P.M. whimpered again and, with what appeared to be a Herculean amount of effort, settled her head in my lap with a wheezing sigh. My heart twisted with worry. Was it me, or had her breathing gotten even worse?
No, tending to her myself at my place wasn’t the optimum solution to this situation at all. I’d much rather get P.M. checked out by an actual vet, especially considering she might have a broken rib, and the closest 24-hour emergency vet was hours away.
As Artyom pulled away from the curb, I tried the veterinary clinic the shelter worked with Monday through Friday, hoping that maybe Dr. Kovacs had an after-hours answering service.
“Heya, there! This is Dr. Kovacs!”
I let out a breath of relief when Dr. Kovacs’s hearty Midwestern voice came down the line.
But then he said, “With a message to let you know the office will be closed until Tuesday in honor of a very special holiday—my twenty-seventh anniversary!”
My heart sank as Dr. Kovacs’s apparently recorded voice laughed at his own gotcha joke. “But if you need anything before Tuesday…”
Hope swelled in my chest...
“…you’re outta luck because Janine and I will be ice fishing in a remote, undisclosed location.”
...then deflated like air from a balloon.
“But leave a message after the beep, and we’ll get back to you when we return to the office. Signing off, Dr. Kovacs, your dependable local vet.”
Dependable, my ass.I nevertheless left a detailed and urgent message before switching over to see what YouTube tutorials I could find for tending to dogs after they’d gotten into an altercation.
There wasn’t much, but I watched a few things and put what I could find in my queue.
I didn’t realize I’d fallen into hyper-focus until a message from Trish suddenly popped up on my screen. I squinted to read.
TRISH: Hey, whatcha doing? Want to go get some consolation ice cream with me?
Consolation ice cream was what my lactose-intolerant bestie called eating entire pints of Ben & Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream when she was between girlfriends because she didn’t have to worry about the smelly consequences.
I began to text her about what was going on, but then I noticed two things:
One: Artyom was talking to someone in Russian through his car’s infotainment system, and
Two: Even taking my general time blindness into account, I’d been in the car for way longer than it should’ve taken to get to my place.
“Oh, no!” I cursed when I glanced out the window and saw that the truck was zipping past dark rows of trees instead of the postcard college town where I lived.
“I’m so sorry!” I called over P.M.’s head to Artyom in the front seat. “But you need to go west on East—not east. I know that’s confusing, but we have to turn around.”
“Hold on,” Artyom said to whomever he was talking to on the phone. Then he turned to me. “Nyet, we will go this way.”
“But this is the wrong way,” I started to argue—only to cut off when he made a sharp left onto a dimly lit access road. “Wait, where are you taking me?”
Instead of answering, Artyom stopped the truck in front of a dark-wood lake house with sleek, angular lines and huge glass windows that gleamed under the night sky.
I stopped arguing when I saw the group standing under the lake house’s brightly lit entrance.
There was a man and a woman, who looked to be college students around my age. They wore open leather jackets over matching egg-yellow University of Gemidgee hoodies. But unlike regular college students, they had stone-cold expressions, and they each had a hand wrapped around the upper arm of an older man dressed in plaid pajamas and a fuzzy pink robe.
“Oh my God.” My mouth dropped open. “Is that Dr. Kovacs?”
“You are welcome,” Artyom said from the front seat.
Two hours later,I stroked P.M.’s sole undamaged leg as she lay sound asleep on the dining room table in Artyom Rustanov’s enormous house. Dr. Kovacs had thoroughly cleaned her wounds, stitched up the worst of the bite marks, and applied antiseptic to prevent infection. He’d also wrapped her chest in a snug bandage to stabilize the broken rib and administered pain medication to keep her comfortable, along with a mild sedative to help her rest.
“Thanks so much for coming to see P.M. on a Friday night,” I told Dr. Kovacs as he packed up his medical bag.
