Gun Shy Read Free Page B

rather large woman with a fondness for flowered work smocks and gray pin curls, which bobbed when she was excited. The curls were bobbing now. “Who was she? Anyone we know?”
    I shook my head, following the Labrador as Doc Withers calmly took his leash and led him into the examining room. “I don’t think they have an ID yet.”
    “Whose cabin was it?” Crystal wanted to know, bringing up the rear of the procession that crowded into the small examining room. “I bet it was some of those peoplefrom the coast. I heard they have some wild parties up there at the lake, lots of drugs.”
    Her mother looked at her sharply. “Where would you hear a thing like that?”
    Crystal shrugged a typical teenager’s shrug.
    Ethel said, “Was it a gun, did you say? I heard on one of those TV shows that women don’t use guns to kill themselves. Too messy.”
    I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. If you were going to kill yourself, male or female, the last thing you’d worry about was the mess you’d leave behind. After all, if one thing was certain, it was that you wouldn’t be the one who had to clean it up.
    But I said, “This one did.” Then I hurried quickly to help Doc Withers lift the quivering dog onto the table. “I don’t think he’s hurt,” I said, “just scared and starving. I wanted you to check him out, though.”
    “Shots?”
    “I don’t know,” I admitted. “He seems kind of well mannered. He might have been pretty well taken care of. But there’s no way of knowing.”
    He grunted. I knew he would innoculate the dog, with no charge to me, against all contagious diseases before he released him to come home to my dogs. And he would never say a word about the cost. He was just that way.
    Ethel insisted, “Maybe it wasn’t suicide at all. Do you think it was? Is that what the sheriff thinks? Are they calling in the state boys?”
    Way too much television, I thought. I said anxiously to her husband, “He probably hasn’t had anything to drink in three or four days either.”
    Doc Withers pinched a fold of the dog’s skin between his fingers and grunted. Even I could see that the lack of elasticity indicated definite dehydration. He peeled back the dog’s lips and checked his gums.
    Crystal said, “Was Deputy Lawson there? I bet he was. I bet he was on the job, in charge of everything.”
    Crystal, like most other females who had ever encountered him, had a shameless crush on my husband. Frankly, I don’t understand it. Buck is cute enough: tall, well built, gorgeous hair. But he’s no Brad Pitt. Maybe it’s the uniform.
    In my younger days, I used to get furious with Buck for his unaccountable appeal to the opposite sex, as though he was deliberately putting out a sex pheromone designed to attract other women. Now I barely noticed— except when he acted on it, which, unfortunately, was far too often for a so-called married man. And that, in a nut-shell, was why we no longer lived together as husband and wife.
    Ethel said, “When do you think they’ll have an ID? Are they collecting DNA evidence?”
    Her husband, meantime, was running a microchip scanner over the dog. I took his grunt to mean a negative finding.
    More and more pet owners these days are having their vets implant microchips in their dogs with their personal information and a link to a lost-and-found service, in case of emergencies just like this. When a dog runs away during a thunderstorm, gets lost on vacation, is separated from its owner during a car accident, house fire, or natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina—there is absolutely, hands down, no better chance of recovering a lost pet than a microchip. Almost all veterinarians, animal shelters and rescue groups routinely scan every new dog they see for the presence of an identifying chip.
    With the lack of a microchip, I lost my best hope of identifying the woman who by now was probably being zipped into a body bag and transported via slow-moving