I Was His Waiting Room novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: The Crew

I read the notice four times under Kerry's work lights.

"Disabled neighbor," Kerry said. "On Gibson Street. Name one."

"I can't."

"Because there isn't one. Because she's in Back Bay with a fresh diamond, and she's the only disabled person who knows this address."

"We can't prove that."

"I don't want to prove it. I want to drive over there and let Biscuit lick her purse."

Biscuit, hearing her name, licked Kerry's purse.

I sat down on the one folding chair and made a list on the back of the notice.

Rusted kennel gates. Floor drains clogged with forty years of soot. No sound baffling. No second exit from the back runs.

Class started Monday.

Four dogs I'd raised on my own weekends for a year and a half. Four handlers who'd been on a waitlist since spring.

A Marine veteran who hadn't slept a full night since Kandahar, and Rook, his shepherd mix.

An eight-year-old boy with seizures, and Pepper.

A deaf woman who taught high school chemistry, and Moss, a standard poodle the color of wet sand.

A seventeen-year-old girl with type 1 diabetes, and Biscuit.

I put my head down on the sawhorse desk.

"Go home," Kerry said. "Sleep. I'll lock up."

I went home to the top floor of my mother's triple-decker and lay awake listening to the radiator knock.

Ronan didn't call.

At seven on Saturday morning, a flatbed truck backed up to the firehouse bay.

Then a pickup. Then a white van.

Five men in Prendergast Builders sweatshirts climbed out.

Niall Prendergast climbed out of the pickup in jeans and a canvas jacket.

On a weekend he looked less like a bank and more like a man who'd once been hit in the face with a stick.

"What is this?" I said.

"Your list," he said.

"How do you have my list?"

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