Read Online Ruff Way to Go by Leslie O'Kane - Free Book Online Page A

much a few years down
the line.
    The last
time, I reminded myself, I’d made the mistake of letting my heart run roughshod
over my brain I’d been all but destroyed. My fiance ran off with my maid of
honor. Nothing of the sort was ever going to happen to me again.
    We kept up a
brisk pace, worried that the wet prints would evaporate, but there seemed to be
enough puddles that the dog had run through to keep us on target. The man and
Russell’s money, on the other hand, seemed to be long gone. We managed to track
the dog across three blocks, till we reached an impasse at a loose board in a
gate on someone’s property, which the dog had squeezed through.
    “Guess that’s
that,” Russell said. “We can’t go traipsing through someone’s backyard.”
    “No, but...we
can knock on their door and ask if they’ve seen a terrier.”
    Russell
grimaced slightly and peered over the fence at the house, which I could see
through the slats was small with white clapboard siding. “All right. But for
the sake of the owner, we have to go around and ring the front door rather than
trespass through their backyard.”
    “Well, all
right, but this is awfully conventional. I was really looking forward to
scaling the fence and banging on a bedroom window,” I said with a forced sigh.
    “They’re
probably just sitting down to dinner now, and if we—”
    “I’m
kidding, Russell. Of course I meant that we should go knock on their
front door, not the back.” Actually, that was a lie, but I was certain that the
thought of using the front door would have occurred to me before I’d even
gotten myself halfway hoisted over the fence.
    I masked my
impatience when Russell made the sensible suggestion that we get the car and
drive to the front of the house on our way to the restaurant. My appetite hadn’t
returned, and I suspected that my thoughts were really much too centered around
Cassandra Randon’s murder and Shogun’s related disappearance to be much of a “date”
anyway. But I do try to be fair, and I had already promised Russell I’d go out
with him tonight
    It took us
several minutes to get around to the house. I convinced Russell to let me go
alone to speak to the inhabitants. A Hispanic woman who wasn’t even as tall as
me opened the door and said, “Hello?” More compelling than the fact that I’d
found another short person in Colorado was the yipping sound of a small dog
barking from within the house.
    “Hello. My
name is Allida Babcock. I’m looking for a lost dog that may have come into or
through your backyard. It was a little silky terrier, about yay high.” I spread
my hands about a foot apart to demonstrate.
    She shook
her head at me. “No entiendo, senorita. Un minuto, por favor.”
    A moment
later, a boy who looked to be about ten emerged with the woman and said in an
accent, “My mother doesn’t speak English. Can I help you?”
    “Hi, there.
Yes, I’m—”
    I stopped as
a dog dashed into the room. He was a terrier mix—similar to, but
definitely not, Shogun.
    “I was
looking for a lost dog, and I think I made a mistake and thought I recognized
your dog. What’s your dog’s name?”
    “Rojas.”
    I knelt,
ostensibly to pet him, but also to gage if this was indeed the same dog I’d
mistaken for Shogun. The long fur of the two dogs was very similar, and seen
from the back, it would have been impossible to tell the dogs apart. “Did I
just see your dog running down an alley?”
    “He gets out
of the yard a lot.”
    “You should
fix the loose board in your fence. Rojas could get hit by a car or something.”
    “I will,” he
said, too quickly for me to believe him.
    I thanked
him and his mother and left. By the time I left, Russell was standing by his
car, watching me with a look on his face as if I were considerably prettier
than I really was.
    “Wrong dog,”
I said simply.
    He held open
the door for me. We made our way back onto Main Street.
    “Thanks for
helping me find the dog and