She interpreted even my gesture of courtesy to be an insult. “Is it because you don’t believe a ‘girl’ would attack you on the ride to jail?”
I could have told Indigo Mazur that I’d once been stabbed by a “girl” who bore a slight resemblance to her. And that I’d learned a hard but valuable lesson from that experience. Never underestimate the threat even the least outwardly intimidating person can pose to your life.
But I wasn’t there to tell them about my brushes with death. “I’m not going to arrest you. I’m not even going to write you a summons, although I could probably come up with a charge that might even stick if the district attorney happened to be feeling generous towards me. But there’s no point in punishing you.”
“What’s your game here?”
“I’m not playing a game. I’m telling you that the State of Maine will not be bringing charges against you, not for luring a domestic dog to a bait pile, not for failing to pursue the animal you wounded, not even for planting a broadhead in Gorman Peaslee’s truck when you saw it parked at the Farmington hospital.”
“Why not?”
“First, because it’s not worth the time of the state employees who would be assigned to a case we might not even win. But second, and most important, because I choose not to.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re free to go.”
“Am I supposed to thank you for being magnanimous?”
I retrieved my crossbow bolt from the back of her Baja. “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”
Zane had been stunned into silence by his girlfriend’s diminishment of him. Now I saw that he was struggling to ask the question that had pained him from the moment he’d seen the injured animal on Alcohol Mary’s mountain.
“How is the wolf dog doing?”
“His name is Shadow, and it looks like he’s going to live.”
“Can I go see him?”
“What the fuck, Zane?” Indigo said.
“I can take you there if you’d like,” I said. “He’s in the Pennacook Hospital for Animals, so it’s going to take about an hour to get there and another hour back.”
“Thank you.” Zane turned to his girlfriend, the unspoken question hanging in the air between them.
Her answer was a snort and a shake of the dreads. “Are you crazy? Why would I want to go?”
“Because you…?”
“What?”
She honestly had no clue.
I had felt sorry for Zane before. But Indigo had revealed herself as clearly to him as she ever would. I understood that he had a choice to make that would shape the rest of his life.
What had Dani said to me? “You have all the information you need to make a decision.” And now Zane did, too.
When Dr. Holman’s pink-haired assistant showed us to the back room of the clinic where they were keeping Shadow, I was surprised to find the wolf on his feet. He still looked hollow eyed and gaunt, and the unevenly shaved spots in his fur gave him a sad, patchwork appearance, but he had been eating heartily, the young woman said, and had showed no signs of aggression to the doctor or herself. He did, however, make a noise that wasn’t quite a growl but signaled his displeasure with the three of us gawking at him in his confinement.
“He’s even bigger than I realized,” said Zane, who held back from the cage as if the animal might have the strength to crash through the bars. “What a specimen!”
“He’s inglorious,” agreed pink-hair. She cast a glance at me. “Am I using that word right?”
“You are,” I lied.
Holman was in surgery, dealing with an unlucky cat whose teeth were being painfully resorbed into her jaws—a condition I had never heard of. The vet promised she would peek in if she got free. But I suspected we wouldn’t be seeing her.
“What’s going to happen to him?” Zane asked.
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Holman had said Shadow would heal in time, but not completely. If he really had suffered nerve damage, he might never be able to run at top speed. Clearly I wouldn’t be releasing him back into the woods to find his female companion—not that I would have. No wolf could dwell safely in this part of Maine, not for the foreseeable future.
Nor could I think of a sanctuary where I might deliver Shadow for safekeeping where he could live out the rest of his days in the company of other wolf dogs. The closest such facility, across the border in New Hampshire, was a compound consisting of acre-size enclosures in the woods. The inmates were fed scraps from a slaughterhouse and had either the same vacant stares or nervous tics I had observed among their human equivalents at the Maine State Prison.
Taking responsibility for the well-being of a creature such as Shadow—unpredictable, dangerous, and wild at heart—was a life commitment of the first order.
“We’re still working out the details,” I said.
Zane lingered behind me. “When I look at him, I can’t decide if he’s a dog or a wolf.”
“Both. Or neither.”
“I wish Indigo had come with us.”
“I do, too.” I cleared my throat. “I’m going to hang out here a second if that’s all right.”
I wanted a few more minutes with the wolf now that he didn’t have the pall of death hanging over him. I suppose I was curious if he remembered me. We’d only been together a few short days, and that was several years prior. I felt that I was projecting a bond with him that was one-sided and as sentimental as the beliefs I ridiculed when I heard them expressed by animal rights activists.
“I’m not surprised you don’t remember me,” I said to the wolf.
He stood with his head tucked beneath his shaggy shoulders.
“There’s no reason you would, I guess. Considering the crazy life you’ve led. I wanted to tell you that she’s alive. Your female. I’m not sure what I can do to keep her safe, but I am working on it. But
