PART 2
The man came out of my back seat fast, with the knife up.
He never reached me. Patch hit him in the chest like a cannonball.
Sixty pounds of skinny, limping stray dog. He knocked the man back against my car and clamped onto his forearm. The knife clattered across the concrete and slid under the car next to mine.
The man screamed and punched at him. Patch didn’t let go.
I kicked the knife farther away. Then I did what eight years in the Army taught me. I put the man on the ground, face down, and put my knee in his back.
“Patch! Out!”
He let go. Instantly. Like he’d been trained.
He stood next to me, growling, until the first police cars came screaming up the ramp.
The man’s name was Gerald Pitts. He was 41.
He’d been hiding in parking garages at three Cleveland hospitals since September. He’d learned how to open older car locks with a thin piece of metal. He’d wait in the back seat for women coming off night shifts.
Three women had been hurt. One of them, a nurse, had been in the ICU for a week.
In his backpack, police found zip ties, gloves, and a notebook. It listed car models, license plates, and shift times.
My car was in it. With my name. And the time I left every morning.
7 a.m.
He’d been watching me for two weeks.
The detective told me later that Pitts had tried to get into my car once before. Five nights earlier. The cameras showed him walking up to it at 2 a.m.
Then they showed a thin brown dog with one white ear standing in front of the driver’s door, growling, until he walked away.
Patch had been guarding my car for days. I never knew.
Gerald Pitts was charged with three counts of aggravated assault, kidnapping, and attempted murder. He pleaded guilty in the spring. Thirty years.
Mr. Gorski called me into his office the day after the arrest.
I thought I was getting fired.
Instead, he stood up and shook my hand.
“Briggs,” he said. “I was wrong about the dog.”
The hospital’s CEO came down to Level 3 that afternoon with a news crew. Patch hid behind my legs the whole time.
A veterinarian on the hospital’s board offered to treat him for free. His limp was from an old untreated fracture in his front paw. They fixed it. He also had a microchip. It was registered to a man who’d passed away in a nursing home two years earlier. His family hadn’t known what happened to the dog.
They asked me if I wanted to keep him.
I didn’t even let them finish the question.
Patch lives with me now. He sleeps on the couch, even though I bought him a bed.
The hospital gave him an honorary security badge. It hangs on his collar.
And every night when I go to work, he rides in my car with me. In the back seat.
Where nobody will ever hide again.
THE END.
