Chapter 24
Ben
The thing about volunteering to be bitten by your own dog was that the dog didn’t care that it was you who volunteered.
I flexed my fingers inside the fabric, checking the fit of the four-pound bite sleeve. The padding ran from my wrist to above my elbow—dense, layered, designed to absorb the impact of a full-speed hit from an animal with a bite force that could crack bone.
I’d worn one hundreds of times. It never got routine.
“All right,” I said, turning to face the group. “Who’s playing handler today? Jolly’s ready.”
Six officers stood along the wall of the training bay, which was a converted warehouse space on the back side of the PD building that they used for tactical exercises.
Reeves was closest, arms crossed, watching Jolly with the kind of focused attention I’d been looking for since we started this contract.
Briggson stood a few feet away, feet planted wide, his usual expression firmly in place.
A couple of the others I’d trained with regularly—Calloway, Peters—filled in the back row.
It was the first session I’d run solo. Donovan had left three days ago, and the empty space beside me hadn’t stopped registering. I kept glancing to my left during setups, expecting the quiet commentary that wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t the same without him.
“Reeves. You’re up.”
He stepped forward without hesitation, which was the right answer to a question I hadn’t asked. I handed him Jolly’s lead.
“You’ve watched me work him for weeks. Today, you’re sending him. Same commands, same sequence. I’m the target.” I held up the sleeved arm. “Your only job is to read the dog, give the command, and control the release. Don’t overthink it.”
Reeves took the lead and looked down at Jolly.
The dog was already locked in. His ears forward, muscles taut beneath the harness, eyes fixed on the sleeve like nothing else in the room existed.
His tail had gone rigid, a straight line from his spine.
No wagging. No play. Just the controlled vibration of a dog who knew exactly what was about to happen.
“He knows,” Reeves said.
“Hell yeah. He knew before I put the sleeve on.”
I walked to the far end of the bay. Thirty yards. Standard distance for a controlled send in an enclosed space. The concrete floor was scuffed from weeks of drills: boot marks, paw marks, the long drag lines where officers had practiced their footwork. I turned to face them.
This was the part that never quite made sense to anyone who hadn’t done it. Standing across from your own dog, making yourself a target for the animal you’d trusted with your life for the better part of a decade.
Jolly didn’t see me right now. Not really.
He saw the sleeve. He saw the posture. He saw the invitation.
Everything that made me Ben—his handler, his partner, the person who fed him and slept beside him and had carried him out of two IED craters—was irrelevant.
He’d been trained to separate the person from the task, and he was very, very good at it.
I planted my feet and raised my arm.
“Whenever you’re ready, Reeves.”
The bay went quiet. I could hear Jolly’s breathing from thirty yards away—fast, shallow, the panting of a dog whose entire body was begging for the command.
Reeves had both hands on the lead, one at his hip, one near the clip.
Good hand position. He was watching Jolly’s head, reading the angle of his attention, waiting for the lock-on to settle into that absolute stillness that meant the dog was committed.
Jolly stopped panting. His weight shifted forward onto his front legs. Every fiber of him pointed at me like an arrow drawn back and held.
Reeves unclipped the lead.
“Fass.”
Jolly launched.
There’s no way to describe the speed of a trained apprehension dog at full commitment except to say that the distance disappeared.
One second, he was at the far wall. The next, he was airborne, flying at me and hitting the sleeve with an impact that traveled through my shoulder, down my spine, and into the concrete under my boots.
I braced and absorbed it, letting him latch and work the sleeve the way he’d been taught: full jaw engagement, head thrashing side to side, that deep, sustained pressure that would make any suspect in the world stop running.
The sound of it was something you felt as much as heard. The heavy crunch of the sleeve material compressing under those jaws. The scrape of his nails on the floor as he dug in for leverage. A low growl that came from somewhere in his chest, not aggressive but focused.
It was the sound of a dog doing the thing he was built to do.
I held position. Let him work. Counted to five in my head, then gave the command. “Aus.”
Jolly released. Immediately. Clean. He dropped back, circled once, and sat at my feet—tail suddenly wagging, tongue out, whole body loose.
The switch was instant and total, like someone had flipped a breaker.
Ten seconds ago, he’d been a weapon. Now he was pressing his head against my thigh, looking up at me with soft brown eyes.
“Good boy.” I dug my fingers into the fur behind his ears. He leaned into it, content, already forgetting what he’d just done. Or, at least, not caring. For Jolly, the work and the love existed in separate rooms, and he moved between them without conflict.
Someone in the back let out a low whistle.
“That,” Briggson said, “is a hell of a dog.”
I unstrapped the sleeve and walked back to the group, shaking out my arm. The impact lingered with a deep ache in my forearm, the kind that would bruise by tomorrow. The fact that it was over my almost-healed knife wound didn’t help.
Jolly trotted beside me, tail still going, completely unbothered by the fact that he’d just tried to take down the person he loved most in the world.
Or maybe I’d moved down to second now behind William. Honestly, I couldn’t be sure anymore.
“All right.” I set the sleeve on the equipment table. “Let’s talk about what just happened. From my end, not his.”
The officers gathered closer. Reeves was still a little wide-eyed, the adrenaline of handling that much dog visible in the way he was holding his hands: loose at his sides, fingers flexing.
Briggson had his arms crossed but was leaning in without making sarcastic comments, which for him was practically a standing ovation.
“First thing to discuss is the impact. Even with the sleeve, he hit me hard enough to move my feet. That’s seventy-five pounds at full speed, and Jolly’s not even a big dog by apprehension standards.
A shepherd or a Malinois running ninety, a hundred pounds would put you on your ass if you weren’t braced. ”
I rotated my shoulder. “A suspect’s instinct is almost always to pull away, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. You pull, K9 escalates. You try to yank your arm free, you tear your own skin against the teeth.”
Briggson shifted his weight. “What about the release? What if it goes to shit in the field, and the dog won’t let go?”
It was a good question, and I gave him credit for it.
“Then you have a problem. A handler who can’t call his dog off a suspect is a liability, not an asset.
That’s why the bond matters more than the training.
Jolly doesn’t release because he’s been programmed to.
He releases because he and I have seven years of trust behind that command.
He knows when I say let go, I mean it, and I’ve never given him a reason to doubt that. ”
The room was quiet. The engaged quiet of people turning something over, connecting it to what they already knew.
“That’s what we’re building toward with this program,” I said. “Not just a dog who can track or detect or apprehend. A partnership. The dog reads the handler, the handler reads the dog, and the communication goes both ways.” I looked at Reeves. “You felt it on the lead. Tell them.”
Reeves nodded slowly. “Right before the send, he went still. Completely still. And I could feel it through the lead. It was weird, almost like holding a live wire. Everything in him was pointed at Ben, and I knew if I unclipped a half second too early or too late, it would change the whole exercise. There was this window where he was ready, and I had to match it.”
“That window is the partnership,” I said. “Handler and dog in the same moment. That’s what you’re training for.”
Briggson uncrossed his arms. He didn’t say anything, but the expression on his face had lost its edge. He looked like a man considering something seriously for the first time.
“I want everyone suited up before the end of the week,” I said. “Full bite suit, not just the sleeve. You need to feel what the suspect feels, because understanding that changes how you deploy the dog. Reeves, you’re first.”
“Lucky me,” Reeves said, but he was grinning.
“Better you than me,” Briggson muttered, but there was no venom in it. Someone laughed. Jolly lifted his head at the sound, tail thumping once against the concrete.
The room had that good energy, the post-adrenaline looseness where people were talking over one another, asking questions, replaying what they’d just watched.
Calloway was asking Reeves what the lead felt like.
Peters was crouched near Jolly, letting the dog nose at his hand.
Briggson and I exchanged a nod—brief, wordless, the closest thing to warmth I’d gotten from the man in weeks.
It felt like a team. For the first time since I’d arrived in Summit Falls, I wasn’t secretly watching everyone to make sure they weren’t a traitor.
I was part of something these officers were building together, and I could see it taking shape. The K9 unit this department would have long after I was gone would be a strong one.
Today, I was just a trainer. And it felt good.
Then the door opened, and one of the administrative staff leaned in.
“Chief Rawlings is calling an all-hands in the briefing room. Now.”