Kid Gloves (Iron Creek K9 #1)

Chapter 1

Delaney

Okay. New plan.

The old plan was sleep. The old plan was eight uninterrupted hours, a Saturday with no vet appointments, and pancakes if I felt fancy. The old plan did not involve standing in my yard at two in the morning in one boot, watching orange light roll out of my kennel barn like it pays rent there.

"Fire," I tell Brisket, because someone should say it out loud and the goat is closest. "The barn is on fire."

Brisket looks at the barn. Looks at me. Chews.

Great talk.

Then the smell reaches me — smoke and hot tin and something underneath it that my brain files away for later because right now there are nine puppies in that barn, and every single thought in my head goes quiet except one.

Get them out.

The side door is the near one and I'm through it before I can develop anything as useful as fear.

Inside is heat and noise, smoke stacked along the rafters like dirty wool, and beneath all of it, the sound that's going to live in my chest for the rest of my life: nine Malinois puppies, six weeks old, screaming their tiny federal heads off.

Mostly weaned, thank God — their dam went home to the breeder co-op Tuesday, spared this — but six weeks is six weeks.

"I know," I call out, dropping to a crouch where the air still counts as air. "I hear you. Everybody's mad. Complaint department opens at nine."

The whelping pen is twelve feet in. The fire is at the north end, past the feed room, crawling the wall studs like it has somewhere to be. Twelve feet. I've walked this aisle ten thousand times with coffee in one hand and a puppy under the other arm.

I grab the transport crate off its peg, kneel at the pen, and start loading puppies two at a time, which is the maximum, because Malinois puppies are less like dogs and more like angry cursive.

One of them — the big male with the crooked ear, the one I've been pretending not to call Biscuit because you shouldn't name government property after breakfast, and because the county's already got a Biscuit on the books, Callie's old hound, and around here Biscuit is turning out to be less a name than a rank — gets a mouthful of my braid and commits to it.

"Not the moment," I tell him.

He disagrees. We go to the door as a unit.

Cool air. Stars. I dump the crate at the fence line, count, two, and go back.

Here's a thing about me, so we're clear on who you're dealing with: I re-shingled my own roof in July with a YouTube video and a grudge.

I do not call for help. Calling for help is a thing you do when the people you'd call have ever once shown up, and my track record on that is what my banker would call under-collateralized.

Trip two. Two more puppies. The smoke is lower now, breathing down at me, and the something-underneath smell is stronger by the north wall.

Trip three. The girls this time, all needle teeth and outrage.

Trip four, and the heat has opinions, and I hear a crack from the rafters that I decide not to think about, and my eyes are streaming, and I am talking the entire time — to the puppies, to the barn, to nobody.

"Almost done. You're fine. We're all fine. Gran, if you're watching, cover your eyes, this is going to get ugly."

Last trip. One puppy left — Crooked Ear's sister, small and furious, wedged in the far corner of the pen behind the water bowl like the corner has a basement she can dig to. I go flat on my stomach where the good air lives, reach through, and get a handful of scruff and disapproval.

The ceiling over the feed room comes down behind me on the way out. Not close. Not far, either.

Then I'm on my knees in the yard with a screaming puppy against my chest, and the barn (my barn, Gran's barn, the barn where I learned to bottle-feed before I learned cursive) exhales fire through the roofline, and the goats have formed a semicircle around me like a Greek chorus with anxiety, and somewhere behind the house Gary the rooster starts crowing at two in the morning because Gary's clock has never once worked and tonight of all nights he decides the sun is coming.

"It's not dawn, Gary," I say. My voice does something wobbly. "It's just my life."

Nine. I count them again in the crate, hands moving on their own. Three, four. Seven. Nine. Nine warm, furious, smoke-scented puppies, every one of them yelling at me, which is how I know they're okay.

I sit back in the dirt and let myself have exactly one breath about it.

One.

Okay.

Phone. The volunteer department is fourteen minutes out on a good night, and I'm dialing when I hear it — boots hitting dirt on the wrong side of my property, fast, coming from the north fence.

The north fence is eight strands and chest-high, because on the other side of it lives Iron Creek K9, three hundred acres of federally contracted order run by a man who once sent me a certified letter about my goats.

Wade Mercer clears it without breaking stride.

I want to be very precise about this, because it's going to matter later, when I've decided how to feel about everything: the fence is chest-high, and the man goes over it like it's a suggestion, in the dark, in a gray T-shirt, moving toward my burning barn while the rest of the county sleeps.

He's got a fire extinguisher in one hand.

Who runs with a fire extinguisher? Who has one ready?

Wade Mercer, apparently. Of course he does. That man has a protocol for grief.

"Anyone inside?" No hello. His voice hits that register that makes livestock and paratroopers sit down.

"No. Puppies are out. All nine." My voice comes out steady, which surprises us both. "Barn's a loss. It's in the roof."

He looks at me (one fast head-to-toe inventory, soot, single boot, puppy teeth still attached to my braid) and something in his jaw does a thing.

Then he's moving again, checking the propane tank clearance, killing the power at my meter box like he's been reading my utilities in his spare time, putting the extinguisher on the grass fire creeping toward the fence line, because God forbid my catastrophe cross onto his side and be disorganized over there.

I should help. I am helping — I've got the hose going on the coop, which is how Gary and I end this night both damp and betrayed, but there's a version of me standing outside myself watching Wade Mercer work a disaster like it's a checklist, and that version notices, in a small doomed voice: oh.

I ignore her. She has terrible judgment. Exhibit A: the roof thing in July.

The volunteer department arrives at minute thirteen, lights swinging red and white across the pasture, and after that it's hoses and shouting and the specific helplessness of watching professionals fight for a building you already know is gone.

I stand at the fence with a crate full of puppies and narrate to them quietly, because their ears are six weeks old and this is a lot.

"That's water. That's a truck. That man yelling is Deke, he coaches Little League. This is all very normal."

Wade appears beside me. He doesn't do anything as human as pant, but his shirt has given up and his forearm is streaked black.

Without a word he takes off the jacket someone handed him (a big canvas thing with IRON CREEK K9 across the back) and puts it around my shoulders, and I discover I've been shaking, which is embarrassing, and that the jacket smells like cedar and dog and something warm underneath, which is worse.

"Thanks," I say.

He nods.

Then he pulls a small notebook out of his back pocket (I swear this on Gran's grave, a notebook, at a fire) and clicks a pen.

"Time you noticed the smoke?"

I stare at him. "Are you... documenting me?"

"Documenting the incident."

"I'm the incident."

"Currently." Not a flicker. "Time?"

And here's the stupid thing, the thing I'll be turning over for weeks: it helps.

The barn is a torch and my chest is a dropped jar and this enormous flannel-scented clipboard of a man wants to know facts, and facts are a handrail, so I hold on.

Two-oh-five, maybe. Woke up to Brisket screaming — yes, that's a scream, you'll know it when you hear it.

Smoke was already through the roof vent.

Fire looked like it started at the north end.

Feed room. Wiring's original, older than me, Gran always said the barn had two moods, dim and blown fuse.

He writes it all down. At the wiring part, his pen slows by half a beat (I only notice because I'm watching his hands, which is its own problem) and he looks at the north end of the barn for a long second, where the fire went up first and hungriest.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing." He closes the notebook. "Wiring."

By the time the sun does come up — the real one, Gary, you absolute fraud — the barn is a black ribcage with steam coming off it, and Deke is saying the words total loss and lucky and could've been in the house in a kind voice, and the puppies are asleep in a dogpile in the crate like tiny drunks, and I'm still wearing Wade Mercer's jacket because giving it back means admitting how cold I am.

Deke walks the perimeter with me once, helmet under his arm, doing the gentle math firefighters do out loud so you don't have to.

"Wind was with you. Ten degrees different and it's in the coop, then the house.

" He stops at the north corner, where the wall isn't a wall anymore, and nudges a fallen brace with his boot.

"Feed room, looks like. Marshal will want to poke at it.

Don't move anything, don't let the goats move anything. "

"You want to tell them that?"

He looks over at the semicircle of goats, who have been supervising the entire operation like unpaid consultants. "No," he says, with the honesty of a man who coaches Little League. "I do not."

A truck I don't recognize comes up the drive around six, and a woman gets out with a vet kit and the kind of ponytail that means business.

I know her by reputation the way you know everyone here by reputation — Callie O'Connor, Iron Creek's staff veterinarian, the one who came down from Colorado and married into the operation next door, or is about to, depending which checkout line you heard it in.

"Wade called," she says, already kneeling at the crate. "Said there were nine puppies who inhaled smoke and one handler who won't sit down."

"I'm fine."

"Uh-huh. That's the version I heard, too.

" She's got her hands on Biscuit before I can organize a defense, thumb under his jaw, counting something.

He tries to eat her stethoscope. She lets him think he's winning.

Watching her work loosens a knot behind my sternum I didn't know I was carrying — she handles them like they're dogs, not paperwork, and every one of them passes inspection while she keeps up a stream of low commentary that has the whole litter drunk on attention.

"Lungs are clear. Eyes are good. This one's going to run a kingdom someday." She stands, strips her gloves, and looks at me the way medical professionals look at people who claim to be fine. "You should get checked."

"The clinic's forty minutes and my barn is still smoking."

"That's not a no."

"It's a Tuesday," I say, which isn't an answer, and she laughs, and something in it says we're going to be a problem for each other in the best way.

He's still here. That's the part I keep snagging on.

The fire's out, his fence line is safe, every reasonable reason to be on my property expired hours ago, and Wade Mercer is still here, standing in the wet ash of my worst morning with his arms crossed, looking at the wreck of my kennel barn like it insulted his family personally.

"You'll need housing for the litter," he says. "Today."

"I'll figure it out."

"They're six weeks into a federal imprinting schedule."

"I know what week they're in. I built the schedule." It comes out sharper than he's earned, this specific man, on this specific morning, and I catch it and drag it back. "Sorry. I'll figure it out. I always figure it out."

He looks at me for a moment with those unreadable ledger-colored eyes, and I brace for the thing men like him say to women like me — something with little lady load-bearing in the middle of it.

"You got all nine out," he says instead. "Twelve-foot aisle, active fire. Alone." A pause, the length of a signature. "Noted."

Then he walks the fence line home, stepping over the wire like it's nothing, and I stand there in his jacket holding the word noted like an idiot holding a live coal, because it's the closest thing to a medal anyone's pinned on me in thirty-two years.

"Did you hear that?" I ask Brisket. "Noted. Man watches me lose everything I own and files a commendation."

Brisket has moved on to investigating the fire hose. One of the volunteers gently reclaims it. She lets him think it was his idea.

I should be planning. I should be on the phone.

Instead I stand there another minute watching Wade Mercer get smaller against all that ruthless organized acreage, and I catalog the facts like he taught me an hour ago, because facts are a handrail: he came over the fence.

He stayed six hours. He left the extinguisher.

He never once said I told you so about the wiring, and the certified-letter man I've been feuding with for two years absolutely would have.

File that under later, too.

The goats regroup around me. Brisket leans her whole criminal weight against my leg, and I do what I always do at the bottom of a hole, which is inventory the hole.

The barn, gone, and not just a barn, the barn, the one with Gran's height marks for every dog she ever raised penciled inside the tack room door, forty years of names and dates that are ash now, and I can't think about that yet, so I put it in the same place I put the smell from the north wall and the way Wade's pen slowed down.

The equipment: crates, the good scale, the puppy obstacle set I built off a video, the washer that only I knew how to threaten into working.

The feed, three weeks of it. The insurance deductible, which I know by heart the way other people know their kids' birthdays.

And the schedule. Because here's the part that turns my stomach in a way the flames didn't: those nine puppies aren't just mine to love, they're mine to deliver.

Week six of a sixteen-week federal imprinting program, every day scripted — new surfaces, new sounds, new hands, all of it in a facility that meets standards I can recite in my sleep and currently do not have.

Iron Creek's contract doesn't care that my barn is a ribcage.

The government's timeline has never once cared about anybody's barn.

The mortgage is due on the first, same as always, sentimental about nothing.

"Okay," I tell Brisket, and my hand finds the warm space between her horns. "I can fix this."

The barn ticks and settles. Somewhere in the wreck, a rafter lets go.

"I cannot fix this."