Canine Capers

Hat tip to my canine crime partner G.  - 

[ Slow jazz piano plays under the crackle of a dusty radio. A distant thunderclap rolls in. A match strikes. Cigarette inhaled.]

NARRATOR (gravelly, wry):

She sits in the corner of my garage like a dame in a cocktail dress at a VFW hall — outta place, outta season, and dreaming of summer. That’s Miss Madeleine Car. A Triumph. Restored and refined, she’s all chrome curves and quiet sighs, waiting for the kind of open country road where the only traffic light is the sun slipping behind a barn.

But me? I drive a beast. A full-size, extended cab 4x4 — the kind of rig that blocks out the sun and flattens the foolish. In the city, where stoplights are more like polite suggestions and every commuter’s auditioning for Talladega Nights, you need mass, momentum, and a decent deductible. Especially in Chicago — the birthplace of the pothole slalom, where the streets are booby-trapped by the Department of Reflex Testing. You don’t drive here. You dodge. You dance. You pray.

Still, I feel safer in that truck than I have in most relationships. It’s paid off, it’s high up, and nothing — and I mean nothing — clears a lane faster than a redhead with no estrogen and a lead foot behind the wheel of a rolling steel fist.

[ Jazz fades. A lighter clicks again. The narrator exhales.]

Work cars? I’ve had ’em. Issued by the Office of Official-Looking Business. You drove ’em like you were chaperoning nuns to bingo — by the book, by the hour, and always ten under the limit. Especially if you saw a patrol cruiser in the rearview. You did not want to end up as the punchline of the week for getting ticketed in what we affectionately called… the Squirrelmobile.

Back then, I was part of a little outfit we’ll just call the International Sneaky Service — a rogue division of Secret Squirrel Ltd. The work was varied, the rules many, and the surprises often had four legs and a tail.

We were on a recon mission, sort of. Midday pit stop outside a diner shaped like a pancake griddle, when the guy we called Lucky — a career op with a busted heart and two years left till freedom — wandered over to the adjacent parking lot where a pet adoption truck was doing its civic duty. He came back with the look of a man who’d just glimpsed salvation in a wagging tail. Said he’d found an old Lab. Gray muzzle, brown eyes, nobody wanted him.

He was asking me. For permission. Me— his team lead. I looked around. My crew was all hard cases: a shot-up combat pilot, a jarhead who cried over fallen K-9s, and a probie who still had that new-spook smell. I gave the nod.

[Jazz fades into soft clarinet.]

Twenty minutes later, Lucky’s got a leash in one hand and a tail-wagging co-pilot in the other. But the ride home was tricky. We had one ride: the official Sneaky Service sedan. Probie’s eyes went wide like we were stuffing dynamite under the seat.

“You can’t put a civilian in the Sneaky car!” he whispered like J. Edgar Hoover was listening.

“Relax,” I said. “He’s not a civilian. He’s a canine. There’s no clause against dogs. No opposable thumbs, no subpoenas.” Besides, the mutt didn’t ask for hazard pay.

Still, Probie spent the ride curled up like a guilt burrito in the back seat, whispering doomsday.

“A DOG… in the SNEAKY car… we might as well be hauling a KILO of COCAINE!”

We got back. No fanfare. No sirens. But as we slid out of the car, our stealth mission met its first real danger: chemical warfare. The Lab had dropped a gas bomb in the back seat so lethal it peeled paint. We evacuated like paratroopers from a burning plane.

The next shift climbed in and recoiled like they’d discovered a crime scene.

“WHAT IS THAT SMELL?!” one of them bellowed.

“DEAR GOD, IT’S… IT’S ALIVE!”

We never admitted a thing. Lucky kept the dog. Named him Buddy. Buddy got a warm bed, table scraps, and a man who needed him more than he ever knew. And in those final years, that dog taught us a thing or two about loyalty… and strategic ventilation.

[ Music swells. Rain patters on a metal roof.]

That’s the tale, boys and girls. A Triumph waits in the garage. A redhead rules the road. And somewhere, in a quieter corner of the world, a dog once gassed a government vehicle… and got away with it.

[Cigarette stubbed out. Jazz fades to silence.]

 NARRATOR (quietly):

Justice wears many collars. Sometimes they’re leather. Sometimes… they drool.

 - LBJ