CHAPTER 12

Josie loved her work. Really she did. And she told herself that many, many times on Tuesday, hoping that the reminder would prove useful. It did, she supposed, in the sense that she neither committed any felonies, nor told any of her patients that really, their pet would be fine if not for the owner’s stupidity. Even the reminder couldn’t stop her from wanting to say it, though. It just stopped the words from actually coming out.

When Eli stopped by at three o’clock, she barely had time to sneak a kiss in the back of the clinic before she had to race to her fifteenth appointment of the day. Thankfully, he took her brush-off with good grace, patting her on the bottom and telling her that he’d already spoken to Ben, the blood samples were already in the hands of the delivery company, and they had the quarantine setup under control. His calm demeanor help to settle her frazzled nerves, but the pat on her ass stayed with her through at least three appointments. She kept finding herself tingling and blushing at the least appropriate time. Brenda Nowicki even asked her if she was coming down with something, which had only made her blush harder.

Force of will got her through the remainder of her schedule, and even an emergency appointment with a congested guinea pig. Thankfully, she had no outcalls for large animals this week, so at least she hadn’t added travel to her list of duties. Still, by the time the clinic locked its door at seven fifteen, Josie felt like she’d been running a marathon for at least nine weeks. She rubbed a hand across the back of her neck as she trudged out of the last exam room to slap a chart down on the teetering pile she still needed to catch up on.

A metallic clang drew her attention to the hallway leading to the storage room she’d told Eli he could set up as a quarantine space. Curiosity drew her down the hall to see how far the Q-Team—as Ben had dubbed them—had gotten with their project. She reached for the knob, but the door swung open before she touched it.

“Brace yourself, Doc.” Ben grinned down at her, looking disheveled and disreputable and highly pleased with himself. She saw why when he stepped back and waved his hand at the newly rearranged and reequipped storage room. “The Q-Team is proud to present... Club Medicine!”

Josie laughed, her eyes widening as she took in the transformation. Gone were empty pallets that had once held dog food, the broken pieces of equipment, and the boxes of extra exam gloves and surgical drapes. In their place, she saw only gleaming tile floors and a floor-to-ceiling gated chain-link partition, securely bolted to opposite walls, that divided the space into an entry and work area in front and a large, enclosed kennel area on the other. Inside the kennel area, the linoleum floor had been padded with rubber mats on each end. Each mat was topped with an egg-crate dog bed.

She looked at Eli in wonder. “You guys managed all this in just a few hours?”

“It wasn’t really all that complicated. The partition was the biggest challenge, but once we found the wall studs, even that wasn’t so bad.” He grinned. “The guy at the fence company guaranteed it would take an entire pack of wolves to take it down.”

“I wasn’t worried about security. It looks solid to me. Besides, our two Lupines aren’t in any condition for a jailbreak at the moment.”

Josie turned around slowly, taking in the front of the room. A narrow hutch had been placed to the left of the door and stocked with everything needed for the care of the Lupines, including their charts, medications, and tape and bandages for their wound dressings.

She shook her head and laughed in amazement. “It’s perfect. I think putting them in the same kennel will make them both feel better once they start to become more alert. You’re both hired.”

“Thanks, but my contract with the town says I’m not allowed to moonlight,” Eli quipped, bending down to steal a brief kiss.

When he pulled away, Josie snuck a glance over at Ben, half expecting that he’d be staring at the ceiling and whistling with a look of perfect innocence on his face. Instead, she caught him watching shamelessly and grinning. When she scowled, he only grinned wider and winked at her. She muttered something under her breath about mutiny and disrespect. Ben appeared unfazed.

“But since I’m already here,” Eli continued, winking at her himself, “why don’t I help Ben move Rosemary and Bill into their new digs? They’re both damn heavy when they’re unconscious.”

Josie nodded and led the way back down the hall and across the triage area to the old kennel area, where she supervised first Rosemary’s and then Bill’s transfer to the quarantine space. When each of them had been settled on their own bed, she and Ben did a quick check of their injuries and made sure their IV drips remained connected and functional.

“Rosemary looks good,” Josie announced when she had assured herself that the short trip had caused the Lupine no harm. She pushed back to her feet and stepped across to her tech. “How’s Bill?”

Ben grumbled and fiddled with the plastic tubing of his IV. “He’s fine, but his line got caught on the door of his crate back there and came loose from the needle. I think I’ve got it fixed, though. He should be good.”

Satisfied, Josie turned and took two steps toward the front of the room. Her feet stuttered to a halt, though, when she heard an ominous rumble in the distance. She frowned at Eli through the chain-link.

“Do you know if it was supposed to rain today?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“Because I could have sworn I just heard thunder.”

And that was when Ben screamed.

Josie spun around—whether of her own volition or from the knock she took when Eli leapt past her into the kennel, she couldn’t really tell. All she knew was that one minute everything had been fine, and the next minute Ben was screaming and Eli was running and Bill Evans had his teeth sunk deep into the flesh of the vet tech’s left leg.

“Out! Get out!” Eli shouted.

It took Josie a minute to realize he was talking to her. She made to step forward instead, intent on helping Ben, but the look Eli aimed at her had nearly enough force to knock her out of the room entirely. She stumbled backward and watched helplessly as the sheriff aimed a vicious kick at the Lupine’s head. The blow stunned the creature and he released his grip on Ben’s leg, shaking his head as if to stop it from ringing.

The moment Bill let go, Eli threw Ben over his shoulder and bolted for the gate, shoving Josie out in front of him. He slammed the chain-link panel closed behind him and leaned against it.

“Secure the lock!” he shouted, and Josie rushed to obey, flipping the pin into place and securing it with the padlock the fence company had so thoughtfully provided. As soon as the gate was secure, Eli stepped away, barely avoiding the vicious fangs of the enraged Lupine as it threw itself over and over against the fence, infuriated by its inability to reach its prey.

“That should not have happened,” Josie stuttered, following Eli out to the triage room, where he placed Ben on an exam table. “He was on enough sedative to knock out a rhino.”

“Yeah, well, he’s not a rhino.” Eli tore the soft cotton of Ben’s scrubs for a better look at the wound. Eli was already calling Dr. Shad’s office.

“The IV did come loose,” Ben gasped, his face white with shock as he looked down at his torn and bloody limb. “It was my fault. I had a hard time getting hold of him in that cage, so when I finally grabbed him, I turned away from the door too fast. I should have been more careful.”

Josie finished relaying the emergency information to Dr. Shad’s nurse and hung up the phone. “It is not your fault. You heard me say it: Bill was on a massive dose of sedative. He still is. It should have been impossible for him to move that fast. Hell, even if we’d removed his IV entirely, he still shouldn’t have been able to so much as open his eyes for at least a couple of hours.”

Eli grunted. “Too bad it didn’t actually work out that way.”

When she hurried to Ben’s side and reached out to examine his leg, Josie realized her hands were shaking. Embarrassed, she snatched them back and pressed them together to stop the trembling. Closing her eyes, she took a slow, deep breath, then carefully blew it out.

Opening her eyes, she reached out again and helped Eli finish tearing the left leg off the younger man’s green scrub trousers. “The blood is flowing, not pulsing,” she observed, using the torn cloth of the scrubs to wipe away the worst of it. “And it looks like he mainly got the outside of the leg. So that’s good news. You don’t have to worry he nicked your femoral artery.”

Ben offered a weak hiccup of a laugh. “Oh, good. At least there’s a bright side.”

Josie felt constitutionally unequipped to stand around doing nothing while they waited for the doctor to arrive. Humans and animals might be different species, she reasoned, but the principles of medicine were universal. When something living had a bleeding open wound, the first thing you did was to stop the bleeding, and the second thing you did was clean the wound. She grabbed a package of sterile dressing and ripped it open.

“Has anyone else noticed that we seem to be going through even more of these wound care supplies than usual?” she asked absently.

This time, Ben’s laugh sounded stronger. “Yeah, I wonder why that is...”

Josie smiled brightly at him, encouraging him to share the joke. “Poor practice management is my guess.”

“I was going to go with insubordination and thievery in the ranks, personally.”

“Well, you’ve always been a British naval justice kind of guy.”

“Keelhauling is an underused form of punishment,” he argued, grimacing when she applied direct pressure to the largest area of bleeding.

“Maybe that’s because so few people these days have properly sized keels at their disposal.”

Eli interrupted their banter with a light touch to her shoulder. “If you’re okay here, I’m going to take a look at something. I’ll be right back.”

Josie looked up and nodded. She was okay, but that didn’t mean she didn’t hope Dr. Shad would hurry up and get here already. And it didn’t mean she was really okay. How could she be okay when her friend was hurt, her gut told her she was responsible, and two of her patients seemed to be either going insane or dying right before her very eyes? For a woman who had succeeded at everything she’d ever attempted, this pill was becoming particularly hard for her to swallow.

“Young lady, I thought you and I had a deal,” a voice announced, and Josie turned to see Dr. Martin Shad standing in the doorway with a huge yellow tackle box in one hand and a cherry lollipop in the other. “When you moved back here to take over your father’s practice, I assumed that we would continue with the same understanding he and I always enjoyed: You treat your patients, and I’ll treat mine.”

Relief flooded through her, unexpectedly intense. After all, nothing truly terrible had happened. She could see Ben’s wounds weren’t all that serious, and she and Eli had emerged from the kennel unscathed. But maybe she’d had to handle just a little too much over the last few days.

Just a little.

She managed to smile at the doctor, though, remembering how he’d always shared those lollipops with his young patients, of which she had once been one. “Well, that could work, provided that your patients don’t turn into my patients while you’re out playing with trout,” she teased. “Catch any keepers this weekend?”

Martin Shad was older than her father by a decade or more, which put him well into his seventies, but he looked at least a decade younger. His white hair still grew full and thick, his eyes sparkled with no help from corrective lenses, he walked with a quick, agile step, and he carried at least twenty extra pounds on his five-foot-seven-inch frame. If he’d had a beard, the man would have been Santa Claus. It wasn’t natural for anyone so round to be so healthy, but the man had never been sick a day in his life. Or at least, not in Josie’s life. Not that she could remember anyway.

“One or two,” the old man said in response to her question, grinning broadly. “Caught a real nice steelhead, but I had to release him. I was already at my limit.” He heaved a gusty sigh. “And now I’m done for the year. Makes a man hate the winter, I tell you. Now, why don’t you fill me in on what happened over the weekend? It’s been some time since I heard a good tale.”

While Josie outlined the situation with Rosemary and Bill for Dr. Shad, the physician frowned and nodded and turned to poke at Ben’s injury, but for all his slow, gruff nonchalance, Josie had noticed that the old doctor had already removed her padding to examine the wounds, prodded the skin, and grunted his approval.

“I rescind my earlier comments about poaching patients. I think you can keep the ones you’ve just picked up. Sounds like you’ve got a better handle on their problem than me, anyway. Country doctors like me don’t even do our own blood counts. We send that kind of mess out to a lab.” Without opening the huge tackle box/jump kit he’d brought with him, Martin reached for the saline flush that Josie seemed to keep permanently in hand these days and began squirting it over the wounds. “I don’t know if I’ve peered into a microscope since my internship.”

Somehow, Josie had a hard time believing that, but she didn’t blame Martin for wanting to stay well out of the mess she’d gotten wrapped up in. Heck, she’d have run in the other direction if she’d been in his shoes.

The doctor poked at Ben’s leg and shook his head. “Young lady, it’s folks like you that give physicians like me a complex. You do twice the work as me and only charge half the money. Anyone ever wises up to that fact, and I can kiss my retirement home in Tempe good-bye.”

Josie ignored the doctor’s scowl and bluster and took the compliment the way it was intended. “My dad always planned to take an ad out in The New York Times.”

Martin snorted. “That wouldn’t do him any good. Tell him I said go for it. No one around here reads the Times, except maybe some of those kids down in Portland. Now, if he’d said The Oregonian, then I might be worried.”

“I’ll let him know. With the money he’ll save, he can probably buy a whole page.”

Ben, watching in fascination while the doctor finished cleaning and began stitching his wounds, snorted. “Whole page? Heck, he could probably buy the whole paper.”

Martin peered up at his patient through the screen of his bushy white eyebrows. “What’s the matter, boy? You work here, don’t you? Don’t tell me you’ve never seen stitches go in before.”

“Not into a human. What did you use for the local before you started? Was that levobupivacaine?”

“I use good old-fashioned lidocaine. What is it with you young folk, always wanting to do something different? Where I come from we believed that old saw about not fixing what isn’t broken.”

Ben held up a hand and shrugged. “No problem. I was just asking.”

The physician set the last stitch and sighed, pulling off the gloves he’d worn during the procedure. “Done. Can I assume you know how to treat stitches, young man?”

“Keep them dry for at least forty-eight hours, use an antibacterial ointment once a day and clean gauze dressings. They can come out in one to two weeks.”

Martin grunted. “That’s something, then. If you come see me, I’ll take them out when they’re done, or you can have Dr. Barrett here do it for you. I know which one I’d vote for, if I were you.”

“Me, too.” Josie grinned. “I don’t hand out lollipops. How do you feel about liver snaps, Ben?”

“Like I’ll be going to see Dr. Shad, thanks, boss.”

The old man had already grabbed his kit as he was making his way toward the door. “Call my office if you do anything stupid enough to need me again.”

And with that, he slipped out the door.

Ben looked to his right. “Twenty-three stitches. How come I thought it was going to be a hell of a lot more?”

Josie hadn’t noticed Eli’s return from the isolation room, but she felt something inside her relax when he moved to her side and draped an arm around her shoulders.

“Probably because it hurt a hell of a lot,” Eli said, giving the younger man a small smile. “And I say that as the voice of experience.”

“Right. Too bad I can’t pull that cool magic trick, though, and make the wounds disappear. I gotta say, that’s a handy skill to have, man.”

“I like it.”

Josie listened to the banter, relieved to see that Ben looked mostly recovered from the incident. True, he had twenty-three stitches and his scrubs now only had one leg, but his color had returned to normal, as had his impudent attitude. Something, though, was not right with Eli. She watched him, frowning.

“Why don’t I drive you home?” he offered Ben, before Josie could ask the question hovering on the tip of her tongue. “You should probably rest that leg for a few hours at least. I’m sure your boss will keep you hopping tomorrow.”

“Only as far as the file room,” Josie assured them. “There’s plenty in there that needs to be done, and you’ll be able to stay off your feet.”

Ben made a face. “Geez, why don’t you just have me executed? It would be less painful.”

“Maybe for you, but then who would do my filing?”

Eli helped ease Ben off the table and wrapped one arm around the younger man’s torso to steady him. “Think you can make it to the car this way?”

The tech nodded. “Yeah, it’ll just be slow going.”

“Take your time.”

Josie opened her mouth to demand that Eli tell her what was bothering him, but he cut her off with a glance.

“I’ll swing back around to your place after I get Ben settled. We can talk then, all right?”

No, Josie thought, it really wasn’t, but it looked like the best offer she would likely get. Reluctantly she nodded and stepped ahead of the pair to open the back door.

“I’ll see you in a little bit then,” she managed unhappily and watched while the two men beat a slow path across the parking lot.

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