Stranded

ball get their attention? Did their eyes follow its every movement? Did they dive for it? And last, when they caught it, did they have a good grip on it? For air-scent work, it was all about drive and Grace had passed his ball-crazy test with flying colors.
    Despite all the training and harnessing the independence, Creed was always surprised by how a dog’s mood and behavior could be influenced by the handler. As he started getting fidgety and looking for someplace to stop, he noticed Grace’s head coming up more often.
    “It’s okay, girl,” he told her.
    Even in the dark, Creed knew this stretch of Interstate 55 and knew that in a couple more miles he’d be leaving the state of Mississippi behind and entering Tennessee. He tried to avoid stopping at Mississippi’s rest areas. The state was one of the few that had security guards at their interstate rest areas 24/7. That should have been a plus, but Creed considered them a nuisance and the term “security guard” a joke. The only thing they guarded was where a dog could or couldn’t pee. He liked to have his dogs stretch their legs, walk around, and sniff without a security guard following in his motorized cart telling him to stay in the designated “pet area.” The area that amounted to a fifteen-by-twenty-foot patch of dead grass. So he waited until he passed the blue-and-white sign that read:
    TENNESSEE
THE VOLUNTEER STATE
WELCOMES YOU
    Then he started to look for the rest area he’d use before he reached Memphis.
    He’d rather drive straight through the night. Grace wouldn’t mind. His dogs always needed fewer bathroom stops than he did. The coffee made that difficult. But stopping wasn’t about losing travel time. The truth was, he didn’t like rest areas or truck stops.
    Actually, they called them truck plazas now. They’d become miniature towns with cafés, small grocery stores, and what was called “convenience retail.” Some even had a twenty-four-hour, full-service barber shop. There were places for truckers to shower, watch TV, use the Internet, and rent a bed by the hour to catch some sleep outside of their trucks. There were also places to buy drugs, if you knew where to look. And late at night there were women who went from truck to truck, knocking on the cabs.
    Unlike the rest areas, the truck plazas were busy night and day, big rigs pulling in and out, motors constantly humming, brakes screeching.
    Creed avoided the truck plazas.
    Rest areas, however, were no less a challenge. No matter how many years had passed since his sister had gone missing from one, he couldn’t stop—especially in the middle of the night—without memories of
that
night. All it took was the smell of diesel and the sound of hydraulic brakes.
    Creed knew subsequent panic attacks could be triggered by a slight reminder of the original one. Something as simple as a smell or a sound. He hadn’t experienced a full-blown attack in yearsbut lately he felt one simmering close to the surface. Exhaustion, stress, anxiety—all were contributing factors. He had worked three homicide scenes just this month. All young women. And each time the assignment came in, Creed had insisted on taking it himself rather than sending one of his crew.
    Maybe he needed to avoid these cases for a while. Take only search-and-rescue requests. Focus on some drug cases. Devote his time to training. He had a way with dogs. He could train them to sniff out just about anything from lost children to cocaine to bombs. Dogs, he understood. People, not so much.
    What had started as a desperate search for his missing eleven-year-old sister’s body had turned into a successful business, success beyond his expectations. He had a waiting list of law enforcement agencies across the country that wanted his dogs or his services. He could afford to hire more handlers and scale back or redirect his time and energies. Most important, he knew he needed to take a break, rest, and rejuvenate, and do it soon, for his own peace of mind. The panic attacks weren’t the only feelings he kept at bay. There was a hollowness inside of him that threatened to suffocate him if it continued to grow.
    As soon as Creed left the interstate, Grace sat up. The exit ramp to the rest area curved down and around, taking them into a wooded area that immediately shielded them from the interstate’s traffic. The road forked: right for cars, left for trucks.
    Creed was familiar with this one. He’d stopped here on several