer to me. “No, Sara,” he says. “So I can give the veterinarian a heads-up.”
My heart races at his kind thought, but at the same time, anxiousness roils through me. I shake my head and clutch the bunnies closer to my body. “We can’t go to the vet. Vets ask questions. I’ll get in so much trouble….”
Now I’m the one panicking, and he’s the calm one. How the tables have turned in a matter of seconds. Gunther lays a hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye. “Listen to me, Sara. You’re not going to get into trouble with me around. That’s a promise. The vet is not going to ask any questions, okay?”
And something in Gunther’s earnest face tells me to trust him.
I shouldn’t trust any man, let alone a bodyguard hired by my uncle. But Gunther has a story behind those intense gray eyes. Besides, he’s right to be concerned. I now have twelve rabbits when initially I had rescued six. And I think I’m about to have thirty rabbits in another month or two.
“My job is to protect you,” he says.
“Your job is to watch me,” I correct.
Gunther shakes his head. “The literal words were: keep her out of trouble.’ He said nothing about making sure you aren’t doing anything he would disapprove of. I’m here to keep your name out of the papers, keeping you from getting arrested. Or, in this case, fined for keeping animals in a fucking storage locker. So trust me when I say I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by not helping you. Okay?”
I study his steady gaze and think. He didn’t approach me when I jumped the turnstile on the Metro. He hasn’t called the cops for any illegal activities in my neighborhood, right out in the open. But this?
The fact remains: I’m in over my head, and I need to take the hand that’s offered.
CHAPTER7
Gunther
Under Sara’s watchful eye, my friend and former seaman, Doc, sees to all the rabbits in my enclosed garage behind my house.
