Free Jackie's Wild Seattle by Will Hobbs Page A

and now he’s hooked. Up till now he’s always held something back, always tried to protect himself emotionally. With Liberty he just couldn’t, so he’s giving it his all.”
    â€œHe’ll be crushed if she doesn’t pull herself together.”
    â€œI know,” Jackie said softly.
    I flashed on Tyler and the opposite point of view. “Jackie, what do you say to someone who says most of these animals aren’t worth saving? Like all these baby squirrels, the little skunks, the baby birds?”
    â€œA life is a life,” Jackie said without hesitation. “That’s what I say. A life is a life. It’s not ours to decide which are worth saving and which aren’t.”
    â€œI understand,” I said. “Thank you for that, Jackie, and thank you for everything. My parents would kiss your feet.”
    She waved me away. “They might have pigeon droppings on them or worse.”
    On my way back to bed I checked in on Cody. He wasn’t jabbering with dogs or with the wildlife this time, he was chewing on his blankie, and with a vengeance.
    No doubt he was having a nightmare. Only the day before he’d shown me a photograph in his Book of Disasters of a softball-sized meteorite that had crashed through the roof of a house and then through the floor at the foot of a kid’s bed. What disaster was he tilting with now?

11
THE DAY OF THE HAWK
    I finally got to sleep, only to end up fighting a nightmare myself, an old one that was back like a disease. I was in an airplane that had been hijacked by terrorists who were flying us right at a skyscraper. A moment before the impact I saw people jump up from their desks. They were looking at us and we were looking at them. Somehow Cody and I survived the collision and found ourselves inside the building. In the dark and the smoke and amid the screams, we started racing down the stairs. After what seemed like forever—everybody kept falling on one another—we had only reached the forty-sixth floor, and time was running out. The whole building was about to come down.
    Finally I got so scared, I blinked myself awake. And there was Cody, standing by my bed. “Something’s different,” he said. “It’s all cloudy. It’s starting to rain.”
    By now I was awake enough to see he was clutching his blankie. There was a hurt look on his face. “What is it?” I said.
    â€œUncle Neal got hurt.”
    I sat up. “How, Cody? What happened? How bad is he hurt?”
    â€œIt was in a dream, Shan.”
    â€œOh, thank goodness. Don’t scare me like that! Come, sit on the bed and tell me about it.”
    He sat on the bedside, sort of hiding his blankie with his leg. It used to picture Mickey Mouse from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with the wand and the wizard’s hat, but these days you had to fill in quite a bit with your imagination. Cody had been on the verge of retiring his blankie when September 11 happened. “Go ahead, Cody,” I told him. “It’s good to talk about your bad dreams.”
    Even though I haven’t been talking about my own, I thought.
    â€œOkay, Uncle Neal was on a steep roof trying to kill a cat with a hockey stick.”
    â€œCody, Uncle Neal does not kill cats.”
    â€œI know, but he doesn’t like how they kill so many birds, and Tyler killed a dog with a stick. It all got mixed together.”
    â€œI can see that, but how did you know what Tyler did?”
    â€œRobbie told me. The bad part of my dream was, Uncle Neal slipped when he was trying to kill the cat and fell off the roof. He got hurt really bad. He had to go to the hospital.”
    I gave him a hug. “This is not a big deal, Cody. Strange things happen in dreams. I ought to know, I have my share of weird ones.”
    â€œBad ones, scary ones?”
    â€œLast night I had one about the World Trade Center—the airplanes and the towers. I’ve had