Free 4 Woof at the Door by Leslie O'Kane Page B

held his wolf at bay as I staggered past him toward the door. The room was dark, the heavy curtains on all windows drawn tightly shut. The room was empty. No bean bags, lamps, collectibles. Had the house been burglarized?
    Working with my good hand, I got the locks to operate and looked back into the room as I pulled open the front door. Along the wall of cinderblock shelves, the stereo and TV were still in place. A tripod was set up in the back corner, no camera in sight.
    Outside, Damian was instructing a pair of startled officers and another pair of male paramedics to let him pass. “Just let me get her locked up. The van’s got a built-in cage.” Damian’s vehicle was a dark blue and again had tinted windows, similar to the steel gray van that Larry Cunriff had used a few hours earlier.
    One paramedic opened the back doors of the van for him and then dashed aside. Damian was strong enough to hurl the wolf up and into the van.
    I made my way down the steps toward them in a dazed state. Beverly had rounded the house and was on the sidewalk talking to one of the officers. When she saw me, she trotted toward me, ignoring the policeman beside her telling her to stop. In the corner of my vision, I could see the Atkinsons heading through the gate with yet another uniformed officer.
    Feeling faint, I shut my eyes for a moment and saw a vision of Atla, her blood-soaked ruff and paws.
    Beverly rushed to my side. “Allida! What happened to you? You’re bleeding!”
    “The wolf bit me. Not bad, though. I’m current on my tetanus vaccinations. I’ll be all right.”
    She yanked off the long-sleeve blouse that she’d been wearing jacket-style over her T-shirt and wrapped it around my hand. The policeman had stepped beside us. “Officers? She needs medical attention.”
    “Miss?” one of the officers said. “We need to speak to you. Would you come with us, please?”
    I glanced down at my injured hand, which was throbbing. Blood was already soaking through Beverly’s blouse. “Okay, but could you give me a ride to the emergency room while we’re at it?”
     
    The next couple of hours passed in that same kind of semi-conscious state my brain seems to put itself into when I’ve got a really bad flu. The EMTs put some butterfly bandages on my wound, then took me to the emergency room at Boulder Community Hospital. Although having policemen as companions won me a lot of strange looks and a pariah-like treatment from my fellow patients, it didn’t seem to get me a doctor any sooner.
    Despite my trauma, the officers asked me questions, and I answered them, while garnering random images from my surroundings. A nurse was criticizing the EMTs over something about my butterfly bandages. The family in the cubicle next to mine, distraught over their little boy’s head injury. The loud, elderly woman on the other side of me complaining in a thick German accent about how slow the doctor was in arriving. The pervasive masking odor of antiseptic that I was certain was now permanently embedded in my nostrils.
    Then the doctor came bearing bad news. A wolf can’t be observed for a mere ten days for rabies the way domestic animals can. I would have to undergo both the two rabies immune globulin shots—today’s and in another three days—plus the full set of vaccinations. This meant a total of five vaccine applications; three this week, then one in two weeks, and my last in four weeks. That meant treatments to the wound itself as well as turning my butt into a pin cushion for extremely long needles.
    Once my stitches were in place, my hand bandaged, and I was able to sit without crying out, the officers took me to the station house on 30th Street. We went through the very same lengthy set of questions that I’d already answered while in the hospital. I told them, once again, that it was clear to me that Ty Bellingham’s death had come not from teeth or claws, but from a knife. The police, in turn, made it clear that, for my own