Page 34 of The Dog in the Alley

“And it’s an honest answer,” I snapped back. “No, he hasn’t gotten into any medicines.”

“Do you take beta blockers, Mr. Hart?”

“Detective,” I reminded him. “And no. I don’t even know what those do.”

“It’s blood pressure medication,detective.” The emphasis was not meant to be polite.

“Well, that’s not something I have a problem with,doctor, so I can promise you that if there are beta blockers in his system, he didn’t get them from me.”

I could hear the skepticism in his silence.

“If I were drugging my dog,” I hissed at the phone, “would I have bothered bringing him in to get his blood checked?”

“Do you board him during the day?”

“No.”

“Someone comes to check on him?”

“I take him to work with me. I know everything he’s eaten and drunk since I pulled his hairless ass out of a dumpster a week ago. So how about you tell me where the hell he’s getting beta blockers?”

I was staring directly at the dog in question as I said it, and he laid down, putting his head on his paws, and whined. It sounded scared, which only made me angrier.

“I—He has to be getting them from somewhere, detective.” I could tell that my irritation was starting to alarm the vet.

“Look, Dr. Niles, I pulled this dog out of a goddamn dumpster with a dislocated hip and a broken leg at a murder scene, and apparently on top of that, his system is full of drugs. I’m not giving them to him, but maybe this is some new fucked-up, long-lasting shit on the black market that some asshole is testing on—dogs.” I’d almost slipped up and said ‘shifters,’ but I’d thankfully caught myself. I didn’t think this Niles guy seemed the type to be in on Zhou’s late-night backdoor clinic.

“I—suppose?”

“Are these beta blockers at all unusual?” I pressed.

“I—I wouldn’t know,” the vet admitted, nervously. “They just get flagged in our bloodwork.”

“You normally screen dogs for blood pressure medication?”

“We check for lots of things. Medications, toxins, food allergens.”

I drew in a deep breath, letting it out through my nose before I said something really rude to the vet. “So you can’t tell me what kind of beta blocker, then.”

“No.”

“Can you tell me whocouldtell me?”

“No?”

I suppressed a growl. “Can I get a copy of what you do have?”

“Um. I can, um, send it by email.”

I gave him my email address and hung up, then slammed the phone down on the counter a bit harder than was strictly necessary.

At my feet, Anubis whined.

“Sorry, bud. No good answers. You don’t have blood pressure issues, do you?”

I got a whining growl as a response, his ears flat and his head still down. No, he didn’t take blood pressure meds, and he was scared. Or upset, anyway. Possibly both.

I was definitely both.

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