Page 10 of Kid Gloves

Brisket sleeps on, sprawled across enemy territory like a signed treaty.

"Traitor."

Chapter 4

Wade

There's a goat on my porch and a stranger in my bite yard, and it's not even 0600.

The goat I expected. Brisket and I have reached the stage of the occupation where we nod at each other. I step over her, she pretends I'm furniture, honor is preserved on both sides. The stranger in the bite yard is a different category of problem, because the bite yard has a gate, a lock, a sign, and a protocol, and the protocol does not include a woman in a flannel shirt sitting cross-legged in the middle of the training surface at dawn with one of my federal puppies.

I'm halfway there before I recognize the shape of what she's doing, and then I stop at the fence and shut my mouth, because interrupting it would be like walking into surgery to ask about parking.

She's got the shy female. The one I flagged in last week's file as a possible washout — nervy, sound-sensitive, folded in on herself when the feed truck backfired. Career-killer traits at six weeks, historically. Delaney's laid a sheet of crackling plastic on the ground, the exact texture that sent the pup under a bench on Tuesday, and she's sitting beside it doing absolutely nothing. Talking, obviously. To the puppy, about the plastic, in the tone other people use for stock tips.

"—and the thing about tarps," she's saying, "is they're all noise and no teeth. Like Gary. You've met Gary. Complete fraud."

The puppy considers the tarp from the safety of her knee. Considers her. Puts one paw on the plastic.

The world does not end. You can watch the discovery move through the dog like water through a dry field.

"There she is," Delaney says softly, no party, no fuss, already looking away like courage is the most ordinary thing a small dog ever did, and the pup takes another step, and then pounces the tarp and kills it thoroughly, and something in my chest turns over like an engine on a cold morning.

I've run this program nine years. I have two certified training instructors, a library of development literature, and a filing system the Air Force audited and then asked to photograph. I know exactly what I'm looking at, because I've been trying to hire it for most of a decade.

"You're in a restricted area," I say.

She doesn't jump. She'd clocked me — of course she had, the pup told her, ears first. "Your gate lock's a Masterlock 175. Gran had the same one on the grain shed. You should be embarrassed."

"You picked my lock."

"I dialed your lock. Picking implies effort." She scoops the puppy, stands, comes to the fence, and holds the small traitor out to me like evidence. "Sound sensitivity's not in her body, it's in her startle recovery. She resets fine if nobody makes it weird. Your handlers make it weird — the second she flinches, five grown men go full apology tour, and now flinching pays. I need her on different surfaces twice a day and I need everyone to stop narrating her feelings."

"You're describing a protocol change."

"I'm describing Tuesday. The protocol can catch up."

The pup gnaws my thumb, sandpaper and needle tips, drive bright as a struck match even half-asleep. I look at the washout flag in my mental file and move it.

"Come to the office at 0800," I say. "Bring your schedule."

"Why?"

Because I watched you rebuild a burned program in a horse trailer in six hours. Because my newest handler walks taller since Tuesday. Because the renewal committee meets in the fall and you are, professionally speaking, the difference between my pipeline and the cheaper bid, and if I don't formalize what you're doing you'll do it anyway through my locks.

"Paperwork," I say.

The document takes me forty minutes, which is thirty-five longer than it should, because I keep adjusting language.

Contract amendment, early-development program. Delaney Boone: Lead Imprinting Specialist, interim. Full authority over the litter through week sixteen — she had that, now it's in ink. Access: campus-wide. Facilities: whelping wing, training yards by schedule, obstacle course. Compensation adjusted to include facility duties, because she's been fixing my kennel drainage on her own time like she can't help herself, like broken things are a personal insult.

Jake reads it over my shoulder, uninvited, eating an apple from my desk, also uninvited.

"Lead Imprinting Specialist," he says. "You made her a title."

"The org chart needed the role."

"You hate interim titles. You said interim means a decision nobody had the spine to make."