Smell!
And as Colonel went to the suitcase with the special smell decoy wrapped in coffee inside, dropped to his chest and gave one single, sharp bark, Preston could feel his shoulders relax. Yes! This was it! Colonel was going to earn his stripes—again. He’d already been placed with the police department, but he had some glitches that Preston was trying to iron out. He really wanted to help this dog live his best life!
Colonel was whining slightly, wiggling his ass and tail, and looking at Preston hopefully before Preston held out his treat.
“Good dog,” Preston praised. “Such a good dog! Keep doing that. Yes. Good dog!” He looked up at Damien and added, “Okay—I’m going to take him around the house and you need to hide the decoy by the stream!” He paused. “But not in the stream!” The decoy was a soft bag that had trace amounts of drugs in the stuffing—he had to get special authorization from the police department to use it, and the department used the exact same kind of bag when working with the dogs on their force.
“Definitely not in the stream,” Damien agreed and then paused and looked up into the sky. “Spencer’s here.”
“Hide the decoy,” Preston said practically. “Then greet Spencer.”
Damien’s eyes went wide, and Preston wondered if that was wrong to dictate things so thoroughly—but he didn’t want Damien to accidentally touch Spencer while he smelled like a decoy, because that would make Colonel nuts the entire time Spencer was there. Damien was wearing gloves so Colonel wouldn’t confuse his smells.
But then the sense of what Preston was asking settled in, and Damien nodded. “Good thinking. Besides, that’ll give Spence time to land.”
The sound of the chopper was getting closer, and Preston called to Colonel briskly, taking him on a trot around the houses and kennel enclosures while the bird landed and Damien ran off toward the shady riparian woodland by the creek that crossed his property.
When he got completely around—it was about a half-mile run—the chopper’s blades were spinning lazily, and Spencer was standing with his hands in his pockets, about six feet away from Damien, which meant Damien had briefed him on the exercise.
Still, that didn’t stop his usually grumpy expression from lightening as Colonel came into view, and Colonel, bless his dense doggy heart, gave a happy bark and ran to greet him.
“No!” Preston snapped. “Colonel, sit!”
Colonel did not sit. Instead, he ran excitedly to Spencer, tail wagging, tongue lolling, his body stretched out in a most undignified lope. He got about four feet away from Spencer and suddenly stopped and barked once, then lay down, his chin on his paws.
Like Spencer was the decoy.
Damien looked at Spencer and Preston looked at Spencer and Spencer stared at the dog.
He knew exactly what that meant.
“No!” he burst out, rolling his eyes. “No, I do not smell like drugs. I haven’t had so much as an aspirin in weeks. Jesus, people, I fly for a living—do you think I’m stupid enough to get in a bird when I’m high?”
Damien shook himself, and Preston thought hard. “No,” Damien said into the silence. “We just… I don’t know what he’s reacting to. That’s really weird. Did you have a passenger who might have… you know—”
“Been doing a little bit of cocaine while I was battling the air currents over the bay?” Spencer snapped, still obviously put out. “No. In fact, Glen and Elsie are out flying—I’m supposed to bring you back so you can man a cargo plane to somewhere I don’t care about to do a thing that’s not my business because I have two days off.”
Damien grimaced. “Shit. I thought I had two days off.”
“Well, yeah. I took an extra shift from Glen because….” Spencer shrugged uncomfortably, and Preston didn’t know what that meant.
“Gotcha,” Damien muttered. He looked apologetically at Preston. “I’m sorry—Glen probably needed the day off. His back has been giving him hell. I know he’s sort of an asshole about it, but I think Spencer’s not saying that he did a nice thing.”
Preston’s eyes widened. His brother, Glen, had been buried under a wall for over twenty-four hours. He’d had surgeries on his shoulder and had only recently been recertified to fly. The cargo and passenger business was Glen and Damien’s baby—and Spencer and his friend Elsie were their first two outside employees. If Spencer was here to get Damien to go help, that meant Damien had to leave.
Dammit.
“You have to go,” he muttered. Then, “But first we need to let Colonel find the bag. And we need to figure out what Spencer smells like, or we don’t know what Colonel thinks he’s smelling.”
“Gotcha. Let’s finish the exercise. Then I can take off the gloves and we can sort this out.”
Colonel was whining at Preston, looking for treats, and Preston was irritated because he wasn’t sure whether to give him one or not. For heaven’s sake—what did Spencer smell like?
“Good dog,” Preston said, hating the ambiguity. “Come get the treat. Come on. Good dog. No, you can’t get pets from Spencer. No. No. Come on. Oh my God, you’re dense. Come on, Colonel, mark!”
It was that final command that did it, and Preston managed to get Colonel down to the creekside, where he quickly identified the decoy under a pile of leaves. Preston gave him lots of treats for that, but as he scooped the decoy up in gloved hands and locked it in his case, he wondered what the smell trigger had been for Spencer. Some dogs were trained to spot smoke—and their sense of smell was so acute that if a kid had been sitting next to a chain-smoking stranger, they’d pull that kid’s backpack out of a lineup during a high school drug search—which was incredibly awkward. Preston was glad he hadn’t been there for that—but he’d been very proud of that dog because it meant he’d trained it well.
Preston and Damien’s home was actually a “lesser” house or cottage that sat behind the main farmhouse on the property. Preston had the thing repainted and refurbished after he and Damien had gotten together, as sort of an enticement to get Damien to move in with him. He’d even added a guest room and bath suite for his miserable brother or any other friend Damien might want over. When that hadn’t worked, Preston had built the chopper pad, and their arrangement seemed to work unless well-meaning colleagues dropped in out of the blue, interrupting what Preston had hoped to be a whole two days of Damien to himself.
When Preston got inside, Damien was packing his duffel bag in their bedroom, hair wet from a quick shower, wearing a fresh set of clothes. Preston could hear the other shower going, and he looked at Damien in confusion.
“Neither of you were particularly dirty,” Preston said shortly.
“Yeah, but I want you to take Colonel to the laundry room. There’s two garbage bags in there—see if he hits on one, then tell me which one.”
Oh. Preston knew where this was going. “Is Spencer washing with vinegar?”
“Reluctantly, but yes. Go! We need to figure this thing out.”
Preston took Colonel with him and was about to tell the dog to mark when Colonel did it without command. Nosing the grocery bag in front of the washer—and ignoring the one in front of the dryer—he gave a sharp bark and set his chin on his paws.