Relief flickered through me.
“Which means,” the second officer added, “the reasonable solution is to retrieve her from the shelter in the morning.”
“Yes,” Gray agreed. “Exactly our point.”
For a moment, it looked like it might end there. That was before Mr. Whiny lifted something from beneath his coat.
A dart gun.
“No!” I shouted as the police scrambled for their weapons and I dived toward Ginger.
It was too late.
The dart whizzed past Baldy’s arm, nearly hitting him in the elbow and missing me by a half inch. It buried itself in Ginger’s right flank. She yelped, took a couple of steps, stumbled, and then collapsed.
“What the hell?” I sobbed as chaos broke loose.
Everyone was shouting as I crawled toward Ginger with tears in my eyes. I yanked the horrible dart from her leg before pulling her head into my lap. She whimpered a few times before her eyes rolled back in her head and she lay deathly still.
One of the policemen grabbed the scientist with the dart gun, slamming him against the wall and forcibly removing the gun from him, while the other policeman stood between us, arms stretched wide. Both the cops looked stunned at what had just happened.
“You shot the dog?” the policeman shouted at Mr. Whiny. “Are you crazy?”
The scientist cringed. “Sorry! Sorry! No, no, no, she’s fine. It’s a dart gun. It’s just, she can run really fast. And she already ran away once…well, technically, twice. It’s a sedative. She’s sleeping, not hurt. We couldn’t risk her getting away again. Check her, you’ll see. She’s okay.”
Baldy rounded on him. “You nearly shot me, you son of a?—”
“Enough,” the policeman roared and everyone in the room fell silent. “Everyone shut up and let me check the dog.” He knelt next to me and with surprisingly gentle hands felt for the pulse at her neck.
“She’s alive,” he said, standing back up. “But you did yourself no favors by shooting that dog without warning.”
“I’m s-sorry, Officer,” Mr. Whiny said, his lips trembling. “We, we just couldn’t lose her again.”
The policeman holding Mr. Whiny finally released him with a small, disgusted push but kept the dart gun safely in his hand and out of reach of anyone else.
“Okay,” the policeman said. “Everyone needs to calm down. If you have proof of ownership, we can settle this right now. Nobody is shooting anything else tonight.”
“Yes, sir,” Baldy said smoothly. “I’m going to reach into my coat and pull out the papers, okay?”
“Easy,” the policeman said, his hand on his service weapon.
“Absolutely.” Baldy carefully pulled out a folder and handed it to the policeman. “She belongs to us at Tango Bio Research Solutions of New Jersey. She is a fully registered research animal and that’s her microchip number.”
I was so angry, I was shaking. “You could have brought that to the shelter tomorrow where her chip could be properly read. We have no chip reader here, so there’s no way to verify this dog is chipped with the number you are claiming on that piece of paper.”
The policeman looked between me and the bald guy and shrugged. “She’s got a point. These papers say a golden retriever, but there are thousands of them in this city.”
“We don’t need the chip to verify the dog is ours,” the bald man said. “We were able to track her because she has a specialized GPS tracking chip between her shoulder blades. Not only that, but she has a unique birthmark under her right front paw. It’s an irregular oval shape of pinkish-white pigmentation. You can check it for yourself, Officer. That’s our dog.”
Once again, the policeman knelt and lifted her paw. My throat tightened when he looked up. “He’s right. Between being able to track the dog here and the birthmark…well, that confirms it for me. I’m sorry, ladies, but I’m going to let them take their dog.”
I felt the room tilt. I heard Gray swear under her breath.
The second officer sighed. “Legally…the dog is theirs.”
“No,” I said, louder than I meant to. “You don’t understand what they’ve been doing to her.”
“If they’ve done anything illegal, that’s something for Animal Control or the state and federal authorities,” the officer said gently. “But they are her legal owners.”
