Free Cadaver Dog by Doug Goodman Page B

this mall. It is a great decoy.”
    “No,” Angie growled, barely able to contain herself, “It is a great source. You may have another wasp around here, but this is a wasp. Congratulations. You’ve proven that against a direct order to stay away from the source, my dog will still locate your damn wasp.”
    “But this isn’t the target,” Director Summers said slowly, like he was talking to a child. “There is still a wasp in this mall, and it hasn’t been found.” He looked at his watch. “And you only have ten minutes left to find it.”
    “That is bullshit!” Angie yelled. “This is a bullshit test and you are full of bullshit if you don’t accept my dog into your program. To hell with it. I don’t want my dog in your program.”
    Angie leashed Murder and walked out to her pickup and drove away.

Chapter Five
    She ignored Dr. Saracen’s calls, not because she was angry with him but because of everything else. And she was embarrassed. She cursed her ‘all-bitchiness’ temper. She wondered why she couldn’t stop the words from coming out of her mouth. She thought of calling somebody to talk about it, but the few people she could think of were more colleagues than friends. That got her thinking of her anti-social tendencies and how her father had always said she needed to join a dog club or something just so that she could socialize with the outside world.
    She was an anti-social, tempestuous, slovenly (looking at her house, which looked like the dilapidated house in a Febreeze commercial— With Febreeze, You Won’t Realize How God-Awful Nasty Angie Graves’s House Smells — Angie Graves, the home that smells like a grave ) agoraphobe who can only talk to dogs. It was a downward spiral for her, one that usually ended at the bottom of a pizza box and cheap romance books.
    A few days later, the dogs were in the house, and she was eating pizza and scrutinizing her body in the mirror, thinking of how her hair was as greasy as an oil check garage and how when she was a teen her aunt had said that she had “Similac breasts” because there was no way she was ever going to breast-feed children with what she had under her shirt.
    Her cell rang. She wanted to silence her phone. She wasn’t taking calls, not even when the hospital called to confirm she was negative for Hepatitis C and AIDS. This time, though, the ringtone sounded like the calling card pipe organ music to the Phantom of the Opera . That meant it was Lieutenant Hankamer. She answered the phone.
    “I really can’t,” she started to say when she was interrupted.
    “I need to see you. Now. Drop whatever you’re doing and come on over. It’s about the zombie you found in the funeral home.”
    “Oh, uh, okay.” Angie thought about saying she needed time, but that wouldn’t make sense to Jasper, who didn’t care one way or the other because he had already ended the call.
     
    Jasper Hankamer’s small office was Spartan in design, with 1970s wood paneling under a quilt of stained ceiling tiles. On the cheap veneer of an old aluminum office desk stood a line of radios. The room had three padded fold-up chairs, two in the front of the desk and one behind it. Jasper shut the door behind them as Angie entered.
    “I do not pay you for the human remains recovery work you conduct for my PD. I have, however, recommended you to Denver and Chicago units, who purchased your bomb dogs,” Jasper said.
    “What are you getting at?”
    “I am about to say something, and I don’t want it to come off as tit-for-tat. You and me, we already have that established. So this is in no way connected to our working relationship. Animal Control has asked for you.”
    “Those sons of bitches set me and my dog up. I would never work for a couple of degenerates like them.”
    “Degenerates like the Director of Animal Control?” Jasper said sarcastically.
    “Damn straight.”
    “They told me there was a misunderstanding at the demonstration. They were very