Shoot Read Free Page B

every inch of her office and home 24–7 and was accessible from anywhere, with automatic intruder alerts and security monitoring.
    “Here it is. This happened a few hours ago. Wait, it was later… there. Watch.”
    The camera footage had a slight fish-eye distortion to it and showed a stainless steel examination table, cabinets, and four people moving around a reddish-brown dog on the table; Jane and an assistant as well as a middle-aged man and a younger woman, obviously the owners of the hacking hot dog on the table.
    “Did you see what he ate, Mr. Corcoran?” Jane asked the husband. “You have to watch them—they’ll gobble up anything off the street.”
    “My wife was home alone but Timmy only goes out in his dog walk in our back yard,” the husband said. “We don’t take him onto the street.”
    “I have no idea what happened,” his pretty blonde wife whimpered. “One second he was fine, and the next he was choking. Please help him!”
    “I got home and my wife was hysterical,” the guy explained. “I put ’em both in the car and rushed over.”
    “This is where I injected Apomorphine to induce vomiting,” Jane explained to me, as I saw her give the dog a shot, while her assistant held the animal still, a basin at the ready.
    The dog puked violently. The wife began crying, as her husband held her. Jane used a pair of forceps to remove an object from the basin. It was what New Yorkers called a Coney Island whitefish. A rubber.
    “What the hell?” the husband asked.
    “A condom,” Jane explained. “That was the problem. It was blocking Timmy’s airway. He’s breathing fine now.”
    The grateful dachshund tried to lick Jane, who backed off.
    “Oh, my God,” said the wife, grabbing her husband’s elbow and shoving him toward the door. “Michael. I’ll take care of this.”
    “Wait… what?” the husband sputtered, looking at his wife, the dog, the condom.
    “Mr. Corcoran, you have to dispose of these… items properly, so Timmy doesn’t get hold of them.”
    “I… I don’t use them,” he said, vaguely. “I don’t need ’em. I got a vasectomy. We…”
    “Michael…” his wife pleaded, running out of words.
    “
I
don’t use ’em.” He glared at her. “Somebody else musta left it there! Tell it to the guy who used it! Ask my wife!”
    Jane and her assistant looked at each other.
    “Who is he? You did this in front of Timmy?” he demanded.
    “I’ll give you folks a few minutes alone,” Jane said diplomatically, beating a hasty retreat.
    The video continued, with yelling and tears and the husband storming out. Jane stopped the recording.
    “Why am I laughing? This is sad,” Jane said. “I’m a terrible person.”
    “So am I,” I told her. “Totally twisted.”
    We both broke down; two terrible people, laughing.

4
    “I had no idea,” Jane insisted, her laughter fading. “I feel terrible. How was I to know?”
    “You couldn’t,” I said. “You were trying to save a dog, not end a marriage. I wonder who’ll get custody of Timmy?”
    We laughed some more, setting Skippy barking. It took me a few seconds to realize Skippy was barking at the front door. Someone was knocking.
    “Be cool, Skippy,” I told him, patting his head.
    He obeyed, but his snowy seventy-pound body tensed, eyes on the door, his blue eyes cold, ready. I opened the door and found a chubby housewife with stringy brown hair, dressed in a loose yellow sundress and red Crocs, waving some papers and babbling breathlessly in a tearful, semi-hysterical voice about how Dr. Strangelove was missing. Her eyes were red. She lifted a shopping bag and wiped one eye with an elbow.
    “I beg your pardon?” Jane said. “Who is missing?”
    “My little baby, Dr. Strangelove. There’s a reward. Here’s his picture,” she managed.
    She handed us each a Xerox copy of a cute little blonde dog with a wavy coat, some of which was blue, and a pink tongue. One eye was blue, the other white. It looked like a pooch