His paws were a little out of control and he had pain coming from his side and his front left leg. The injuries, if that were what he could feel, would have to wait for later though because he needed to make sure his human was okay and that meant subduing the man whose scent was in his nostrils.
The sound of the car engine starting told Rex he was already too late, but he got his paws sorted out and leapt for the car just as it sprang forward.
Francis was in a deep panic. What had been a perfectly crafted, seamlessly executed plan was going completely to pieces. He was going to have to cut his losses and get out of here right now. His door wasn’t even closed when he let the handbrake go and stamped on the accelerator. The roller door to the lockup was down, but he figured he could blast his way through it if he tried. So that was what he did.
The industrial units were little more than wide garages with an extra pedestrian door at the side. Built back in the eighties, the contractor had taken every short cut he could because his winning bid demanded it. The roller doors were the cheapest things going, but at the time he’d managed to secure a contract to perform repairs at the building owner’s expense and had rejoiced because he made more money from fixing the cheap as chips doors than he did from building the lockups in the first place.
Hitting it with the front bumper of the car did several things. Firstly, it folded the roller door outwards from the bottom which ripped the lower sections from the channel they ran in. Second, it yanked the whole assembly from the roof, exploding ancient, and cheaply made mortar which came away along with brickwork and the chain which made the door go up and down. Third, it set off both airbags.
None of these things would have stopped Francis from driving away, but the cop car just pulling to a stop outside did.
The two uniformed constables had been directed to investigate what dispatch thought to be a hoax call. They were duty bound to check it, but the level of urgency got dropped a peg, not only because it was likely to be nothing, but also because there was no danger to life reported: a break in at a lockup was not an urgent shout.
Constables Marin and Patterson had been attending to a minor RTA on the other side of town but were nearly finished when the call came in. Like dispatch, they expected it to be nothing but a hoax. Until the garage door exploded right next to them that is. Bricks, a large chunk of a galvanised steel roller door, and a bright red Ford Mondeo slammed into them as yet more pieces of masonry showered down on the roof of their squad car.
It scared the socks off Constable Marin who was in the passenger seat and took the full brunt of the low speed impact. Some choice words were said, but the time to gather themselves and work out what had happened was snapped away when the driver of the red car bailed out and started running.
‘What the heck was that?’ yelled Patterson. Then, when he should have been getting out and giving pursuit, he said, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ Checking on his partner who he’d been secretly admiring since they started riding together six months ago.
‘Yes! Yes, I’m fine, just get going! I can’t get out my side,’ Marin despaired of her partner. He was nice enough but seemed far too concerned with making her life easy when he ought to be focused on the job. He was gawping at her now and she had to shove him to get him moving.
As they were bailing out through the undamaged driver’s door, from the dark interior of the lockup a large shadow was emerging. The dust from the exploded roller door was still filtering out and shrouding the air in a hazy cloud and from that, trailing debris as he ran was a giant dog. It leapt onto the bonnet of the squad car to get around the wreckage of the roller door, and off again as he tore after the driver.
‘Go!’ shouted Marin, slapping Patterson on his shoulder to get him moving. Her partner put his head down to start sprinting but just as he did, something close to the ground and moving fast whipped by his feet. Momentarily terrified that there were terrible creatures escaping from the exploded lockup – Patterson watched far too many horror movies – he squealed and fell over. Marin’s centre of gravity was already extended beyond her toes as she tried to get out of the car. Patterson was supposed to be gone, giving her room to stand and now there was none.
Falling on top of her partner, the pair got to see a pair of feet shuffle up to the boot of the red Mondeo and a second set of feet, these ones tied together in duct tape, appear a moment later. They were looking under the car, bewildered by what they could see and now they became a tangle of limbs and excuse me’s as they tried to extricate themselves and get to their feet without inadvertently touching parts of each other they ought not to.
Rex knew none of this. He saw his human be grabbed and shoved inside the building but no matter how much he had bucked; he couldn’t get his collar free. It was his new little dachshund friend who came to the rescue.
‘I can gnaw through the leather,’ he offered, putting his front two paws on Rex’s neck. ‘The lead is rope, that’s way too hard, but I can get through your
