Free Snitch by Norah McClintock Page B

problems. I didn’t know anything about dogs. And I didn’t like what I was hearing.
    Maggie nodded to Scott. He left the room. When he came back, there were three other people with him. Each of them was holding onto four dog leashes. Each leash had a dog at the end. Most ofthe dogs were barking and growling and jumping around. A couple of the dogs were pulling in the opposite direction, like all they wanted to do was get out of the room.
    Some of the guys looked at each other. I bet some of them were thinking the same thing I was—no wonder those dogs couldn’t get adopted. They were like hyperactive kids, yapping and jumping and not paying any attention to Scott and the other people who were trying to get them to calm down.
    â€œOkay,” Mr. Weller said. “I am going to call your names. When you hear your name, come up and meet your dog.”
    One by one, guys got up and walked to the front of the room. Nobody seemed in a big hurry to get there. A couple of guys walked with more confidence. Maybe they had dogs at home. One guy must not have been paying attention to Maggie. As soon as he got to the front of the room, he stuck out his hand in front of the dog he was supposed to be training. The dog lunged athis hand. The guy jumped back so fast he got tangled up in a chair in the front row. He fell over. Everyone laughed.
    Finally there were only two dogs left. One was a small hairy thing. I don’t even know what kind it was. It was one of the dogs that had been pulling to get out of the room. The other was a big white dog that looked like a cross between a pit bull and something even nastier. I looked at the girl. We were the only two people whose names hadn’t been called. Then Mr. Weller said, “Amy.” The girl got up and walked slowly to the front of the room as if she were walking to the electric chair or something. She was probably scared she was going to get the big dog.
    Of course, she didn’t.
    No, they gave her the little dog, whose name was Coco. They saved the big one for me.
    â€œJosh,” Mr. Weller said, “meet Sully.”
    I did everything that Maggie had said to do and didn’t do anything that she had warned us not to. It didn’t make anydifference. Sully took one look at me and lunged. The guy who had been holding his leash was asleep on the job or something because he let go, and all of a sudden this dog was jumping on me. He was growling. All I saw was teeth and drool. I froze. Then someone had hold of the leash again and was talking to the dog in a soft, firm voice, telling it to “Get down. Down, boy.”
    It was Scott.
    He didn’t look the least bit afraid.
    Once he got the dog calmed down, he brought it over to me and stayed with me until the dog stopped jumping around. I wanted to tell him to get lost, but I didn’t want to get stuck alone with the dog. What a monster.

Chapter Three
    â€œSo, how was it?” Andrew said. He was waiting for me out in the parking lot. He had come directly from work. His main job was shift manager at a video store. He still had on his store T-shirt. He had a second job delivering newspapers. He did that between 3:30 and 5:30 in the morning.
    â€œWhat do you think?” I said. I got into the car and slammed the door. I had spenthalf an hour with that stupid dog. Most of the time Scott was right there with me because it turned out—
of course
—that my dog had more problems than any of the other dogs in the program.
    â€œYeah, but dogs,” Andrew said. “That should be fun, right? Remember when you were little? You always wanted a dog.”
    I’d been mad, too, that I had never got one. My dad always said they were more trouble than kids, and kids were trouble enough. The only kind of animal my dad liked was fish—at the end of his fishing line. My main memory of my dad is going fishing with him. Hauling in a fish and dropping it into the bottom of his old boat and