“Mandy, stand by.” Creed switched calls. “Shit, woman!”
“Yeah,” Auralia exhaled. “I guess Doli got hold of you.”
“Are you okay?”
“Just hanging around for the moment. I wanted to let you hear my voice so you could focus on the people who need you most. Is Rou with you?”
“We’re getting ready for a search. Somebody seems to be concussive and wandered into the woods.”
“In this rain? Shit. Get out there, Creed. What the hell are you doing talking to me?”
He chuckled.
“I love you. Be safe.”
“Love you. Be safest.” When she hung up, Creed tapped Mandy. “Mandy, that was Auralia calling in. Let Gator’s support know I heard her voice, and she’s okay for now.”
Chapter Seventeen
Creed
Creed scanned the horizon on the top of the hill before he sprinted Rougarou across the four-lane highway, slowing to check the distance to the red point on his topo map.
Rou was ridiculous in her little red shoes with matching socks.
The Cerberus trainer, Reaper Hamilton, had just introduced them to Rou’s training, so on the upcoming hot summer days, standing on the macadam and sniffing out the crowds, little Rourou didn’t scald her paw pads.
Rou hadn’t quite figured out how to navigate the new sensation. To say she was clownish as she moved down the road was an understatement.
With a bit of time and a job to perform, Rou would shift her focus away from the odd addition to her paws, but so far, she wasn’t yet distracted enough to forget she was wearing them.
As Rou ran along, each step went too high or too sideways as she hopped and popped and waggled, trying to figure out how to move forward in a straight line.
She was lifting her hind legs with a kick, kick, hop, then the other side, kick, kick, kick, hop, followed by some fancy prancing with her front paws that included a little wave, as if she were a movie star working the red carpet at a gala, greeting her fans.
Ridiculous and endearing, the teams would stop to watch and get a good chuckle during training.
Under these circumstances, while she was keeping up with Creed, she was burning energy. But with the glass and metal pieces peppered across the area, he wasn’t risking an injury.
“That must be the woman up there, Rou.”
She was sitting on the edge of the road, with her legs dangling down into the gutter below. The weeds, left unmown for months, spiked up around the thickness of her soft body. The kind of body that reminded Creed of summers on the porch, sitting with the neighborhood elders as he snapped beans and listened to them sing. It was the kind of soft body that gave hugs that he could remember wrapped around him like a blanket when he was lying in the desert listening to the bombs explode and wondering how he had found himself so far from home.
Creed made sure to call the woman’s attention to his approach so he didn’t startle her. In his search and rescue classes, he’d learned that Cerberus often got called out to assist on local searches, and there were three main subjects in this area—those with dementia, children with autism, and (to be frank) men doing dumb shit in the woods.
The elder had wrapped her arms around herself and was rocking side to side, making a humming sound as she self-soothed.
“Ma’am?” Creed said, warming his voice and adding a dash of confidence and capability.
She jerked, then shifted his way. Putting her hands on either side of herself, she rocked harder, this time to gain momentum to stand.
“No need to get up, ma’am. I’m coming to you.” He put his hand to his chest. “I’m Creed Duchamp. This is my search and rescue dog, Rougarou.”
“That little thing with her too-big paws? She’s trained to look for people?”
“She’s a star,” Creed said with a grin, seeing that she was trying to tease, though her eyes were red-rimmed with crying.
“My grandson, Parker, was in the car with me, and we were in kind of a protected place there.” She hitched a thumb over hershoulder to the sedan pressed at the trunk between the car in front and the one in the back.
