comfortably. She heard the cry again, and this time, with her maternal instinct laid to rest, she could tellthe sound was animal, not human. It was coming from the backyard.
She ran down the hall and out the kitchen door. Mordecai was lying on his stomach, his facepressed against the chain-link fence, whimpering and howling in pain.
“It’s okay, Mordecai,” she said as she approached him. “It’s me, Mordecai.” Animals in pain, sheknew, could strike out without thinking. She softly repeated his name to remind him that she was hisfriend.
When she got closer, she saw what had happened. Mordecai, famous for digging his way out of hisdog pen at the big McGilly house, had attempted to do the same thing with the chain-link fence here. Buthe had, hit a painful snag.
The section of fencing he had exposed was torn, as though someone had clipped a jagged hole in it
— a hole just the right size to trap one of his mammoth front paws.
There was a lot of blood. In trying to remove his paw from the trap, he had only succeeded indigging the metal into his flesh.
“Poor baby,” Lily cooed. Mordecai whimpered in agreement.
Lily locked her fingers in the links above the hole and pulled upward. The big dog looked down athis freed paw with mournful eyes.
Lily had to agree that it did look pretty bad. His dark fur made the nature of his wounds hard todetect, but when he tried to stand, the injured foot dangled limply. For all Lily knew, it could be broken.
“Sit tight, Mordecai. Let me go inside and get the baby and the car keys. We’re gonna get yousome help.”
The one thing she could say in favor of the monstrous Chrysler New Yorker Big Ben had boughtwas that it was a vehicle of sufficient size to comfortably transport a toddler and a rottweiler. Lily’s oldHonda, which was sitting unused in the condo parking lot in Atlanta, barely had enough room for her andMimi, let alone a one-hundred-eighty-pound dog. She had wrapped Mordecai’s paw in a clean towel.
Even so, she was sure he was bleeding all over the car’s plush upholstery. She knew this kind of thingwould cause Ben to have a hissy fit, but she didn’t care. The day she cared more about personal propertythan living things was the day she’d have her woman’s symbol tattoo removed and become acheeseburger-chomping Republican.
After Lily was already on the road, it occurred to her that she could have called Jeanie and askedwho Mordecai’s regular vet was. But it was too late for that. Since he was losing blood, expediencyseemed the best path. Down the road from the sock mill, she had noticed a green double-wide trailer with