Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

without any effort on my part. Mel changed places with me, whipping me around behind his back, and immediately afterward, though it all seemed to happen at once, there was the shot, and a sound from Mel like air escaping from a tire. Joe screamed, Dashiell yelped, I heard the apartment door slam, and Mel slumped against me as if someone had suddenly removed the bones from his body. I held on while he, too, slid to the floor. Dashiell was in the hallway shaking his head. Behind him, Blanche made an amazingly small heap just inside the door to Sophie’s apartment. When I looked back at Mel’s face, which was already as gray as the sky above the garden just behind me, his blood spilling down his chest, hot and sticky on my hand, there was Bianca, licking his hands and whining.
    “Phone, Dashiell,” I told him, forgetting the wires had been cut.
    I bunched up Mel’s shirt and pressed it against the wound, watching helplessly as the blood continued to ooze out around it.
    Bianca was in near hysterics, licking Mel’s face now, but it wasn’t until after Dash came with my cell phone in his mouth and I had dialed nine-one-one that I realized what she was doing.
    Mel opened his eyes and looked at me. “I told him he’d already gone too far,” he said, barely audible. Then his eyes rolled up and he began to shake, legs kicking, arms jerking, saliva coming out of one side of his mouth, in the middle of it all making a honking noise, like a goose. I held on tight, keeping his head on my lap, trying to prevent further injury, thinking all along that if he didn’t get emergency care soon, if he didn’t get a transfusion, he’d be gone no matter what I did.
    When Mel stopped shaking, I saw that Bianca was lying pressed against his side. I looked down the hall at Blanche and could see her torso moving up and down, her breathing as shallow as Mel’s was now, both of them slipping away as I sat there waiting for help.
    Mel opened his eyes once more, looking confused for a moment. When he opened his mouth, I bent my head to listen.
    “I’m sorry,” was all he said.
    “Help is on the way,” I whispered.
    “It’s okay,” he said. “I feel better now.”
    I held him tight, one arm under his neck and around his shoulder, one hand still pressed against the wound, rocking him back and forth in my arms as if he were my baby, feeling his life running out between my fingers.

Chapter 25
    Someone Has to Get the Dog

    “There’s a dog at his house,” I’d told one of the officers who responded to the 911 call. “Someone will have to get her.”
    He nodded and wrote it down.
    “Do you want me to ... ?”
    “No, ma’am. Thank you. We’ll take care of checking out the victim’s residence.”
    I winced.
    “Sorry, ma’am. Were you close?”
    I didn’t know how to answer him. I hardly knew Mel Sugarman, but less than an hour earlier, he’d saved my life and lost his own in the process.
    “We’ll take care of the dog. It looks like you got enough on your hands as it is.”
    I looked down at my hands, soaked in blood, and for an odd moment thought that’s what he meant.
    But he must have meant the animals that were already in my care, because he was looking at Dashiell, who was sitting next to the couch, pressed against my leg.
    “Maybe Marty would take care of her for now,” I said.
    His eyebrows went up. “Ma’am?”
    “The dog. Maybe Marty Shapiro could take her temporarily.”
    He still looked puzzled.
    “He’s with the Bomb Squad. At the Sixth.”
    He made a note of that, too.
    An army had responded to my call. There was blue everywhere, paramedics, too. They’d put pressure pants on Mel, started an IV, but it was too little and too late. Much too late. Now they were waiting for the Crime Scene Unit, the detectives in dark-colored suits and cheap ties standing around and talking to each other, three of them out in the garden, two more in the short hallway, Bianca lying at Mel’s side, not moving even when the paramedics tried to shoo her away. One look at that little black teardrop and they let her stay, working around her.
    One of the officers had carried Blanche out into the garden and a paramedic seemed to be taking her vital signs. I couldn’t see if she was still breathing. I could hardly breathe myself at that point.
    “Ms. Alexander?”
    I must have closed my eyes. When I looked up, the uniform was gone. A familiar-looking man in a suit was there in his place.
    “Detective Agoudian,” he