Dave 1 shot the old man an enquiring look from the side of his face but didn’t say anything in front of the officer. Was a button evidence? Maybe. Albert figured he wouldn’t know until he found where it had come from. He already had a good guess lined up, but no idea when he might get to test it.
Coming out of the container, the officer paused, and with a frown, asked, ‘Didn’t you have a dog?’
Blood in the Air
Rex’s nose led him onwards, but he was beginning to doubt that he was tracking the scent of the moped. There was something wrong about it … something human. It was the same scent, yet different.
When the answer came to him, it was like a gut punch – he was smelling the moped on a human! Was it the one he chased earlier today, the one who cheated in their game of chase and bite? It could be, Rex knew, but he couldn’t be certain because he had been too busy chasing to get a good grasp of the human’s scent.
If he assumed it was the same human, then he was here now, in the same location as the human in the suit he was trying to hurt in the alleyway. Was he here earlier when Rex had been chasing the cat? The disappointing answer to that question was probably a yes and he’d been too distracted to notice.
The sound of his human’s voice reached his ears, pricking them up, but as Rex turned to go, he caught something on the wind.
Blood.
Turning his whole body toward the breeze, Rex closed off his other senses and tried to catch it again.
‘Rex!’
Rex heard the shout but filtered it out. If he could hear his human shouting, then his human was okay, and he could go to him shortly. Right now, he needed to focus on finding the source of the blood. It was on the wind, and like the moped’s exhaust scent, it was almost intangible. Almost but not quite.
When he caught it again, he set off, running quickly but not sprinting. There was blood on the air, and it was human. It usually was in Rex’s experience. He was forced to weave through the storage containers, trucks, vans, and cars again, but his nose led him on, and he could see just fine in the dark. Coming through the last line of vehicles, now well away from the marquee, he saw a human.
The human, a male, was framed in the dim moonlight peering through the clouds above, but now the smell of blood was dominating Rex’s olfactory system and he was having trouble picking up what the man smelled of.
Then he realised, the man also smelled of blood, but it wasn’t his, he was just covered in enough of it to mask his natural odour. The source of the blood was a lump lying on the ground twenty yards behind the human bathed in moonlight.
Rex barked, which he realised afterward was the wrong thing to do. The human broke into a sprint; walking one moment, running as fast as he could the next. Well there was a simple decision: It was chase and bite time. His record for the day was two for nothing, and it was time to improve his batting average.
Rex’s powerful back legs bunched and drove off the grass, his short claws digging in to give him purchase. This far away from the marquee, the ground hadn’t been saturated by the water washing the flour away. It was what racehorses might call good to firm and was perfect for sprinting on.
The injured human lying on the grass needed help, Rex felt certain of that. The scent of blood was strong enough that there had to be a lot of it. However, helping the human would require more humans so Rex concentrated on the thing he knew how to do: chase the criminal.
Almost back at the marquee, Albert heard Rex bark once. It came from way over in the other side of the field. ‘What is that dog up to now?’ he muttered, wishing he hadn’t trusted Rex to hold his own lead. He needed to find Gary and go after Rex. His son was right that it was bedtime but retiring would now have to wait until he found Rex again.
Glancing to his right, he saw Beefy Botham being taken away. The detectives had arrested him, and Albert couldn’t blame them for that. Beefy insisted he was innocent but admitted he sent everyone away to get ingredients and was in the marquee by himself. He then refused to account for how he hadn’t seen Brian and didn’t know how he could have ended up in the mixer. Albert knew he would have arrested him too - the death threat earlier was really damning, especially since that was exactly how Brian came to die.
The police were wrapping up; they had statements, and a suspect in custody, the crime scene guys had a body to process - once they got him out of the batter – so they were about done too.
That was until they heard the dog start to howl mournfully.
Does Anyone Speak Dog?
Rex chased the human across the grass. Whoever it was had a big lead and Rex had to run up an incline to get to him, but even so, Rex did not expect to be beaten for the third time on the same day. He was fast enough to close the distance, but he couldn’t see what was ahead in the dead ground.
Powering onward, closing the gap between them with each bound, he needed just a few more strides to bring down his quarry. Thoughts of whether the human carried a
